Hoonah Culture Camp participants drum outside Xunaa Shuká Hít (Huna Ancestor’s House). (Photo by Bethany Sonsini Goodrich/Sustainable Southeast Partnership)
Story by Avery Lill/High Country News
(This story originally appeared September 13, 2022, on High Country News.)
During a lower-than-usual tide this summer, the rocks on the beach were exposed on Southeast Alaska’s Chichagof Island. Ralph Wolfe went down to the shore to help young people — participants in Hoonah Culture Camp — harvest traditional Alaska Native subsistence foods. Together, they pried tasty mollusks, called gumboots, off rocks and filled plastic buckets with slick bull-kelp and bright green sea asparagus.
“Just below the tide line is the sea asparagus that we harvested,” said Wolfe (Tlingit and Haida), a regional network director with Spruce Root, a nonprofit focused on economic development and job creation. He said young adults from Alaskan Youth Stewards helped kids learn to harvest the tasty greens with their hands and scissors. That kind of mentorship, Wolfe said, helps the younger campers better understand subsistence work.