When Eva Dawn Burk first saw Calypso Farm and Ecology Center in 2019, she felt enchanted. Calypso is an educational farm tucked away in a boreal forest in Ester, Alaska, near Fairbanks. To Burk, it looked like a subarctic Eden, encompassing vegetable and flower gardens, greenhouses, goats, sheep, honeybees, a nature trail, and more. In non-pandemic summers, the property teems with local kids and aspiring farmers who converge on the terraced hillside for hands-on education.

Calypso reminded Burk, 38, who is Denaakk’e and Lower Tanana Athabascan from the villages of Nenana and Manley Hot Springs, of her family’s traditional fish camp in the Alaskan Interior, where she spent childhood summers. “I just felt like I was home,” Burk said. “(Calypso) really spoke to my heart.”

When Burk was still young, though, her family drifted away from its traditions. As fish stocks dropped and the cost of living rose, they stopped going to fish camp. Burk studied engineering in college and, in 2007, found a stable job in the oil and gas industry at Arctic Slope Regional Corporation. But after she had a series of revelatory dreams — first of an oil spill, then of a visit from her departed grandmothers — and heard elders discussing threats to traditional food sources, Burk committed herself to advocating for tribal food sovereignty.

A few months after her first visit to Calypso, Burk became a graduate student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where she currently researches the link between health and traditional food practices. In 2020, Burk received the Indigenous Communities Fellowship from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to develop a business model for implementing biomass-heated (or wood-fired) greenhouses in rural Native villages. The greenhouses will grow fresh produce year-round while also creating local jobs and mitigating wildfire risk.

Read the full article about Calypso Farm and Ecology Center by Max Graham at The Counter.