Yupik

WaPo Article about Alaskan Yupik/Inuit Snowboarder

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

From WaPo:

Callan Chythlook-Sifsof grew up in the part of Alaska known as “The Bush” and spent her first 12 years in a village about 500 miles northwest of Anchorage, a place reachable only by boat or plane.She received her first snowboard as a gift from an uncle when she was 7, and she and her older brother would pull each other across the rugged terrain.

She never imagined a snowboard would carry her to the Olympics and let her make history in the process. Chythlook-Sifsof is the first Native Alaskan – from the state’s indigenous cultures – to make the U.S. Winter Olympic team. Even she’s a little amazed by it all.

“When you come from where I come from, the Olympics are just something you see on TV. It’s never really real,” she said. “For everybody living there, I’m really proud to show to people that this isn’t just something that you see on TV. That real people can do this. It’s for everybody.”

It’s not that Native Alaskans have a disdain for the Olympics. Chythlook-Sifsof said the remoteness of the land doesn’t exactly lend itself to having Olympic dreams come true.

Even now there isn’t a snowboardcross course in Alaska. Her family moved to a ski resort in Girdwood – about an hour outside Anchorage – when she was 12, a move that allowed her to hone her craft.

And when she saw Girdwood native Rosie Fletcher take bronze in the parallel giant slalom in 2006, she knew the Olympics were suddenly a very real possibility.

NYTs Article on Alaskan Native Corporations

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

From the NYTs:

The Alaska Native corporations have had Senator Ted Stevens to thank nearly every step of the way.

In 1971, a few years after he was first elected to the Senate, Mr. Stevens helped write the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. Also known as the “Billion Dollar Deal,” the act established more than 200 corporations to manage almost 45 million acres and gave $962 million to Alaska Natives in return for their ceding of all aboriginal land rights.

When the Alaska Native corporations struggled in their early years as they tried to turn people who had survived on fishing and hunting into business managers and to teach thousands of villagers to call themselves shareholders, Senator Stevens was there, too.

He helped corporations with financial difficulties by persuading Congress to approve a provision in the 1986 Tax Reform Act allowing the corporations to sell their accumulated tax losses to profitable companies seeking tax write-offs.

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Article on Todd Palin’s Grandmother

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

From the Anchorage Daily News:

HOMER, Alaska — Like many Alaska Natives of her generation, Lena Andree, Todd Palin’s 87-year-old Yup’ik grandmother, grew up living between two worlds.

Her father was a Dutchman, Glass Eye Billy Bartman, a sled dog freighter in the Bristol Bay region and caretaker of the Alaska Packers saltry on the Igushik River.

Her mother was full-blooded Yup’ik, growing up in a sod-roofed barabara in the now-abandoned village of Tuklung, somewhere on the tundra between Dillingham and Togiak.

Growing up in two worlds along the Igushik River in Bristol Bay, Lena Bartman spoke broken English with her father and more fluent Yup’ik with her mother,. Later she would make a career as a translator, bridging the cultures of Dillingham, speaking English with the doctors and storekeepers and pilots, and “speaking Native” with the residents.

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