Module III blog

Essential Question:
How are landscapes formed and how, in turn, are cultures shaped by their landscapes?

I was born and raised in Green Bay, Wisconsin. My family lived in town, but all of our many relatives lived in the country a short distance away.




The town of Green Bay is split by the Fox River, flowing north to empty into the bay itself: an inlet of Lake Michigan. A narrow peninsula of land separates the town from Lake Michigan proper, and shelters it from the worst of the lake-effect wind and snow. The marshy plains that line the bay quickly give way to well-watered, rolling farmland. Northeastern Wisconsin is only saved from pure flatness by the occasional gentle hill left by the glacial action of the last ice age. (Images captured from Google Earth.)


Most of the area surrounding Green Bay is neatly chopped into small parcels, often farmed by the same families for decades. My family has been in this area, farming and raising cattle, for about 150 years. (Photo: Kelly Auer)






I chose to visit Kotzebue using Google Earth because, in some ways, it reminds me of where I grew up in Wisconsin. Kotzebue, like Green Bay, is located on the verge of a large body of water, with all the wind, water, and weather that entails.
(Image captured using Google Earth)





The landscape in the Kotzebue area was formed by a combination of these forces, largely the erosion and deposition caused by wind and water. This is a community concern, as erosion is still eating away at the coastline, although it is nothing like the catastrophic erosion experienced in other coastal communities (such as Shishmaref). (Photo: Army Corps of Engineers Digital Visual Library, photographer unknown)


The people of Kotzebue, like the people of Green Bay, have been in the area for generations, living off the land in a manner similar to that practiced by their parents and grandparents. They are largely Inupiaq, and live by fishing the waters of Kotzebue Sound, as well as by harvesting plants and animals from the surrounding land. (Photo: Al Grillo, Associated Press)


People in both communities are close to their families and neighbors and support one another, a characteristic that can be the difference between starving and surviving in a bad harvest year. Their lifestyle and culture are clear reflections of their geographical location.

I have physically visited both Kotzebue and Green Bay, but using Google Earth to explore them was a completely different experience for me. Being able to compare and contrast the landscapes of Alaska and Wisconsin really led me to look at the familiar geography of my home city in a completely different way. Using my fresh look at the familiar geography to try to understand the culture of the area where I was raised also really helped me to extrapolate and relate the culture of an unfamiliar area to its geography.

For example, it never before occurred to me that I had anything in common with an Alaska Native youth who was one generation out of the village; but I was a midwestern youth, one generation off the farm, who found herself 4,000 miles from home. There is a strange disconnect between struggling to retain the value of what your parents and grandparents have taught you and assimilating yourself to the culture in which you find yourself. Keeping my values and sense of self while thriving in my new culture was a balance that I struggled with, and I didn't even have the barriers of language and ethnic differences to overcome.

This lesson also led me to think of how useful this exercise could be with my students, who often have not had the opportunity to travel widely or experience cultures other than the familiar one in which they were raised. Using Google Earth in conjunction with other tools (internet searches, etc.) students could begin to experience other points of view as well as finding similarities between themselves and those they instinctively think of as completely "other". In addition to opening a different perspective to urban students, this type of exercise may prove useful in easing the transition to urban life for students who have only lived in rural Alaska.