♪♪ -See, if you're away from home... do you feel like you're missing something?

That's how I felt when I was growing up.

'Cause we asked questions to the elders of why we just left our culture behind, and they couldn't answer us.

And that's what I'm looking for, is a sense of belonging.

♪♪ ♪♪ [ Indistinct conversations ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -[ Speaks Alutiiq ] -[ Repeats Alutiiq ] -[ Speaks Alutiiq ] -[ Repeats Alutiiq ] -[ Speaks Alutiiq ] ♪♪ -Our ancestors were Alutiiq people.

It's a thousand miles away, but you guys are always gonna be connected there.

And that's part of your history, and that's part of your children's history, and so on and so forth.

Because that's where you're from.

♪♪ -My family's from the Native village of Chignik.

That's where my grandma was born.

She left Alaska, and she went to California.

And so for a couple generations, we haven't really had a strong connection to Alaska.

♪♪ -This is a culture camp.

It's a place of learning from a young age.

My husband.

Mitch, looked all over, and he said this was the spot because it protected us from the winds coming that way and it also protected us from the winds coming this way.

We work all year long putting this camp together.

♪♪ -You sit in the front.

-Yeah, I know!

-It's so easy -- and I catch myself doing it -- talking about the Alutiiq people in the past tense.

But our culture isn't stagnant.

We're ever-growing and learning, and we're not gone.

We're not living only in the pages of journals from old explorers.

We're a living culture.

♪♪ ♪♪ -Mitch and Judy created a camp where they wanted to get kids to go to where they felt safe and feel okay about asking questions that we don't give kids the chance to ask.

We have this deep, rich cultural heritage that is tied to our land.

We need to take the knowledge and put it back into our next generation.

You spend your life learning.

And that's a journey.

♪♪ [ Indistinct conversations ] ♪♪ ♪♪ -Yes!

♪♪ -[ Speaking indistinctly ] -This place is a source of strength and love and community, and I feel a part of the family here.

And I hope my boys feel that wealth of knowledge, and we will always have a story of having some connection.

♪♪ -Awa'uq.

[ Waves crashing ] ♪♪ -Growing up, we had no idea how rich our history was.

♪♪ We had no idea how long our people had lived here.

♪♪ But our ancestors have been here for well over 7,500 years... and most likely longer.

♪♪ Our people could go out and find all the materials right off the beach to survive, to build their houses, boats, kayaks, get food right here.

We didn't have to go out to the outside world.

We didn't have to depend on the outside world, as we've become dependent now.

We were thriving.

-Sugpiaq was the original name for Alutiiq.

Sugpiaq in Alutiiq means "the real people."

But when they were colonizing, They were like, "No.

You're now the Alutiiq."

-The story of Refuge Rock was one that I think people forgot intentionally because of what happened there in 1784.

This is where the Russians took control of the people's future and destiny on Kodiak.

We became servants to the occupiers.

We became a conquered people.

♪♪ And the way the Russians did this was they waited.

When tide comes in, you can't get there, but at low tide, there's a land bridge that dries out, so you can walk out there without any problems.

And so all they had to do is wait 6 to 8 hours, and they could get out there easily.

Over 500 Alutiiq people, women and children and men, were killed in one day.

The people there went back to the area, but it was so stink with the bodies that they wouldn't go back.

And that site's never been occupied since -- 1784.

And we found out from my mom the original name for that area is called Awa'uq, which means when you stick your hands in the water too long and pull them out and they're numb, so you can't feel them anymore.

It made perfect sense.

If that's where so many people die and that's where the Russians claimed Alaska, you know, that's where we lost our own destiny.

And I think that, in many ways, our people are still numb.

♪♪ -I would say 99% of the village was drinking.

Kids were drinking, as well.

When my boys were 7 and 8, I decided to sober up.

And my husband sobered up seven years later.

-My parents, when they quit drinking, it's like their eyes got opened to the village.

-A lot of the fears that I have are from my alcoholic parents.

I understand a lot of the physical, spiritual, emotional stuff that goes on with alcoholism.

Rape is one of the biggest ones.

Violence.

That's another one.

Fear.

It's a big one.

-I quit drinking in '94, and in '95, you know, I was thinking of the kids, you know?

Wow.

What a devastation we had caused by drinking so much.

-They saw all the kids just running amok, not being taken care of, and they wanted to do something for the kids.

-I had learned that if I look down the road and -- and visualize something better, that something better was going to happen.

♪♪ So we decided to bring kids to camp.

[ Indistinct shouting ] -One, two, three, four... five, six, seven... eight, nine, ten!

Ready or not, here I come!

-Hurry!

-We decided to take them away from their parents for a week to give them a chance to play and have fun and to be able to smile and be happy.

We just let them play and get wet and do everything that they couldn't do when they were at home.

They just needed to be kids... enjoy life... and have their own thoughts and feelings.

[ Waves crashing ] -It's quiet.

You can listen to the waves crashing on the beach.

You can hear birds chirping.

-[ Birds chirping ] -You can hear the grass... if you're really paying attention.

-If you're out there alone and hiding in the grasses somewhere and we can't see you... and a bear shows up and we can't find you... and the bear decides to find you for us... that's it.

If you look around in this camp, you can see there's no technology other than your cameras.

You can see that beauty that doesn't have that stressful moment of a phone ringing.

Serenity is here.

-There's, like, no distractions.

You can't go off and, like, be on your phone.

And it's all, like, together, and you're all bored together, so you do stuff.

[ Chuckles ] -You know, I don't really know what we're gonna do today, but whatever we do, I'm just looking forward to it.

-There's not assigned times to do this or that.

It's more of a free rein.

You can choose what you want to do and when you want to do it.

-Early on, I had a real love-hate relationship with the camp.

[ Laughs ] It felt disorganized to me because I was, like, this, you know, Western-style trained teacher coming in and just seeing kids running around everywhere.

I felt like I should be doing something, and I felt uncomfortable with the unstructured time, and the whole thing just kind of made me feel nervous.

And then I saw the kids come up with games at a moment's notice, turn the whole grassy field into a wilderness of little alleyways and stand a little taller and realize that they own this place.

They own this beach.

And I realized that it was my problem.

[Chuckles] ♪♪ -I've been visiting here since I was young.

I think I've been going since I was 3 years old.

So it's kind of like tradition.

♪♪ I think it's just having a place to, like, reconnect with your culture and having familiar faces, people that look alike.

-Eyebrows are right here, and then it goes all the way down to here.

Here is its first smile, and then it goes down to here, and here is its second.

-And ancestors were here on the same land, and then we're, like, going back and redoing the same things that they used to do and living how they used to live, which is pretty cool.

♪♪ -[ All singing in Alutiiq ] ♪♪ -Gage is gonna show you how to do what we call a bow-and-drill fire making.

I take the laces out of my boot.

-My favorite thing about Akhiok is the children.

The way their brains are sucking up knowledge.

-That's cool!

-I love to watch a child growing and learning and experiencing the world.

That reminds me of how I was when I was a child.

As I started to learn about different things, I started adding them to camp, so I started talking about alcoholism, talking about drug use, talking about tobacco, talking about sexual abuse.

I want the kids to learn that if it happens to them to make sure that it stops happening so that they don't become adults that are abusing.

We can't fix the old ones, but you can fix the kids before they get that way.

That's my motto.

Fix it before it happens.

-[ Singing in Alutiiq ] -Uluryaklluku.

♪♪ ♪♪ -Being in the position as a curator, being Native, how do I fit the extraction, exploitation, and destruction of my culture in a place that was established by outsiders to exotify us as disappearing humans on this planet.

How do I justify that with myself?

♪♪ The colonial past is not pretty.

We started with treating the people as subhuman, but we should not say, "Oh, that happened in the past."

I'm like -- Actually, we're still practicing the same methods of extraction and exploitation of the Native peoples as they did.

We're just calling it a different thing.

How do we change that?

We change that by finding ways to collaborate with the communities so that they're the ones who are telling us and museums what we can share and what we shouldn't share with the public.

And that changes that discussion of, "I have your things.

I'm gonna do whatever I want."

As opposed to, "We are caring for your collections.

How do you want us to continue caring for those?"

And then how do you get that knowledge of how those cultural pieces were created back to the community?

And applying that in a way that allows us to lift up these cultures that have been suppressed, that have been systematically erased... to reversing that and respecting us as human beings.

♪♪ -Naama.

-Okay.

Again.

Let's go.

[ Singing in Alutiiq ] ♪♪ I'm gonna try to be distinct on how to pronounce the words.

[ Speaking Alutiiq ] -[ All repeat Alutiiq ] -Is it with a "guh" or a "hguh"?

-"Hguh."

-[ All speaking Alutiiq ] -I've been teaching our language, which is called Alutiiq, but most white people call it Aleut.

-[ Speaking Alutiiq ] -There was a time there, it was a little fearful for me because I thought the language might be dying away.

-Unuku is "tonight."

-Mm-hmm.

-"Very late tonight, I will come."

I did not grow up speaking Alutiiq.

I couldn't tell a story in Alutiiq.

But I wanted to learn.

♪ When doggies, doggies bark at me ♪ ♪ Don't you think I'm a boogeyman?

♪ [ Laughter ] -[ Speaking Alutiiq ] -[ Singing in Alutiiq ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ I was a good student.

I loved learning, but no one was allowed to speak Alutiiq in classes.

This sounds very foolish for the teachers to come to the village to teach English, but if the children could not speak English, how are they going to tell what they know?

And how is the teacher going to understand the children if they can't speak Alutiiq?

That's stupid.

I noticed adults here moved away from the Alutiiq language.

Maybe they were traumatized in the school that they no longer wanted to speak it.

So how could they pass anything on that they've forgotten?

-When I was little, I spoke my language.

When I was getting ready to start school, my mom said, "Don't speak any more."

So I didn't.

And, sadly, I forgot it.

♪♪ ♪♪ Ohh... ♪♪ I didn't expect that.

-Naugkwarluku.

♪♪ -In 1988, I was invited to go to the Sixth Inuit Studies Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, and during a lecture about the history of the Aleut peoples of Alaska, I found myself wondering, "Why am I on the other side of the world listening to scholars talk about my culture when I should be home, working with elders and learning from them?"

That sparked me to want to not only do anthropology, but archaeology within my own region and out into the Aleutians.

The Aleutians are a 1,500-mile-long stretch of islands.

In order to get out there, you need a vessel that is very seaworthy.

It's open ocean, and it's dangerous.

Weather comes up really quickly.

-Okay.

♪♪ ♪♪ [ Camera shutter clicking ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ In 1942, the Japanese invaded Attu and Kiska.

And that whole area they claimed for Japan, and they occupied it for over a year.

They took the 42 people who were living in Attu to become prisoners of war in Japan, in Hokkaido.

They thought they were gonna be allowed to go back to Attu and Kiska, but no Native peoples were allowed to go back to the islands after 1945 because the American general had burnt the sites to the ground, and so they were never allowed to go home.

♪♪ [ Camera shutter clicks ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ This is really cool.

This rock's been stood up.

I wonder if it's a marker.

Put here by Unangas people, people from Agattu and Attu.

♪♪ ♪♪ -That bomb blew up, and bits and pieces were everywhere.

♪♪ ♪♪ Artelion "Arty" -- Angelina's baby -- Golodoff.

Freddie "Fedosay" Hodikoff.

Foster Jones.

Gabriel Lokanin.

Tatiana Lokanin.

Anecia...

There is a marker that was put up by the original descendants from Attu that talks a little bit about that tragic history that happened there with the Unangan people.

Helen, Lavrenti... Mary Prokopioff.

Bladimir Prossoff.

Martha Hodikoff-Prossoff.

-Anerneq.

-I've been discovering my abilities as I get older.

I've discovered these little things that were never taught to me.

One of them is that I can move wind.

I can calm it down.

I've been able to close my eyes and watch people in the whole community and see them moving around without seeing with my eyes.

I can tell when somebody is going to pass away before they pass away.

My ability to see that is very heartbreaking sometimes.

-♪ Double, double this, this, double, double that, that ♪ -We could only have two kids, so we decided to have camps so we could have lots of kids.

I believe that even the negative-est person in the world can become positive if they're taught how.

And we're still having kids.

[ Laughs ] And so I try to teach how to be positive, how to give, be positive, take, be positive.

It's a gift.

The only one that gave it to me was the Creator, so I use it with utmost respect to Him.

-Back when the camp was really just starting, we would have eight, nine kids and my parents, who ran everything, and they've done everything by themselves.

So they took everything out of their own money, out of the bank, and bought fuel, bought groceries.

When my wife and I took over the planning part of it, my parents said, "We're getting older, and the planning of this is starting to interfere with what we need to be doing."

Because my mom was working as the behavioral health aide at the time, and her supervisors didn't consider the work that she was doing for camp as part of her work, and she was just coming home tired and upset sometimes.

-In 2000, Mitch and Judy invited me to their Akhiok Kids Camp.

It was one of these things where somebody takes you and bats you over the head and you open your eyes, you're like, "Holy smokes!

This is amazing!"

I was like, "Sure.

When?"

Go ahead.

-I get to see my dad in a different setting.

He works so hard during the year.

-There we go.

That sounded good.

-But when I see him in Akhiok, he seems, like, actually, like, happy.

And he's relaxed, and he'll make, you know, village jokes.

[ Laughter ] And he seems like himself, and it's really cool to see my dad like that.

-Having "Fisherman" here as an educated person, we don't see him as professor.

We see him as friend.

We see him as family.

He's just like one of our kids.

And he's always a giving person like his mom and his dad.

He has those gifts.

-"There is nothing."

[ Speaking Alutiiq ] -[ Speaking Alutiiq ] -Alphonse Pinart was a French scholar who was traveling around the world in the 1870s, collecting Indigenous peoples' words and languages.

-To care about something.

They have "canaqlluku."

-Canaqlluku.

-Canaqlluku?

-Yeah.

-[ Speaking Alutiiq ] -In the fall of 1871, Pinart hired four Unangan to take him by kayak to Kodiak and record his stories, songs that he collected.

And so when I was translating this material, I sat down with my mom, and over 20 years, we would translate a few of the texts.

Each of the words that were written down was written in archaic Alutiiq, and some of those texts took over a month to translate, working back and forth.

-[ Speaking Alutiiq ] -But what was the bias on how this was being written?

Like, for example, there's a text that's talking about our religious belief system.

[ Speaking Alutiiq ] -[ Speaking Alutiiq ] -Something terrible or hideous or a monster.

-The Russian texts equate all those traditional beliefs as being devils and evil and bad... to make us look worse in order to subjugate us.

So when you read the text, you're like, "Oh, my God.

These guys are nothing but satanic worshippers!"

But if you change the words from "devil" to "helper spirits," it changes the entire meaning of that entire paragraph that talks about our world views and beliefs.

♪♪ They're about caring for each other.

They're about caring for our environment, caring for the food that sustains us... and understanding our histories.

And for me, that made it even more important to really start to translate these stories so that they're reflecting who we are, not what people think we are.

Which, up until that point, we were still considered nothing but primitive savages unable to care for ourselves, unable to care for our environment, even though we've been doing that for thousands of years.

[ Speaking Alutiiq ] -[ Speaking Alutiiq ] -Okay.

I feel very grateful for the last 20 years of being able to record my mom, to be able to learn from her, and, you know, carry that knowledge forward.

-Aqiturlluni.

[ Indistinct conversations ] [ Instrument plays ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -"J" for Jennifer.

"S" for Simeonoff.

It's my mom.

♪♪ -Alright.

Here it comes.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -[ Speaking Alutiiq ] Right hand.

So, ladies, we're standing.

Our fingers are always closed.

We have our berry basket right here.

And then you're putting your berries into your basket.

Let me switch.

Then you're putting your berries into that basket.

And we have so many berries, we're sharing them!

Ready?

Two, three, four.

[ All singing in Alutiiq ] ♪♪ -Everything is tied around how we gather food.

At contact, based on the archaeological data, there was between 20,000 to 30,000 people on the island.

Between 1784 and 1818, our population dropped down to 1,500.

It wasn't disease that killed us off.

It was starvation.

If you were a whaler, for example, you went out and got a whale.

The Russians took the whale.

Then you had to work to get the food back.

And so if you didn't get a whale, your family starved.

♪♪ ♪♪ Our people knew that, living in this precarious environment, things are finite.

You waste food, you get in trouble.

And that waste then impacts the future.

♪♪ What's happening today?

We are taking our food away from ourselves and the food away from all the animals that actually sustain themselves.

We need to step back and say, "Hey, who's looking out for the long-term future?"

-I just hate being fancy, which is what I have to do at college.

I have to be put together and be organized and look nice and, like, have my hair nice.

But I hate that.

I really just want to be on a slimy boat.

♪♪ -My family's goal is to teach as many people as we can how to hunt and fish to save the subsistence lifestyle.

The cost of food in Safeway is just gonna get higher and higher.

I don't see a whole lot of people that's gonna stay in the village when it gets like that.

It is loaded now.

This is the safety.

I want you to sit up right here.

When I was growing up, there was 130 people in the village.

Every time we went hunting, we didn't hunt for just ourselves.

We hunted to bring back to the village, and we shared with everybody in the village.

Are you having a hard time?

Yeah?

You s-- You still scared of it?

I better shoot.

♪♪ [ Gunshot ] Now there's roughly about 50 to 70 people in the village.

And everybody is for themselves.

♪♪ The sharing is not there anymore.

♪♪ That's the idea of bringing the little ones.

Watch and learn.

♪♪ Take your knife.

Put it right underneath the skin.

Our biggest goal is to teach the kids how to share with everybody.

Yeah.

-My dad grew up with, like, five sisters, and he didn't really raise me and Bella with gender roles.

But I can see it now, when I want to go hunting, people seem surprised, which is crazy to me.

[ Chuckles ] -When my brother and I are gone, who's there to keep it going?

Knowing where the best places to hunt will be gone.

Knowing the best places to fish will be gone.

-We went to where the two tides meet because that's where Speridon said the most fish were.

There was a lot of fish.

There was like hundreds of fish.

The way I fish, I have my weights almost two feet off of the hook.

-Yeah.

-So you want to keep the hook off the bottom.

-Toss it.

-I haven't done that kind of fishing.

It would go down, and then you'd stop once in a while and you hold and tug.

The hook wouldn't even hit the ground before a fish would bite it.

I don't think it's there anymore.

-Oh, there you go!

Come on!

-As a young child, I used to go visiting all the time with the elders... sit there for hours and hours listening to them tell stories.

I wouldn't even ask questions.

I would just sit there and listen.

[Chuckles] We're losing our elders so quick now that, sadly, a lot of the knowledge is disappearing very quickly.

So the lifestyle that we have here in the village will be gone, and then the people will be gone.

So to be able to teach a broader number of people this stuff is very important to me.

Hey.

You be quiet.

They can hear you.

[ Water bubbling ] -We can't think about it from a global perspective, because, globally, if you step away from the local, you don't have to pay attention.

You can ignore it.

But when you're at the local level, when your food is disappearing right in front of you, you're gonna fight for it.

You're gonna say, "Wait a minute here.

This needs to stop.

And we need to change these practices."

I think that going back to these traditional ways can allow us to be able to be sustainable on the island.

[ Indistinct conversations ] We can gather enough food to teach our own children how to care for the food, how to eat it and not go, "Oh, yuck, that's just Native, primitive, savagery food stuff," to get them to realize how healthy and important it is food-wise.

So all of that's really, really tied in to the health and well-being of not only our environment, but ourselves.

-When we started the camp, we didn't have canned stuff.

We served rice and potatoes and carrots and vegetables.

Everything we ate, we caught.

Fish and halibut.

-Lettuce.

-That's lettuce?

What is this one?

-Carrot.

-Mm-hmm!

-When I was growing up, Spam became a pretty big thing because you can put it away and store it and have it for any time and for anything.

Spam is not a great staple for people today, but it's part of the culture, it's part of the past, so I want to keep that in the camp because it's who we were and how we grew up.

The other part that nobody knows about is the "healing hands" part.

When you touch food, everybody has healing hands, and they don't know it.

-[ Man laughs ] -That's why when they're cooking I tell them not to be thinking any evil thoughts or talking about nasties or anything because you serve that to people, and then you'll notice the people start acting like what you were just thinking and serving.

And so when I'm cooking and people come in and they want to help, I allow them to help or even add to whatever's being cooked.

Make the big stew better.

[ Laughs ] To me, it's like we're putting all of our healing hands together to put it into that food, and it goes into your stomach, so it's healing everybody from our insides out.

-Nallugkunaku.

-Come on, buddy!

[ Indistinct shouting ] -Come on, Kaley!

Run!

-We set camp up at Cape Alitak because of the petroglyphs that are there.

Petroglyphs are images pecked in the stone.

They're using a rock as a chisel or a hammer.

And they're creating these stories in stone.

♪♪ [ Chiseling ] Because when you start pecking on the rocks, that sound goes out into the ocean, and seals come in.

And so you can have a hunter get the seals.

♪♪ We originally thought there was only about 300 to 400 petroglyphs, and now we're past 1,300 petroglyphs.

Here's some new ones, guys!

They've been making petroglyphs without me.

Look at them.

You can barely see them.

You see them?

[ Chuckles ] This is pretty cool.

Right here.

One.

Haven't seen these before.

That's 16 years of walking by these guys.

[ Laughs ] But geez...

It was worth the walk.

We did carbon-dating of a site that went from 200 to 1,000 years old, and then there's a site that goes back probably 1,500 to 4,000 years old.

Most of them are all along the coast, but they're hard to see.

There's the head, and then that goes up into a drum right here.

And then there's two lines that come out that go over here up into the spirit world.

The petroglyphs facing the bay are images of smiley faces... and a couple of whales.

The ones facing the ocean are more anthropomorphic.

You have a whale dancing.

You've got people.

You've got seals.

These petroglyphs were for giving thanks.

And you have people dancing and celebrating for the whales coming back every year to help sustain us.

It doesn't look like much, but when you start to see them, you see the faces popping up.

They had a purpose of telling a story or a legend or what someone had done in their life to be remembered.

The petroglyphs are actually eroding mainly because of the changing climates in our environment.

The tides are a little bit bigger.

The storms are bigger.

And also the rise in sea level.

And so it's eroding away the petroglyphs.

If we made petroglyphs today, we would be calling them graffiti because then it's not considered cultural, even though I think that in the future we can as long as we are all aware of what we're going to put into the rocks so that in the future the story isn't just about us defacing a rock or defacing a site.

It's telling a story about what we were doing at that time.

These are ours, created by our ancestors.

It's living art for us that is now, I hope, inspiring the next generation of Alutiiq not just artists, but community members, in looking at stories and understanding our history and our connection to the area.

-Canaluku.

-[ Shouts in Alutiiq ] [ Drum beating ] ♪♪ [ Shouts in Alutiiq ] ♪♪ [ Shouts in Alutiiq ] ♪♪ [ Shouts in Alutiiq ] -[ Singing in Alutiiq ] ♪♪ -Long ago, when the Alutiiq people would travel long distances in their skin kayaks, sometimes when they were out on the water, a storm would come up, and they would survive by lashing their kayaks together and riding out the storm together.

And we as people need to do the same.

The times that we're in, with the storms that we're all weathering in our community, in our homes, in our country, it's important that we hold tight to our family and ride out the storm together.

♪♪ -[ Shouts in Alutiiq ] ♪♪ [ Shouts in Alutiiq ] ♪♪ -Every outside contact really took away from us where we belonged.

And we just left our culture behind.

And that's what I searched for.

Like, the kayak stuff that I got into.

It kind of brought me closer to where I belong.

Kayak building was like the rite of passage for a young man because he was going to have to support his family, and he tells stories about going out and places they've been and what they did, how they hunted in them.

They weren't just kayaks.

These were a way of life.

♪♪ -We've been told we were dumb Natives for the last century.

I grew up with that, where I was told that all the time.

But to make a boat from wood you collect off the beach and then the engineering involved in that and making sure that you design it and build it so you're not putting your life in danger in really rough weather and being able to go out and go hunting in that?

That's pretty amazing.

Originally there were no three-man kayaks.

There was usually two-men or single-man kayaks.

And the reason three-men kayaks came in was because that's where the Russian would sit.

They put the idiot in the middle.

[Chuckles] Since that time, almost nobody has spent the time to go out with the kayak makers to learn that knowledge.

-You want to pick them up and find out which angle is going to droop the most so you don't have any of this wood fighting each other.

-We have a responsibility to make sure that the knowledge gets back.

Otherwise, it's gone.

And that's the knowledge that Alfred has.

It's that lived knowledge that you won't get in books.

Another half-inch?

-Old-timers, you know, would tell us how they built them with their dad or their grandfather.

We talked about what kind of woods to use, the shape of things, and how you measured them with your hands and your body.

And that's what really grasped me.

See, I don't have patterns for all this.

It's make it or don't.

-He is the last traditional kayak builder that had learned from our ancestors.

-The spiritual addition to the whole kayak -- because it became a being after we got done making it.

-Oh!

-This is the key to hold that.

-Uh-huh.

-And it'll hold this when you tie it.

-He doesn't have it written down.

And I want to make sure that we do get it written down.

-We want the gunnels to come in right here, and then you have plates that go over the top, and those create the air void to keep your bow from going underwater in the next wave that's ahead of you.

...two pieces... -Building a full-size boat teaches the value of understanding your resources and carrying it forward.

[ Indistinct conversation ] By learning it through your hands... and you start understanding the symbolisms and knowledge that is embodied in them.

♪♪ ♪♪ -Boats are all-important.

That's how we feed our families.

The angyaq has been a dream of ours for a long time.

-The angyaq is the open boat versus the kayaks.

They're not designed for heavy, rough seas and going long distances.

They take a lot more energy to move.

-My role in building the angyaq is helping my father realize his dream.

So we decided that we would try and do it out in the camp.

♪♪ -This is something that he's always wanted to build, the historical event of having it made by Native people and in a native environment.

From scratch, really?

Yeah.

-When you make boats, you do not veer off and change it because you'll really throw things off from what they really are.

Yeah, do it right or don't do it at all.

-Yeah.

-It may have taken 10,000, 20,000 years to just design the shape of the bow, and that was something that was passed down in the family.

You know, not everything comes in a day.

-[ Fingers snap ] You gotta learn this stuff.

I'm gonna be calling on you forever.

You have to work for it, no matter what you do.

♪♪ -In Kodiak, the last documented angyaq that was built was in the 1860s.

The Russian took the open boats from the communities and destroyed them or used them for themselves only because in an open boat you could fit in an entire village, and then they can get away.

[ Indistinct conversation ] -I like making the boats with the community... because when you have the community there, they own the knowledge.

They take the knowledge back with them.

They keep it.

It belongs to them.

And that is important because if anything happens to our system and breaks down, we can be self-reliant again.

Instead of depending on the outside world, we are depending on us.

It's all about working together and balancing.

And when you show community members that and they see it, they embrace it.

They're like, "Wow!

That's us?

That's ours?

We did that?"

-I grew up with nothing but questions.

I've got quite a few answers, but I got a long way to go.

I'm just starting.

I want them to be able to understand where they came from without having to dig too deep, you know, where they can walk in and say, "I am Alutiiq.

This is where I come from.

And this is a part of our life right here."

It takes a lifetime.

I'll tell you that.

But searching for that was worth it.

-Asiriuq.

[ All singing in Alutiiq ] -This is not something to take lightly.

It's too destructive to say that something's "gone."

That's too finite.

That's too limiting.

But to say that something is "sleeping" knowledge feels like it's not gone but can be reawakened.

And so it's the value of the learning.

It's not so much their actual performance in their carving or their performance in their hunting.

It's just them knowing that they have a space to be Indigenous, to be Alutiiq, to be who they are.

That is the value of this camp.

[ All speaking Alutiiq ] ♪♪ -I guess the ultimate gem in all of this is teaching our children the value of caring for our resources.

They have a bigger meaning in terms of showing the rest of the world that we have this deep, rich cultural heritage that is tied to our land.

♪♪ -I belong in this land.

I will always have a place for this in my heart... even if I'm not here to see it.

♪♪ -[ Laughs ] -[ Laughs ] -[ Laughs ] ♪♪ -The kids love being at camp.

We allow them to make noise and be part of who they are and have fun and stay up late and do whatever they want to do until it's time to go to bed.

To sing.

To be happy.

I've had a lot of kids come to me that are adults now and tell me, "Thank you," because they were so happy to be able to come to my camp.

This is what I see.

I see a community that's healing.

-[ Kids laughing ] -Shut up!

-The sound of kids is an awesome thing to hear.

Don't you just love to hear them?

-So she ran back inside...

He came out and yelled at it.

-Yelled at it?

-He yelled -- He yelled -- He yelled at it.

It stood up.

It stood up.

[ Laughter ] ♪♪ [ Indistinct conversations ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Laughter ] ♪♪ -Ohh!

[ Laughter ]