Kotlik R2D8-10

Aloha!

Well I’m still in Kotlik and figured I really should write an update so here it goes…

Tuesday was a slow day in terms of adventure, in fact this whole week kinda has been. I uploaded my first recording to Elan (a computer transcription program) and set up all of the tiers and the framework I would need to start transcribing that first hour and then put on my headphones and got to work. If you’ve never transcribed a recording before, well it takes 10 times as long to transcribe as it did to record. You have to listen to the recording, determine who is speaking, and write it down word for word and sound by sound, especially if its not in English, then cross check it with your notes and make sure both are right and complete. So ultimately you find yourself listening to the same 10-second segment over and over and over and over again just to get it right. And that’s just a brief summary of what I have to do for an hour-long recording which is only the first of many to come, hopefully. And that’s how I spent my Tuesday.

Well mostly, I did also spend a few hours taking a hike out of the village, first along the old dirt runway (they have a dirt and gravel one as of maybe 10 years ago) then out of the village and down along the river through the bush. It was pretty cool… quiet, beautiful scenery; some birds chirping, some moose tracks, the lazy (but don’t let appearances fool you) river. I love being out in the wild (I also miss the reliable and fast internet). After I got back I walked through the village and made a new friend (a puppy of course) and after a few minutes he was brave enough to let me pet him a bit. While I was one of the elders walked by and said "hey you've made a new friend, you should take him and tie him up outside the school and feed him then you can take him home with you when you leave" soooo...! I'd feel a little bad taking him to a big city though because he's a cute little bundle of energy who probably belongs out here on the wild tundra and for now is happy. Anyway a bit later he took off after some kids riding thier bikes. Since

Finally, Tueday night I went outside the school to just walk around a bit and saw a pretty large raven, which circled directly overhead several times and then swooshed out towards the river crowing. That was an awesome sight! And in Yup’ik culture a good sign of luck as the raven is the creator, more or less.

Then Wednesday I had to wake up early as the maintenance staff was carpet cleaning my room so I set up all my stuff again in the library and prepped for the elders to come work with me again, so I couldn’t do much beforehand. As such I got back to transcribing and now I’m a full few minutes into the hour-long recording! Then I waited for the elders to come by and waited some more and then waited and waited and this time they never came (maybe our culture is right and the raven is bad luck? I hope not). About an hour and a half after we were supposed to meet I went over to their houses just to say hi and make sure everything was all right but one of my consultants wasn’t home and the second I caught right as she was preparing to go to the store. Apparently she had been out all morning fish cutting ((taking the catch and with an ulaq (woman’s knife/fish knife – its shaped like a half moon with a wooden handle on the flat edge) gutting the fish and then filleting the meat and tying the strips together to hang and dry)) and then she had been cooking for family and just didn’t have time. Nicely though she said she might be able to come over with her husband on Thursday morning and work with me or call my other consultant and they’d come over in the afternoon to work with me. Basically I said whatever worked best for her and then she had to leave. The rest of the evening I spent at the school with a couple of people who had flown in (two were checking the fire alarm system at the school and making sure everything was up to code and working, and the other was with children’s protective services just coming in to make sure everything in the village was okay). We basically spent the evening talking about Alaska and history and what they were doing and what I was doing and fishing.

And that brings us to today. Because they were testing the fire alarm system the fire alarm went off at 8am promptly and continued for a full 15 minutes so again I was up early by my standards. As my consultant never told me when she might come by I really couldn’t leave so I spent most of the day in the school waiting and trying to surf the internet but when your restricted to maybe half a dozen sites that gets old kind of fast. Around lunch time I was invited over to my friends house to eat seal ribs for dinner which was awesome and around five o’clock after my elders never came I headed over there. Seal ribs are just as amazing as seal meat… They also cut up some blubber to eat but me being me, I didn’t try that. So basically the blubber is about 2 inches thick and then inside (in the perspective of a living seal) that is the good stuff. (I personally think seal would be great ground up and turned into a hamburger with bacon and pepper jack on top…).

So that was basically my day and my week. Now I’m sitting here typing this even though the main power at the school is out and thusly the Internet is out (It came back!). I have to say being three days away from half way through my trip with only an hour of work done and the elders seemingly being uninterested in working with me on preserving their awesome language is causing me some anxiety right now. I figure the average field methods class meets 3 hours at most a week for 15 weeks a semester, as I’m here for 4 weeks if I can get 10 hours of recordings I’ll call it good and on par with one-third of a class designed to help you practice to do field work. However, if I get less than 3-5 hours then I think I have a problem. We will see what happens and I’ll be going to try to set up another, better time to meet with the elders tomorrow and then see what other elders aren’t at fish camp and aren’t busy subsistenc-ing right now, I think that is one of the big issues and one I’m happy to work around. I kinda wonder if it would be better (colder too) to come work with them during the winter, that’d be an awesome experience, I’d love to spend a winter here just because, but I also suspect that they aren’t any less busy then.

And that’s all I got for now, so until the next time,

Piuraa!