Jody Potts-Joseph likes to say she was “raised in the back of a dog sled.” She grew up on a trapline 70 miles from Eagle Village on the Yukon River, traveling with her family by dog team or by horse. Now a competitive dog musher, mother, snowboarder, guide and public speaker, Potts-Joseph works tirelessly to increase representation for Indigenous people in outdoor recreation, inspiring the next generation of Indigenous snowboarders, dog mushers and adventurers.
Potts-Joseph says her parents didn’t slow down their way of life for their kids — instead they brought them along. Her mother often ran or walked ahead of their dog team on foot, breaking trail. Her father took her on countless adventures and taught her to never be controlled by fear. Growing up, Potts-Joseph idolized her older brother Sonny, who had a race team by the time she was six. She credits those early years — riding in the basket and watching him run dogs — as the original source of her love of mushing.
Potts-Joseph carries her upbringing into everything she does. “It’s part of my constitution,” she says of her connection to the land her Han Gwich’in people have inhabited for over 10,000 years. “It really guides the way I walk in this world.”
A snowboarder, trail runner and mountain biker herself, Potts-Joseph has long seen outdoor recreation as essential to her own health and wellness, and something she wants to pass on to the next generation. For Native youth facing high rates of suicide, addiction and hopelessness, she sees access to the outdoors as something close to lifesaving. “I just know how much it’s kept me healthy,” she says. “And I hope if I can share that, it might ignite a fire in them too.”
She founded the small nonprofit Native Youth Outdoors, which aims to provide outdoor recreation opportunities for Indigenous youth to increase their health and wellness. Potts-Joseph also worked to raise her kids with a deep respect for the outdoors, carrying on the lessons her parents had instilled in her at a young age. She raised them on the land — hunting, hiking, canoeing, snowboarding and picking berries.
But as her kids grew up and left home, she found herself drawn back to the pursuit she’d had to set aside years before: dog mushing. Though she’d raised and raced dogs on and off over the years, Potts-Joseph took a long break while her kids were teens. In 2013, she passed her lead dog Flash on to musher Jesse Holmes. Years later, with her kids grown, she began rebuilding a team bred from Flash’s lineage.
Over the the past few years, Potts-Joseph has committed to training and raising a strong team with her eyes set on the Iditarod. After a few seasons of qualifying races like the Kobuk 440 and Copper Basin 300, she continued to train her team for the 1,000 mile journey in 2026. Her brother Sonny, still her most trusted eye for dogs, rode in her sled on her final training run before the Iditarod and agreed with Potts-Joseph — her dogs were ready.
Potts-Joseph is deeply aware of what her presence on the trail represents. She will be the sixth Native woman and first Gwich’in woman to enter the race. She still carries a mental image of her school principal from Eagle competing in the 1983 Iditarod with a handmade parka and sled bag from the village. “That always stuck with me,” she says. “I just hope there’s kids that might see me on the trail and think, I think I can do this.”
She wants her historic run to bring awareness to issues facing her people. Potts-Joseph is a survivor of domestic violence and sexual assault, and she speaks about it directly. Native women experience violence at higher rates than any other group in the country, and she doesn’t want that statistic to be the end of the story for anyone. “I want native women to find the power within themselves to be resilient and still chase their dreams,” she says. “Don’t let your trauma define you.”
She also hopes to raise awareness for the Yukon River salmon fishery, which has been devastated in recent years due to a combination of warming rivers and offshore bycatch from trawlers. Harsh subsistence fishing restrictions have followed in villages on the Yukon River, with a strict 7-year moratorium on king salmon. Without fish to feed dog teams, mushing is disappearing from villages that once had more dogs than people. “Dog mushing is dying in the villages,” she says. “And people don’t even know it’s happening.”
But as she heads out on the trail, Potts-Joseph looks forward to the challenges ahead. She is most excited to cut her teeth on the technical portions of trail, to spend time on the land with her dogs, and to see new country. She’ll be thinking about those who came before her, including her grandfather, who traveled the Interior by dog team. She wears a patch on her race parka which reads “Honoring Native Heritage: Iditarod,” a nod to the intentions she carries with her on the trail.
Emily Sullivan is a photographer and writer focused on outdoor recreation, environmental wellness, and community empowerment. She is based on Dena’ina lands, where she can usually be found skiing, packrafting, or berry picking.
