36. Fresh Start w/Throw Party.

The school year started off again with a community feast, with more people packing into the gym this year than I saw last. We now have the largest enrolment Tuntutuliak has ever seen- over 130 kids, K-12. About half of the teachers who taught here last year are back again this year and we also have a few more teachers this year than we had last, so there’s a good amount of fresh energy.
Two of our teachers got married over the summer and celebrated with a special take on a traditional Yupik event. They held a ‘throw party’ to which everyone in the village (male and female) was invited. Below is a picture of a traditional throw party I happened upon last fall.A throw party is traditionally celebrated only by the woman and children of the village. It is held when a girl makes her first kill- that is, when she captures an animal for the first time. She climbs to the roof of her house or a nearby building and throws gifts (candy, toys, sundries) to the crowd of woman and children below.

35. Glacier Bay.

34. Bread Loaf in Juneau.

Greetings from Juneau! Welcome to my site!I started this web log last August when I arrived at Tuntutuliak, Alaska- a tiny Eskimo village in southwest Alaska. My decision to move to Tuntutuliak happened rather abruptly- over the summer, it struck me that four years as an inner-city middle school teacher at a public middle school in Philadelphia was enough... more than enough even. So I looked to Alaska for something different. This website is a collection of my experiences and observations, as a city dweller, of this radically different environment.

Presently, I'm in Juneau attending Bread Loaf School of English through a state grant fellowship- a program designed to improve writing instruction for Native Alaskan youth. After school let out around May 20th, I visited Philadelphia for a few weeks, then headed straight to Juneau for this program. As soon as this is over, I go back to Tuntutuliak for another year of fascinating desolation and meaningful instruction. I'm looking forward to it. Grad school has been a great experience so far- being an adult in a college environment is something to behold. People really seem to leave their hang-ups at the door.I'll come back to this at the end of August. Have a good summer!

33. More From Culture Week.

Jigging (Ice Fishing)...

Sling-shot workshop...

Basket weaving...

The kids were given saws and exacto-knives to make their sling-shots from scratch. I was given indigestion...

32. Culture Week: Rabbit Drive.

Regular afternoon classes this week were canceled to make room for the learning of a slew of skills vital to Yup'k culture. The weeks activities covered a broad spectrum of current traditional practices, including a variety of fine native craft-making techniques and various methods of subsistence living, many different activities occurring simultaneously. All Culture Week instruction was delivered by village residents, who this week became temporary members of the school staff. Certified staff were to serve only as aids to the village resident teachers. I'll post some of the highlights over the next few days.

On Monday and Tuesday afternoons, I headed into the bush for rabbit drives with Robert Enoch and Henry Lupie. A rabbit drive is basically a group of people in line formation trudging through thick brush to corral any and all dwelling rabbits into a previously set net that extends about thirty feet on the far side of the brush.

Above is Mr. Enoch explaining to the kids in Yup'k how it's done.

Here we are heading out to the bush to try to catch some rabbits.

Too bad the rabbits got away. The second day, we took a much longer route and spotted at least one, but we found fox tracks and think we were out foxed. The net had been gnawed through and there was a tuft of fur nearby. Break up is a poor time to go on rabbit drives. Had we gone a week earlier, the snow would have been more firm and thus more easily navigable. Maybe next year.

31. Beluga Swims To Philadelphia.

"A beluga whale, whose normal range is defined by the Arctic Circle, has somehow found its way into the Delaware River, making it as far north as Trenton."
            April 13, 2005 Philadelphia Inquirer