Eek

FEA Advisor Marlene Schmitt

FEA – Eek – 2009-10 10/24/09 Eek School Club Mission Statement & Club Biography The Eek FEA mission statement is: we would like to become teachers one day here in Alaska, or some other state. In Future Educators of Alaska of Eek, we hope to do many activities. Last year, some of the activities we did included: helping to organize a couple basketball tournaments, helping with Family Nights, creating bulletin boards, and making posters. This year, we’ve already helped make bulletin boards, created small posters of Inspirational Quotes, created our own bulletin board, organized the teacher storage room, organized the student store, and helped with Family Nights. There are five active students in the Eek FEA Club this year (2009-10). We are: Beverly Alexie, Elena Alexie, Adolph Henry, Jr., Miranda Henry, and Carla Lopez. Our sponsor teacher is Marlene Schmitt. We are in grades 5 to 11, and our ages range from 11 to 18. Most of us are inspired to become teachers because an aunt or a grandmother is/was a teacher. Eek is a small Yupik Eskimo village in southwestern Alaska. Eek is located along the Eek River, which drains into the lower Kuskokwim River, and from the Kuskokwim Bay the water drains into the Bering Sea. There are about 300 people in our village and about 100 students in school (pre-K to 12). We are all related to each other and we share a common culture that includes speaking Yup’ik and a subsistence lifestyle – hunting, fishing and gathering. We hunt and eat seals, caribou, moose, and birds. We fish mostly for salmon, but for sheefish, blackfish and whitefish too. We gather many berries in late summer. Some of the other things that make Eek unique are: we make and eat akutaq (Eskimo ice cream), clotheslines hang at every house, we don’t have indoor plumbing, we use honey buckets, there is grass everywhere, there are no car’s – only 4-wheelers/sno-go’s/boats, many dogs are tied up next to houses, we have a little grocery store, we have a small school, we make and sell native arts & crafts, we go ice fishing, we help our Elders, we have steam houses, we have smoke houses and fish drying racks, we have “The Tower” (for internet reception & someday soon for 911 service), each family has a fish camp, we walk all around the village and the tundra, we have a small runway for airplanes to land, we have one gravel road, we have plywood sidewalks (boardwalks), and we have lots of lakes and ponds. In school, we have also discussed what kinds of things teachers need to know before they come to Eek. This list is especially helpful for teachers who are not from Alaska. We have no hotels, you need heavy clothing (especially in winter), remember that Alaska is the coldest state, take note that you can see a full view of the dump from most of the school’s windows, all the 6th-12th grade students have their own laptop computers, we speak Yupik, all the classrooms have Smart boards, there are no coffee shops in town, we get water from frozen lakes and the river and rain barrels, the planes that fly here are small (usually 5-seaters), the tundra is very quiet, and you need to learn how to drive a 4-wheeler and a snow-go, we don’t have 911 – just a local clinic, and we call each other on the VHF more than on telephones. However, we finally got cell phones last year, which most of us have.