Alaska Natives Archives - Julia O'Malley

For The Guardian: Alaskan opinions divided as Shell halts Arctic drilling

Julia O'Malley — Tue, 29 Sep 2015 20:19:36 +0000

Here’s a quick-turn story I worked on for the Guardian yesterday, asking Alaskans about their reaction to the news that Shell would shut down Arctic drilling…

“As the news spread Monday, some Alaskans expressed dire worries about the ripple effect on the state’s oil-dependent economy, which has already suffered a blow from low oil prices. Others saw the move as a reprieve for the state’s fragile northern ecosystem that many Alaska Native communities rely on for food….”

Read the story here.

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For Talking Points Memo: What the Lower 48 doesn’t get about Denali

Julia O'Malley — Wed, 02 Sep 2015 15:16:30 +0000

(I got a note early yesterday asking me to explain how Alaskans feel about the Denali/McKinley thing. Here’s the best I could do…)

While Lower 48 politicians might have partisan heartburn over President Barack Obama’s decision to change the name of Mount McKinley to its Koyukon Athabascan name, Denali, you’d be hard pressed to find many Alaskans, conservative or otherwise, with objections.

“We’ve been calling it Denali since I moved up here,” Dave Stieren, a conservative talk radio host for KFQD-AM in Anchorage told me. “To me it’s like happy holidays/merry Christmas. Anybody who cares about it too much is not someone I’d like to hang out with.”

At Monday’s GLACIER conference on Arctic issues, put on by the State Department in Anchorage, one of the biggest applause lines came during Secretary of State John Kerry’s remarks introducing Obama, who is spending part of the week touring Alaska.

“I think we can say that Denali never looked better than it does today,” Kerry said, drawing hoots and whistles from a crowd that had until then stuck to polite clapping.

Alaska is a conservative state. Registered Republicans outnumber Democrats by a wide margin, but the state’s brand of conservatism has a pro-development, anti-government, libertarian flavor. Most people don’t see the mountain’s name change along partisan lines. Instead, some see it as a victory in the state’s long public lands tug-of-war with the federal government, while others, especially in the Alaska Native community, see it as a victory for indigenous rights. And pretty much everybody has been calling the mountain Denali for years.

There’s also something worth explaining about the culture here. We put Alaska-ness before all else, and tend to view outsiders with suspicion. In Alaska, nobody really cares if you went to Harvard, but if your grandmother was buried here, you should say so because it gives you cred. I think this is because there are only 700,000 people in this state and a whole lot of dangerous country, animals and weather. People from very different backgrounds tend to find themselves relying on each other, so we care most about stuff like whether you are the type to carry a tow strap in your truck and would be willing to pull us out of a ditch in a snowstorm. Politics come way second. Our loyalty to Denali over McKinley is driven by the same impulse. Denali is ours, it comes from here, it carries a tow strap. McKinley isn’t and doesn’t.

For Al Jazeera America: A whaling village preserves its past

Julia O'Malley — Sun, 26 Jul 2015 05:29:00 +0000

What an honor to introduce this group of whaling crew photos taken over the last few years by by friend Nathaniel Wilder!

POINT HOPE, Alaska — At this community’s original town site, abandoned decades ago because of creeping beach erosion, the bleached remains of a few houses still stand on the treeless landscape. In one of them, you can make out “1957” carved into a driftwood corner post. That’s the year this Inupiat village first got electricity. Up until then, light in the winter came from seal oil.

Change has been washing over this ancient place, one of the oldest continuously inhabited town sites in North America, rapidly the last 100 years. Here on this ever-thinning peninsula in the Chukchi Sea, people have gone from existing completely off the land, traveling by dog sled, living in homes built from sod and whalebone, to a world of four wheelers and Facebook, big screen TVs and toaster waffles in the span of two generations. Someday soon, offshore, high-tech Shell platforms will likely begin drilling for oil.

But, the 900 people who live here hold on to a ritual that dates back 2,000 years: the spring hunt for the bowhead whale. This year, the village took three.

For National Geographic: With changing Arctic ice, a short window for a traditional hunt

Julia O'Malley — Wed, 01 Jul 2015 21:19:40 +0000

Whew. Kind of a whirlwind the last few weeks turning around a story about hunting bearded seal out of Kotzebue for National Geographic. It’s the first story out of three I’ll be working on with Katie Orlinsky over the next few months that have to do with climate change, subsistence hunting and traditional foods in Alaska (thanks to a travel grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.)

KOTZEBUE, Alaska—In this Far North village, no animal provides more protein to fill freezers than the bearded seal. A single seal can supply hundreds of pounds of meat, enough to feed a large, extended family for a winter.

For generations, every late June and early July, native hunters like Ross Schaeffer and his niece Karmen Schaeffer Monigold have motored through the broken sea ice of Kotzebue Sound in northwestern Alaska, looking for seals basking on frosty rafts. But this year, temperatures were close to 70 degrees, there was no ice in sight, and the seals had already migrated north.

This seal-hunting season was the shortest in memory, lasting less than a week, compared with the usual three weeks.

Schaeffer and Monigold did manage to get a few animals, but the conditions were nothing like Schaeffer, 68, had seen before. By the third week in June, when Monigold would usually be dressed for cold, she drove out to check on her drying seal hide wearing flip-flops and shorts.

“Every year we’ve gone out, it’s getting harder and harder because the ice is so rotten by the time it’s time to go hunting that the seals are hard to find,” Monigold says.

In Kotzebue, as temperatures and ice become increasingly unpredictable, hunters worry their children and grandchildren will no longer be able to participate in the traditional seal hunt. Kotzebue is among the largest of roughly 40 Alaska Native communities on the coast between Bristol Bay and Kaktovik that rely on bearded seal.

Kotzebue’s changing seal season is part of another chapter of Alaska’s accelerated climate change story, which is threatening the food, economics, and culture of Native communities.

Making “akutuq,” Alaska Eskimo ice cream, and AK-style donuts in the kitchens of Point Hope

Julia O'Malley — Mon, 22 Jun 2015 20:04:46 +0000

Akutaq is made many ways in Alaska. In Point Hope, it starts with hot, rendered caribou fat that must be mixed by hand. It's pretty amazing to watch how it changes.

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For Al Jazeera America: Listen to the Gwich’in

Julia O'Malley — Sat, 14 Mar 2015 17:43:10 +0000

ARCTIC VILLAGE, Alaska — To understand the relationship between the indigenous Gwich’in who live in this village near the edge of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the massive caribou herd that migrates through their land, you might start in February with a ride on the back of Charlie Swaney’s old snowmobile.

Motor past his sled-dog yard and head along a trail that leads out of the village through the powdery snow. After 15 minutes, you’ll reach a wide frozen lake, and he’ll slow down, so as not to scare the animals. There might have been 50 caribou along the distant shoreline on a recent afternoon. This time of year, they dig through the snow with their shovel-shaped hooves, looking for lichen.

Swaney silences the engine, gets off, swings the rifle off his back and examines the line of animal shapes through his scope. Pop! The herd scatters, leaving one female down. Soon Swaney is kneeling next to it with his knife. Head comes off first. Then the skin, beginning with a gentle slit down the white belly. Gwich’in have been hunting caribou in this area for thousands of years.

“You got to respect the animal, because that’s how you eat,” Swaney says as he pulls hide from muscle. You don’t take too many, he says. What you don’t eat, you feed to the dogs, he says.

“Respect is the main thing.”

Read more here.

Photos for this story by Nathaniel Wilder.

To take a tour in iPhone photos, go here.

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Postcards from Tanana

Julia O'Malley — Thu, 06 Nov 2014 21:52:04 +0000

Had a great visit with Cynthia Erickson in Tanana this fall, reporting this story, about the village trying to heal after two Alaska State Troopers where shot there last spring. Here are some snapshots I took during my visit.

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For Al Jazeera America: “Healing a Village,” a trip to Tanana

Julia O'Malley — Sun, 19 Oct 2014 16:13:00 +0000

TANANA, Alaska — The 4-H club in this Yukon River village began out of desperation. It was maybe four years ago when Cynthia Erickson, who owns the local store, found herself one night in the sanctuary of the Catholic Church with the body of a sweet 20-something village youth. He had shot himself in the face. She cleaned him up the best she could, she said, and then she went outside to throw up.

There were so many suicides leading up to that one. Six she could think of right away in Tanana and neighboring villages on the river: five men and one young girl. Alaska Native men have the highest suicide rate in the country. Her brother-in-law was on her list. He hanged himself, leaving five children.

There are dozens of theories about why suicide is so common in Alaskan villages. And there are as many programs and committees meant to address it. Maybe it’s lack of connection to traditional culture, people say. Or seasonal affective disorder. Or generational trauma. Or lack of opportunity. Or lack of purpose that comes with living on food stamps. Or the ready availability of firearms. Or brain damage caused by fetal exposure to alcohol.

After that night in the church, Erickson just wanted to heal it, she said, or at least heal what she could. While 4-H clubs are often associated with farm kids — Tanana has no agriculture to speak of — she opened a chapter as a way to keep the kids close. The 4-H slogan “Helping hands, healing hearts” always appealed to her, she said. She put up a sign and opened her house to children soon after that. They did beading, made jam, skipped rocks and sewed kuspuks, traditional overshirts worn by Alaskan Natives. Soon they began talking about problems at home…. Read more here.

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For Al Jazeera America: “Alaska ballots fraught with issues for Yup’ik speakers”

Julia O'Malley — Mon, 18 Aug 2014 23:30:23 +0000

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Ahead of tomorrow’s primary elections in Alaska, every voter in the state should have received a pamphlet that introduces the candidates, describes ballot issues and explains how to vote.

The pamphlets are available in Spanish and Tagalog — but not Yup’ik, a language spoken by Alaska Natives, even though it is among the most commonly spoken languages in the state.

At least 10,000 people speak Yup’ik, according to the Alaska Native Language Center at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. It’s the second-most-spoken Native language in the U.S., after Navajo. Many speakers live in the community of Bethel or surrounding smaller rural villages in southwestern Alaska.

When Yup’ik-only speakers get to the voting booth, they may request a Yup’ik sample ballot, which can also be read to them. Though the translation may be technically correct, it may be in an unfamiliar dialect or so dense and convoluted that, some Alaska Native leaders say, older Natives in particular will feel they are voting blindly. The ballot they mark will be written in English.

Lawyers for the Native American Rights Fund say Alaska election officials need to do better…. Read more here.

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For Al Jazeera America: “At these games, culture counts”

Julia O'Malley — Wed, 23 Jul 2014 22:41:00 +0000

FAIRBANKS, Alaska — The ball was made of sealskin, a furry sphere about the circumference of a softball, and it dangled 82 inches from the stadium floor. Autumn Ridley, an 18-year-old athlete in a Bob Marley T-shirt, studied it, letting the buzz of the stadium crowd fade from her thoughts.

This was the Alaskan high kick, one of dozens of games designed to test survival skills needed by ancient indigenous people in extreme northern climates at the World Eskimo-Indian Olympics (WEIO). The competition, held last week in Fairbanks, Alaska, was attended by roughly 200 indigenous athletes. Thousands showed up to watch the sports, dancing and cultural demonstrations.

Similar indigenous sporting competitions are being held this month across the circumpolar north, including the Beringia Games in Chukotka, Russia, and theTraditional Circumpolar Northern Games in Inuvik, in Canada’s Northwest Territories…