Mary C. Pete
Director, Kuskokwim Campus
University of Alaska Fairbanks
Bethel, AK

Pete passed away on November 17, 2018.

Mary C. Pete was appointed to the US Arctic Research Commission by President Obama on June 25, 2010.

Since 2005, Mary C. Pete has been the director of the University of Alaska Fairbanks Kuskokwim Campus in Bethel, Alaska. Between 1996–2005, Pete served as the director of the subsistence division for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G), overseeing a research program and advocating for the protection of subsistence rights with a statewide staff of nearly 40 full-time employees, and 70 part-time subsistence monitors in rural communities. 

After earning her bachelor’s degree in anthropology, and then a master’s degree in cultural anthropology from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 1984, Pete worked in Bethel as a researcher in the Yukon-Kuskokwim delta region, and as a resource specialist for the ADF&G division of subsistence. The division is the applied social science research arm of the department, and is responsible for helping management boards implement the state’s subsistence priority law. Prior to that, Pete served as an instructor for the applied field-based rural development bachelor’s degree program at the Kuskokwim Campus for nearly three years and helped expand and enhance the program through seminars. Pete was born and raised in Stebbins, Alaska along the Bering Sea coast. She speaks and writes Central Yup’ik. Pete and her husband Hubert Angaiak have two children, and live in Bethel.