I always appreciate the smell. You're out on the nuna all day and then you go inside and you're like, I smell like outside.
The nuna is the tundra. And so when you come home, your hair smells like the grass or the tundra and you got dirt in your nails and you're dusty, like real stiff ‘cause the dust, you know, but you know, you get into bed at the end of the night and you could just smell, you know, the being outside and being at the beach or on the, you know, the tundra and you could just live those memories of, you know, we're almost giving our kids the same thing we had growing up, but on a bigger level because, you know, I was raised to pick greens too. And so I try to teach my kids the same because you know, to the naked eye, you look out on the tundra and they're like, “oh, there's nothing out there.” But there really is, you know, and you show these kids, you know, we took a bunch of middle school kids out onto the tundra and we showed them what you pick and how you use them. And they, after that, like we had a mom tell us they went out like after the camp and they made like 26 jars of the jelly that we showed them how to make. And they just started handing it out to Elders. And so we just kind of give back to the people that gave to us,. And so I think that that's also important too, is you know, even if you're not Iñupiaq, you still learn what we do up here and of course Justina, you know, talking about it, you know, she says, "I wasn't, you know, Iñupiaq, but I was in maklak," or "I learned how to do this." You know, she now does whaling and you know, so we're, we're inclusive and we welcome everybody, you know, it doesn't matter where you're from. I think that's important for people to understand is we're very open.
Tenna Judkins & Natasha Itta, Utqiaġvik kalaka