My name is Aivana Enmynkau. I am a Naukanski Yupik from Chukotka — a legal researcher, translator, storyteller and independent editor. For more than a decade I have worked at the intersection of Indigenous rights, natural resource governance, community consent, and public policy. My work has taken me from local Indigenous communities to international institutions, tracing how decisions about land, resources and development affect people whose voices are often absent from public conversations.
Alirpaq was created from a simple conviction: some of the most important stories in the world remain invisible not because they are unimportant, but because they happen far from centres of power.
“Safety and accountability only seem expensive if you aren't counting the full cost — or if someone else is paying it.”
Too often Indigenous peoples, Arctic communities, extractive industries, environmental conflicts and questions of governance are discussed through statistics, political slogans or institutional reports. Alirpaq seeks to bring together data, analysis and human stories in order to better understand the forces shaping our world.
The project is also personal. I come from a small town on the edge of the Bering Strait. Like many Indigenous peoples, my people live between memory and change — between inherited knowledge and contemporary realities, between local experience and global forces. I created Alirpaq because I believe that stories matter: not only as records of what happened, but as tools for understanding who we are and where we are going.
In a world increasingly dominated by noise, speed and polarisation, I am interested in careful observation, complexity and context. In the lives that rarely become headlines. In the communities that exist beyond centres of power. And in the connections between personal experience and larger political, economic and environmental processes.
Extractive industries generate extraordinary profits — built, in part, on underpriced risk, underpaid labour, and communities that absorb consequences they did not choose. The argument that safety and accountability cost too much only holds if you never ask who is paying. Alirpaq asks.