When Stephanie Anaver answered the door to her hotel room, a volunteer handed her a bag filled with traditional foods: muktuk, salmon strips and herring eggs.
Anaver was living in Kipnuk when the remnants of Typhoon Halong destroyed her home. Now she is one of more than 600 displaced people staying in Anchorage hotels. The storm also devastated traditional harvests for families like hers.
“We lost everything we had,” Anaver said.
Anaver, who now stays at the Wingate hotel, said she was thankful for the the subsistence food donations she got this week. She said she might bring them to her relatives in Wasilla to celebrate Thanksgiving.
“It's good to have Native food to share with my family,” she said.
The Alaska Native Heritage Center and other local organizations have been gathering subsistence food donations for over a month and distributing them to evacuees. Veronica Boerger, a program manager at the heritage center, said they have made deliveries to about 250 hotel rooms across Anchorage, and people have been excited to satisfy their cravings.
“They lost a lot of their harvests, their gatherings,” Boerger said. “It helps get a little taste of home.”
The heritage center staff try to be mindful of the conditions in hotels and deliver food that people can actually use, Boerger said. She said they have two types of donation bags. The one for hotels with kitchens includes items like fish filets and cuts of moose meat. Evacuees who don’t have kitchens receive bags with items they don’t have to cook, like muktuk and herring eggs.
“Anything that they can eat raw,” Boerger said.
Often the donations, which have come from all over the state, are an exciting delicacy for evacuees from the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta region – like for Arthur Paul from Kipnuk.
“I’ve never tried muktuk before,” he said while examining his donation bag. “We are happy to have that.”
For Elizabeth Smith, also from Kipnuk, herring eggs were the most exciting thing in the food bag. But she said she wishes she had seal oil to go with them. Smith also said she hopes to get more dried salmon next time – and knives or utensils to eat the food with.
For now, Smith said she will keep the food donations in her mini fridge and maybe share them with family on Thanksgiving day.
“I never even planned about that,” she said. “But my family is over at the Aspen. I might go see them.”
The heritage center has also hosted potlucks and is planning more events in the months to come.
Evacuees who are interested in receiving a family food pack can email nativefoods@alaskanative.net or call the Alaska Native Heritage Center at (907) 205 0068. Residents who want to donate can email that address to schedule a food drop off.
