Igor Krupnik is curator of Arctic and Northern Ethnology collections at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. His areas of expertise include the modern cultures, ecological knowledge, and cultural heritage of Arctic people, primarily in Alaska and Siberia; human ecology; and the impact of modern climate change on Arctic residents. He published and edited several books and collections, including three volumes on indigenous observations of Arctic environmental change and a collected volume on the history of Eskimology, Early Inuit Studies: Themes and Transitions, 1850s-1980s (2016).

Aron L. Crowell is an Arctic/subarctic archaeologist and anthropologist whose research and publications have focused on the peoples of the Gulf of Alaska region, where he is currently leading an NSF-funded study of the human and environmental history of Yakutat Bay in partnership with the Yakutat Tlingit Tribe. Crowell is the Alaska director of the Smithsonian Institution's Arctic Studies Center in Anchorage and curator of the Center's collaborative exhibition Living Our Cultures, Sharing Our Heritage: The First Peoples of Alaska.