The Ski Journal - Volume 18, Issue 1
ELLEN BRADLEY’S CURRENTS OF CHANGE
Words Emily Sullivan 2024-09-24 08:10:11
Ellen Bradley stands in front of the Sealaska Heritage Institute’s Walter Sobeloff building in downtown Juneau, AK. Named for her great uncle, the building hosts a Native cultural center and features Lingít formline art on its façade. Photo: Emily Sullivan
A soft glow illuminates Auke Bay as the evening sun, warm and golden, slips lower in the sky. It's one of the first sunny days of spring, and Áak'w Kwáan (Juneau, AK) is abuzz with energy. But the bay remains frigid and quiet, a reminder of the winter that's rapidly melting—both from the town's collective memory as well as the nearby mountains.
Ellen Bradley greets the salt water slowly, wading step by step into it. A few quiet minutes pass as she takes in the rainforest, the mountains, the horizon. Without fanfare she slips entirely beneath the sparkling surface, engulfed by cold. For Ellen, this is coming home.
A skier since she was four, Ellen grew up just north of Seattle in Mill Creek, WA, away from her family’s traditional homelands in Southeast Alaska. She is Lingít and a child of the Dog Salmon clan, the L’eeneidí. Her youth was spent largely outdoors, playing team sports like soccer and skiing with her family at Stevens Pass on the weekends. She nurtured her identity as a skier throughout college, structuring her course load to allow for weekday skiing. Now a professional athlete, the 26-year-old resides in Winter Park, CO—where she is an alpine ambassador for the resort—and spends much of her free time developing her backcountry skillset. Though based in the Lower 48, she has recently sought to strengthen her relationship with Lingít Aaní (Lingít land) through ski trips to Juneau.
In her youth, Ellen visited Ketchikan, AK, often in the summer. There, she would fish, camp and spend time on the land with family and friends. But the Alaska she knew intimately was vastly different than that which she saw illustrated in the ski media she consumed. “I would watch a lot of ski films growing up where Alaska was depicted as this pinnacle of skiing, as this place where you had to go to prove yourself,” says Ellen. She looked on as pro skiers spoke about traveling to Alaska to “conquer lines” in a landscape they touted as “untouched by man.” As she grew into a young adult, Ellen was proud of her identity as a skier, but her relationship with the sport felt tenuous as she navigated the conflict between her own values and those glorified by the ski industry.
“It’s always made me uncomfortable to see that kind of depiction of Alaska in ski media, knowing that [these are] places that my people have lived since time immemorial—for tens of thousands of years—and have thrived in as a people,” says Ellen. She says that most skiers see Alaska through an extractive lens—wondering what boxes they can check and what experiences they can take, without forming relationships, investing in local communities, or learning about the state’s history of colonization.
The deeper Ellen found herself in the world of professional skiing, the more obvious these rifts began to feel. she found there was a clear need for more focus on goals rooted in community. “[Skiing is] a really personal—and at times, selfish—pursuit,” she adds.
In contrast, Ellen’s recent trips to ski in Alaska have been deeply intentional. Her first time skiing in Áak’w Ḵwáan was in 2022, on a media project for Patagonia, raising awareness for threats to the Tongass National Forest. She initiated her time there by first building reciprocity with the land and community with its people. For Ellen, it was important to spend a few days in the ocean, the rainforest, and with locals around Juneau rather than stepping directly into the alpine.
With an undergraduate degree in environmental studies and biology and professional background as an ecologist, Ellen experiences Áak’w Ḵwáan landscape through both an Indigenous and a scientific lens, seeking to comprehend the nuanced connections between humans and ecosystems. As we walk in the dappled sunlight of the rainforest’s edge, she points out various epiphytes by name, explaining their relationships to the trees that host them. When we emerge onto the adjacent beach, Ellen shares that her favorite aspect of Lingít Aaní is its diversity of ecosystems. “I don’t think I’ve ever been to another place that has the ocean touching the rainforest touching the mountains to the alpine,” she says.
The cold-water dip, a traditional Lingít practice, serves as an important reintroduction to the land on each of Ellen’s visits. “It’s a way to become present to your surroundings, but also present to yourself in the moment,” she explains. “Traditionally, it was a practice we used to build strength for hunting … so I felt like it was a way to be present with the land and to work on the strength and bravery that it takes to come home to lands that you’ve been separated from.”
On her early visits to Juneau, Ellen was struck by how few Indigenous skiers were present at Eaglecrest, the local, non-profit ski area on Sayéik, or Douglas Island. She knew that one of the most powerful ways she could engage with the local community was by creating more access on the hill for Alaska Native people. The Douglas Indian Association was in the process of establishing a ski program for local Indigenous middle- and high-school students, but local parents underscored the need for programming for younger Indigenous kids. Deeply aware of how impactful skiing can be at a young age, Ellen worked with local skiers, snowboarders and the local tribal government—the Central Council of Tlingit and Haida—to establish a youth snowsports camp for third- through fifth-grade tribal members in 2023.
The following year, Ellen moved to Juneau for the winter, working to develop the spring break snowsports camp for native youth. She also got to experience the full range of skiing in Southeast Alaska—from deep powder days to rain to long windows of high pressure. She felt her level of connection to Áak’w Ḵwáan deepen with each passing experience.
This year, the Tlingit and Haida spring break camp hosts fifteen youth who are excited to arrive at Eaglecrest under the glaringly bright March sun. Ellen greets each child by name as they arrive at the day lodge, making sure that they have the gear they need. Eventually, the students break out into small groups with Eaglecrest instructors at the helm, practicing pizza wedges and parallel turns on the bunny slope before venturing onto bigger blue and green runs. Ellen expertly juggles the logistics of the event while also finding time to take a few runs with the students during their afternoon freeski session, encouraging them with fist bumps and high fives. Eleven-year-old Amari is trying skiing for the first time today, and she is eager to graduate from the bunny hill. After lunch, Ellen helps her navigate over to the intermediate chair, Hooter, where she can try her new skills out on a larger slope. She tows Amari across the flats to access the two-seater lift which will deposit them midway up the mountain. Despite a few falls, Amari is all smiles and pride at the bottom of her first “big” run.
The tribe provides lessons, lunch and rentals to the camp’s participants, ensuring that families can focus on the fun aspects of skiing without shouldering the burden of affordability and logistics. “This sport is happening on our land, so I wanted to start with the youth, to dismantle some of those barriers to access,” says Ellen. It allows those kids to connect with the land and figure out if this is a way they enjoy moving their body.”
The Tlingit and Haida camp is just one example of Ellen’s ongoing work to increase Indigenous access and representation in the world of skiing. Ellen says that her life and work as an athlete look quite different than that of most pro skiers—while she does speaking engagements, photoshoots, and spends as much of her time skiing as possible, her work is always aimed at returning Native people to the land.
“Being on the land will allow us to have better connection to our own values, recognizing where our tribal values are being upheld or not. And then finding agency to establish and situate our own tribal values and protocols on how to be on our land,” Ellen explains. She says that reciprocity is an Indigenous value that is sorely lacking from mainstream outdoor culture. Conquering language is ever-present in skiing in particular—“peak bagging” or “smash-and-grab” missions reinforce the mindset of human dominance over landscapes.
“That [mindset] doesn’t acknowledge a relationship to the land,” she says. “I would really like to see reciprocity reflected in the ski industry. Giving back, sacrificing, donating—whatever it is—to these places, to the land, and to the people.”
In that spirit, Ellen helps run several additional programs aimed at developing skills and providing a point of entry to skiing for Indigenous peoples across the U.S. She mentors an Alaska Native snow science intern with the Sealaska Heritage Institute in Juneau, helps run an Indigenous backcountry hut trip in Oregon with the Wy’East Canary Club, and facilitates a scholarship program in collaboration with Ikon Pass. In 2024, the scholarship provided a free Ikon Pass and some essential gear to 30 Indigenous skiers. Ellen considers herself a “purpose-driven version of a pro skier” and says that collaborating with others doing similar equity work across the outdoor industry is imperative to driving meaningful change.
Grete Eliassen, a champion freestyle skier who Ellen sees as an industry mentor, says that meeting Ellen while skiing at Alta and subsequently learning from her, “changed my world forever.” Hearing Ellen’s perspective opened Eliassen’s eyes to deeper layers of nuance of inequity within the ski industry. “I never want to let her down,” says Eliassen. “I look to her for advice and I’m excited for the ski industry to get to know her, too.”
Though the impact of her work is clearly tangible, Ellen knows that changing the ski industry is a long game. “Getting 100 Native people that might not have been out in the mountains is incredible,” says Ellen. “It’s some of the most meaningful work I do. And it’s also a drop in the bucket compared to the actual issue of Land Back—of all of these industries occurring on our land, in many places against treaty rights.”
Her vision for the future of the ski industry includes Indigenous people everywhere having agency over their land. She says that the commercialization of skiing on Indigenous lands feels so obvious to her in Colorado, where tourists ski by the millions, but rarely does one see Ute, Cheyenne or Arapahoe skiers. She says that the industry can do better by spearheading and supporting initiatives that encourage Indigenous access to skiing—from scholarship programs to affinity skills workshops. “Every single resort needs to be engaged with their local tribal communities and with programs that are working to get Indigenous people back on their land,” she says, adding, “So much of skiing occurs on land that was stolen from tribes.”
Meaningful storytelling in ski media is also needed, she says. By supporting “Indigenous people in front of and behind the camera, helping to determine the direction of storytelling,” Ellen says that ski media can begin to elevate purposeful narratives that explore the concepts of reciprocity and respect on Indigenous lands. Ellen is currently directing her own film about seeking equity as an Indigenous skier in Alaska, for which she is still seeking industry sponsorship.
After three days of youth ski camp and climate-focused community events, Ellen and I head to the Eaglecrest backcountry for a ski tour to close out our time together in Áak’w Ḵwáan. The ocean glimmers in the afternoon sun, and across the water, the striking peaks of Xutsnoowu Ḵwáan (Admiralty Island) create an impressive backdrop. Ellen’s paternal village of Angoon sits on the opposite side of the island, roughly 40 miles as the raven flies.
This ridgeline is an important home for Ellen. It serves as a key location for her forthcoming film and one of the first places she established a relationship with Áak’w Ḵwáan as a skier. “It’s a place that feels so incredibly special, that has watched across [the water] at these different lands through change of time, through contact and colonization,” she says. “I’ve experienced such a wide array of emotions up there. So much of it coming from feeling what the land has witnessed and experienced.”
Despite the temperature hovering around 40 degrees, the afternoon feels incredibly warm, the sun’s heat reflecting off the snow in stark contrast with the cold, deep blue waters below. Though we’re only 2,700 feet above sea level, the trees on the ridge are stunted—a hallmark of the alpine. Below us, the rainforest continues to awaken from the long winter. Ellen navigates the terrain with a familiar ease, taking stock of where we might descend. She skis confidently through the forest, weaving between trees and airing small drops, her orange jacket a pop of color in a sea of blue and green. Her joy in this moment fuels Ellen’s energy to create change; a moment of bliss to bring everything back to the simple joy of making turns.
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