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Who Gets to Tell Alaska’s Story?

Sarah Manriquez, CLA Public Information Office
April 13, 2026
cla-pio@alaska.edu

Jennifer Schell studies how the North is represented and why the stories we tell about it matter.

For Jennifer Schell, the questions begin with attention.

What stories are being told about the Arctic. Who is telling them. What gets flattened, distorted, or erased when the North is imagined from far away. And what becomes possible when people slow down long enough to see this place more clearly.

Those questions connect three recent publications by Schell, a professor of English at the �鶹ԭ��, whose work moves across biotechnology, Arctic ecology, and film. At first glance, the subjects might seem unrelated: a proposed effort to de-extinct the woolly mammoth and release it in Alaska, horror and humor in Arctic cinema, and Inuit sci-fi films that imagine justice beyond the human. But together, they reflect a consistent scholarly concern with representation, responsibility, and place.

Schell studies the Arctic not as an abstract landscape or dramatic backdrop, but as a lived, inhabited world. In her work, the stakes are never only literary. They are ethical, cultural, and environmental.

“I’m most interested in representations of the North, especially from outsiders,” she said. “I’m really interested in how people see us from outside.”

From outsider to witness

Schell is originally from Rhode Island. She came to Alaska after graduate school and a first faculty position in Kansas, drawn westward by geography, curiosity, and a long held sense that Alaska was where she wanted to be. Seventeen years later, she speaks about the state with the kind of affection that comes from sustained attention rather than romantic distance.

It took time, she said, before she felt ready to write about the Arctic. Studying a place responsibly meant first learning it. One of her earliest Arctic projects examined Ice Road Truckers, prompted in part by her own experience driving the Dalton Highway. What struck her was the gap between reality and representation. The road she encountered was beautiful, expansive, and full of ecological richness. The road presented on screen was danger, spectacle, and near constant crisis.

That contrast became a productive tension in her work. Again and again, Schell found herself returning to the same pattern: the North framed by outsiders as empty, extreme, and available for reinvention.

Those narratives persist because they are powerful, but they also carry consequences.

The problem with a good story

In one of Schell’s recent essays, she examines Colossal Biosciences’ highly publicized vision of bringing back the woolly mammoth and eventually releasing it into Arctic Alaska. The idea is bold, headline friendly, and easy to market. It is also, in Schell’s view, built on a familiar and troubling narrative structure.

The company’s messaging, she argues, leans on crisis. Climate change is urgent. The Arctic is vulnerable. A technological fix is coming. The solution is framed as visionary, inevitable, and benevolent.

For Schell, that was precisely the problem.

Stories, she said, have become a kind of civic and academic buzzword. People talk about storytelling as inherently good, as though any story told in the name of science or climate action must be doing useful work. But stories are not neutral. They can deepen understanding and build empathy. They can also reinforce colonial habits of thought.

“We need to talk about what stories we tell, and how we tell those stories,” she said.

That distinction sits at the center of her mammoth essay. Her unease with de-extinction began years ago with questions about animal welfare. What would it mean to create a mammoth without a mammoth mother. What kind of life would that animal have. What responsibilities would humans assume by bringing a species back into existence.

But as she listened more closely to the rhetoric surrounding the mammoth project, another concern came into focus. The proposal did not just raise ethical questions about animals. It revealed a deeper disregard for place.

Nobody, she recalled thinking, seemed to be asking what this would mean for Alaska itself. For the ecosystems already here. For the people who live here. For the Indigenous communities who have long been forced to contend with outside visions imposed on their homelands.

A place people still imagine as empty

That omission is not new.

One of the strongest threads in Schell’s work is her insistence that Alaska has long been treated as a testing ground for outside ambition. She points to projects like Project Chariot, the Cold War era proposal to use nuclear explosives to create a harbor near Point Hope, as part of a broader history in which the state has been imagined less as home than as experiment.

Those histories changed how she saw Alaska. What many outsiders describe as wilderness began to look, in her research, more like a heavily managed space shaped by extraction, policy, and intervention.

That history helps explain why crisis rhetoric can be so dangerous here. In moments of fear, people may be more willing to accept sweeping promises and dramatic solutions. But urgency can also short circuit accountability. It can silence questions that should be asked slowly and publicly.

Schell remembers being struck not only by the confidence of Colossal’s presentation at �鶹ԭ��F, but by the assumptions embedded within it. The future was spoken of as settled. Mammoths would come. Alaska would host them. People would be excited.

There was little sign, she said, that anyone had done the deeper work of relationship building or community consultation. The project seemed to assume what so many Arctic narratives assume, that this is a place where things can simply be done.

“People live here,” Schell said. “And not just human people, but more-than-human people live here.”

That phrase, more-than-human, is one she returns to often. She prefers it to terms that define other life forms only by what they are not. For her, it offers a way to think more expansively about the Arctic as a world shared among animals, plants, rivers, permafrost, and humans, all of them implicated in environmental change and all of them deserving of care.

Imagining better futures

Schell is careful not to reject rewilding or environmental intervention wholesale. What matters to her is how those projects are imagined and carried out.

An anticolonial project, she said, is grounded in relationships. Ideally, it is led by local and Indigenous communities. At minimum, it requires outsiders to spend real time listening, learning, and earning trust rather than arriving with answers already formed. It also requires something often missing from Western research traditions: a willingness to do one’s own homework rather than extracting knowledge from communities for professional gain.

“It’s about relationships,” she said.

That framework shaped the way she wrote about the wood bison rewilding effort near Shageluk. While not perfect, the project struck her as meaningfully different from the mammoth proposal because it appeared to grow out of years of community engagement, reciprocity, and practical local benefit. The timeline was longer. The process was slower. The work seemed less interested in spectacle than in responsiveness.

For Schell, the future of Arctic scholarship and environmental thinking depends in part on whether people are willing to replace fantasies of rescue with harder, more relational forms of care.

Why sci-fi belongs in the conversation

If the mammoth essay explores the politics of scientific storytelling, Schell’s film work opens another path into the same questions.

Her recent scholarship on Inuit sci-fi and horror cinema examines how speculative films can challenge familiar ways of imagining the Arctic. In these films, the North is not a blank stage for outside fear. It is a place of culture, humor, adaptation, and resilience. Humans are not always centered. Crisis is not always the only story. Community remains visible, even in the midst of apocalypse.

Schell is especially interested in the idea of multispecies justice, a term that allows her to think about climate change as something that affects not only humans, but entire interconnected worlds.

“It’s not just about human beings,” she said. “It’s about all the plants, and the animals, and the rivers, and the glaciers, and all of the things.”

Sci-fi, she argues, is especially useful because it stretches the imagination. It allows filmmakers and viewers to ask different questions about responsibility, survival, and coexistence. In the Inuit films she studies, speculative storytelling often looks different from mainstream disaster narratives. Rather than dwelling solely on devastation, these stories foreground survival, kinship, culture, and the possibility of thriving through change.

For Schell, that perspective offers something more than critique. It offers instruction.

Indigenous filmmakers, she noted, are often working from histories in which apocalypse is not a future abstraction but part of lived and inherited experience. As a result, their films tend to treat catastrophe differently. Less as the end of meaning. More as a condition through which community continues.

Accountability in the classroom

At �鶹ԭ��F, Schell’s research is shaped not only by Alaska as a place, but by the students she teaches.

She described feeling accountable to them. Some are from the very places being represented in the texts and films she studies. Even when she is writing about broad cultural narratives, those narratives are never far removed from real communities, real histories, and real lives.

That proximity sharpens her sense of responsibility. It also gives her work its particular tone. Her scholarship is intellectually rigorous, but it is never detached from the ethical demands of being here.

“I feel like I need to be a good representative,” she said.

That impulse runs through all three of her recent publications. They are not simply critiques of bad storytelling. They are efforts to model a more careful kind of reading and a more responsible kind of attention.

In Schell’s work, Alaska is neither fantasy nor frontier. It is not empty. It is not waiting to be saved by someone else’s imagination. It is a place full of life, history, complexity, and relation.

And if there is a through line in her scholarship, it may be this: before proposing a future for the Arctic, one should first learn how to see the Arctic as it already is.

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The �鶹ԭ��F Department of English invites students to explore literature, language and storytelling while building strong skills in writing, analysis and communication. Through creative and critical work, students engage with diverse voices, ideas and forms that shape how we understand the world.

The �鶹ԭ��F Arctic and Northern Studies program offers an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the North, connecting culture, environment, history and policy. Students gain a deeper appreciation of Arctic communities and issues while developing the tools to think critically about the region’s past, present and future.