Investigating Historical Trauma Endured by Native Americans, Alaska Natives. An Ojibwe woman and independent journalist Mary Annette Pember recently visited Alaska for a series of stories on historical trauma and Native American mental health practices. Pember says the troubled lives of Native Americans reflect their troubled history. Alaska Public Radio

Game Board Votes to Restrict Western Alaska Caribou Harvest. Alaska's Board of Game voted unanimously this week to make the first harvest restrictions in more than 30 years to Alaska's largest caribou herd. The Western Alaska Herd, which numbered about 235,000 animals in July 2013, migrates through a range from Point Home to Kobuk to Unalakleet. The herd feeds thousands of people in villages where imported meat is not affordable. Fairbanks Daily News-Miner

Greenland Sets Its Sights on Tackling High TB Rates. Tuberculosis continues to pose a major threat to health in Greenland. "The size of the challenge we face cannot be underestimated. The road to an acceptable incidence of the disease is long. The path to extinction [of TB] is even longer," the Greenland government said March 23 in a statement released in advanced of World TB Day, March 24. In 2014, 95 cases of TB were detected - which means Greenlandic Inuit suffer from TB at about the same high rate as Canadian Inuit. Nunatsiaq Online

Tuberculosis Rates Remain Sky-High Among Canadian Inuit. If you live in the Inuit regions of Canada, chances are that you or someone you know has tested positive for tuberculosis, a deadly infectious disease that usually affects the lungs. In 2006 and again in 2014, Canada's minister of health announced the adoption of a national TB reduction target of 3.6 cases per 100,000 by 2015. But TB rates among Inuit continue to be high - overall, at least 30 times higher than that target rate, or, in Nunavut, 49 times higher. Nunatsiaq Online

The Third Wheels: Observers at the Arctic Council. Does the United Kingdom need an Arctic ambassador? According to the UK House of Lords Select Committee on the Arctic, which released a report last month that considers how the UK should respond to a changing Arctic, it does. Predictably, if not a little unfortunately, this became the main headline to emerge from their work. It was predictable because many commentators have become preoccupied with the symbolic involvement of non-Arctic states in regional Arctic politics, and this has been boiled down to the observation of 1) whether they are observers in the Arctic Council, and increasingly, 2) whether they have an Ambassador devoted to Arctic affairs. While these are objective criterion, I have seen little evidence that either designation leads to influence in regional policy making. Alaska Dispatch News

Nome Could Have Deep-Draft Arctic Port by 2020. Nome could be home to a deep-draft Arctic port as early as 2020, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The Army Corps released a joint study with the Alaska Department of Transportation this month, "tentatively selecting" the Port of Nome as the site for a deep-draft expansion. The plan calls for a roughly 2,000-foot extension to Nome's existing causeway and would involve dredging the harbor to a depth of minus 28 feet. That would accommodate vessels with a draft exceeding the harbor's current depth of minus 22 feet. KNOM

How to Assess Food Security From an Inuit Perspective: Building a Conceptual Framework on How to Assess Food Security in the Alaskan Arctic. The project has been moving along quickly with fourteen villages visited and two more to be visited in early 2014. Since our last update, our focus has been on fundraising to hold regional food security evaluation workshops, and on the analysis of information gathered through expert interviews. As a reminder, the Objectives and Outcomes of this Indigenous led project are: Through community meetings, semi-directive interviews, and workshops we are gathering information from traditional knowledge holders to identify the baselines needed to assess the vulnerabilities of food security. See "Food Security Update" here.

Arctic Ice Reaches a Low Winter Maximum. The winter ice covering the Arctic Ocean has reached its annual peak, but the extent of sea ice cover this winter is smaller than it has been at the end of any winter since 1978, when scientists began keeping consistent satellite records. The vast amount of sea ice covering the Arctic fluctuates on a seasonal basis, and the winter peak marks a turning point before a melting period during the warmer spring and summer months. Arctic sea ice typically expands to a maximum in March and shrinks to a minimum in September each year. The National Snow & Ice Data Center said on Thursday that this year's maximum occurred on Feb. 25, about two weeks earlier than the average, barring any unlikely additional growth of ice late in the season. New York Times