Transcript

Episode 4: Road tripping to a rural village 

Emily Charash (00:02) 
Hello and welcome to this episode of my summer in Alaska. On this episode, I'm going to be giving you a gist of what my Economy of Rural Alaska course was like. This was actually one of the classes that piqued my interest originally in UAF. This is such a fascinating profile of economy and how it plays out in people's lives. I knew nothing about rural Alaskan communities before I came here, and I think this was an amazing crash course into how people sustain themselves, culture, and lifestyle of rural communities. On this episode, I'm very excited. I have a special trip planned. I'm going on a road trip to a rural Alaskan community called Nenana. To start the day off, I had an interview with the professor for my Economy of Rural Alaska course. 

Noelle Iles (00:46) 
My name is Noelle Iles. I am teaching the economy of rural Alaska. Really, my goal is to provide a high level overview of a bunch of different topics instead of really drilling into one topic. Like, I believe we spent about two weeks on subsistence, but you could spend an entire semester on subsistence hunting and fishing and its effect on the economy of rural Alaska. 

Emily Charash (01:08) 
I think one of my favorite topics that we covered was definitely subsistence living because it's just so different from how I grew up and how I know the world to be. So can you define that for people that are not familiar with Alaska and are not familiar with what that is? 

Noelle Iles (01:24) 
You can also call it subsistence activities. Hunting, fishing, Berry picking includes preserving meat and fish. It's really a huge part of Alaskan Native cultures, as well as the sharing of those subsistence food. And both the subsistence activities themselves and the sharing among families and friends also have huge, substantial economic value that isn't always realized. And it doesn't only refer to like hunting and fishing and edible subsistence goods. It also can refer to non subsistence goods trading of resources, clothing, fuel. It really kind of boils down to an informal economy, and it's not usually captured in a lot of statistics. In remote places like families and neighbors will trade services, they'll share goods or make cash payments. But it's not something that can is reported or it can be even reportable to the IRS. So it's all things that are kind of outside the standard market economy, and that's really something that makes the economy of rural Alaska Super unique. 

Emily Charash (02:33) 
On that note, what are some of the differences between non rural economies and rural economies? 

Noelle Iles (02:39) 
Rural economies have what we call a mixed economy where a portion of the economy is cash based. There are cash based paying jobs, but also there's a portion that's subsistence based because rural economies generally have a really high unemployment and poverty rate. So they do rely on both cash paying jobs and subsistence jobs in order to make their livelihoods work. One of the big ways that the economy has changed in the last 100 years is something that is called out migration. And there is a large number of the younger populations of individuals that are living in these rural Alaska economies that are leaving their communities and moving to more urban centers such as Anchorage, such as Fairbanks. And a lot of reasons are due to I can't find a job, there's a lot of poverty. There's nowhere for me to work. There's no healthcare. I have a lot of family that lives there, et cetera. So that's a big thing. And that does affect subsistence because you have to have a fairly large workforce in order to make subsistence successful. You have to have a lot of resources that people that generally families will pull together and do it. 

Noelle Iles (03:58) 
But if you have a huge majority of your young population leaving rural Alaska for urban centers, you're really losing a huge portion of your workforce. 

Emily Charash (04:08) 
Why is it an important course to teach and for students to learn?

Noelle Iles (04:13) 
It is really important for students and educators and those individuals in academia to understand. They're talking about Alaska specifically. It's really important for them to have a deep understanding of rural communities and how they operate because there have been so many efforts to improve the remote rule Alaska economy through a bunch of different measures. But there's a lot that we still don't know about it. And standard economic measures don't necessarily capture all of the activity in a rural Alaska economy. I'm talking kind of specifically about general macroeconomic measures of how an economy is performing. Those things don't work because there's a lack of data and a lack of availability of data and difficulties even getting data in the first place. So, yeah, standard economic measures don't necessarily capture everything. They don't capture subsistence. They don't capture sharing reciprocity of resources between families and members of a rural Alaska community and other noncash trading. Most of these kinds of data doesn't exist. So it's important because as we continue to evolve and statistics get better and data gets better, we need to understand how these economies operate so that we can understand how to help them better. 

Emily Charash (05:34) 
What are some of the challenges and benefits of rural living? 

Noelle Iles (05:39) 
Probably one of the challenges I've already kind of touched on is unemployment. And like I said, an overwhelming majority of one of the most valuable parts of rural Alaska is its natural resources. And a lot of large oil companies aren't employing rural Alaskans or individuals living in rural Alaska communities or rural Alaskans or individuals living in the communities don't necessarily want to work for them. So a lot of those jobs are going to people out of state or people in larger urban centers in Anchorage. So money essentially is constantly leaking out of all of these regional economies. And households end up spending money on goods and services that are produced outside of the rural Alaska economy that they can't or won't buy locally. And it is expensive to create jobs in rural Alaska. So one of the biggest challenges are for individuals that maybe are wanting to continue living in their community, their home, where they were born, but can't find a job, can't achieve the quality of life that they would like to have is probably one of the biggest challenges. It ends up kind of creating the cycle of discouraged workers and it ends up people will just completely withdraw from the workforce because they can't find a job or again are forced to migrate to urban centers. There needs to be more data so that we can develop kind of more holistic measures of community welfare in remote rural Alaska to kind of help include cultural and traditional dimensions of the economy as well. 

Emily Charash (07:16) 
Thanks to Noelle. Today I'm very excited because I am traveling to a rural Alaskan community called Nenana. People that are not from Alaska. This is something I learned. A lot of rural communities in Alaska are not on the road system, meaning you cannot drive to get there. They are accessed by small planes. And Nenana, which is the place I'm going to now, is one of few that are on the road system. So I got in my car and traveled an hour south to the village of Nenana, where I sat down with the chief of the village and a tribal administrator to talk about economics and life in Nenana. 

Jessica Shaw (07:56) 
My name is Jessica Shaw and Gosh, I think my relation to Nenana is currently I'm the tribal administrator for the Nenana Native Council. I'm a tribal member from Ninilchik, though I married a local. My husband is from here. He grew up here and we have our son, so we are raising our family here. But I was born and raised early on in Fairbanks. 

Chief Tim McManus (08:23) 
My name is Tim McManus. I'm from Nenana. I moved up here in Fairbanks, but I was raised here in by my grandma till I was five and I moved back here when I was eleven. Been here ever since. Raised up the traditional lifestyle of hunting, fishing, trapping. Got a lot of interest in dancing, music on the way. Been doing a lot of potlatches through the years. When you do potlatches, you start off just chopping wood and watching. But as years go by and the more experience you get, you get thrown in different roles, such as the sacred things that we got is cutting up the Moose meat and stuff. And they gave me a Moose head the first time. I just felt so happy I was able to. They trusted me enough to dice up skin and Moose head. So I know some people wouldn't take that very rewarding, but I do. So through the years I've been around and ended up the chief here five years ago, going on my six years the chief in Nenana. 

Emily Charash (09:35) 
What is life like here in Nenana? 

Jessica Shaw (09:37) 
Life is good. Nenana is a beautiful place. It's the best of both worlds in terms of like, a rural lifestyle and access to rural activities. But it's an hour from an international airport, so we have access to things. But I would say the village, we have a lot of the same issues as off the road. We have a lot of the same challenges just right here in an hour from Fairbanks. 

Chief Tim McManus (10:09) 
Well out of 365 days out of the year, there don't seem to be a day that repeats itself around here, that's for sure. In the summertime, it really booms here. There's lots of people in and out. There's so many things going on here in the summertime has always been here on the river where river people, the Alaska Highway came to us. The Alaska Railroad came to us. We didn't come to them. So everything that's modern out of modern technology, world and stuff came to us United has been here for long, as people remember after the pandemic and 19th, there are seven villages on the outskirts of Nenana. A lot of tribes came together here in Nenana, and once they quit going, living their lifestyles of spring camp, summer camp, fall camp. 

Emily Charash (11:07) 
Can you describe what those are? 

Chief Tim McManus (11:09) 
In springtime, people would go out for …  go Muskrat hunting, and then they'd have a camp where they catch fish and go geese hunting. So it was a seasonal place when the game was there, that's where they would go. Summertime was fish camp where they put up as much fish as they could for the winter time, and then in the fall time, they go out to their hunting area where they get their big games. So there's basically three different camps that people used to go to. When I was growing up young, I remember being taken out to some of these places in that style was springtime. We go out for a week and stay at spring camp and get Ducks and geese and muskrats. Since the river and stuff was falling again, there was some Beaver in there. We get a Beaver or two, smoke them up. So fresh meat is fresh meat. And then summertime was always at a fish camp with my grandma and grandpa. My best memories when I was growing up. 

Emily Charash (12:16) 
Can you talk a little bit about what Nenana is like in a modern context? So maybe the integration of modern practices and traditional practices. 

Jessica Shaw (12:26) 
Local families walking in two worlds. Like we have people that work like that typical full time Western job with benefits and trying to make money and provide that way. But you see families also still going out on the river and going and practicing the traditional culture, getting food and preserving food. So I think there's a handful of people that are doing both of those things and just trying to keep traditions going. 

Chief Tim McManus (13:07) 
I had Uncle Frank Jacob, and he told me stories that on the river there's families that when the steam wheels go by that they have a camp there where they get wood. They'd sell a cord wood for $7. They use their hand tools. They'd have an accident saw. They'd have to have the wood cut up in blocks and down there by the bank. So the steam will just come and load up and give the family $7. He was raised by his mom. His dad died at an early age, so he was raised by his mom. And I remember one time he's saying that we did three cords of wooden one week, just me and my mom just by hand. She was 70 years old and he was 20 or something. So just to have that toughness, that was part of the will of living. Imagine getting a cart of wood by using an axe and a hand saw. You don't hear that. People are like, why would you do that? 

Emily Charash (14:14) 
Do either of you have any final thoughts? 

Jessica Shaw (14:16) 
I think here in Nenana, you can kind of see some of our history, like how we got here through specifically the transportation infrastructure, things that have happened. We've got the confluence of the Nenana River and the Tanana River right out here. And then like the chief said, you know, the railroad came, the highway came these bridges. And I think economically, those are things that have the biggest impact. Those things created jobs. Those things created booms, economic booms, which you see in Alaska, like that boom and bust pattern. I think that absolutely the history of Nanna has that. 

Emily Charash (15:06) 
Thanks so much to the Chief and to Jessica. It's been a long day, a lot of beautiful sights. I walked around town a little bit. Nenana is on the river, so I walked by the river. It's so beautiful here, but it's time to head back after a long road trip. Nothing better than ending the day with ice cream from Fairbanks most iconic ice cream place, Hot Licks. So I invited my friend Sam from Archeology to join me. This is Sam. 

Sam Steele (15:32) 
My name is Samuel Steele. I'm originally from Austin, Texas, and my home institution is the University of Montana. And we are currently at Hot Licks, which I'm assuming is Fairbanks premiere ice cream place. You forgot? No, I got a strawberry sundae with hot fudge. 

Emily Charash (15:50) 
What are some of the interesting experiences you've had here? 

Sam Steele (15:53) 
Well, I guess it's going to sound silly, but I'd never been to a Fred Meyer. Yeah, what is a Fred Meyer? I'd never seen a reindeer before I came to Fairbanks, so that was pretty cool. When I went to the animal research station and I'm trying to think the riverboat was real fun the other week, I had never ridden on anything like that. I guess one thing that was interesting is when we got to the site the first day and there were just like Moose droppings everywhere, and that was pretty neat to think like, oh, cool. We might just be working out here with bunches of different animals that you don't see most other places in the country definitely Moose and links and stuff that you don't get in other parts of the country out here which is really neat I mean I like archeology because it's outdoors I don't want to be cubed up in an office all day so I want to work outdoors and I've always had that kind of stuff interesting I mean I was always interested in paleontology as a kid but I hate geology and I really like history I really like the discovery aspect of it like finding things is really, really neat for the first time something could be the first person that's touched in hundreds of years if not thousands for some of the archeology that you could be doing just trying to figure out what I want to do directly I think this has really helped knock out some of at least get down the path of figuring out yeah, this program just because it's like my first chance to really do hands on archeology so it's helped me decide help me think about more what I'd like to study in grad school what I'd like to go into and Doctor Cramb has been a great help for all that he's really insightful with his grad school knowledge finishing out my last year of undergrad is a little bit weird and it's like oh, now you're a real adult you got to go out in the real world 

Emily Charash (17:38) 
Thank you so much for spending the day with me thanks for listening to this episode of my summer in Alaska this podcast is presented by the University of Alaska, Fairbanks a special thanks Producer Marmian Grimes and Samara Taber thank you to everyone at UAF for more information on the classes that I took, you can check out uaf.edu.