The Importance of Culture Camps
How do children in Alaska learn how to catch a fish? Identify the right berries? Retell oral history?
In most communities, they learn these things from the older members of society. And, in many communities around Alaska, they’re learning it at Culture Camps organized to help bring youth in touch with their culture, their environment, and their communities.
Culture camps can be a way for Alaskan communities to form stronger bonds, for youth to learn more about their family’s culture, and for the traditions of past generations to be passed on to younger community members.
As the Alaska Native Knowledge Network states on its website,
“Elders and subsistence camps are an important part of Native life throughout Alaska. One of the strategies that is proving most successful in connecting the school curriculum to students lives in culturally and educationally meaningful ways is through the involvement of Native Elders as teachers and the real-world setting of a subsistence camp environment as the classroom.”
One such camp is being held this week in Juneau: the Tlingit Haida Central Council's (CCTHITA) summer youth culture camp.
At camps like these, children learn how to identify and use foodstuffs from the wild, find out more about oral traditions and traditional artwork, and other activities.
Kake and Wrangell
In Kake, the Organized Village supports yearly culture camps to teach village youth about the traditions of their elders. The Kake camp started more than two decades ago, as a way to strengthen youth bonds to the community and reduce the suicide rate.
Meanwhile, the Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium’s WISEFAMILIES community-driven programs also played the role of a culture camp for the residents of Wrangell and Kake, teaching participants, both children and adults, about local natural foods.
Want to learn more?
Listen to a radio program about the Kake Culture Camp 2013.
Selawik Culture Camp
The US Fish and Wildlife Service is a major funder of the Selawik Science and Culture Camp, where participants learn Inupiaq values as well as learning how to live off of the land. Held every year, children in kindergarten through 12th grade can participate, practicing how to catch and process pike and find and gather berries along with other skills.
Though many of the culture camps throughout the state are aimed at children and youth, there are others that allow adults to participate as well.
The Alaska Native Heritage Center
In Anchorage, the Alaska Native Heritage Center is holding Athabascan Language Gatherings this August, one for Denaakke’-Koyukon language and one for Dinzhii Zhuh K’yaa-Gwich’in language. These language camps will allow participants to interact with each other in the target language, as well as provide support to learners.
Chugach Spirit Camp
Meanwhile in Chugach, the village of Nuuciq provides a home for the community’s yearly spirit camp, held twice in July. According to the website, the spirit camp, “is designed to raise awareness of the origin and history of the people in the Prince William Sound and to heighten awareness of their history and culture. Activities include gathering and preparing subsistence foods, language lessons, woodcarving, beading, traditional singing and dancing. Storytelling with Elders provides important lessons in culture, history and learning the values of the Chugach community.”