Curt's Ponderings From The Bioshelter

One of the oldest, continuously occupied villages in Alaska is the village of Healy Lake.  Archaeologists estimate that the Healy Lake Athabascans have enjoyed continual habitation there for over 11,000 years.  My family members are newcomers to the lake.  We began going there in 1967 (I think).  We helped one family build a cabin there and later built one ourselves.  It is a place of life and beauty and has become an especially sacred place in my heart. We travel by boat to Healy Lake in the summer, launching in the Tanana River near Delta Jct., cruising downstream to the mouth of the Healy River and then up the Healy for a few miles to Healy Lake, itself.  Crossing the lake one can’t help but notice the skeleton branches of dead treetops sticking up, out of the water.  Clearly, at one time there were significant, forest ecosystem-supporting islands there. As we cross the lake I remember enjoying a picnic at the top of one of those now-submerged...

When my daughter was in the sixth grade I brought her with me to the arctic village of Anaktuvuk Pass.  The church in Anaktuvuk Pass needed a new pastor and I was flying there to help them begin the process for finding one.  I thought it would be a great experience for my daughter to see and experience another part of Alaska and a bit of the way of life that goes with living in that place. My daughter loved it.  She attended school for that week and therefore met a lot of new friends very quickly.  She learned to play aku-aku (a game about making people smile), Norwegian Baseball, and probably a number of games I never heard about.  As a father I was overjoyed to recognize in her a joy that I share: the joy of going to new places, meeting new people and learning new things. Dorothy (Dodo) Hopson, the clerk of session at the church also befriended us, and made sure we got a sampling of the local foods.  Our favorite was masu root, a wild vegetable that g...

It has been well over thirty years since I first began work in Christian ministry.  My first paid service was as in my college days when I served as a Lay Pastor at the First Presbyterian Church in Fairbanks.  The church had two worship services, one in English and one in Iñupiat Eskimo. One day I asked one of the elders at the Iñupiat service why the Iñupiat people accepted Christianity so quickly and so whole-heartedly in Alaska’s arctic.  As near as I could tell it had happened within only one or two generations.  At the time, many of my own college classmates were questioning the validity of the whole concept of faith (let alone accepting Christianity), and the Iñupiat response stood in such contrast to what I was seeing elsewhere that I couldn’t help but ask the question. The elder gave a two part answer.  He began by telling me the story of Maniilaq, a prophet from the Kotzebue region who hung hides to dry-cure above his house.  He told the peopl...