Hazel Apok: Interview Outline: Section 6 Parents worked hard to provide food, leaving home, and not learning about certain things Tape Reference Number: H2002-09-13 Hazel spoke with Bill Burke in Fairbanks, Alaska on April 3, 2002.

Hazel Apok: My parents were -- were rich in that they gathered food, I mean we can't have the kind of food that my mom prepared. My father did all of the hard work outside the house, hunting and bringing it home, and my mother did all the hard work preparing it, harvesting it, and putting it away.

But we used to -- we used to eat every bit of the caribou. And there are some delicacies that I don't know how to make, you know, using intestines and liver, and you know, all.

Some of the white people, like the Friends Church, missionaries that came along, used to come and request certain foods from my mom because she knew how to prepare these, what are now delicacies. One -- one I remember that I liked was blueberries mixed with whitefish eggs and a little bit of seal oil, and the white people really liked that. I mean, there's different ways of preparing our foods that I grew up with that I don't know how to do today, you know, and that's because life has changed so much.

I -- I left for twenty-eight years from my home, from my region due to marriage and going to school and raising a family. And I -- I didn't stay home to learn how to do -- how to make akutuq -- how to, you know, prepare foods that I really like. And that's what I'm spending time doing right now, just with basics, you know, with dried fish and dried meat right now. Eventually, I want to -- I want to get back to -- and me and my cousins will get together and compare notes about, you know, "how did your mom do it?", and my "mom, I think, did it this way." So we are teaching ourselves and we want to go back to how it was when we were growing up.

We thought, I think -- I think we thought as we were growing up that life was pretty hard. We wanted to escape. We would -- we would have high school coming home in -- in the latest styles and listening to the latest music, you know. And I think that the -- the grades just above me were the ones that would come back with all of this is where my age group wanted to be like them. We wanted the latest hairstyles and the latest clothes and, you know, the latest foods that they learned to eat, you know. We wanted that. We wanted to be like our older brothers and sisters.

And I think that's where, like, in -- what year was that I went to high school? In the early '60s, '64 I think is when I went away to high school. And the old -- the kids older than me would have started going away to high school probably 1960 because it was those years. And the -- the kinds of schools that I'm talking about that changed it are like Chemawa Indian School in Oregon, Mount Edgecumbe. I think it's different from when my sister Lulu, who's 15 years older than I am, when she went to school in White Mountain, her age group, you know, is a lot different than those in between her age group and my age group because they went further away and learned different things and came back with different things.

[Top]