Ida Nagusavuq Nelson loaded her two young daughters into an SUV. Strollers and suitcases went in the back, smaller totes in the back seat. She also packed two cooler bags full of subsistence foods.
“I have muktuk, dry fish, black meat,” she said. “It's essentially just whale meat.”
Nelson is from Igiugig in the Bristol Bay region. Last week, she and her daughters were in Anchorage on a brief layover. But she made time to meet up with a family who had evacuated from Kipnuk after the recent devastating storm. Nelson shared some of her harvest with them.
“Our comfort foods are subsistence foods, foods that we catch and foods that we get off the land,” Nelson said. “When we're hurting, or displaced, or in stress, I don't want to go eat chicken. I want to go eat moose. I want to go eat salmon.”
About a dozen Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta communities were hit by the remnants of the Typhoon Halong earlier this month. The storm destroyed homes and infrastructure and displaced over a thousand people, many of whom are now staying in shelters and with relatives and friends in Anchorage.
People also lost the food they harvested over the last months, like salmon and berries. So Nelson is one of many Alaskans who are looking for ways to provide evacuees with traditional foods.
Two statewide tribal organizations, the Alaska Native Heritage Center and Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, have also partnered to collect donations. The effort started in the days after the storm, said Kelsey Ciugun Wallace, the president of the heritage center.
“We've received inquiries from our relatives in the North Slope Area, in Southeast Alaska, along the Aleutian Chain, of ‘How can I help?’ We have accepted everything from seals to berries to fish,” Wallace said last week. “There's a whole crate of muktuk being shipped on the plane right now.”
Wallace said that the organizations were also looking at hosting community events where they can cook and share those foods.
“The act of actually cooking the foods and processing the foods is also part of healing,” Wallace said.
The heritage center helped Nelson, the mom from Igiugig, find a family to donate to. When Nelson arrived at a house in South Anchorage, Kristen Amik and her daughter were outside to greet her.
Amik said that when her family evacuated from Kipnik, one of the hardest hit communities, she could not bring much with her.
“My daughter here was devastated by the food that we left behind, all that hard work we did over the summer, and she was saying, ‘Mom, we should have took the berries and the food that we worked on,” Amik said.
Nelson said she can relate to what it takes to fill a freezer. Kipnuk and Igiugig are hundreds of miles away from each other, but they share a lot of similar foods.
“I understand the amount of work and the amount of time that it takes to put away these subsistence foods and the grief that comes with losing all of that,” she said. “They lost everything, and I can't even wrap my mind around what they've gone through.”
As Nelson drove away from Amik, she got a text saying the family was already enjoying the food Nelson had given them.
“That makes me happy. The first thing I would go for is the seal oil,” she said with a laugh. “The seal oil in a dry fish.”
Subsistence food donations for people displaced by the storm can be brought to the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium lodging, at 4001 Tudor Center Drive, or to the Alaska Native Heritage Center, at 8800 Heritage Center Drive. Dropoff is open from Monday through Friday.
