I think systematically learning about our real history and why we are the way we are. Like when I started this journey of language revitalization for myself in the beginning I asked my mom, like I was really mad at her. I said to her, “Why didn't you teach me Iñupiaq?” Then she said, “I wasn’t taught it.” ”Why didn’t Gram teach you Iñupiaq?” And she had to go back and tell me at that time they were moving them down to California and that was their way of getting them into the workforce. So having that real history of how we are, the way we are, intergenerational trauma, historical trauma, all of that. So we can understand all of these things aren’t just because of your ethnicity. No, there's generations of issues that have evolved into what's happening.

I was attending junior college in California. As an underclassman, I didn’t have a lot of choices for classes because by the time I was able to register many classes were already full. So, I decided to take a class called Anthropology. It met the social science requirement for my degree, and it still was open for registration. I had no idea what Anthropology was… but I thought, what the heck, might as well. This was the first step in a journey in which I grew to love Anthropology and gain a better understand and respect for Indigenous peoples, and myself as an Indigenous person. During the class, we made our way around the world learning about Indigenous people. Once we got to the North, the film they showed to teach this class of mostly Californians was “Nanook of the North.” I was a bit appalled. This was not the best representation of my people. And the class thought it was comical, and not serious. I proceeded to actually step out of my comfort zone and tell the class that I was from the North, and I had more contemporary and respectful visual aids that could help show we were as Iñupiaq people. So, I proceeded to teach the class one day about who Iñupiaq people were. And this fueled a passion I have had since then—a mission to make sure that Indigenous peoples have a voice and that so many of these myths about Indigenous peoples are dispelled.

Eben Hopson. He was a big advocate for education at home…Yeah, like making education happen in the home. In the home. And not being sent to boarding schools and stuff. Yeah, he wasn't allowed to go to school after eighth grade. He wasn't on the list to go to school after eighth grade on the ship because he took some running water from the school district or something along those lines. So he wasn't allowed. So that really like fired him up to advocate for local education instead. So they didn’t need to leave after middle school.

Back home our creation story was the first man who sprung from the blade of grass that grew alongside the melting winter snow in the springtime. The blade of grass that was bending the wind in Unalakleet - it means "where the east wind blows" - and then bent over this Creek and saw this reflection and that he was a person. And I think about how Indigenous people have creation stories of how we've come to be in a place, not colonization or settler stories of how we've come to be in a place. And there's something really sacred and special about that because our knowledge, our languages, our evolution has happened on and with these lands so there doesn't exist any deeper reserve of knowledge about place than within Indigenous languages.

I'm very vocal about, you know, telling people Christopher Columbus is not the first person that discovered America and that us Indigenous people despise that day so we call it Indigenous People’s Day. I wanna take back our culture. I want us to grow our hair. I want us to, you know, what I admire the most about what Canada does, in all over Canada, in Nunavut especially, they still wear, they still adorn their polar bear pants and their polar bear parkas. They still wear them today and the mukluks that they make.

There's another story about a Giant that had three carved rocks. He carved them into faces and there was a story of when he was juggling. And he got distracted by…I can't remember what he was distracted. I wish I could remember that story. But he had those stones and he got distracted. And that one, a couple of the stones knocked, knocked on each other. And one landed on Nunivak Island. We don't have a map here either. There was one, one big rock landed on Triangle Island, which is on the east side of the island. And another rock, which is on the southwest of the island, which is called Talungmiut. And that rock is kinda propped on a mountain that has been there for years and years and years and years. And then the other stone head is, in our school, preserved.

We're all storytellers in our own right but a lot of us just don't know it, right? Because automatically, and a lot of us think about, oh, if you're a storyteller that means, you know, all of the old traditional stories, or legends or fables, whatever you want to title it, right? But our memories too are also stories...those are equally as important. I think we have to remind people of that.

One other thing I'd just like to say that I personally work at in my life is educating the non-Indigenous people…I see people in tourism in daily life and I'll bring something up or I'll relate something because I know some of these stories and some of these things about the history, I work it in. And then they don't know that or they don't know what I'm talking about. And it's just amazing. And I, in my mind, in my life, I feel like the more, I mean, I know this isn't what your forum is about, but the more I can educate non-Indigenous people to the history of this state and where they've been living and what is here and, "Isn't it fascinating to think about them living in the Arctic on this cold winter day and how they only were living on the ground with skins," or "They had their, you know, caribou first and their, you know, all the structure of their units and on these cold wintery days." And they're just, people all of a sudden go, oh yeah, there was somebody here before us in the houses. But that is something that I think is so important. If we can keep educating along with the teachers so that they're going, becoming inquisitive and going, "Wow, how can we share all of this story of this state, you know?" But I really, really work at it in, in our active tourism activity that we do and just in my daily life. But I have to be educated myself. So I work at it and I read. There's fascinating books out there. And those, those are stories, you know, they're incredible stories.

I want our kids to learn the Western culture as well as the bad parts of Western and Native culture and, you know, to have them tell their stories even though it does hurt. Even though it is culturally sensitive to most of Our Elders.

I've used this with like HR stuff where unhealthy habits or communications and I've shared like, that is not part of our values. We don't talk to each other that way or we don't communicate that way. And that behavior doesn't have a place here. Tying it back to our values and it seems that they receive it and it helps.

I graduated from East High School and I mean, I transferred from like Tyson Elementary School, East High School, Clark Middle School, you know, I grew up on East Anchorage and it's just, it's definitely different. I mean like urban kids just don't really understand or respect Our people, you know, or, Our past or acknowledge that. And it's just like, you know, you try to use your voice. I always, I always stuck up for my friends and my community and you know, being a, being a part of like our Alaskan Native groups after school. I'd do that all the time, you know, remembering how to make akutaq and in class, in elementary school, it was my favorite time. It was like, it was like the joy of going to school. I was like, “Oh my gosh, we have an event today. Like, I'm so excited.” And, um, especially cuz I grew up in Anchorage, you know, so I'm like an urban Indigenous kid and, um, yeah, it's just different. It's definitely like urban kids just don't really understand what our day to day life looks like or they don't really want to learn about it or respect it. And that's one thing I want us, you know, to see grow, you know, to see more kids just understand like, respect, diversity and want to be together and want to learn more about each other and each other's history and each other's ancestry, you know, it's so important.

I think it's just like we wanna be ready and we want our kids to be ready to learn and we want them to want to learn. And so that means the trauma piece has to be taken out.

I believe that when we went through the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, it was with the thought that it set us up for failure. The fact that we've been resilient has, I think, been a surprise to the federal government in its own way. They set up that divisiveness- the corporation versus the Tribe- and their different goals. They have different goals and they were given those strategies. And again, it shouldn't have been given, because we had our inherent rights, but they failed to recognize that. So I always feel that we were set up for failure. And so it causes personal bias. We know that the Tribes compete for similar grants, or for people, or for the workforce, or for whatever it may be. And we also then compete with the village corporations and the regional corporations. And then you get into the nonprofit and we all have our opinion about who's right on it. But again, it's a system that is not part of our traditional values, and yet we're forced to live within that. And the grants just accelerate that.

The students need to learn about leaders. Like we have so many leaders just in this region: Alberta Schenck, William Beltz, Chief, Emily Ivanoff-Brown, Ivan Gozrick, Caleb Pungowiyi, William Merculieff, Mathew Iya. We have leaders. And that goes to students coming to realize that they too can become leaders.

When you have to fight all the time, it's really hard.

A lot of us have parents who grew up, whose life was strongly dictated by the church. Right? And so the church had a lot to do with belief systems. And so, you know, my mom grew up very Catholic and it was the Catholic way, Catholic belief, everything else was superstitious. And so a lot of older adults of these older parents had to relearn who they were kind of on their own. And so was a lot of self discovery. Or on the flipside with my family and my dad, religion was like, I mean, it was, he went away from religion. He ran as fast as he could because of the things that were done to his family and to him. So there's the flip side of that. Yeah. Yeah. Cuz in my village dance wasn't revitalized until the seventies and it was finally then that, you know, that people, I don't know what the word is, reconciled the church with their own Indigenous belief systems. And so it was one of those things where, you know, it came back. People still knew the songs and dances and so it was the slow process.