of a classmate. her husband had just passed away a few months before that. this was the same young man who didn t know the basic command for sit down. i realized he does understand the culture. it s beautiful. that s an example of alaska native values. giving and gifting and also providing for those who can t arrive themselves. something i love about our culture is our regalia. yes. regalia says a lot about who you are, also your status in the community by way of higher serving a community. that s how status is obtained. generosity is really what brings the most prestige. making sure people not saving things and start filing yourself. to be alaskan, is to adopt a lot of it s a way of life. if you live in alaska, you end up hunting, fishing, gathering, enjoying nature. wanting to make sure that we
about one community and more about fishing and hunting and gathering. why is fishing and hunting and gathering so important to our cultures in alaska? i served in the legislature for ten years. one day i said to my second son who is five at the time, i said a basic command for sit down. he looked at me with a blank expression. i thought, oh, no he s from a different culture that i m from. he s growing up in the city. i realized, i really just needed to go home so they could hunt and fish. i knew i couldn t teach them about yup ik values or the yup ik culture through a book. or just with words. they had to really lit it. to limit, they had to be home hunting and fishing. i don t know how else to explain it. it s a relationship with the environment. making sure that our harvest is shared with people who need it. when my second son was nine, we were drifting for salmon. i said, well, son who you re going to give your catch to? he immediately said the mother
are preserving our fishery so we can do that with our family members. seven generations and beyond. one of the main reasons i ran for congress to begin with, was to elevate the issues of food security or having. many parts of alaska, specifically the yukon river, the river, many of the regions are having issues with a lack of abundance. the resources we have relied on for centuries. we have to be asking people with knowledge to come forward. there have been so many decades of radical. they re still ridicule for incorporating traditional knowledge. there s a recognition that everything is related. the middle and upper uconn, their indicator is yellow butterflies when they see yellow butterflies, they know there s abundance in the river. to celebrate indigenous knowledge more and how it integrates with protecting our land and resources. yeah and not just celebrating it, but applying it.
that the civil rights movement was alive and well in southeast alaska, long before it took hold in the lower 48. alaska natives have been working on civil rights and it really predated the lower 48 s movement. the interesting thing is, even though we got a jump start, i don t know that we are that much further ahead. i know the state of alaska sues it s tribes more than all other lower 48 states, combined. wasn t it just in the last six months that the state legislature specifically recognizes? were you a part of laying the groundwork for that? no, actually, when i served, it was very forbidden to talk about tribes in a lot of contexts. we ve come a long way. we have, especially in the last 15 years. i spend more time trying to explain how we are all related, how we are all similar, how i m also german, american, and trying to find commonalities. and i m not really sure why people are so threatened by alaska natives and native americans. we have historical claims to