“The time is now”: UAF anthropology PhD student honored with Governor’s Arts & Humanities Award

Sarah Manriquez, CLA Public Information Office
December 5, 2025
cla-pio@alaska.edu

On an ordinary evening at home, PhD student MoHagani Magnetek was on the couch with her wife, Juanita, watching TV when the phone rang. On the other end of the line was anything but ordinary news: she had been selected as a 2025 Governor’s Arts & Humanities Award recipient for Distinguished Service to the Humanities in Community.

At first, she didn’t quite believe it. Only when the follow-up details arrived — a date, a place, a formal invitation — did the reality begin to settle in. The recognition, she said, feels like one of the most prestigious honors an individual can receive in Alaska, and the fact that it is specifically for distinguished service to community still amazes her.

For the UAF College of Liberal Arts, it’s also a moment of pride: one of the state’s highest honors for humanities work is going to one of our own graduate students in the Department of Anthropology.

A lifetime of showing up for community

Long before there were awards and public recognition, there was a teenager who kept showing up wherever there was work to be done.

MoHagani traces her commitment to community back to her family. She grew up watching her parents take in relatives who had fallen on hard times, caring for a houseless grandfather and opening their home to family members who needed a place to stay. That early example of “charity begins at home” quietly shaped what she thought a good life should look like: you look beyond your own needs, you help where you can, and you don’t wait for a perfect moment to begin.

By 14, she was already involved in advocacy and community organizing. Over the years, that work has taken many forms — civil rights organizing, animal rescue, mutual support networks, mental health advocacy, and social justice campaigns. Wherever she has lived, she has plugged into local efforts to address harm and build something better.

Friends sometimes talked about “giving back later,” after they were more settled. That never sat right with her. For MoHagani, the work can’t wait. The way she puts it, “people need help now… the world needs love right now.”

Her approach to activism has evolved with time. In earlier years, she spent more time in the streets on the grassroots level of community organizing: chaining herself to a tree in protest after being harassed by an individual only to receive no support from the Alaska State Troop after the racist and sexual assault committed against her, speaking against anti-trans bathroom policies at Anchorage Assembly meetings, organizing silent protests that lasted for hours on the floor of City Hall. In more recent years, she has shifted toward art, philanthropy, and mental health advocacy — but the through line is the same: using whatever tools she has to push toward a more just, compassionate world.

One line she carries with her comes from civil rights leader Vernon Johns: “If you see a good fight, get in it.” It’s a mantra that fits the arc of her life.

Choosing Alaska, choosing to stay

Although her work often takes her across the country, Alaska is home.

A graduate of East High School in Anchorage (now Bettye Davis East Anchorage High School), she left the state for college and then joined the military, then returned to Alaska in 2012 after serving in the U.S. Coast Guard. Her homecoming coincided with another major transition: living openly as an African American transgender woman.

Those early years back in Anchorage were not easy. As she began her transition, visibility brought hostility. She recalls in 2013  being harassed in public, banned from using a women’s restroom at a restaurant, and targeted on social media as her advocacy against discriminatory policies became more visible. At one point, she became a recognizable face in debates over 2018 Proposition 1, a ballot initiative that would have restricted bathroom access for transgender people.

There were times she wanted to leave. But in the end, her love for the place — and the people — won out. She decided that if Alaska was her home, then she would stay, stand up for herself, and use her experiences to make it safer for those who came after her. When she advocates, she is always thinking about who is coming “immediately behind” her and how they will be treated.

That sense of responsibility to the people who follow is part of what makes this award feel so significant to her. It isn’t just about what she has endured; it’s about the changes those fights have made possible for others.

Poetry as a universal equalizer

Many Alaskans first came to know MoHagani not through academia, but through art.

As a poet, performer, and event organizer, she has a talent for creating spaces where very different people end up in the same room. She has never been a “one clique only” person — even in high school, she bounced from the library to the lockers to the athletes’ corner, moving fluidly between social worlds. She still does that today, moving through arts communities, activist circles, faith spaces, neighborhood events, and academic environments.

Poetry, she says, is a kind of “universal equalizer.” Everyone can connect to it — whether they’re seasoned writers, nervous first-timers, or audience members who never considered themselves “poetry people” at all.

When she hosts events like poetry events, she intentionally designs them as welcoming, high-energy spaces where people feel safe enough to be honest and brave enough to bring their best work. Over the years, she has watched newcomers perform for the first time, seen winners go on to study creative writing in college, and watched others publish their own books. Those ripples matter to her as much as any award.

Her philosophy of community is simple and radical at once. At one point in our conversation, she summed it up this way: “If I have $2, you have one.” The same impulse carries into how she meets conflict. After a long, painful conflict in 2015 with a bus driver who had treated her badly, she decided to try something different: consistently greeting him with warmth until, over time, the relationship thawed.

That experience taught her something about the power of persistence and kindness. As she put it, she chose to “win this battle with kindness.” For her, that practice of refusing to give up on people — including those who have done harm — is part of what it means to build community in Alaska right now.

“This is my home. This is my state”: finding a place at UAF

Alongside her community work, MoHagani has always nurtured a deep love of learning. She jokes that one of the truths she had to fully accept about herself is that she genuinely enjoys school.

“Ever since I was in high school and I learned there was a such thing as being a graduate student beyond a college, a bachelor's degree,” she said, “I said, oh, I can't wait till I'm a doctoral student, I want to be that.”

When it came time to pursue a doctorate, two things were clear: she wanted to study anthropology, and she didn’t want to leave Alaska.

“Alaska’s my home,” she said. “They have a good anthropology program here that I'm happy to be a part of.”

Anthropology offered a way to bring together the threads of her interests — history, culture, material traces of the past, lived experiences in the present — into a single field. At UAF, she proposed focusing on African American history and culture in Alaska, a topic she saw as an underexplored area with a significant “knowledge gap” that needed to be filled.

That interest grew out of her own engagement with African American communities across the state, from Fairbanks to Anchorage to Juneau. People knew she was an archaeologist and a lover of history, and they wanted those stories uncovered and shared. For her, pursuing this research at UAF is a way of honoring those communities and creating a record that will last.

She also speaks warmly about the intellectual environment on campus. She loves walking through a place where her neighbors include volcanologists, neuroscientists, and fellow anthropologists. “There's a lot of smart people walking around here, just willy-nilly,” she told her mom once, who gently reminded her that she is one of them.

Research that braids archives, landscapes, and living communities

Right now, MoHagani is in the middle of her comprehensive exams, choosing to complete them through papers rather than timed tests. Her dissertation proposal is still taking shape, but some themes are already clear.

One core interest is the relationship between archival research and historical archaeology, cultural anthropology and museology — how documents, photographs, and personal collections inform what archaeologists look for in the ground, and how material finds in turn reshape what we see in the archives. She is also attentive to how oral history and museum studies (museology) intersect with that work.

She is deeply involved in the Alcan (Alaska–Canada) Highway Historical Archaeology Project, which focuses on the 1942–43 winter encampment of the segregated and predominantly African American 97th Engineer Regiment of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The project’s first field school ran in summer 2025, with another planned for 2026, and she expects those findings to form an important part of her dissertation.

At the same time, she is just as interested in contemporary African American life in Alaska: theater movements, Juneteenth celebrations, Annual Black Business Expo, events like the Wakanda Ball, and everyday cultural work happening in communities across the state. People are “creating and replicating culture all the time,” she notes, and she wants that vibrancy to be visible in the historical record.

Another emerging thread is bioarchaeology and repatriation. When human remains are found, communities often rightly insist on a say in how those remains are identified and cared for. When remains of African-descended people appear in Alaska, she hopes to be present — both as a scholar and as a community advocate — to help with identification, repatriation, and the difficult conversations that surround them. Even as the details evolve, one thing is constant: “my anthropology is community-driven and based on people,” she said.

Making an impact in the department

Within the UAF Department of Anthropology, MoHagani is not just a student — she’s helping shape the program’s future.

With support from a Geist Fund award, she acquired an aerial drone to support archaeological fieldwork along the Alaska Highway and beyond. From her perspective, the technology doesn’t just make fieldwork more efficient; it changes how archaeologists see. A bird’s eye view offers patterns and relationships that are easily missed at ground level. She’s eager not just to master that technology herself but to help train other students to use it in their own research.

She also speaks with gratitude about her committee, which includes both cultural and historical archaeologists and a medical anthropologist. She appreciates that her faculty mentors treat her less like a student to be directed and more like an early-career colleague expected to figure things out, generate new ideas, and contribute meaningfully to the field.

“They treat me like an entry-level professor,” she said — and while that can be demanding, she values the trust and expectations that come with it. Through assistantships and mentoring, faculty like Dr. Justin Cramb and Dr. Sveta Yamin-Pasternak (her doctoral advisory committee co-chairs)  have also helped her grow as a teacher, not just a researcher, something she sees as essential for anyone hoping to remain in academia.

“I like what’s happening for me in this program,” she said. “I'm happy to be here, and I'm having a good time. I'm having a wonderful time.”

A win for community — and a reminder to keep going

For many years, MoHagani’s activism, organizing, and care work were largely invisible to institutions. Some of it couldn’t safely go on a résumé; some of it happened quietly because they involved individuals' personal life struggles so some things had to be kept confidential.

The Governor’s Arts & Humanities Award for Distinguished Service to the Humanities in Community makes that labor visible in a new way — not just for her, but for the communities she stands with and for.

When the disbelief faded, one of her first impulses was to call her mother. As she explained the job she now holds in philanthropy, the art exhibits she helps curate, the scholarships and grants she helps move into people’s hands, her mother reflected that she had not only done what her parents taught her — helping others with what little they had — but had gone “far beyond” anything they imagined.

For MoHagani, that’s exactly how it should be. Each generation, she believes, is meant to stand on the shoulders of elders and ancestors and go further.

Receiving this award doesn’t change her path so much as confirm it. She’s grateful for the chance to pause, take a breath, and acknowledge what she has built with others. But in her mind, it is just one peak on a much longer journey.

“You can reach the mountaintop, and you can look around,” she said. “But that ain't the end… This is just one, and I'm happy to be in this space and to be standing here… and then get movin' again to explore more mountaintops... Yes, you have more to do.”