Rose Rural Urban Exchange

City students take cultural leap to remote village
JUNEAU-DOUGLAS: Program aims to bridge rural, urban divide.

By ERIC FRY
The Juneau Empire

(Published: March 27, 2005)

JUNEAU -- Five Juneau-Douglas High School students recently got a taste of ice fishing, mushing, trapping, muktuk and beaver tail in Russian Mission, a Yup'ik Eskimo village on the Yukon River near the coast.

The weeklong experience in mid-February was federally funded through the Rose Urban Rural Exchange of the Alaska Humanities Forum. Since the program began five years ago, about 300 students from cities and villages in Alaska have visited each other, said program director Panu Lucier in Anchorage.

An exchange between students from Floyd Dryden Middle School and Napakiak also is taking place this year.

In mid-April, students from Russian Mission -- a village of 330 people 375 miles west of Anchorage -- will visit Juneau, where they will experience bowling, movies, malls and perhaps walk on the Mendenhall Glacier.

"The ultimate goal is to create a sustainable sister-school relationship between urban and rural classrooms," said Ali McKenna, a JDHS English teacher who accompanied the students to Russian Mission.

Juneau and Russian Mission are both isolated communities in their own ways, said Chris Jans, a Russian Mission teacher.

The humanities forum is willing to continue to fund exchanges between participating schools, Lucier said. The goal is for urban students to learn more about rural lifestyles and Native cultures, and for village students to see what it's like to live in a city, she said.

"It sounded like something really different that you wouldn't be able to do anywhere else -- live in a tiny Alaskan village where everything's so in touch with everything," JDHS sophomore Joey Bosworth said.

That and a week out of school was hard to resist, students said.

Students usually stay with host families, but Russian Mission was holding a winter festival when the Juneau students visited, so they lodged with teachers.

The Juneau students said they didn't spend time in the classrooms, but they did see the students at their school work because that included subsistence activities, which then became the basis for studies in the usual academic subjects.

The Juneau students mostly were outdoors, following children or teenagers along their beaver and lynx traplines, ice fishing, mushing and snowmachining or skiing to cabins and staying overnight.

The Juneau students said they expected a barren, flat landscape and were surprised to see hills and trees. But it was the people they remembered most.

"You walk down the streets -- well, they're not really streets -- and everyone says 'hi.' They know who you are," JDHS sophomore Jill Carlile said.

"And by the end of the trip, you know everyone in the village," JDHS sophomore Lindsey Kato said. "The little kids were precious."

The Juneau students chopped wood at remote cabins and cleared the snow off the roofs. They learned that driving a team of dogs is more fun than riding in the basket, where your face gets coated in icy snow churned up by the dogs.

They ate moose, beaver meat and beaver tail, eel, beluga muktuk, and Eskimo "ice cream," which is made of fish oil, berries, lard and sugar.

"It doesn't really taste like ice cream at all," Carlile observed.

"Like sweet, dried tuna fish," Kato suggested.

Beaver tail tastes like wood, the students said.

"Good wood. Really tasty wood," said Bosworth.

The exchange program began five years ago with students only. In the second year, it added teachers. And in the third year, it promoted sister-school relationships.

The King Career Center, a vocational school in Anchorage, made the exchange with Barrow as part of King's natural resources department. The city students learned about resource issues in the Bush, and the rural students learned about job opportunities in government agencies.

"It's basically getting agencies and groups together that don't communicate a lot," said Myroslava Ponomarchuk, the sister-school coordinator for the humanities forum.

"The proper approach to the solution of the gap (between rural and urban Alaska) is you've got to teach the kids how to deal with it because we're about done," said Jans, referring to his generation. "We're not the ones who are going to make a change."


Distributed by The Associated Press

Copyright © 2005 The Anchorage Daily News (www.adn.com)

Small Town Technology...Big Time Results

For most folks, when they think about technology, the broadband and the internet, and the 'ultra' rural (as we like to denote in Alaska) communities in Alaska...a manifest destiny vision of 'the lost souls of digital divide' are oft-times conjured-up...visions of folks just 'out of the loop', without access to information resources, backwoods hobo technologists with little or nothing to offer the outside world!

It has always been my pretense that 'once connected' to the 'net' and having the ability to participate via a broadband standard, with full access and complete reliability, rural Alaskans would have a tremendous amount to offer the outsiders.

It wasn't so much that rural residents wouldn't benefit greatly, as the underserved recipients of the digital information age - that was a given. To me it was more that rural Alaskans had so much to offer than most regulators, policy makers, and urban jockeys could ever imagine.

It's been years since my rant was published on MSN...and I'm happy to call-up some new visions of 'the possible'. Rural Alaskans, known for their innovation, acceptance and use of technologies that enhance (and dutifully unaccepting of those that don't) their well-being and improve the quality of life for their communities are here and now!

I'm happy to present a few on this blog...

John and Sheila Wallace, Bethel
http://www.alaskatechnologies.com/

Greg and Kelley Lincoln, Bethel / Toksook Bay
http://www.deltadiscovery.com/

Jim and Esther
http://www.wholewheatradio.org/

______________________________



We're real people. We have an outhouse out back. We don't have a professionally polished webpage, flashy banner ads, overblown self-promotion and lots of glitz. If you came here because you're tired of other webcast's hype and just want to connect with down-to-earth people and great music --- stick

http://www.wholewheatradio.org/

Whole Wheat Radio is an unpretentious, interactive, independent music world community. Our webcast originates from a cramped 12x12 cabin in Talkeetna, Alaska. It's as close to Northern Exposure's funky radio station as you can get. (Yup, there's a moose that hangs around the cabin. And an adorable monkey too.) We broadcast 24 hours/day, 7 days/week, 365 days/year with the help of our tireless DJs - human and otherwise. We've been on-the-air since August of 2002 and have served up well over a million individual 'listens' to independent musicians' tunes.

_____________________________




The Delta Discovery is the newest and most widely circulated weekly publication serving the people of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta and Bristol Bay regions of Southwestern Alaska.

http://www.deltadiscovery.com

The newspaper was established and continues as a locally owned and operated Bethel newspaper with support from the people of the region who contribute letters, commentaries and columns which shapes the news of rural Alaska.

_____________________________




Purchasing, Upgrade, and Training Assistance. Specializing in remote and creative solutions to the problems of Rural Alaska's needs. Alaska Technologies, LLC (ATL)

http://www.alaskatechnologies.com/

ATL provides IT services to Companies and Organizations that do not need or want an internal IT department. ATL is a FirstClass partner offering what we feel is the best eMail and internal communication product on the market. ATL provides end user and other corporate training. We design individual and group packages based upon YOUR system.

http://www.kusko.net/

kusko.net is the community service arm of ATL and provides web and technology services throughout the Y-K Delta, connecting other community service orgs to their community and the www. Years of development, support and outright contributions to the YK Delta community through technology.