Finished

I have finished my research. Hooray! I wok up this morning and thought to myself "Today I dont have to ask anyone anything about Education! Today I dont have to introduce myself and explain where I come from and explain how what people are doing in this place relates to what I do. Today I dont have to convince anyone to share something of themselves so that I can learn from them." Dont get me wrong. The last 5 weeks of reasearch have been amazing. I have been to some remarkable places and met great people who have actually been very generous in what they have shared with me. I feel lucky because along the way I have made new friends. But tonight I am sleeping in the house of old friends. Friends who know me and have been part of my story for a while now. I am with people who know something of what my life was like prior to coming overseas and who know the right questions to ask. And when I go to bed I can read my book without thinking that I should be reading this academic paper or that historical account. And tomorrow when I wake up I will be on holidays.

Canada

I'm in Canada now. I spent a long day travelling from Alaska to Vancouver and stayed only about 4 days in British Columbia. That definitely was not long enough as it is a really beautiful area. The drive from Vancouver up to the Okanagan Valley was a real treat and at times we were driving above the tree tops.
Edmonton has been less pictoresque but the friendliness of the people here has more than made up for it. I have had some great days visiting schools and reservations and meeting people from many of the different First Nations, Metis and Inuit groups here in Western Canada.
My research finishes at the end of this week and the hoiday begins. Yay!

Leaving Alaska

Alaska is an improbable place. It is vast and rugged and cold. It has unreachable mountains and frozen seas, rivers and lakes. It has a capital city which cannot be reached by road - only by air or sea. It has a temperature swing of 150 degrees (F). But still there is life here. There is amazing wild life such as I may never see again. There is a remarkable history of the first inhabitants of this place, the Inupiaqs, the Athabascans, the Yupiaq, the Aluets, and all of the other groups that make up the 20 language groups of Alaska. They showed repect and love of the land and trusted that they would be given what they needed to survive the cold hard winters. And survive them they did developing along the way an amazing collection of stories and knowledge about the cylce of life in the frozen North. Then there are those who live there now. The 'outsiders' who most often come from somewhere else but have grown to love their new home and have undertaken great feats of engineering to make the hard to reach places easier to reach. They are the ones who thought to build a tunnel directly through a mountain that takes 10 minutes to drive through. They are the ones who have built bridges so that traintracks and roads could be laid. They are the ones who have seen to the development of airports and shopping centres and oil pipelines to ensure economic 'progress' in Alaska. Rightly or wrongly they too have their place in this place.
I dont know that I could live here. It is too 'other' for me. The mountains are too high and everything is too white. The seasons are too stark and the differential between day and night, light and dark, summer and winter is too much for me to want to adjust to.
I'm sure that people would say the same about where I live. Maybe that's why I understand why, improbable a place as it is, people yearn for Alaska and call it home.

Wildlife

Spent my last two days in Alaska on the Kenai Penninsula. A very differnt landscape and atmsphere there than it was in the interior. The mountains are even bigger, and I didn't think that was possible. They are majestic and awe inspiring and somehow beyond the realms of my imagination.
Once I arrived in Seward, the seaside town that was my base for the two days, the highlight was a Whale and wildlife boat cruise around Resurrection Bay. We saw a pair of Humpback whales aswell as sea otters, sea lions, bald eagles, mountain goats and all manner of sea birds. It beggars belief how they al manage to survive in that environment during the bleak winters. I think the whales have the right idea. They spend the winter in Hawaii and the summer in Alaska!
I was literally surorunded by absolute beauty for the length of the cruise and it was almost overwhelming - almost!

Howard

I just got back from Howard's camp. I had to walk on water to get there! Howard Luke is an Athabaskan man who lives up river from Fairbanks about 10 miles. His camp is cut off from the mainland by the Chena river which freezes over in the winter. You can walk the half mile across the river to get to his camp when the ice is thick, or in the summer you can get across there in a boat. There's a flag you can raise at the landing to show Howard you want to come over and visit and he will come over in his boat to pick you up. Traversing the river today was touch and go as the weather is getting warmer and the ice is breaking up. Howard is a highly respected Senior Elder of the local community. One of the local schools has been named after him. He has written his own book telling his life story of growing up in the Athabaskan way and he still lives a traditional life of hunting and fishing in his camp where he lives by himself. He is a modern traditional man. He knows how to hunt moose, smoke fish, trap beaver and build a sweat lodge. He also has two snow machines, a solar powered cell phone and an outboard motor boat. He was kind enough to show me around his camp and tell me a bit about his life growing up in Alaska. What a great morning and how cool to have walked across a frozen river.

Lines of desire

Apparantly those little well trodden paths that shorten the distance between A and B are called "Lines of Desire". Instead of following the designated footpath or road, people see where they want to get to and make their own way in that direction in the most direct way possible. As the snow has been melting here I have seen the evidence of lots of desire lines. Sometimes I feel like my journey through life is like a line of desire. It's as if there are these well established paths that most of the people in the world seem to be on, but my desire is leading me somewhere else. I can see where I want to go and am having to tread my own path to get there.

Different landscape, same themes

Here in Alaska my focus is on learning about a group called the Alaskan Native Knowledge Network and the work they are doing to create 'place-based' learning where what students do in school grows out of the community they come from. It has already been an amazing few days of talking to new colleagues about their journey so far, their successes, their struggles and the things that keep them going. So many conversations have included genuine acknowledgement of just how similar our two contexts are. Strange to think that two places, two peoples so far apart geographically could be so similar in so many ways. But then if you think about it, it's not so strange. Native Alaskans and Indigenous Central Australians both live in harsh environements where surivival id difficult and you depend on your family, your community to look after you. In both cases contact with Europeans has led to disease, death, missions, loss of culture and language. In both cases the people have had to fight to regain control over their traditional lands - the core of their being and sense of self. In both cases knowledge is passed on through the telling of stories and the experiential learning gained through hands on activities such as hunting. All of this just makes me feel at home here, and feel a sense of kinship with the people I have met so far. Their ways are familiar to me.

Athabaskan creation story

A train through Alaska

There are no words to describe how beautiful the journey from Anchorage to Fairbanks was. I will simply offer you some photos and suggest that you click on the 'my photos' link on the side to see even more.

Anchorage

Anchorage is a town built on extraction of things. On every street corner of downtown is a fur trader, a jade shop or an ivory shop. The presence of the trans Alaskan Oil pipeline is ubiquitous. If you aren't involved in extracting something then you likely work in the tourist industry. Strangely the month I have decided to visit is the inbetween seasons. Tourists dont really start coming to Alaska until May. The first cruise ship arrives on the 13th of May. A visit to the Alaskan Mueum of Art and History details the strong links with Siberia and Russia. The West Coast of Alaska is less than 3 miles from Russia and once upon a time a land bride existed conecting the two lands. It is thought that all of the Americas were originally populated via this bridge. In a typically non-indigenous approach to land, the Russians who had a controlling trade interest in Alaska decided to sell Alaska to the United States for 7.2 million dollars. Staggering!
The day I spent wandering the quiet streets, locals were excited because the local Hot Dog stand had ventured out for the first time this year. His arrival seemed to officially mark the start of the thaw, the start of Spring. No less than 4 people suggested I should try on eof his hot dogs. have to admit, they were good.