This series is about people and their culture only…without politics.
Please tell about yourself. What do you do? Where do you live? Where are you from?
My name is Priscilla “Aumaqpaq” Frankson. I am currently a second-year masters student at Arizona State University (ASU). My focus in school is tribal leadership and governance, specifically looking at policy in my home state of Alaska. When I started my graduate degree I did not plan on doing work in the Arctic. I fully planned on moving out of Alaska and trying new things. But because of happenstance, I found a small group at ASU that are doing work in the Alaskan Arctic and they quickly offered me a job as a graduate research assistant. This work led me into realizing my passion for Alaska Arctic policy and Arctic policy in general. Alaska is much different than many other areas in America, we are considered incorporated as our tribal affiliation. There is only one reservation in the whole state of Alaska, and that is the community of Metlakatla. So, in order for me to fully understand the relationship between the federal government and Alaskan Native peoples, I must understand certain legal policies surrounding the Alaska Native Corporations (ANCs) that were formed after the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) was passed in 1971.

Priscilla “Aumaqpaq” Frankson
My ancestral homelands are in the Northwestern part of Alaska. A community called Tikiġaq, also known as Point Hope, Alaska. I try my best to use the traditional name, but I do switch between both names. Both my mother and father are from Tikiġaq, so my connections in Northwestern Alaska are strong. This connection never waivered, even after my family moved us to Wasilla, Alaska, when I was 14 years old. My parents decided that in order to get a proper education within the Western system, we had to move out of our community because the education just wasn’t very good. And I think the biggest part of us moving is learning how to live in a city because even within the same state, there’s a huge culture shock of moving from the village to the city. Going from a place where you know everyone and your family is always there to help you; to a place where you are essentially on your own. It is a culture shock that needs to be talked about more, especially when we are negotiating policy because it is no secret that many policymakers are based out of the larger communities that have much more access to the outside world. Also, I lived in Anchorage for about eight years, and now I live in Arizona, and it’s been almost two years. So I’ve lived in a lot of different places, but a lot of my work is in the Arctic because that’s where my people are from.
So you are between big cities and small communities in Alaska. What are you missing about the big city when you are in your small community, and what are you missing in a small community when you are in the big city?
When I’m in the village, I miss the necessities that are around me at all times. So you can go to the grocery store, you can buy fruits, you can buy vegetables, you can buy all these different sorts of things for fairly good prices. And when you’re in the village, it could be more than double the price because my community, like many others in Alaska, is only accessible by plane. We don’t have a road system where I come from, so when you’re in Point Hope, it could easily cost $10 for a half gallon of milk. Either way, it’s very expensive, and there are sometimes not all of the amenities that you might want or need. Usually, the fruit and the vegetables are frozen before they ever make it, so then they do not taste very good. A lot of what we eat is mostly carrots, onions, like easily transferable things, or a lot of canned food, which is not very good for your health. So I always miss the amenities that you can have in the city that you can’t have in the village. And when I’m in the city, there are two things that I miss. I miss my family, and I miss being on the land. I miss the feeling that you get when you’re up north. We live in the tundra, we live in a very cold climate. And it’s a very special feeling to be where it feels like you’re at the edge of the earth. That’s the easiest way to explain what it feels like to be at home, especially in the winter when the ice is there. And when you are on 10ft of ice and stand there, and you look out over the ocean at the open water, it makes you feel like a speck on an entire planet. You’re at the edge of the earth like you’re going to drop as you go a little bit further. No, I do not believe the earth is flat (lolol). It’s a different kind of feeling that you can get in any city because you are so closely connected to nature, and nature is all around you, and you can’t, no matter what you want to do, get away from it.

Point Hope, Alaska – boating 2024 (c) Priscilla “Aumaqpaq” Frankson
What factors influenced your decision to become an Inupiaq researcher? So, what was the reason why you became an Inupiaq researcher?
When I graduated from my undergrad, it was back in 2018. And I have my undergraduate degree or my bachelor’s degree in aviation management. So very business-oriented. I worked in the aviation industry for a couple of years before realizing it wasn’t what I wanted to do. Thankfully, I didn’t have to go through COVID while taking graduate-level studies, but it was this time that I realized that I wanted to do something with Indigenous people. I didn’t really know what it was going to be. When I applied to come to ASU, I did not intend to do Arctic research. I have a massive love for the Maori people in Aotearoa (New Zealand), and so I really wanted to work with them. And as I said earlier, I met a group of people at ASU doing work in Alaska. I found them when I had a friend put me in contact with a woman who “loves Alaska and works in Alaska.” So I ended up meeting Dr. Shauna BurnSilver and she explained to me that she is doing work in Sivuqaq (Gambell), Alaska. Shauna also told me that this project had all plans to go to Point Hope, which, again, is where I am from. Within a few weeks of that interaction, she asked me to work with them on this project called ARC-NAV (click to read more about the project). At that point, I believe it was meant for me to begin my work in the Arctic.
Being an Indigenous researcher for me must first include that I am Iñupiaq. There are many more things to being an Indigenous researcher; they usually include education about the traumas caused by colonial systems and learning to navigate those exact systems in order to benefit your own community. Being an Indigenous researcher means that you hold a burden that includes living the traumas that research or colonial governments have caused and ensuring that you do not reproduce those exact traumas in your own research. Being a young Arctic Indigenous scholar in the US Southwest means that I am the only one of my kind in almost all the spaces I enter. I have learned over time to explain to people that I do not represent my community – I speak as one person who has grown up in a Native community in Arctic Alaska. This ensures that people are aware of the diversity within the diversity; we are not all the same, and we cannot be put into boxes. I could go on and on, but I will end there.

Priscilla “Aumaqpaq” Frankson at the EU Arctic Forum 2024 (c) Youth Together for Arctic Futures project
With which three words do you associate your community of Tikiġaq?
The first one for me, these are all personal words that I would put to it home. It’s community, family. There are so many that it could be. There’s nature, there’s animals. I can’t choose just three. The ocean. It’s the ice. If I had to choose only three, I would pick family, community and nature. But I can explain that better because those are very, very broad words. Community, because that’s where I come from. That’s where I hold a lot of my own beliefs, my own kind of ways that I live. And it’s those situations that, growing up, we would spend Christmas together, and it wasn’t just our families, like how normally you would – it was everybody coming to the school gym (school hall), and we would spend the entire day together, and sometimes the day before, and we would hand out food to everybody. The whaling crews would bring out the meat and muktuk, which is from the whale. So, the muktuk is the blubber and the skin. And so they would put certain portions of the whale away for Christmas specifically. So then they would pull that out the freezers, and we would hand it out to the entire community, and we would all sit and eat together. And, like, growing up, it was probably. It was definitely a lot different than it is now. I haven’t been home for Christmas in a long time. But those memories of being together and being with my family, we would all be sitting on the floor in the gym. So, like, having that kind of community was very different. Family – will always be my family. I would go as far as to say half to three-fourths of the entire town I’m related to. And about half of the entire Arctic part of Alaska I’m also related to. Because you have so many generations of family members there, you start becoming related to all of them. And so I have a huge family. Nature, because the Arctic is very vast, but also, at the same time, it feels very small only because of my home, because that’s where my community is, and there are only around 700 still living there. So it feels very small. Even though, in general, the Arctic is huge, it’s massive. And I don’t know, I always think about what the one thing that I always miss when I think about home is being out in the land at certain times of the year, whether that be summer, winter, winter when there’s no sun for a whole month, the sun doesn’t rise, and you can see the northern lights on any clear day. It’s a very special feeling. And then in the summer, when the sun doesn’t set, then that’s also another very special feeling of, like, your body just never feels tired. It’s just a really fun place to be.

Point Hope in the winter (c) Priscilla “Aumaqpaq” Frankson
It’s a very interesting explanation, and I just would like to ask for a follow-up on that. So, did I understand correctly, I talked with many Inuit people, actually, and almost everyone pointed out that they don’t consider the community as some kind of administrative entity or something like that. They consider the community as a family. So it’s not like society or community. It’s a family. Is it the same in your case?
Yeah. When I talk about community, I mean my family, the extended family, I mean, the people. So, in our Iñupiaq language, Tikiġaġmiut means someone from Tikiġaq. So Tikiġaġmiut means I am from Point Hope or a person of Point Hope or something like that. And so, like, when I think of my community, I think I am from Tikiġaq as a Tikiġaġmiut. And it doesn’t at all, like, when I answered that, I didn’t think of the tribal affiliation or like the tribal government that maybe some people think about when they do think about community. I think of community as being at the gym for hours for the entirety of Christmas or the entirety of Thanksgiving. Like, that’s what I think about when I think about community.
Yeah, very interesting. I would like to ask also a question from Nina: how do you define and express your cultural identity as an Indigenous youth in the Arctic? So maybe you can share some traditions or a specific aspect of it that holds particular significance for you? I would like to add that I saw on Instagram that it was some kind of fashion show by the Arctic Education Foundation, I think if I’m correct. And you participated there, and it’s kind of impressive. It’s very beautiful. Is it also part of the culture that you express?
So I think with that fashion show specifically, that was the Ivalu Gala. So, the Arctic Education Foundation is an entity of the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, which is the corporation that I am a shareholder of. And the Arctic Education Foundation has their scholarship entity. They have this Ivalu Gala every year and invite Arctic designers from around Alaska, Canada, and Greenland. I don’t think there was ever anybody from the northern part of Europe.
The person whose Parka (click here to read more) I used comes from my community. She’s an amazing seamstress. She makes Parkas, earrings, mukluks (click to read more) (traditional footwear), she also taught me how to work on a ugruk (bearded seal) to get them ready to make hard bottoms for our mukluks. She makes the most beautiful dresses with very modern Inuit designs. So, a lot of the furs are sealskin. She made mukluk boots that are from Polar bears. She’s very well known for the Parkas that she makes. And she made a full fur parka for her husband, or fancy parka as we call it. And for a lot of people that are at home specifically.

Priscilla stretching ugruk (bearded seal) skin to dry (c) Priscilla “Aumaqpaq” Frankson
Many whaling captains or whaling captains’ wives have beautiful fur parkas that they wear during our whaling feast every year, which traditionally happens on the second Sunday of June. This event is called Qagruk, or our whaling feast and it is a three-day feast during which we give thanks to the whale and the people who caught it.
So we only celebrate if we’ve caught a whale during our whaling season, which happens in the springtime. And each whaling captain, their whaling captain’s wife, and their entire crew are preparing the entire year for this feast. Even if that crew does not successfully catch a whale that spring, they are spending the rest of the year hunting, fishing, and gathering for the possibility of catching a whale. The entire community comes out. We make sure that we feed everyone, we feed the elders, and we do all of this outside, even when it’s raining, even when it’s windy. It’s a very, very fun time of the year. And usually, we’re preparing for this feast the entire year. So it’s not like we just grab a bunch of food and we’re randomly cooking it. No, we hunt the tuutuu or caribou in the falltime, then we hunt the whale in the springtime, and then we hunt our ugruk or bearded seals (Inuit: Ugjuk) right after whaling. You have to go with the seasons, and you are the grace of the conditions of that time of the year. Because there are years when our berries are low or the caribou are not in abundance, when this happens, you ask family or friends if they might have some extra that they are willing to give to help out the crew. So, the preparation for this one three-day feast is an entire twelve-month period that happens every year.

Priscilla cutting muktuk to get ready to boil and serve (c) Priscilla “Aumaqpaq” Frankson
Another question, and I would like to ask you is a question from Anastasia. She wanted to know in what ways you perceive the use in the community of Tikiġaq to deal with or react to the colonial history of your home of Alaska. Is it a topic which comes up regularly and do you learn about it in schools or from elders? Would you like there to be more activities which aim at educating about the topic? Especially given the fact that Alaska was part of the Russian Empire and has a huge colonial history, and decolonizing is one of the goals of Alaskan governance – maybe I’m wrong.
I would hope so one day, too. But unfortunately, no. I never once learned anything about my people or the people that were around me, the original people of the lands, throughout my four years of high school. Even in my Alaskan history class, they taught me about the president of the United States, who decided to purchase Alaska. Or they told me that Russia used to own it, but they never really dived into the people that were there. And so I never really thought anything of it while I was going to school because I was like, okay, I’m just learning this. There’s nothing I don’t have to question these people who are obviously smarter than me and who know more than I do, like the teachers. So, yeah, I didn’t question anything until I came here. And then I realized that Russia colonized Alaska, and they mainly settled in the southern part of Alaska. They never made it up north. So, we don’t really have any Russian influence in the Arctic. Still, a lot of my friends who are from the Aleutian chain in the southwestern part of Alaska mentioned Russian influence in their language, in their appearance, and in a lot of different aspects of their lives. But I don’t want to talk more about that as it is a much different history than my own in the north.
And then Russia sold their claim to the United States of America. Back in the sixties, the US had found oil in the northern part of Alaska. So that was when they offered to settle a land claim settlement with the Alaska Native people. And so, within three years, they had signed and written into law the Alaska Native Claim Settlement Act, which then, unfortunately, extinguished our aboriginal rights to our lands, which wasn’t the case before. So it’s, again, this is all the information that I had to learn myself. This is information I wish I had been taught in high school, at least in the Alaska history class, at least at the bare minimum, the one class that we had to take that was on the history of Alaska, but that wasn’t the case for me.
Do you feel empowered using the Iñupiaq language? And if not using it, would you like to speak the Iñupiaq language more freely?
So, for me, I don’t speak it. What I was talking about with the language is that people my age, in my community, don’t speak it at all, other than a few words that we use in our English, some more than others. My parents don’t speak it as well. They don’t understand it. They understand a little bit of it, but not really. I grew up with my grandparents speaking it. So my Aana (grandma) and Aapa (grandpa) would speak it only to each other, but they never spoke it to any of their grandkids, which I think was a very common thing. Why they did that, I wonder. Maybe they were scared of us having an accent. I don’t know. They never told us. But with the language, it’s very sad knowing that it’s not being taught to the new generations. For me, language and your own personal language are very important. With the language, it holds so much more than just words. It holds your culture, and it holds your traditions. It holds jokes that you can’t even tell in English because it doesn’t make sense. You can’t translate certain things. Language is very land-oriented, specifically your own land. For example, there are many different ways to explain snow and the state of snow or ice, which makes total sense because we are surrounded by it for half of the year, and English can barely scratch the surface of a few of those terms because there’s no need to have that many terms in English. And on St. Lawrence Island, where I work, they speak St. Lawrence Island Yupik. They have 101 different terms for ice and snow and the state of it.
It is frustrating not to know own language; the yearning for something that I never had, but it’s yours at the same time, is one that I am still trying to grasp. And it’s also something that we have to be the ones willing to go out and learn it. A lot of my parents’ generation and the generation before I talk about being, and a lot of other people reference it as the lost generation. So kind of that time of boarding schools, that time of intense segregation that was happening in bigger communities in Alaska, it was the switch from being very much like a hunter-gatherer society and moving into a very western society where you have to make money in order to live instead of you have to hunt in order to live. That kind of distinction and that movement from hunter-gatherer to westernized, a lot of the things we’re still seeing today. I think this is more new thoughts that come into my mind as I’m writing my thesis. Well, and the ability to live in both a western society and a hunter-gatherer society, there’s been research that shows that specifically within the context of Alaska, these superhunters are what they call them. So normally, superhunters are the younger men who go out, and they hunt as much as they possibly can for their family and multiple other families. So usually, I think the percentage is 30% of the people hunt for the 70% of the community. I think something like that. Either way, they feed a lot of people. And usually, according to the research, the people who hunt more are usually the ones that have these better jobs that are making more money because they have more money to be able to go out and hunt. And so that is a very interesting finding that I’ve had in doing research. So, I think we have the ability to be a part of both worlds, but I’m still trying to figure out how I feel about what it’s like being in both of those worlds.

Point Hope, Alaska – caribou hunting (c) Priscilla “Aumaqpaq” Frankson
It’s a very interesting goal for the future to define for yourself what your place is in these in-between worlds. I would like to ask a last question: What Indigenous knowledge, stories, or advice you got from elders do you use for everyday life?
So, one thing that I’ve learned recently, on my last trip to Gambell in February, is at what point do I know how much space to take in what situations? When I am in Gambell or when I’m home in Point Hope, where the majority of people are the Native people of that land, I tend to be very quiet. I tend to try my best to listen, always to learn from them and not to take up as much space, or to almost try my best to take up almost no space just to be there and be present and be willing to learn from whoever is willing to teach me. And I don’t want to go in, and I don’t want to force anything. I don’t want to ask question after question after question. I want to ask maybe a few questions and allow them to teach me what they think they should teach me. So in that time, I’m taking up very little space. It’s definitely a learning process. But then I came back to ASU, and I came back to a different space, and I realized that I take up more space within academia than I do when I’m home or in another community. And this is because I feel the need to get my point across and get what I know across. And I think, this kind of thought process has stemmed from learning how to hunt with my brother. So my brother is a year younger than me, but my brother has spent his entire life hunting since he could walk since he was able to go out in the boats. I would say since he was like four, five, six years old, he’s been learning how to hunt. And so when I go with him, I’ve learned that I sit there and I listen and I go wherever he needs me, wherever he tells me I need to go, which is usually sitting right next to him in the boat. And as you’re sitting next to the driver of the boat, they tell you to do this, they tell you to do that, but you don’t go up to them, and you don’t keep asking them question after question. You allow them to teach you, and you don’t force the teachings. This is the use of non-verbal communication that is very well present in Iñupiaq societies. You learn how to catch body cues, or if it’s not from body cues, it’s them verbally telling you things. And so that’s where I learned how to sit and listen. But at the same time, when I am in academia, and I’m the only Iñupiaq scholar in the room, I tend to take up more space because those are the spaces that I think force that kind of behaviour. Academia and Western academia specifically has built this kind of environment of whoever can take up the most space is going to be heard the loudest. And I personally hate taking up that much space. I don’t like doing it, but I’m learning how to do it because I realize the importance of it.

Point Hope, Alaska winter (c) Priscilla “Aumaqpaq” Frankson