I bought a knife!

Today during training, we visited the Sulianich Art Center right across the street from the Northwest Arctic Heritage Center where I work.  This art center is a non-profit where local artists can send their work, which in turn is sold across the country and all the profits are returned to the artist.  Not only does this process support the arts economically, it also supports the continuation of Inupiaq tradition.

Some of the owners were traditional dancers and drummers.  They shared with us how the drums are traditionally constructed out of walrus stomach and wood from an ash tree (there are trees around here if you move inland).  Nowadays drums are made of non-traditional material, like vinyl.

They showed us a very fancy parkie (they say that instead of 'parka') made out of ground squirrel pelts.  One of the owners shared a story with us of summer days in his childhood spent waiting outside ground squirrel burrows to snare the little guys with fishing line.  They would skin the squirrel in such a fashion that they didn't have to cut the pelt. Then he would roast the rest of the squirrel over a fire right there on the hill.

He recalled the transition he was required to make as a boy from traditional furs to JC Penny clothes in order to attend school in Kotzebue in the early 70s.  He used to stuff his boots with grass for padding until they were replaced with store-bought felt insoles.

We were able to visit with local carvers in the back of the shop, where artist chisel wood and scrimshaw whale baleen.  Baleen is the comb-like structures analogous to teeth on whales, used for filtering water and catching krill.  A basket woven out of baleen will sell for $400.

One of the local carvers sold me a knife for $75.  The handle is made out of caribou antler with the image of a seal carved into the side and the face of a hunter carved into the butt.  Th eyes of the sea and the hunter are inlaid baleen.  The blade is made of mastodon ivory.  Yes, mastodon ivory! The petrified tusk of a long extinct relative of the woolly mammoth!  How cool is that!!!  Apparently the ivory shards can be found along the beaches of the peninsula, but you must look carefully because it looks like wood.

So that's pretty cool.  I guess the art center will offer workshops about making traditional knives.  I look forward to visiting with them throughout my stay here.

Here I am in Kotz

Hello, folks.  Welcome to my new blog.  This will be a new experience for me as I am not quite so computer savvy and my ex-roommate computer guru can't help me because he's in Africa at the moment.  So I figured out Blogger on my own and I'll try to keep up with it.  Let's get started.

This has been my second full day in Kotzebue.  It is currently 11:45pm here and the sun is just thinking about going down.  It will probably set around 2am tonight and rise again around 4:30am.  I'm sleeping soundly in the dark corner of the loft in the house that I'm staying in.  Another seasonal interpreter and I are basically house-sitting for the summer for two professors of the local community college who spend their summers in Fairbanks.  It's awesome because we have a fully-stocked kitchen and a laundry machine.

I'm getting off-track, so I'll give you a brief background of Kotzebue.  Kotzebue is a town of about 3,000 that exists on a flat peninsula in the Chukchi Sea in northwest Alaska.  The town is about 25 miles north of the Arctic Circle, hence the late sunset and the current temperature in the 30s and the ice covered sea surround the town right now.  The population in around 85% Inupiat, the native people of the region.  The people up here still participate in centuries-old subsistence practices such as hunting and fishing, which is allowed on federal parklands for natives only.  The elders here have a supreme knowledge of the land and I hope to learn a lot from them this summer.

Today was my first day of training at the Northwest Alaska Heritage Center, here in Kotz.  This building is the headquarters for the four parklands that compose the Western Arctic National Parklands.  I may talk about them in later posts.  The goal of today was to lean about the reason these parklands had been established and how much of a role the natives played in claiming and securing their own lands in this region.

After training was over today, Holly, my roommate and colleague, at two interp staff members from Nome who are also in training with us took a few of my boss' sled dogs out for a walk.  Awesome!  I get to play with dogs all summer!  One thing about sled dogs is that they are trained to pull, so its really quite a tiring process to take them out.  I also had to carry one of the dogs part of the way back because she was having respiratory problems, so that was also pretty tiring. 

Needless to say, I'm kind of falling asleep here, so I'm going to end this post soon.

It is of my understanding that blog posts are somewhat short and not as scattered as I've organized this entry.  I've experienced so much in these past three days that I want to tell you everything, but I realize that telling you about my in-flight movie is a little too much detail (it was Invictus; very good!).  I'm meeting a lot of cool people and I will tell you more in future blog posts as I start figuring this place out.  For now, peace to you all.