MARLA:  Is September 27th, 2005, my name is Marla Statscewich, I'm here in Huslia for the Community Health Aide Program Project Jukebox, and I have the pleasure today of talking with Rose Ambrose.  So thank you for agreeing to do this interview with me. 

ROSE:  Well, I don't know what we're going to talk about but we could talk. 

MARLA:  Okay.  Well, I'm glad that you're willing to talk with me. 

ROSE:  Yeah. 

MARLA:  Well, so let's start out.  If you could just give me a little bit of background information, you know, where you were born, when you were born, your family, and we'll start from there and --

ROSE:  All right.  Way back in the old days, let's say somewhere in the twenties, already our parents, our mother and our dad was all -- already, they had their own little boat outfit inboard motor, so they move around.  They were up the Koyukuk River right now. 

So they go downriver in the summertime and they come back in the falltime.  They go fishing on the Yukon River, with fish wheel for the beautiful salmon that's running on the Yukon River.  And then they come back up.  They come back up early enough to get the fish, frozen fish and all that for dog feed, too. 

So they start moving around very, very early, our mother.  George -- George Attla and Eliza Attla.  And wintertime, too, they still move around.  That's way back.  Supposedly they have to go down Yukon River to sell their furs and get groceries.
 
So it happened that they were going down Koyukuk, for the -- for the big time, too, 17th of March, but they must have went down a little bit early because I was born in Koyukuk March -- March 7th, 1928.  So I'm -- I'm pretty old now.  And then that's the way it went.
 
Our parents, they moved back and forth all around here, up on the Koyukuk River.  Sometimes we're in Hughes, but most of the time we stayed in camp and we grew up in the camp.
 
And I don't know -- all of us bunch of kids, we didn't go to school, but somehow, I think we went to school a little bit.  Not lots.
 
In Koyukuk, that's where we -- I learned how to read.  And then from there on we went back to camp and were reading.  I'm reading but not that much. 

Well, by the time I -- I grew up already, then I went to Holy Cross Mission on Yukon River way down close to the mouth of Yukon River.  Well, that's where I learned how to read and write.  I learned all the small -- I mean, small things.  Not big things.  And that's it.
 
But I came back up the river, and then throughout my life, here and there where we lived, like Nulato or Huslia, then I go to ABA class.  Then it looked like I was doing all right.  I thought I was tackling -- tackling my readings and all that.
 
Then about 1968, that's when this whole program, Health Aide Program thing was coming about.  And I got interested.  I thought I wished to be health aide or something.  But I really didn't know that much, especially the medical -- medical things.  I didn't know.  But I studied pretty hard.  By the time I got into the program, I study it pretty hard.
 
And then I work with doctors, whoever come to Huslia when they are doing a routine checkup, physical screening, all the way on, how to listen to chest, how to listen to lungs, what's abnormal, what's -- what's normal, looking in ears, what's abnormal, what's normal.  The color looks.  I learned that probably from the young doctors that was coming out to Huslia.
 
And the Public Health nurses.  I'll say the Public Health nurses were nice, they were very humble people.  And that's where I -- I picked up pretty much of all that.  And it went on and on like that.
 
And there's so many things that's -- that happened out here, way out here in the Bush that we couldn't know what's -- what's normal, normal looks.  They would say, well, look inside the ear.  Right off the bat, we don't know.  For sure, the doctors told us, you know, do you know if the eardrum was red color, then they tell us, you know that's a sign of infection.
  
And how to look inside our -- inside our nose all the way up our throat, then examine the outside on the neck for lymph nodes, that's the doctors, the young doctors.  They were nice.  That just really put us through the education, all of us health aides.
 
I was old by the time I was into the program, but on all the way on like --