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Story and photos by DENISE JARRETT
Beneath the pond surfaces can be seen brush strokes of char-treuse that turn out to be long reeds bending in the wind-rubbed current. A pair of whistling swans rests among the bog orchid and cotton grass. Above them, a squadron of geese passes over. It is the time of the great gathering. The abundance of water in the Yukon-Kuskokwim delta provides critical habitat for migrating waterfowl and shorebirds. In the lower delta lies the Kan- ektok, a river dotted with sandbars and teeming with chum, king, and sockeye salmon. Where the Kanektok empties into the Bering Sea lies the village of Quinhagak (say: KWIN-a-hawk) The visitor to this Yup'ik Eskimo community of 550 is struck by a sense of exhilarating isolation. To the west across the shallow waters of the bay, the Bering Sea cuts a dark band beneath the sky; to the south, there's the faint outline of the Kilbuck mountain range. Elsewhere, the tundra rolls undisturbed. Quinhagak is 70 miles south of Bethel, a community of 5,000 which serves as air transportation hub for the region, and 400 miles west of Anchorage. For travelers from afar, it is accessible only by small plane or boat. For local travel, residents use four-wheelers, snowmobiles, and, occasionally, dogsleds. It doesn't take long for the visitor to realize that this remote community is thriving. A couple of dump trucks roar incongruously along the village's one road, carrying gravel foundation for a new airstrip and a health clinic/wash- eteria. Four-wheelers crisscross the village throughout the day, carrying people to work, school, the village store, post office-typical errands in an exceptional place. On one cold morning, Samson Mann shrugs on his jacket and leaves his office in the Quinhagak school, called by its Yup'ik name, Kuinerrarmiut Elitnaurviat. Outside, he climbs onto a four-wheeler and drives a short distance to a wooden house raised on stilts above the tundra. As school-community liaison, he is here to check on a student's unexcused absence. Inside, he learns that the student has overslept and, while the rousted youth is dressing, Mann sits chatting with the parents at a kitchen table. As often happens, the talk turns to fishing: this season's salmon run; the troubling influx of fly fishermen from the big cities. There's a bit of commiserating, too, about the universal chore of getting children off to school. Mann's full-time position as school-community liaison is a reflection of the village's commitment to educating its youth. Like some other staff jobs at the school, Mann's position is paid for by the Kwinhagak Tribal Council. The council is closely involved with the activities of the school, supplementing its budget when state revenues fall, awarding scholarships and helping students to develop career plans, and sponsoring summer programs. Determined to transform the school-historically controlled by White missionaries and distant federal and state bureaucracies -into one that plays a central and relevant role in this Yup'ik community, the people of Quinhagak have assumed leadership of important aspects of their children's education. They are achieving this transformation by infusing the school environment with Yup'ik language and culture. The culture of the Yup'ik people is based on thousands of years of subsisting on the wildlife of the delta region. Their ceremonies and belief system revolve around this subsistence lifestyle, expressing their interconnectedness with the natural world. The people of Quinhagak continue to harvest salmon and trout, ducks and geese, seal and the occasional Beluga whale. Sometimes a moose or migrating caribou is taken. While picking salmonberries out on the tundra, villagers take care to watch for the occasional brown bear. "We pick berries, some people call them cloudberries, we call them salmonberries," recalls Quinhagak elder, Carrie Pleasant. "In the old days, we would put the berries in wooden barrels and top them with one-stem grass and wild spinach. If you were going to make akutaq (a sweet treat), you took the tallow, fat from the reindeer, cut it up and put it in a skillet. When it was cool, you would wring the fat out. You put what's left with sugar in a bowl, put in seal oil and the berries." Like many other Alaska Natives, the Yup'ik people have felt pressured by 100 years of Western influence to relinquish their language, beliefs, and ceremonies. In villages across the state, the all-too-common result has been to diminish the people's core identity, leaving them demoralized and prone to alcoholism, domestic abuse, and suicide. Because theirs was one of the last regions of Alaska to be occupied by Westerners, the Yup'ik people of the delta were able to sustain a stronger link to their language and some traditions well into this century. This twist of fate, as well as recent legislation supporting bilingual education and self-governance by tribal councils, empowers people in villages like Quinhagak to maintain a leadership role in the education of their children, seeing to it that their youth are educated in Yup'ik as well as Western knowledge.  Today, students at Quinhagak learn not only the core curriculum of a Western education, but the skills and values of their ancestors, as well. Paid an honorarium by the tribal council, village elders regularly deliver guest lectures at the school. They teach students carving and basket weaving, Eskimo dancing and mask ceremonies. They show how to prepare and preserve salmon, how to sew seal and mink pelts. The teachers link this traditional knowledge to core Western concepts in science, social studies, geography, health, mathematics, and language arts. For many, the most meaningful change in the school has been the adoption of Yup'ik as the primary language of instruction from kindergarten through fourth grade. Students study English an hour each day until they reach the fifth grade when the practice is reversed: English becomes the primary language of instruction, and Yup'ik reading and writing is taught separately. "Research in bilingual education shows that if students learn to read and understand science, math, and other subjects in their own language, they establish a firm base from which they can then transfer that knowledge into English," says Carol Barnhardt, Assistant Professor of Education at University of Alaska Fairbanks. Barnhardt has been working with Quinhagak Principal, John Mark, as part of the Alaska Onward to Excellence (AOTE) program administered by the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory. Since 1995, Quinhagak educators, AOTE team members, and staff from the Lower Kuskokwim School District have worked together to identify learning goals and to develop a school reform implementation plan for the Quinhagak school. The school has chosen as its primary student learning goal, "to communicate more effectively in Yup'ik." In Dora Strunk's third- and fourth-grade classroom, there is an alphabet key on the wall. To a non-Native, it looks familiar until one notices that eight letters are "missing." This is the Yup'ik alphabet, originally devised by the Moravian missionaries in the early part of the century and later developed further by orthographers from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. The children are doing a writing exercise, and Strunk calls on them one by one to read from their work. Chantal reads, "Caqtaanrilu!" (Don't mess around with that!) Next, Walter reads, "Mayuraviiqnak!" (Quit climbing!) Strunk, 37, grew up in Quinhagak. Like most people her generation and older, she had to leave Quinhagak to attend high school. (Not until a 1976 Alaska Supreme Court ruling was it mandated that every village be provided with a public high school.) By example, her parents taught her to value learning and literacy. "They both stressed the importance of going to school," Strunk says. "My dad quit when he was in ninth grade, but I always saw him reading. We always had magazines like Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, and Life. From looking at my dad reading, it got me curious -why is he always reading? I started reading those magazines in grade school, because we didn't have TV back then!" she laughs. "My mom only got up to the sixth grade, but she was always teaching Native crafts and how to cook and how to sew. My dad fished and we'd go egg hunting. Before there were any four-wheelers, we walked to pick salmonberries, blackberries, and cranberries. Now that I have my own children, I find that I'm passing that-the way I was brought up-on to them, too." The Lower Kuskokwim School District is a driving force behind efforts to preserve and cultivate the Yup'ik culture and language in Southwest Alaska. Quinhagak is one of 21 villages served by the district, which encompasses 44,000 square miles (an area about the size of Pennsylvania). The district's curriculum department creates bilingual programs that reflect a Yup'ik emphasis and trains school staff in effective bilingual methodologies and practices. The district has been prolific in its development of Yup'ik language materials to support the curriculum. One such development is a yearlong thematic unit that integrates Yup'ik activities, beliefs, and experience with academic content areas in mathe- matics, science, social studies, and language arts. Quinhagak has incorporated this program into its curriculum.
It would be nearly impossible to accomplish this kind of culture-focused curriculum and instruction without the participation of people from the community. In addition to inviting elders to speak to the students, the school employs among the highest numbers of Yup'ik certified teachers in the district. Last year, students in first through sixth grades were taught by Yup'ik-speaking certified teachers, and every class through 12th grade had a Yup'ik-speaking teacher's aide. The elders help to strengthen the link between the present and the past-an essential combination, many believe, for the well-being and future success of their young people. "You get a feeling of togetherness and support from people like Carrie Pleasant," says Emma Petluska, a lifelong resident of Quinhagak and the school's detention supervisor. "If everyone in the community encourages children, it would just grow from that. The school is not the only place for education, it's all day long. It involves everybody that the kids know. It has to be that way for children to learn." "I talk to the students about how we used to use and store fish without electricity," says Pleasant, who taught first grade at the Quinhagak school for 22 years. Now retired, she is a frequent guest speaker, instructing students in some of the old ways. "I show them how to cut the skin of the salmon and hang them to dry, then smoke them. You can put the fish heads with the liver and gills to make stinkheads. You top the fish heads and things with grass and wet moss, let it ferment for two weeks, then wash and eat them. In the winter, we would catch blackfish by cutting a square hole in the ice, then putting a net down into the water. If you use your hand, the fish will swim away." The school's principal, John Mark, also grew up in Quinhagak. He was among the first in the village to earn a college degree. After obtaining an associate of arts degree in bilingual education through the Bethel campus of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Mark earned a bachelor's degree in education from the Oregon College of Education. After teaching for a few years, he returned to college at University of Alaska Anchorage and earned a master's degree in public school administration. He's been principal at the Quinhagak school for four years.
When Pauline Roberts, 83, was a young woman, she learned from her mother and other women in the village how to cut seal with the uluaq (a curved blade that fits in the palm of the hand), how to make oil for heating and cooking, and to care for the meat. She also became skilled in crafts. "I learned how to make baskets, some small with lids and some large without lids, and grass mats," she explains. "I learned to make winter mittens and boots, handbags and slippers out of seal skin. I also learned how to make yo-yos. I learned how to use every part of the salmon." Using her hands to demonstrate, she tells how she made salmon skinboots. She would carefully remove the skin from the salmon, wash it with soap and then hang it to dry. After it was completely dry, she would scrape the scales off and sew together several pieces of the strong parchment-like material to make tall, waterproof boots-valuable protection from the constant moisture of the delta. "Our elders won't be here forever," says Samson Mann. "The Yup'ik tradition is important for kids to learn because it's part of our basic survival, our subsistence. At the same time, the world is coming to us. Kids need to keep up with both the traditional ways and the modern ways. Change is a good thing, too."
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This document's URL is: Home | Up & Coming | Programs & Projects: Northwest Education | People | Products & Publications | Topics © 2001 Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory
Date of Last Update: 9/28/01 
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Seen from the air, the riverine delta in Southwest Alaska displays its fall splendor with a sprawl of russet, green, and yellow tundra. Traversed by numberless tributaries and sloughs of the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers, with overflow collecting into darkened ponds,
the delta appears as much lake
as it is land.
Upingaurluta, "getting ready for life," is a series of standards-based thematic units founded
on aspects of the Yup'ik cycle of life: the self and one's role in the community; gathering food and preparing for hunts; clothing and celebrating with masks; survival skills and fish camp; and recreation and storytelling.
For the younger generation, new tasks are replacing subsistence work. "The more mature this generation gets," Marks says, "the more they understand the importance of education to their livelihoods and survival. There is now record keeping, IRS, employment records. People have to be able to read and write and do arithmetic much more than they did then."
