A Meeting of Minds: Five Hundred Years of Arctic Knowledge & Experience

If we were to add up the collective years of the recently formed SEARCH Advisory Committee, we’d get pretty close to half a millennium. Between October 2022 and March 2023, we invited and welcomed to our Advisory Committee nine leaders in Arctic Indigenous knowledge, science, politics, economics, and business: Honorable Aleqa Hammond; Gail Schubert; Lisa Qiluqqi Koperqualuk; Gunn-Britt Retter; Dr. Craig E. Dorman; Dr. Jackie Dawson; Dr. Kathryn A. Donnelly; Dr. Terry Chapin; and Steve Myers. In April 2023, the SEARCH Advisory Committee met for the first time, virtually by Zoom and in person at the historical Hotel Captain Cook in Anchorage, Alaska. The Advisory Committee offered exacting and even difficult truths that all of us engaging in this work must consider. For example, SEARCH’s current work must balance local and regional community engagement and capacity building with greater understanding of and relationship to international and global decision making. Specifically, the Advisory Committee advised SEARCH to clarify global decision making mechanisms and impacts within communities, while co-designing ways to amplify, share, and incorporate community knowledge and concerns at all levels of governance.