>From:    Mary <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: 100 miles from Arctic circle
>Dear Kathleen,
>What town/settlement do you live in? Are you aware of any
outposts where the people still follow a hunter gatherer diet?
>Mary

Dear Mary,

Small question with a large answer which  I am not particularly
qualified to address, but since I am here I'll do my best.
Anyone with strong sympathy with the animal rights movement
would probably be offended by what I will write about, and I
suggest that you probably should just hit delete and spare us both.

I live in Two Rivers, AK, about twenty miles from Fairbanks.
We are on the road system, which makes a big difference
around here in how people eat.  The more remote, the more
expensive it is to fly and ship food in, and the more likely it is
that people will eat from the land and waters.   Also, employment
makes a big difference.  When family members are working for
cash, subsistance (by which I mean to hunt, fish,  forage and
preserve) is more difficult because the time isn't available.
However, without cash income, the money for  the equipment
(boats, guns, ammo, fishing tackle, nets, freezers, canning and
 camping gear, etc.) is not there, and  the subsistance lifestyle is
 not  as productive.   What is frequently seen  is a mix in families
or extended families where some members work and provide
cash, and some hunt and gather and harvest, particularly in
Native Alaskan families.

Most rural families will try to put either moose or caribou or both
in the freezer, depending on where they live.  The ones on the river
system often have fishwheels (use of these is restricted by law to
Native Alaskans)  or set nets.  The whole family will go out to
fishcamp, a place where their parents and parents' parents and so
on fished, and set up living there for a few weeks or months until
they have a year's supply of salmon for themselves and their dogs
put up.  Young strong people set the nets and gather the fish, the
older more experienced folks do the cutting and hanging and smoking.
Ones who are too far upriver for the salmon follow centuries of
tradition in caribou or other food with the fisherfolk.

When you go downriver in the fall, you see racks of salmon, like red
jewels, split down the center and hanging in smoke to cure for the
winter.  Against a turquoise sky with summer green turning into
the bittersweet red, they make a memorable picture.

Seasons are rich with meaning--spring is filling an empty larder
with the migrating waterfowl and fiddlehead ferns.   Summer is
berries and gardens and time flying by so quickly with so much to
be done.  Fall is hunting and fishing and putting by.  Winter is
icefishing
and a little more hunting, until the game grows thin and scarce,
and trapping season is on in earnest.

There are some wild herbs that are used for food and medicine.
 Berry gathering is an important activity.  All of these represent
a significant source of food, both in a physical and a spiritual sense.

I don't know if I can explain satisfactorily, but in the Native cultures
here,  food and its availability and means  and methods of gathering
are very important in a sense I can only describe as spiritual.  People
are taught to speak respecfully and euphemistically about animals,
especially during hunting seasons.  For example, many hunters will
not say, "I'm going to hunt bear,"  they will say, "I'm going to go out
and look around for awhile," because if the animals hear them, they
will resent the egotism and not give themselves to the hunter.  The
remains that are not harvested are disposed of in respectful and ritual
ways.  Genders have certain food-related tasks, and can speak of
certain animals only with certain terms, or the hunters' luck will go
out of him and he will not hunt successfully until he has atoned.
 THis is not just the way it was done, but is actively taught and
practised still.

I heard a man talk about being married to a woman who was taught
that women did not say the word for bear.  So when they were
boating down a river and she said, "There's something dark over
there on the bank," she MEANT there was a bear.  He didn't realize
this, and they were both a little tense with one another about the
steaks and stew that got away.

Almost all rural people live to some degree on subsistance and
to some degree on boughten food.  You don't so much see
absolutes as a continuum.  There is a great series of videos
called Make Prayers to the Raven which do a much better
job in describing and explaing some of the beliefs and practices,
and the blend of modern/western/Euro lifestyle and Native Alaskan
subsistance lifestyles.  You might be able to locate them somewhere.
If anyone is truly interested, I can try to track down a source.

Even the urban Athabascans (`Indians') and Innuit and Yup'ik
(coastal people which some people call Esquimos) and Aleuts
usually have some village connections which provide them with
soul food --smoked dried fish, caribou, seal oil, muktuk, etc.

There are said to be groups of people, for example on an island off
of Point Lay, AK where people follow the old ways as completely
as possible.  If someone wanted to pursue this as a lifestyle, it is
still possible in the villages and rural areas, though as population
increases, there will be more and more competition over resources.

The Alaska Native Lands Claim Settlement Act made some
provisions for the rights of Natives (btw, this is considered a
respectful rather than perjorative term here) to gather food
from their land.  There are strong feelings on both sides of this
issue on the equity of this settlement, and I will not begin to
touch on it, but merely say, this is so significant a part of their
culture that it was imperative that it be addressed.

I was blessed with a very knowledgeble and wise and wonderful
teacher from Koyukuk who told me that people used to gather
a certain kind of moss off of spruce trees, and use this as a diaper
with charcoal and ash in the bottom of baby carriers to soak up
the urine.  She said, "life was hard, real hard, in those days."

A man lives in the village of Minto named Peter John.  He is  the
elder of the village, about 100 years old, and he was raised by his
grandmother (firstborn children were traditionally given to the
grandparents to raise, which provided a caregiver to the old folks
and also was a great means of preserving cultural and linguistic
continuity and stability)  I was out there a few years ago and
visited with him, and there were duck carcasses on his porch,
though it was not hunting season and he had not hunted them.
He lived in a settlement that had been relocated out of a flood
zone in the last twenty years or so, up on a bluff overlooking a
river valley.  Until the missionaries came, people had moved
seasonally following the food, like migrating birds and fish.
Then schools were built, and people erected permenent shelter.

He was raised by his grandmother, who was raised by her
grandmother, who was alive about the time of the American
Revolutionary War.   A strong stream through time.
Anyway, he made the comment that, "I wouldn't want to go back
to living that way.  We lost a lot of kids.  But I don't want to be
here, either."

This is probably both more and less than you wanted to know, and
I apologize for taking up so much bandwidth for a topic only
obliquely diet-related.  I have received other posts off-list on this
question and thought it might be satisfactory to address this here.

best to all of you, Kathleen

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