Minnie Salmon

"If they don't hold on to what I'm trying to teach, then we might lose our culture. Nowadays, the world is so sad. I don't think we will always have easy life, like right now. I'm sitting here, with electricity. One day, this is going to be gone. What will we do then?"

Minnie Salmon with a chief's sash that she made. Minnie has taught many Chalkytsik children.

When she was growing up, Minnie Salmon had little chance to attend school. "My education is in my way of living, my Indian culture," Salmon recalls. "My parents didn't have an income, they just go out and get muskrats for trading. This is how my father and mother raised me, the Indian way, out here in Chalkytsik. The only time we go into Fort Yukon is to get flour, coffee, tea - in the spring time."

Salmon used the skills she had learned living the old ways to become an educator in the modern school system.

"I've been working with the kids in bilingual education for 25 years," she said in 1998. "I'm really interested in helping them to learn my cultural way." Over the years, she has taught many young people skills ranging from setting rabbit snares to beading and skin sewing.

Despite her childhood lack of western education, during her career Salmon has participated in workshops put on by RurAL CAP, and has graduated from educational programs sponsored by the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.
She also served as a prevention worker under CATG's Center for Substance Abuse grant, "The Road Back, A Village Based Prevention Strategy."

The goals of the program are:

"To develop local and regional coalitions in the Yukon Flats Region; to develop culturally competent prevention education and training for Prevention Workers and Communities; to expand and enhance culturally competent substance abuse prevention activities using regional and local coalitions throughout the Yukon Flats Region."

The need is real, Salmon says. She has seen a number of the children she has taught over the past two decades wind up in jail.

"They have problems with alcohol. It hurts! It really does! I just want to cry!" Salmon says. " It really hurts. I don't know how to explain it. I love them all. I just want to keep on working on them, until the last day of me."

Part of her job was to help people who have problems with alcohol and drugs find their road back to sobriety. Some want to get better and try hard, she says, while others make little effort.

"My job is in part to help people deep into alcohol, but then I can't just go and say 'I need to help you.' They need to ask for help, that's how I look at it."

While she recognizes the struggle ahead as a tough one, Salmon hopes the work she has done with children and youth will help.

"I teach them how to sew, I teach them how to snare rabbits, and even what kind of wood they need to build fires." She has taken many young people she has taught to dance to the World Eskimo-Indian Olympics in Fairbanks. She has taken them to summer camp on the Black River. There, she taught youth how to set fishnets, how to prepare the fish, and how to tan skins. She taught them to make dog packs and even how to construct a boat in the field from skins. Her friend, Margaret James from Arctic Village, donated the skins. Some of her students paddled back to the village in the skin boat.

"What makes it important is they learn our culture so they might use it in the near future,” Salmon says. “If they don't hold on to what I'm trying to teach, then we might lose our culture. Nowadays, the world is so sad. I don't think we will always have easy life, like right now. I'm sitting here, with electricity. One day, this is going to be gone. What will we do then?"

Salmon notes with pride that, by combining her traditional and educational skills, she has always made a good living without going on welfare. "I don't want to draw a pension. I want to keep on working, making my own money. I don't consider myself old. I don't. I want to keep working until the last day of me."