What Stories Are Shaping Alaska’s Outdoor Future?

The May 12 session in the Alaska Outdoor Alliance’s Regenerative Outdoor Visioning Project surfaced one of the clearest tensions yet in the series:

How do we tell fuller, more truthful stories about Alaska’s outdoors — without reducing Alaska to either fantasy or despair?

That question drove a wide-ranging conversation with filmmaker Princess Johnson and photojournalist Marlena Sloss about tourism, media, stewardship, and the stories embedded everywhere from films and social media to trail signs, visitor centers, maps, and destination marketing.

One theme surfaced repeatedly: storytelling is everywhere. It’s not just newspapers or film. It’s the language on interpretive signage. It’s the stories cruise ships tell. It’s the way Alaska is marketed as the last frontier, untouched wilderness, or an adventure playground disconnected from living communities and histories.

Princess spoke about growing up largely invisible within Alaska’s dominant narratives and how that shaped her work as a storyteller. She described storytelling as a way of rebuilding relationship — with place, culture, and the living world — and shared a memorable example from Vancouver where signage described a restoration area as being “governed by the laws of nature.” That simple phrase sparked discussion about how values quietly get embedded into tourism, interpretation, and public space.

Marlena spoke about “slow journalism” rooted in trust, reciprocity, and relationship instead of extraction and speed. Both she and Princess reflected on how journalism and filmmaking are evolving as more Indigenous and place-rooted storytellers reshape the values underlying those fields.

One of the strongest discussions centered on tourism itself. Participants wrestled with the gap between the Alaska visitors are sold and the Alaska many communities are actually living through — including collapsing salmon runs, cultural loss, and environmental change. Dorothy Shockley shared the example of a riverboat tourism experience that beautifully interpreted fishing culture and subsistence history without mentioning that many Yukon and Tanana River communities can no longer fish because of collapsing salmon runs.

That led to a difficult but important question: How do we tell the whole story without turning Alaska into “bummer.com”?

Participants explored ways tourism and storytelling might evolve toward deeper engagement instead of passive consumption — through Indigenous storytelling, archaeology, restoration projects, arts, science, reciprocity, and experiences that invite visitors into relationship with place.

By the end of the session, one idea felt increasingly clear:

Storytelling is not separate from stewardship, tourism, or recreation.