Category Archives: Shaktoolik

All about my adventure teaching in the small Alaskan bush village of Shaktoolik.

Bush teacher or Marine recruit? You decide.

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One of the things you have to get used to while living in the bush is the lack of certain things you’ve taken for granted all your life. For example, there are no restaurants, no paved roads and no barber shops (we have phones, lights and motor cars though). So, like many other things in the village, you’ve got to learn to do for yourself. It’s been over 2 months since my last haircut and I was definitely overdue.

Unfortunately for me, my last shipment from drugstore.com which contained my clippers, toilet paper, paper towels and Kleenex took a month to arrive. When it came today, I was determined that tonight was the night to give myself my very first haircut. There was no sheet whirled around me by a barber, no hot foam on the back of the neck for use with a straight razor and no wraparound mirror. Instead, there was just me, a pair of clippers, a bathroom floor and small mirror.

Needless to say, it isn’t the most glamourous looking haircut – in fact, my first thought after getting it even was, “Did I just pass out and join the Marines?” But, it’s definitely not long and unmanageable anymore; in fact – I fit in with my students pretty well.

Bush Haircut

BSSD’s Inupiaq dictionary

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On Wednesday, I boarded a plane in order to head to Unalakleet, site of Bering Strait School District’s headquarters in order to participate in a bilingual training session with a student and our site’s bilingual teacher. Joining us were representatives from 8 of the other schools in the district.

Before I go into detail about the topic at the heart of this post, the native language dictionary that is being created, I want to point out something that I have found since living in the village. (And something that was pointed out to me earlier today during a conversation with my mom.) My students are all bilingual. Except that isn’t really true. My students should all be bilingual. In reality, they have a slightly better grasp on their native language than I do on my old high school french, which is a shame.

This is a recognized problem and one of the big reasons for having a bilingual program in our schools. As teachers, we try to integrate local culture into our lessons, but that isn’t really enough to preserve the way of life. The ability to speak the Inupiaq or Yupik languages that are native to the region is disappearing.

With that in mind, the Inupiaq dictionary project was started and has since expanded to include a Yupik dictionary. The big idea of the project is to get students to go out into the community, identify the native words for different things, take pictures if they can and upload it all, along with a voice recording of the word being pronounced.

Preserving culture, teaching technology skills, life skills and writing skills all while having students contribute authentic work to a valuable resource. That’s what I call motivating and educational.

Nome, AK

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A little over a week ago, I got the opportunity to travel to Nome, AK for the district’s Tech Liaison training. It was my first visit to Nome, which is odd since Nome is the largest “city” in the region (population – approx. 3,600). Most of the time was spent in the NACTEC house(Northwestern Alaska Career and Technical Center), where students from around the region come to learn technical and career skills during the school year and where we set up camp for 2 days in order to learn about the tools we use to keep technology in our schools up and running. I’m not going to write about the training except to mention that it is already making my life easier, instead, I’m going to write about Nome itself.

The first thing to know about Nome is that it is the only “wet” town in the region. Alaska has what is called a “Local Option” law which allows bush villages to decide to what degree alcohol is allowed into the village. Many towns (including Shaktoolik) choose not to allow the possession of alcohol (dry); others like Unalakleet allow the importation of alcohol but not its sale (damp). It doesn’t take long very long after landing in Nome to recognize the effect this has had on the town. Let’s simply say that drunks are not an uncommon sight and leave it at that…

Nome also has a reputation as a mining town and for those of you familiar with active mining towns in very remote locations, you already know what this means. For the rest of you… Nome is dirty. Nome is dingy and one could even call parts of it ramshackle. There’s a feeling of age, but also of haste; mining booms don’t leave much time for planning, zoning laws and strict oversight.

Underlying it all is the history of the town though. Everyone knows about the, Iditarod the annual dogsled race that commemorates the delivery of diphtheria serum from Anchorage via dogsled. Fewer people know that at one point, Nome was the largest town in Alaska; that the US Postal Service refused to allow the town to change it’s name to Anvil City in 1899 or that few of the original gold rush structures have survived numerous fires and violent storms. The history is what draws me to the town, it is what makes me want to visit it again sometime. It isn’t a place I’d like to live, but a place that would be interesting to study and learn about first-hand.

Note to readers: I spent less than 48 hours in Nome, most of that holed up inside a building training. I only spent 3-4 hours exploring the town (and that was spent on Front St.), this is what my viewpoint is based upon and is therefore reflective of a short-term visitor and not someone who lives there.

First snow!

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I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted an update… it’s not that I don’t have things to post – I’ve been up to quite a bit the last two weeks – I just haven’t had time. I’ll follow up with a couple longer posts when things quiet down a little bit (this evening or tomorrow when I return home from Unalakleet). I just wanted to share a picture for now though:

Unalakleet snow

I’m told it’s not snowing 40 miles away in Shaktoolik, just windy and cold, which is apparently what winter looks like there. Until later!

Dating in the Bush

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As some of you know, shortly after my arrival in the Bush, I met someone at my first teacher inservice. She’s from a nearby village and when the district brought us back to the district office for training the next week, we decided to try a relationship – though neither of us knew exactly what it would look like or how it would work.

Well, it has been about 5 weeks now and I can clue you in on how a relationship in the Bush works. It looks quite a bit different from a normal relationship – in fact, it probably resembles internet dating in quite a few ways.

First, there are (usually) nightly instant messenger sessions to answer the all important questions that people apart usually want to know, “How was your day?” and “What have you been thinking about?” It’s an instant messenger conversation because long distance phone calls are expensive and besides, neither of us has a telephone. VHF handsets, which are common for communication in the region, can’t cover the 40 miles between the two villages, nor do we want everyone within the range of the radios listening in on idle chitchat and personal conversations. Usually, nighttime conversations are multi-tasked with cooking, cleaning or working on lesson plans.

Then, maybe once a week, usually on Friday evenings, we find two or three hours to set aside and actually talk to hear each other. Usually, I’m reminded of what a poor substitute text is for voice – so many nuances and feelings simply aren’t conveyed through words and emoticons alone. Unfortunately, copper doesn’t carry the conversation, instead it goes over an internet program called Skype, a voice-over-ip or internet telephone system – which is carried over our satellite links. And the delay between speaking and being heard is about a second, which results in a fair bit of talking over each other before someone realizes it and lets the other finish their thought.

This week – we did something new. A video dinner date using Skype. And like my mentor teacher told me the experience would be, it was one of the highlights of my week. (Along with a reminder that I haven’t had a haircut in almost two months now.) Hopefully this becomes part of our routine as it’s a better substitute for actually seeing one another regularly that we’ve found.

Before coming to the Bush, I never really thought that 40 miles would be long distance. It’s less than an hour’s drive most places – here it is a 6ish hour window of time when the plane might show up, if the weather is good, followed by a 20 minute flight. That’s after forking out $160-$200 for the plane tickets. In a lot of ways, that 40 miles is more like 400. Come winter though, snow and ice will cover the landscape and Norton Sound and I’ll be able to snowmachine there and see her instead. It is odd to think of winter as the season of mobility and travel opportunities, but that’s life in the Alaskan Bush.