Every year mountains of things are shipped into the Yukon Kuskokwim region, much of it headed to remote communities. The result is growing mountains of trash that villages are trying to ship back out, or back-haul, so that the materials will not pollute the land and water they depend on to feed themselves. Reporter Johanna Eurich attended a unique workshop in Anchorage designed to help villages in the Delta back-haul their trash.
The back-haul workshop at the Alaska Forum on the Environment was the first ever held totally in Yup'ik, or almost totally.
Evelyn Agnus is an Environmental Scientist with Zender Environmental Health and Research Group. She grew up speaking Yup'ik in Chefornak and Nightmute and learned English as well.
Evelyn had to jump back and forth between the two languages, which is no easy task. Evelyn says that her grandmother gave her a good rule: "There's a struggle between having either the thought first or word first. My grandmother, before she passed, told me to try to think in Yup’ik so I don't have to have the thought first and the word. So I'd have the word first before the thought."
But even with experience, at the workshop Evelyn was stretching for the right word. Several times an older Yup’ik woman suggested one. Evelyn was grateful, and at the end of an hour talking about the technicalities of sorting modern trash that often include toxic materials, she was happy to give Katherine Brower the floor when she asked if she could help.
Katherine threw her body into it, pointing to invisible piles of this and that. As she talked so evocatively, you could almost see the batteries piled high.
"We are people that talk with our heart, if we mean it, and we start doing body gestures. It helps us articulate what we're trying to say," said Katherine.
But even Katherine was having problems translating technical terms into Yup’ik.
"Specifically for batteries, or ballast, or chemicals. We don't have those in our first language so we just call them 'dangerous things'. Dangerous things to our environment and our health," she said.
Who knew that talking trash would be so tough?
The presenters and participants soldiered on, because they all want to deal with the trash properly. They know that the dumps they have are not working.
"Traditionally we didn't have wastes we have today, because waste was only, like, animal parts that we couldn't eat any more, and they were put in specific places,” said Katherine. “Like where I'm from, there was a lake that only bones went into. Intestines went back into the river. There were no real landfills."
Katherine Brower says villages want the wastes we have today hauled off, recycled, or just isolated away from the land and water they and their children depend on for their livelihood. She and others will keep struggling to find the right words, to talk about how to do sorting, storing, packing up, and negotiating with the same shippers that bring in conexes full of stuff ever year to back-haul the trash to where it came from.
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