' I think we'll learn a lot from them up there'

April 5, 2005

BOB MARTINSON/Frontiersman reporter

Children from the Allak School in the village of Wainwright visited Wasilla last week, sharing facts about their culture and looking at things they had never seen.

"It was amazing, none of them had ever seen a live cow before, so we took them out to a dairy," Wasilla Middle School teacher Gary Walker said. "None had ever seen a horse, and some of the kids rode on one. They just got a lot of experiences that they couldn't have had up there."

The kids from Wainwright arrived March 19. During their week in Southcentral, they made trips to Martin Buser's place, the Alaska Native Medical Center, UAA and out to the flight line at Elmendorf Air Force Base.

"They just had a really great time here," Walker said.

Wainwright is located about 72 miles southwest of Barrow on the coast of the Chukchi Sea; it is the third-largest village on the North Slope, with a population of about 584 people. Wasilla Middle School is sending five of its eighth-graders up to visit the village later this week.

Alaska Natives make up about 94 percent of Wainwright's population. Most of them are Inupiat Eskimos who live a close-to-subsistence lifestyle. Wainwright's Allak school has 130 students, while Wasilla Middle has around 800 students enrolled.

Faculty members chose the children who participated in the program, based on how hard they worked and if they went above and beyond the usual effort.

The program is coordinated through the Alaska Humanities Forum, part of the Rose Urban Rural Exchange Program. The Rose program started with grant funding appropriated through U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, and named after his former chief of staff, Mitch Rose.

"We got hooked up with Wainwright because the principal of the Allak school, Bob Thompson, was a teacher and principal at Wasilla Middle School and he's been at Allak school for three years now," Walker said.

Five students from Wasilla will be leaving next Friday and will stay two days in Barrow, to see what the workings of a larger community on the North Slope look like. They will then travel to Wainwright for a cultural exchange of seven days there. Wasilla will be sending five girls, all eighth-graders.

"It just worked out that way through the selection process," Walker said.

Wainwright's Allak school has only 18 students in the eighth grade, while Wasilla Middle School has about 230. The differences for the students were vast.

Rachel Hoffman, one of the Wasilla eighth-graders, said they housed a boy named Simeon Aktik while he was here.

"I learned that basketball was one of the most important things to them up there and that they loved to go swimming in the ocean and that they ate things like boiled whale and seal flipper; yummy, I think we'll learn a lot from them up there," Rachel said.

"Their culture is really important to them," student Lariesa Pepper said. "They have potlucks to celebrate stuff where we just have birthday parties. The girl that stayed with me brought a parka and some knitting stuff."

Walker got to go to the Arctic coast last summer as part of the teacher exchange program, so he got a preview of things the kids will see next week.

"It was really incredible up there, they will get to meet one of the few Inupiat women who whale hunts," Walker said.

Myroslava Ponomarchuk coordinated the Sister Schools Program within the Rose Urban Rural Exchange. The Rose program is run by Panu Lucier, deputy director of the Humanities Forum.

"This is our fifth year, we began in 1999, and our first exhange was in 2000," Lucier said. "The sister-school program is working out really well and next year we are hoping to have 32 schools participating -16 rural and 16 urban. Working to see this program become a reality has been a very rewarding experience for me,"

Lucier said 14 schools participated this year - seven being rural and seven urban.

When the exchange is concluded, the students will develop a presentation of their experiences in a digital movie, which they can share with other students and the community back in Wasilla.

"We're so thankful here at Wasilla Middle School to be part of the program, the Rose people have been outstanding," Walker said.