The Raven's Gift - Don Rearden [14]
Two Yup’ik women, dressed in brightly coloured hooded smocks took the stage. The speakers chirped with feedback as the younger of the two held the microphone to her mouth and smiled at the audience.
“Camai.”
“Juh-my!” the crowd responded, with far too much enthusiasm.
“Quyana tailuci. Thank you all for coming. That first word, quyana, is the first word you should all learn. In Yup’ik it means thank you. Pronounced goy-yan-na. I’m Nita and this is Lucy. We work at the District Office in the Yup’ik Immersion Program. Today we want to take some time to tell you a little bit about our culture and share with you some teaching ideas to take with you when you go out to teach in the villages.”
Anna turned back and gave him the thumbs-up, as Nita passed the microphone to Lucy and turned on the computer projector beside them.
“As Nita’s getting our slide show ready, I thought I would tell you about the clothes we’re wearing. These are called qaspeqs. Mostly women wear them, but sometimes men, too, for special occasions. They are great in summer when you’re picking berries or cutting fish because the hood keeps the mosquitoes out and this big pocket on the front can hold all your snacks.”
“And you can see Lucy packs plenty of strips in her pocket,” Nita said, as the lamp lit up the screen behind them, projecting a giant frowning face of a young boy holding a green can of soda pop.
“That’s my grandson,” Lucy said. “He was mad I wouldn’t let him drink that pop.”
John laughed with the crowd at the presenters’ subtle joking. He noticed that the locals and the teachers who had been around awhile were quick to understand and enjoy the humour, while he and the rest of the new teachers laughed with sincerity but also a slight awkwardness. The teachers didn’t want to offend during a lesson intended to help keep them from offending anyone.
Nita pointed a remote and a new photo appeared. Onscreen a giant fish hung from what looked like driftwood racks, the wood weathered white and grey.
“This is probably what you’re feeling like right now,” Lucy said, grinning. “Like a fish out of water?”
The crowd laughed.
“That looks like dinner to me,” Nita said.
The crowd laughed again.
The slide changed again, this one with a small boat brimming with freshly caught salmon, their scales glistening in the sun.
“The kids most of you will be teaching come from a subsistence background. This means that their families live maybe seventy to ninety percent off the land. As you might have guessed from these photos, salmon and other fishes are a huge part of our diet.”
“So when I teased Lucy about having strips in her pocket, I was talking about fish strips, or dried fish—fish we smoke or dry during the summer and eat year-round.”
The next photo revealed rows and rows of fiery red salmon strips hanging from what looked like a series of clotheslines, stretching along a steep riverbank. The photo after that showed three young Native men, buzz cuts and camouflage, holding M16s and grinning ear to ear. “We have the highest percentage per capita of military members in the country,” said Lucy. “Their deployment just started, too. Going to be really hard on us here, but we’re so sad for them over in that awful desert.”
The next photo revealed two young boys, shotguns slung over their shoulders, walking at the river’s edge, each of them carrying large dead birds. He thought one looked like a Canada goose; the other was some sort of large black duck he’d never seen before.
“I must be hungry,” Nita said. “These pictures are making my stomach rumble.”
The crowd chuckled. She smiled back.
“We hunt, fish, and gather pretty much all year round. The rest of the time we’re getting ready for the next season. Always getting ready, we say. Right now people are putting up silver salmon, and the men who aren’t overseas are already thinking about moose-hunting season.”
“That’s in September,” Lucy added, “when many of your students will leave upriver with their fathers. Some of them will