Hazel Apok: Interview Outline: Section 3 Spending time with her parents, looking for caribou, hard work, and attending grade school Tape Reference Number: H2002-09-13 Hazel spoke with Bill Burke in Fairbanks, Alaska on April 3, 2002.

Hazel Apok: I didn't know any English when I went to school. We had our spring camp, our summer camp, and during the winter we roamed the area looking for caribou. I used to have a rabbit sleeping bag where my feet - I would keep our sourdough so that we would have -- we were huge eaters because we hunted and fished and did a lot of hard work. We had, like, four squares a day. Huge breakfasts. We would stop and have maybe a -- a light lunch somewhere. Maybe a, a light dinner, and then our -- just before we went to bed we would have, you know, another meal again.

I remember my parents telling me when we ran into some caribou on -- they spotted some caribou far away and there was a hill, we were -- we were on the river, but there were some hills around us. And my mother explaining to me that caribous looked like this, they have big eyes. Me and your father are going to -- not corral them, but were going to go on each side of them and try to get to -- them to an area where it will be easy to reach. They didn't want to get them up on the hill where it would be hard to carry or far away from where we were. They -- they wanted to get the caribou close to where we were at and she explained to me that I had to sit still, that if I did see a caribou, not to be frightened. I remember that very vividly because that caribou -- that one caribou did come along, you know, and we looked at each other. And it was good that they talked to me about that because I don't know how terrified I would have been.

I remember running into some people and them telling us about Laura Geffe passing on in Kiana (map). So we took our dog team to the village, and then I remember -- now I'll have to go back and see when Laura passed on because that will tell me how old I was when we -- when we went back to the community for that event.

But in their travels -- in our travels we would -- I guess my parents came to realize that I had to go to school. So around five years old they settled down below Kiana and built a log cabin. A nice huge -- to me, in them days, it was the biggest log cabin around. It seemed like the biggest. Maybe it was because I -- I always lived in tents. And living in this seemed like a mansion to me, a huge log cabin. Now, when I look back on it, it was probably an average size one. But we built the log cabin and I started going to school. Fortunately, we had some good teachers. They had their families with them, and I remember competing with the schoolteacher's daughter. My parents encouraged me to learn.

And my sister -- oh, my adopted sister Lulu had to go away to White Mountain to go to school. I -- I'll have to go back and try to find out why a lot of our kids went to White Mountain for school, but she studied to be a licensed practical nurse. But she would go home -- when school was out she would go home. And the things that she learned would meld with my parents' teaching about, you know, what makes me today, what she learned from the Outside and what my parents knew about surviving, you know, made me who I am today.

Back to the teachers - we had good teachers that cared about us, that -- that taught us -- that anyway, that got that competitive spirit in me. I was always competing with the schoolteacher's daughter. And I would go home and proudly tell my parents "I got an A plus and Susan got an A," you know. And that kind of thing. You know, I had all kinds of encouragement. My second grade teacher was a perfect penmanship. You know, her -- her -- her writing was real plain and real clear and I would emulate. And today people will say, oh, I sure like your -- you know, your writing. And that was because I learned at an early age, you know, to -- to try to do it that way.

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