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“Uvaŋa atiġa Asikłuk. Ataataga Sanguk. Aanaga Aileen. Iḷatga Iiġalugniagvik. Qawiaraġmuiruŋa. My Iñupiaq name is Asikłuk. My parents are the late Clifford and Aileen Topkok of Teller. My white-fox name is Dr. Sean Topkok. I am Iñupiaq, Sámi, Kven, Irish, and Norwegian. My family comes from Iiġalugniagvik (place to go fishing), the place name of Teller. I am a person of Kawerak.”

Dr. Topkok is the Director for the Indigenous Studies master’s and doctoral programs at the University of Alaska Fairbanks in the Center for Cross-Cultural Studies. His research interests include multicultural and Indigenous education, decolonization and Indigenist methods and methodologies, working with communities to help them document their cultural heritages, and community well-being.

Michael Koskey is an associate professor with the Center for Cross-Cultural Studies, which offers a Master's of Arts and a Ph.D. in Indigenous Studies. While serving in the Marine Corps he received a BS in Anthropology and a BA in Political Science from the University of Central Florida, and afterward received an MS in Anthropology from Purdue University and a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Mike's research focuses on oral history, traditional knowledge, ethnohistory, culture change, political economy, decolonization, Indigenous food sovereignty and security, resource use and allocation, and Indigenous cosmology/mythology. He is married and has two grown sons, lives in Goldstream Valley, and enjoys hiking, hunting, and blacksmithing with family and friends.

Cannon was born and raised in Helena, Montana and has lived in Alaska for the last twenty years. Cannon earned his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 2021. He brings more than a decade of experience working with and learning from Dene Elders, speakers, and culture bearers from across more than 30 communities in Alaska and Canada. His doctoral research employed a Dene epistemology for investigation to conduct a large-scale comparative study of the ways in which Northern Dene peoples perceive, conceptualize, and integrate the sky and its contents into systems of knowledge and practices, worldview, cosmology, and spirituality. 
Cannon has collaborated on a variety of outreach projects and workshops with Dene communities, museums, and the WGBH television series, “Molly of Denali.” He is thrilled to join the Indigenous Studies Program offered through the Center for Cross-Cultural Studies and especially looks forward to helping students build meaningful relationships in their work and the communities they will serve.

Yoko Kugo earned a Ph.D in Interdisciplinary Studies with an emphasis on ethnogeography from UAF in May 2021. Her dissertation, Iliamna Lake Ethnogeography: Yup’ik Place Names and Sense of Place, examined the physical, intellectual, and spiritual understanding of landscape by researching place names and stories about these places through Yup’ik eyes (Yupiit iingitgun). She studied the Central Yup’ik language (Yugcetun) at UAF for two years with her graduate committee co-chair, Dr. Walkie Charles, which has also helped her to become familiar with Yup’ik ways of understanding the land. Her main research and teaching interests include Indigenous knowledge systems, oral traditions and art of Alaska Natives (southeast and southwest Alaska), Alaska Native language (Yugcetun), place names, cultural anthropology, and Alaska history.

Kugo moved from one of the largest cities in the world, Tokyo, to Sitka, Alaska in 2006. She became interested in learning Northwest Coast basketry weaving, and was fortunate to learn skills from master weavers including Teri Rofker (Tlingit) and Dolores Churchill (Haida) when she lived in Sitka. Kugo then moved to Juneau, began conducting ethnographic fieldwork to learn how climate change had influenced traditional tree harvesting practices in the Juneau area, and completed her BA in Social Sciences. She continued her studies and earned a MA in Anthropology at UAA. When she conducted interviews to learn traditional and contemporary knowledge in the Iliamna Lake communities, she learned that Yup’ik place names in the region had rarely been recorded—this situation motivated her to start her Ph.D. program and move to Fairbanks.

While she conducted ethnographic field trips and came to know residents in the Iliamna Lake communities, she discovered that the residents she met were also interested in her research and background. In the course of her visits, Kugo organized sushi making classes and community story time meetings, attended annual community events, and taught young students Japanese songs and basic vocabularies as cultural exchange. Using a community-based participatory research approach, Iliamna Lake communities and Kugo published one community Elders’ life history book and two maps of Iliamna Lake Yup’ik place names. 

In her personal time, Kugo enjoys cooking, baking, walking, hiking, berry picking, basketry weaving, and traveling.