Backpack Blessings
Dear Editor: Thank you very much to all the members of the Sitka Food Coop who rounded up their purchase in support of Blessings in a Backpack. It was a big surprise to be informed of this donation. I was not even aware the Food Coop regularly chooses a local organization to donate to or that Blessings in a Backpack had been chosen.
We have been providing a bag of food to 80 students at Baranof, Keet and Blatchley every weekend this school year. The Sitka High School National Honor Society students have been organizing the monthly food pack and the weekly distribution to each school. They do this completely as volunteers. We are looking for two new students to take the lead on these tasks starting in the fall of 2019. The two senior students who have taken the lead this year, Ella Lubin and Aani Perkins, have done a tremendous job and will be moving on to other adventures.
This program would not continue without this generous donation, other donations and volunteer hours. We are almost all set for one more year of offering supplemental food to students in our community who may otherwise show up to school hungry on Monday morning. Thank you, members of the Sitka Food Coop, and thank you, Honor Society students who have helped pack and deliver bags this past year.
Kathy O’Gara, Sitka
Herring Celebration
Dear Editor: Gratitude and Courage: Yaa’ Koo.eex.
Harvey Kitka remembers a time when the herring were so thick on Sitka Sound, their flipping backs echoed like a hailstorm. When Wade Martin remembers, he recites 50 years of place names – each year leaner than the last. In just my itty tiny blip of experience chasing spawn in our Sound for six years, I’ve seen changes that incite a terrible feeling. Crawling up deep from my gut, this worry pierces the hollows of my heart, grips my throat, and renders my otherwise light body to a dark fragility. I feel fear.
Herring season. The happiest time in Sitka, when our coves erupt in turquoise foam, our bodies thaw, seasons of hunting and fishing and gathering begin. Friends from afar gather, on the water and on shore in the company of eagles, whales, and lions – all on great migrations to the final epicenter of this feast. This rhythm has played out for thousands of years and yet this joy is increasingly tinged by fear, loss and worry.
But balance is also the rhythm that has played out here for thousands of years. And fear is being answered by courage.
Courage.
Say that word aloud and remember what it means. Remember when you learned it in grade school in children’s books and on the playground? Remember how it felt as it bubbled hot in your growing body and you stood up for yourself, for the people who were torn down by vicious bullies testing boundaries. Red faced and shaking, you were firm for what was right.
As adults, the villains become more nuanced and wildly complex. Our challenges are tied in real ways to our economy, our political institutions, our social status, to doubt and data and fear and comfort and conformity. It’s hard to be brave. Today, I fear that ‘‘courage’’ is as rare and threatened as the resources that sustain us. And yet, applying courage to the things that matter, the things we love deeply, is the only way we will endure.
This weekend, the courage of the Kiks.ádi people drummed through the Sound so loud it shook the clouds from the sky.
Gunalchéesh to the hosts of the Yaaw Koo.eex’, for the Herring Ladies, for the Kiks.ádi, for the people who traveled from afar in solidarity, for their ancestors who began this work, and the youth and freshly adopted who will carry it forward. Gunalchéesh for the battles being fought in court, in hearings, on the water, in libraries, and between difficult conversations. Gunalchéesh endlessly for your strength to restore balance to this place we love. And, personally gunalchéesh from this little gracious soul, a humble visitor on Tlingit Aani, for the reminder of what it looks like to be courageous.
Bethany Sonsini Goodrich, Sitka
