I think that there’s that thought that, “Oh if Su’naq Tribe’s doing it, only Natives can do it." Yes, we would love to have our Native students have first priority, but we are open to the entire community, we want to bring in the entire community and share our culture with them.

We've done all this work, our kids already, and I mean this is kids, kids, right? If we think about it. And then in 50 plus years there wouldn't be any prejudice. So I think that you know, all of these pieces build every year on reaching our kind of vision, of that [no] prejudice. You know, it could be in our education system, in our societies, in our communities, across the board.

So it doesn't all have to be good. It could be bad. So we're not even thinking of the opposite of these, if there was one people. So if we did all gather, like you said, then it'd be too many people. And then when there's less, when there's too many people, everybody can't be heard. So that's why there's villages and then a long time ago, it'd be a big thing to go to another village. Like from here to just Gakona it was a whole planning. And then they wouldn't go just for the day. They'd be there for like a week or a couple of weeks or so. But you go and you don’t have that like one-on-one engaging and then, and you go for a certain amount of time because things come out and you remember things and then, you know, kind of a sense of healing. So now things are rushed. So when we have our potlatches, it's only like a day. Back then it used to be like a week. Like people, they come and then stay with the family for a week. And that's because everything doesn't come out at once. Like say somebody had dropped something and they remembered, you know, their loved one that had passed and they did this in and you know, stuff like that comes up then that helps heal. So if we were all one people, there wouldn't be that smaller intimacy.

Quit being so scared. See, this is why I put myself out there for my students. They can see me. When I'm with students, I'm not as scared, but with adults, I get scared. Sorry, I'm scared. I could do this. Train your brain.

QNT is my heart. It's not just my job...I still struggled through for the first few years and trying to get people to come back and realizing that, you know, this is your clubhouse. This is you, this is your place. I'm only here giving you what you deserve. And, you know, bringing their stuff back. I mean, this stuff was in a bag on the floor in the closet. Our regalia was horrible and I had people come in and redo it. We have the room full of parkas and pictures of our Elders who have served on the board. And those were just thrown in a blanket and taken off the wall. And it was so disrespectful to me, like, how you can't disrespect these people? And it broke my heart and from there on I swore I was gonna put 110% into this place. And my people, it's not just my place, it's my people, my home. I love my job and I love what I do.

What I like about the what if questions is it just, it leads to more and more questions, right? What if more non-Native people had a greater awareness of Alaska Native history and sense of place? And that's why I named it What if Lady Justice Were Native. It's called What If Lady Justice. When I show it to people, that are usually non-Indigenous people, I go, “well, Lady Justice is a Greek goddess with a white robe on. Lady Justice is a white Greek goddess that doesn't have anything to do with what started in this country.” So now they're thinking. So that's why it's called what if Lady Justice…

So my thought on this is our stories will continue to reflect a colonized perspective of the dominant culture. Because I think that's what we have right now. We're all "one people". We're the "melting pot". We blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like what we have right now is that dominant message in our education system. It's manifest destiny. It's, “We conquer, we control. Everybody else is less than.” And so our stories will continue to be left out of the education system. Because "one People" is really a colonizer perspective.

Being one People is really, really, really not part of our cultures. Our stories will not be the same as they used to. All the creation stories of how our People were brought to the lands that we are at. All the individual lands. The inland people, the ocean people, the desert people, the northern people. So it's not necessarily a good thing.

I’ll tell you what my husband did, what he learned. He would trade things from St Lawrence Island, so he can get muktuk for me and our family. So if somebody needs a stove fixed. Oh, you could send this and this and this to my family. So they would send it. And then you would, they would send their stove, whatever he needed to get fixed and send it back fixed. So he figured out how to take care of us. With his own knowledge of, you know, being able to fix certain things, stoves and things like that.

We're competing right now. And so if we weren't in a grant space system, we would not be wasting that energy on application time, the processing time, and the competition with our neighbors and all of that energy could go into doing the work versus doing the application.

In my future community there is more unity, more of a united vision that recognizes that it's important for us to work together in order to be stronger as a people as a whole, that we're teaching our traditional values. Not just teaching our traditional values, but living our traditional values.