The Anvil City Science Academy is a charter school with forty-four fifth through eighth grade students. This year, A.C.S.A. students will create a play inspired by the lives of Nome residents. They used StoryCorps as a way to record and save those stories.
Here are the beginnings of some of the stories shared during their project:
Lawyer Kirsten Bey moved to Alaska and started dog-mushing all because of a chance car ride between Valdez and Anchorage. As a child she didn’t even particularly like dogs. Now she considers herself lucky to lead the life that she lives.
James Agloinga grew up in the village of White Mountain. He considers how education can mean different things: in his family it meant learning how to hunt and help the family, while for his daughter it has meant learning academic and professional skills, such as how to use a computer.
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Banner Creek is a neighborhood 12 miles outside of Nome. Facilitator Anahma Saito lives there with her family. This weekend StoryCorps Nome moved to the country to record her neighbors’ stories. Banner Creek became a neighborhood when a group of friends moved out of Nome in the 1970′s looking for a place to live where they could raise their dogs and mush in open country. Many residents continue to mush including StoryCorps participants Marianna Mallory, 10 and Maisie Thomas, 11 and Conor Thomas, 53. And many of the stories involved mushing.
Though some residents have running water and internet, none have phone lines. In the winter everyone parks their cars up on the Kugorak Road and snowmachines or walks home. If you want to know what people are up to, you just look towards the road. In between interviews, we’d have coffee with participants and more than once, people noted the whereabouts of their other neighbors: “Nope the Mallory’s didn’t go to church today, too cold, or, I thought I saw your truck over here and thought I’d say hi.” Resident Margaret Thomas explained, “It gets really interesting when someone in the neighborhood starts seeing someone new.’
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