They're called hooligan, candlefish, cigar fish.
They're really, really oily fish. They're a little on the mushy side.
So we like to fry them.
And we decided to go up river, about maybe half mile up the river,
and fish off the bank there.
For me, one of the nice things about the fish,
is actually that there's a lot of other populations,
other than the local Athabascans and Alaska Native people,
that go down and take advantage of it.
There's a lot of Pacific Island people, a lot of Korean people,
and a lot of other Asian folks out there. They all love these little fish.
And they all go out there every year, and catch them and bring them home.
I think people really just enjoy getting their own food.
Obviously we don't have to. We could just go to the store,
but it's kind of like the principle.
You know, you go out there, and you're going out there with your family,
and your friends. And you're, you know, getting food.
I take my family out. That's the way I grew up. I grew up in Nome.
We spent a lot of our winters, definitely all of our summers,
subsistence hunting and fishing.
And for me, I don't know, I just feel that it was a great way to grow up,
and it's really foreign to me when people don't have those experiences.
And so I really, really wanted my kids to have that experience,
and to know where their food comes from.
I don't want them to think that all their fish comes from the grocery store,
or comes packaged in little packages of meat.
I want them to know that it comes from other beings that live on this earth.
For them to have some respect for that.
There's a lot of other distractions, like my oldest song really likes Angry Birds.
A lot. Way too much.
I want him to learn to enjoy being outside,
and learning to enjoy harvesting your own food.
When I was growing up, actually my mom, she gets amazed by this,
but literally we would wake up in the morning, eat breakfast,
and then go out and play. And she would have no clue where we were,
or what we were doing, until lunch time.
Then we'd come back hungry, eat, and go back outside and play again
until it was night.
I don't know if she, or the world has changed,
or just because she's gotten older or whatever, but now with my kids,
she can't even let them out of her sight.
I started working in canneries, I started working on the docks for a little bit.
Ended up on a tender. Went over to Bristol Bay.
So I spent some time commercial fishing.
Then I actually travelled around the United States as a pitch salesman,
for a little bit. Like the dude who sells the ShamWow.
Like the commercials you see on TV, where everything is $29.99,
$19.95, $9.95. I would do that live, starting at the Alaska State Fair.
I stopped being a pitch salesman. I went to my brother's marine corps graduation,
my younger brother,
and when I was watching that, I decided that was something
that I would like to do.
And then went back home to Alaska,
and then joined the Marine Corps from Alaska.
We were scouts. Our job was to be on the ground,
and so our job was anything that had to do on the ground.
We were foreign recon, we'd clear houses and stuff like that.
Everytime that we'd stop, we'd do a sweep for IEDs,
Improvised Explosive Devices. I'm sure everybody knows what those are by now.
Even when I was growing up, my mom said that,
after I got done with high school I was going to go to college,
and I wasn't going to college for me.
She said that, you know you need to go to college, so you can learn,
and then you can come back, and you know, serve your people, basically.
I guess that was just part of the way that we were raised.
Even when we were out fishing, i wasn't just fishing for myself.
I was actually fishing for friends and family as well.
And it's not a burden or anything, I'm happy to do it.
And the marine corps wasn't a burden either.
Kind of a pain at times, but...
I really feel like maybe part of the reason why I try to do the subsistence stuff
so much is because the education that I want to get now,
is my Yupiq education.
Even though I did grow up subsistence, and stuff like that,
we moved away right around the time that I would have been going out,
and starting to do things like seal hunting, and going on big hunting trips,
and stuff like that. So I never actually got to do that kind of stuff.
So I'm starting to learn it all now.
And I'd like to go home, and I'd like to learn the Yupiq language.
I know some. I don't know enough. And I'd like to learn more about how we do things.
My Yupiq name is Maraaq.
How we name, is that when you're born, whoever has died around
the time that you're born, you get their name.
So I got my name, it's from my great grandma, her name was Maraaq.
I don't know what it means. I asked one of my uncles about it.
He just told me the name was one of those, it was an old name.
So they didn't actually know what it meant anymore.
So I think about that, about how far back that name goes.
If it's thousands of years, if it's 5,000 years, 6,000 years, how far back that name goes.
And so, it's a really tangible connection with my past and history.
And it helps ground me, to know where I come from.
That I literally am standing here, because of all the people that came before me,
on this entire planet.
I think that we've become really, really arrogant,
and really disconnected from, not only just the earth -
I also hate how cheesy that sounds now. People have made it cheesy,
to where I sound like some sort of hippie when I say "the connection to the earth."
But hey, that's legit. I mean, we are part of the earth.