Red Fox, Blue Fox

The first thing I saw when I moved to Kodiak was the sweeping form of a red fox bristling into the trees as we drove from the airport. The bushy red tail (or tale…) seemed an omen of welcome, a flash of a place where people and nature move together.

Now I land at Blue Fox Bay, five years later. It's so quiet here that airplanes don't even bother to fly overhead.  Solar panels reflect the blue of sea and sky. A cat surprises me with a hiss through the windowpane. Today the bay ripples quietly, tomorrow it may thrash. Buoys and bones punctuate the landscape and the hearth. Stories sneak beneath the keys of the piano, into the yellowed photographs under the wall of guns. Venison steaks melt in our mouths a syrup of grass, streams, and subtle Kodiak light the buck survived on. Colleen's cooking could launch 1,000 ships. I hunger to do nothing, and satisfy my hunger perched in a corner with a pen, a book, a half-knit sweater.


I am new here. I know the basics about this place. Anjuli's Grandpa Slim lived here, now buried out back with his friend Al. The world comes here, and the evidence is not only felt but seen. Business cards with titles like Adventurer. Long-Distance Rower. CEO. Dreamer. The French girl who suggested Colleen soak nasturtium in her vinegar. The Belgian who taught her to add cream and nutmeg to the juices that ran off her wild mushrooms.

Sometimes life is nothing but being. Nothing but a patch of sun on the cheek, a feather in a bramble of dried seaweed or net, a bird so small it seems nothing more than a pulse. Hank Williams on an old radio while the wood stove gurgles like a belly. A nap that takes over the body without declaration or apology. Coming together with a group of women, each unfurling into her own independence, then back together again to laugh and talk. Letting go of having to know. Letting go of the need to solve. Letting the sediment of life settle at its own pace, trusting the water will clear without clinging to your own timing. I haven't looked at a clock in days. Or has it been hours, or weeks?

On Being a Teacher

Please note: I share in this blog some of the raw-er moments of teaching in Tatitlek in order to express some of my thoughts about being an educator. I want to emphasize how wonderful the students and teachers of the Tatitlek School are and how privileged I was to work with all of them for two weeks. They are some of the best bunch of people that can exist in one place, and as Tchabo says, "When do we get to go back, Mom?!?!"

When people ask me what I do, and I hear the words "I travel to remote Alaskan villages and teach film workshops" come out of my mouth, I imagine that to some it might sound glamorous and intriguing. When my own memory of the nitty-gritty fades, I am left with stunning moments. Returning now from Tatitlek, I have many. Stumbling on a Russian New Year's Masquerade in which my students were unrecognizable except a tuft of hair or a familiar strut. They each caught their shadow, as instructed, to carry it out of the room intact after the dancing was over. Visiting the village grave yard with students

on a photo shoot while they spontaneously sang hymns. One young woman recruited her father for an interview, and he spoke more about the spill than many of the students had ever heard him speak in their entire time knowing him. His daughter was proud of the clean-up work he did, and he was proud of his daughter's film. "You were born to make movies" he told her after the community film screening, which he spent in the hallway to distance himself from the oversized version of himself projected on the gym wall.

The meat of my work though is not film, or seeing new places, or making new friends. My job is to teach. And anyone who teaches knows that it is not a glamorous job. Rewarding, intense, challenging, punctuated by moments of self-doubt, giggles, boredom, plans that are reworked mid-way through the class… in Tatitlek, it occurred to me in a new way that I am an educator first and foremost. Film is my medium, but transformed students (and a transformed me) are the end goal.

In this photo Aunty Dean explains to the students what her father called Alingnaluni Atlartuq, or Bad Winds Bring Bad Times. Tatitlek sits right next to Bligh Reef, the source of the 1989 Exxon Valdez Oil Spill that blew down through the Prince William Sound, reaching Kodiak and beyond. This moment with Aunty Dean was one of the stunning moments that stays with me. And yet at this precise moment one of my students disappeared for 10 minutes. I knew I had to stay with the students, and yet I felt nervous about where she might be, and upset that she didn't tell me where she was going. Suddenly I wasn't witnessing the interview, or the way the students took turns asking spontaneous questions. This preoccupation was not the moment of a filmmaker, or an ethnographer, but of an educator. I do not work in spite of such moments, but with them. They are the fabric of teaching, and they happen not only on a daily but on an hourly basis.

I called the student to speak with me after class, and she stated a resounding no. I told her that it wasn't an option to talk about it, that I was nervous about where she was and that she needed to communicate. I don't CARE she explained to me, and thrust a DVD about the history of Tatitlek into my hand, showing me what she was retrieving while out of the room. You aren't respecting me, but more importantly you aren't respecting yourself right now I told her, and while I meant what I said sincerely, I realized how trite it might sound, so pre-packaged and presumptuous. We both returned to our day.

These are the kind of unglamorous moments that teaching can be composed of.

Later that evening I was chopping an onion in the kitchen for an Avgolemeno soup. Students ran laps in the gym. The same young woman kept peeking in on me as she made her rounds. I suddenly was stunned by an I was really cranky today. I'm sorry. She had ducked into the kitchen to apologize. For the next two weeks she was the student that kept the class moving and alive. She was the one who greeted me in the morning and told me she couldn't wait for class. She was the one who told me she was going to miss me and Tchabo so much when we left.

Students reflecting on life atop the village water tower during a photo shoot

I love film. I love learning new cultures and communities. I love seeing all the different ways mountains meet water. I love the sensation of how hot a banya can get, how many bites it takes to chew muktuk, and how many cups of tea an Elder can drink at midday. But most of all I love working with young adults and supporting them to become who they are, to laugh with them when the mood in the room needs lifting, and to be together even when that's the last thing any of us wants.

New Year, New Story

"I will tell you something about stories, (he said) They aren’t just entertainment. Don’t be fooled. They are all we have, you see, All we have to fight off illness and death." 

—Leslie Marmon Silko

My work with See Stories gives me the greatest privilege of traveling to amazing places and listening to stories, and watching those stories work in the hearts and minds of young people. Like most people, during the holidays I took a break from my work, which allowed me time to reflect on the power of story. I recalled Silko's Ceremony that beautifully outlines how stories can make or break us. Here is the story I told myself on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day, accompanied by a beautiful sunrise...

This New Years Eve I stayed in. I watched Star Wars with my son (which embarrassingly I have never watched before),  and visited with a friend until it was time to toast the arrival of a fresh year. It occurred to me that New Year's Eve is one of the most inspiring and most pressure-filled holidays. There's the excitement of celebrating with those you love, of the sense that anything could happen with this new beginning. There is also the pressure to have a big grand time when perhaps that's not how you feel in the heart of winter, and sometimes reflection on the previous year that can come with mixed emotions. What are the stories we tell ourselves about our lives? The stories we tell ourselves about what our lives should be (in this coming year)? 

The idea of a New Year, of a fresh start, of rebirth, is as old as rocks. As humans we need to shed skins, to release the old ways and embrace the new. The Christmas story is one of birth in the heart of winter. A mosaic shows how old broken fragments can transform into something beautiful. In Greek Mythology Persephone goes to the underworld and comes back up in cycles. Each day brings the freshness of new potential, each baby born the promise that humanity can evolve and deepen. This is a beautiful and essential part of human existence. These are the stories that nourish and shape us, day after day, year after year. 

However, there's a cruel little trick we play on ourselves as we narrate our own story. Instead of gracefully releasing whatever has outgrown it's purpose, we shame ourselves for being the "wrong" way, and try to write a long list of all the things we want to be different about ourselves. New year's resolutions. I am not against new years resolutions by any means, but the idea that we start a fresh beginning thinking of all the ways we would like to be different can be dangerous. The obvious risk is that we don't make the changes and then have yet another thing to mentally beat ourselves up for. 

My quiet New Year's Eve celebration made me realize that New Year's Eve is like any other night. The sun sets, and it rises. Life moves forward. What makes it special and different is the stories we tell ourselves around it, our regrets and hopes, of whatever skin we are ready or not ready to shed. This year I would rather make a list of all the stories I love and cherish about myself. Some of those stories may have outgrown their time, and I will let them go, but with love.

If I am to make one New Year's Resolution, it would be to embrace my own stories and to practice that in my work as I witness the stories of youth, elders, and communities. Instead of trying to fix myself or to help others through leading film workshops and doing community work, I would rather just sit with the stories and let them work their magic.  

Happy New Year!

Full Moon Friday

Students sit shyly but rapt at the Nanwalek Elders tea, as four women speak in Sugstun about the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill (EVOS) while sipping their sugared black tea. Much of the language is lost on the students who grew in a post-EVOS world, but not the emotion; anger, sadness, a sense of being stunned. Change. Throughout the week we visit Elders in their homes.

I am impressed at how ready everyone is to share their stories and experiences, and their quiet honesty. Ama (Grandma) Alice (pictured right) spoke of how painful it was to leave her four children to join the cleaning crew, but also how exciting it was to be together telling stories, and to experience an infusion of money. She opened a Cafe with her father and served the countless clean-up crews and visitors pouring through their village of 200. The good memories mixed in with the bad, and vice versa: "There was one man who seemed to come from nowhere, though, and he was terrible. He was dressed fancy, and as we scrubbed the rocks he looked around and said 'I don't see any oil.'" 

Tchabo brings levity as I hold the stories and the workload. He teaches me Sugstun words he learned at Headstart as we zag through the woods to our final interview with the students. I often wonder at his unique experience of a village. Our days end with his stories of going with his babysitter to her Godmother's house and enjoying dried & salted fish, or walking to the visiting dentist with the other Head Start kids. We are both relieved its Friday; he will play with friends while I sweat in the Banya before we call it a night. Reunited we are stunned by the milky light of a nearly full moon, drenching the village in festivity. Kids play basketball, cruise around on 4-wheelers, and from the darkness of the low tide splashes of light play off the coral reef; the flashlights of folks searching for octopus and bidarki entice us for our first harvest. We donned our extra tuffs and headlamps and scrambled across the barnacles and tidepools to join the others, the momentary brightness of star fish and anemones slicing through the night. 

We find Martha and Guy, who we had not yet met but welcomed us to join their harvest. The quiet excitement of the bounty of the ocean underneath the moonlight was wordlessly understood by all. Tchabo shimmied uriitaq (bidarki) off the rocks with a knife, and felt the suction of the amikuq (octopus) as Guy held it up for him to hold. Later I giggled with Martha who gently teased me for gathering only the smallest bidarki. "We would call you a cradle-robber, but you didn't know!" We laughed as she showed me how to shimmy the bones and guts from the mollusks.

That night as we drifted to sleep, Tchabo told me "I miss home, but Nanwalek is fun." The full moon and the knowledge that we collected our own food to eat tucked us in to a sweet sleep. I started to understand the grief and anger the community shares about EVOS, the most common comment being we couldn't eat our subsistence foods, or share with our kids how to harvest and collect the foods that we grew up on. 

                                                                                                                                                                   

Now in Nanwalek

"All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware."

-Martin Buber

I forget that traveling used to be its own trip. Today we suffer the 8 hour flight, and forget the endless time of traveling by boat, road, or foot. Tchabo and I had a small taste of the fullness of travel as we slept through the rocking and rolling of the Tustemena from Kodiak to Homer before jumping on a quick flight across the bay from Homer to Nanwalek.

The echoes of a slower pace of life continue beyond the ferry ride. As we make a sharp circle
to land on the finger of gravel hugged by mountains in Nanwalek I see that my phone has no reception.

My sigh is simultaneously one of relief and of discomfort. I am forced to shift from my life of text messaging, emailing-on-the-go, and a laughable sense of the urgency of communication. I realize the joyful irony that I have come to engage the community in digital storytelling, and yet I celebrate taking a break from technology.

The first day with the students and community is punctuated by the nervous excitement inevitable on all sides of a storytelling project. I speak with Tom Evans, community leader and liaison for Cook Inlet Keeper, about advice for how to approach the community about a topic as painful as the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill (EVOS). "After the Spill, no one ever came to ask us for our stories or what it was like for us. I think people will be ready and open to talk about it." I remember Kodiak student interviews about EVOS that ended with tears, but also a sense of healthy catharsis and processing.


The students started to choose their film topics ranging from the geography of the EVOS clean-up efforts to present-day oceanic health. They practiced interview triangles and composition. One kind 11th grader even indulged Tchabo in an arm wrestling competition, which she gracefully allowed him to win. I was reminded of what I love about film: it allows us to tackle the most challenging stories and have fun at the same time.

Nearing Nanwalek

TB test. Ferry ticket with berth. A few hour layover in Homer, the land of my birth. Raid the grocery store for two weeks of sustenance. Coffee date with historian friend to get the Nanwalek scoop. Crash course in new video editing software. Sleeping bags for me and my son to set up camp in the school library. Prepare sense of humor for inevitable Alaskan December weather delays.

This is a smattering of my prep list as I ready myself to travel to Nanwalek to teach a film workshop for the first two weeks of December. I am busy, but not bored. Nothing about traveling to rural Alaska could surprise me anymore, except, perhaps, a lack of surprises. The unexpected is precisely what I love in village life. The car without seat belts, or without even a door. The airplanes that depart according to sun and wind and mood. The communication that goes on without words, but with nods and looks and familiar gestures. The startling and wonderful lack of cell reception.

I prepare to travel with my 5 year old son, who already considers himself my co-teacher, and has claimed a tripod as his very own. Work and mothering merge for me in rural Alaska, where a child warms the mood when I come as yet another stranger in a countless stream wandering through, some with cleaner agendas than others. I am thankful that I am not a stranger when I leave. My son is a huge part of why we are welcomed.

I prepare myself for the task at hand. The Prince William Sound Science Center and the Gulf Watch Alaska Program hired See Stories to dive into stories of oceanic health and environmental sustainability in a post Exxon Valdez Oil Spill (EVOS) context. I will spend two weeks with a team of Middle School science and drama students as each one of them creates their own unique documentary film. They will interview elders, community members, and each other. The ocean is everything for an Alaskan coastal community, and I am convinced the best ocean scientists are those who grew up mind and body depending on the water. Many of them have no degrees or recognition, and yet they are the ones we ought to turn to for insight and answers in the face of global warming and disasters such as EVOS.

As Kodiak 12th grader Debora Bitenga's film on EVOS captures fisherwoman and educator Jane Eisemann saying, "after 25 years I think we can celebrate our successes and how far we've come in terms of preventing an oil spill, or cleaning up one, if another one happens, but we have a long ways to go..."