September 28, 2010

Sharing

Written by: Michael Jerue, Student Support Advocate, Education Resource Center

Fish camp starts for us the fist week of June. My Uncle Charlie and I take an 18 passenger airplane to Anvik from Anchorage, takes about an hour and ten minutes. We then take a Navajo airplane (which is the mail plane) and fly 20 minutes to Holy Cross. We are met by millions and billions of mosquito’s and a relative that takes us to our Cache in their pick up. The cache is about the size of a one car garage. It has electricity for our freezer and all the supplies for fish camp. We don’t keep anything at fish camp, when we are in Anchorage, because people seem to break-in and take stuff.

We have two boats, one is the fishing boat and the other is the traveling boat. The boats are stored upside down in Holy Cross next to the Cache. They are stored upside down so they won’t float away in case of a flood; also the kids don’t play in them. Our fist job is to get the boats ready to be launched. At the end of the fishing season every year we take out the oil out of our kickers (outboard motors) so they don’t freeze in the 50 below weather, we change the oil and clean the kickers every summer. We pack all of our bedding, kitchen tools, food and everything else we need for the summer into the boats.

We haul the boats to the Yukon River to be launched, and then drive them up river 7 miles to our family fish camp. The first thing Charlie and I do is look for bear tracks. If there are any we check to see if they are fresh. When we know that it is safe we can clean the house so we can unload the boats. We go back to Holy Cross for two more boat loads. Our next job is to cut the grass with a weed eater, the grass can be 4-5 feet high, this is wear the mosquito’s live so it’s very important to cut the grass. Next, we clean the smoke house and out house. Then Charlie and I put the cutting table together.

For the first two days Charlie and I are eating can food, spaghetti (yum) and beef stew. Then we can enjoy some rod and reel fishing or duck/goose hunting for our home cook meals.

It takes about five days for the fish (King Salmon) to reach our fish camp from St. Michaels. When we hear the fish are at St. Michael’s we send for the cutters. The cutters are the girls (Betty, Nancy, grandma and anyone that wants to go from our family) back in Anchorage. They always arrive two days before the fish. Charlie and I pick them up from Holy Cross. Than our fishing season begins.

When we moved to Anchorage in 1958 my grandpa said we will always go back to Holy Cross to get our native food. He did that by opening up a savings account for fishing. The very first year we sold our fish strips to people in Anchorage. The money in the fishing account buys our food, plane tickets and kickers for our family to go back every year.