Al Jazeera World

We Are Still Here: A Story From Native Alaska (2018x44)

Data di messa in onda: Nov 01, 2018

Every summer, Amira Abujbara boards a nine-seater plane at a tiny air taxi office. It is the same plane, with the same pilot, that she has flown in almost every year of her childhood. The 50-minute flight will take her over a snowy mountain range, a volcano and an elaborate tundra of blueberries and mushrooms, tea leaves and caribou moss, wildflowers and spider webs. She is heading to her mother’s childhood home and the place where she spends her summers – the remote Alaskan village of Iliamna. Without any roads connecting it to the outside world, this is her only way of going ‘home’. Iliamna, which is an Athabascan word meaning 'big ice' or 'big lake' sits on the shore of the lake that shares its name. The largest in Alaska, it spans more than 2,500 square kilometres, is pure enough to drink from and is home to the biggest sockeye salmon run in the world. Iliamna shares a post office, school, airport, medical clinic and two small stores with the neighbouring village, Newhalen. Together, they have fewer than 300 residents. It is a far cry from her father’s home country, Qatar, where Amira spends the rest of the year. Her father is Qatari and her mother is Dena’ina - a subset of the Athabascan Alaska Natives. Amira was born in Alaska and is registered as an Alaska Native. When her father married her mother he promised her parents that they would return regularly and so Amira and her sister spent their summers in Iliamna. Their grandmother ran a bed and breakfast for fishermen, so she would help make the beds, clean and prepare the meals for her guests. She learned how to subsistence fish – catching, smoking, brining and canning salmon during the summer months to store for the rest of the year. For the villagers, their home is a beautiful and fruitful land, but it is also a place of incredible hardships. Tiny villages are dwarfed by the vast wilderness that surrounds them, and while the region is rich in natural resources, many Alaska