August 18, 2010

Resilience

Written by: Chris Meier, Education Director

When I first remember the school putting elders and students together in the classroom, both the students and elders would complain, “We don’t understand them.” But not Mike. Slow and steady he would come to the school everyday speaking to the students in Yup’ik while telling stories, making nets and sleds, carving and teaching a way of life. After a year of being in the classroom everyday, the students and other elders began to understand each other.

Nothing would stop Mike, an elder in his eighties, from coming to school. No one had told Mike that in the middle of a Bering Sea blizzard school had been called off, so he set off trudging up and down ten foot high snow drifts in a thirty mile and hour wind to school. He stumbled and broke his arm, but the next week he was back in class with a sling, teaching.

Mike passed away in the school gym on the afternoon of a large spring dance festival where he had come as one of the first to prepare for the many dancers coming from many villages. Later that evening, in the same gym, a multitude of flowers arrived on Qaspet, dresses, of the dancers - flowers as bright and fresh and beautiful as any funeral every attended.

Mikes wife, Susie, danced with the echoing rhythm of the drums with the grace and flow of a young bride to the voices and songs of her and Mike’s drummers and their ancestors. Mikes stories and songs are now immortalized in the minds of the next generation.

This is a story of Yup’ik resilience as I remember experiencing it in Tununak, AK, in the 1990’s.