This series features Yupik Elder Harriet Penayah. Listen to the previous episode here. Harriet Penayah stays active in her community. The 80 year-old elder teaches children native drumming and dance. She also recently opened up her home to her community’s youth. Savoonga has no teen center. After the “hang-out place” closed down, Harriet saw teens [...]
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Elder Voices: Harriet Penayah, Part Two
This series features Yupik elder Harriet Penayah. Listen to the first episode here. For most of her life, Harriet Penayah worked as a health aide in Savoonga. She tended to the wounded and sick within her community, stitching up cuts, transfusing blood, and even delivering twins. There were no doctors in Savoonga. No nurses. But Harriet says [...]
Elder Voices: Harriet Penayah, Part One
This episode is the first of a three-part series featuring Yupik elder Harriet Penayah. When Harriet Penayah was growing up in Savoonga in the 1930s, the Alaska native village looked much the same as it does today. “No igloos,” she says, “no sod houses.” Just wooden-frame homes clustered above the black sandy beach. But, she says, [...]
Elder Voices: Winton Weyapuk Jr.
At 62, Winton Weyapuk Jr. is a young elder. But he is a wealth of information about the Inupiaq language and marine mammal subsistence in his native village of Wales. Winton’s passion for preserving Inupiaq and the subsistence lifestyle started as a boy, learning how to navigate sea ice in an umiak skinboat with his father, and [...]
