When Jeron Joseph evacuated from his home community of Kwigillingok after ex-typhoon Halong, he sheltered with family in Anchorage. When looking at resources available to evacuees in the Egan Center, he showed his photographs of home to some of members from the group EarthJustice who were there: summer cotton in the tundra sunrise; figures, bundled in fur parkas, gathered at a cemetery. They were pieces of what made up a place that now faces an uncertain future.
“We got to exchanging some emails, and eventually they landed, you know, within the sight of the chief curator of the Anchorage Museum,” Joseph said.
Now his photographs are getting a bigger stage — an Anchorage Museum exhibit that features Joseph’s work in a display called “Sacred Ground.” He said that the exhibit’s images evoke the senses of home and of being out on the open tundra.
Joseph said that he sees the exhibit in part as “a way for me and my fellow Natives to be able to experience that beauty and that feeling of home that I’m sure a lot of us are missing, because I am certainly missing it.”…