Newswise — On a few summer nights last year, in the dimly shining light of midnight a few latitudinal degrees shy of the Arctic Circle, Creighton University students regularly walked the tundra of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, treading in the footsteps of the Alaskan Yup’ik people who have inhabited the area for millennia.
In those midnight perambulations, the students — part of Creighton’s fourth Backpack Journalism Project expedition — thought about what they were doing in Alaska and what had brought them there. They were making a film, that much was certain. But the idea of that film was evolving. They were documenting creeping ecological ruin in the Kuskokwim Delta brought on by climate change, but they were also bearing witness to a way of life that, like the Alaskan summer sunset before them, hasn’t quite sunk below the horizon.
“A group of us would go out on the tundra and just watch,” said Nico Sandi, a senior journalism and sociology/anthropology major from Cochabamba, Bolivia. “The sun took forever to set and it was the middle of the night. It was a good time to think about what we were doing there and put ourselves in the frame of mind we needed to do the work.”
A portion of that work is the documentary film “Mother Kuskokwim,” now making the rounds at film festivals around the nation and garnering Best Short Feature recognition at the 2015 Princeton Environmental Film Festival. Sixteen Creighton students, along with three faculty members and an assistant from the Department of Journalism, Media and Computing, created the piece from footage shot and interviews undertaken during two weeks spent in the Kuskokwim Delta, among the Yup’ik people.
The Yup’ik, after more than 3,000 years in the Kuskokwim Delta, are watching as changes — climate and cultural — decimate the ways by which they have led a subsistence lifestyle. As the Creighton contingent winged its way over the lush Alaskan wilderness and pulled into Bethel, Alaska, in June 2014, there were a set of challenges for which they felt unprepared, but which quickly took on the figure of a character in their film.
“We went there to make this film, not quite knowing what to expect,” said Kari Welniak, a junior biology major from Omaha. “We came out with something extraordinary. In seeing the Yup’iks’ subsistence lifestyle, it changed the way I thought about everything I did. It changed how I thought about grocery shopping. Everything I ate was packaged. Just about everything we ate there came right off the tundra or out of the river.”
The experience, both Sandi and Welniak said, keyed on one Yup’ik phrase — a single word, really, that is untranslatable in any other language. The word is ella (pronounced sheh-LA).
Ella, Welniak said, could stand in for dozens of concepts in Yup’ik life, but it hews closest to describing something approaching the divine. The word connotes the sublime sensation many of the Creighton students described as they beheld the massive Yukon-Kuskokwim watershed, teeming with wildlife, a world the Yup’ik depend upon for their sustenance.
“Ella seemed to be a way of being more aware of the world around you,” Welniak said. “It was an appreciation of the lifestyle you lead and how even the littlest thing has an impact. We all felt more awareness of that while we were there. For me, it’s continued ever since.”
Faculty filmmakers Tim Guthrie, MFA, a professor of graphic design and new media, and John O’Keefe, Ph.D., professor of historical theology and holder of the A. F. Jacobson Chair in Communications, said ella informed their approach to the trip and the making of “Mother Kuskokwim” from the beginning.
O’Keefe said before he even heard the word uttered by anyone, he read it in the course of his research on the Yup’ik and the Kuskokwim Delta, and it spoke to him as a foundational principle for not only this trip, but the motivating force behind the Backpack Journalism Program, generally.
“So often, people go on other service trips, short-term trips, and they do work at an orphanage or a shelter or a pantry, and then they leave it behind,” O’Keefe said. “Our goal, really, is to do good in the world, but we seek to do that by helping our students develop a lifelong commitment to working for social justice. We want to help the people we encounter, but it’s also about changing yourself, of coming to an awareness of one’s own experience and life and impact, and taking that forward for the rest of your life.”
The films produced by the Backpack Journalism Program continue to be some of the most innovative, moving and inspirational work produced by Creighton students.
“And we do it on less than a shoestring,” Guthrie said. “I don’t know where else you can get this kind of lasting, meaningful, tangible experience as a student. These are stories we love to tell and we want more people to hear them and to hear our own story about the making of the films. From a faculty perspective, doing these films with students has been some of the greatest, most fun work I’ve ever done. You see lives changed, you see questions shaping up, you see purpose.”
As the Yup’ik of the Kuskokwim Delta grapple with the ella of their own lives, “Mother Kuskokwim” began taking shape around how this little word is a big one in a rapidly shrinking Yup’ik vocabulary.
The people, watching their subsistence lifestyle of fishing and hunting disappear ever more rapidly over the last half-century and dependent on an ever more fragile ecosystem to sustain that lifestyle, often were without voices to talk about the crisis they face as they live in and care for Mother Earth or, more locally, Mother Kuskokwim.
“We could easily get them to say that they were losing their culture,” Guthrie said. “But when you’d ask, ‘Is that bad? Is that good? Is change necessary?’ That’s where the real difficulty in expressing that feeling became evident. It’s not just the climate changing. It’s a cultural change. And in Native American culture, broadly speaking, that change is happening very rapidly. We could have made a film just about that.”
Students and faculty took note of what journalism professor Carol Zuegner, Ph.D., called “historical trauma” and its aftermath among the Yup’ik. The idea is tied up in American and Euro-centric colonialism in Alaska over the past 250 years and translates today in a depressed economy and the rapid outflow of Yup’iks from the Kuskokwim to other points in Alaska or the Lower 48.
“We were able to highlight that historical trauma on this trip and have the students engage with that on a very deep level,” Zuegner said. “The film shows that very well. We always want to make a good film but, more than that, we also want to make good people.”
The climactic moment of the trip and the film occurred in an interview with a young man named Nelson.
While displaying the seemingly innate reticence of the Yup’ik, Nelson was nevertheless eloquent in recounting the struggles of his people as they contend with cultural expectations and those of staid, white, middle-class America urging them to get ahead and get out of Bethel.
The conversation brought to tears all who took part in it as Nelson poured out the grief and frustration of the changing world and the prospects of staying or leaving Mother Kuskokwim.
“Almost all the people we interviewed seemed to have an underlying feeling of guilt about leaving,” Sandi said. “What Nelson said was, ‘There is a pull to join in the life of your parents and grandparents and all your ancestors. But there’s also another segment of society that wants me to go to Anchorage and go to college and get a good job.’ It’s a struggle and a terrible one. There’s a lot of depression and a lot of suicide in that area because of it.”
The filmmakers felt the struggle firsthand in their time in Bethel and the Kuskokwim. Having filmed other projects in Uganda and the Dominican Republic, Guthrie, Zuegner and O’Keefe felt the conditions of shooting “Mother Kuskokwim” may have been the bleakest they’d yet encountered.
Ready access to modern conveniences like telecommunications and even supermarkets wasn’t always available. Students and faculty slept on the floors of the local Catholic church in Bethel. Showers were a rare luxury.
In an advance scouting trip to the region, O’Keefe said he had prepared himself for the Spartan conditions, but he wondered what 21st century students might think about three weeks of close quarters and fellowship.
“We’ve never slept on floors,” he said. “It was roughing it on a new scale.”
It was a trip all about the sometimes fierce shove outside of a comfort zone a person will endure, Zuegner said. On one of the first nights with the Yup’ik, students were given fish and told to filet and prepare it for cooking. The exercise proved a good metaphor for the conditions they encountered and the film work upon which they were about to embark.
“Everyone took a role,” she said. “They held a boom mic, did the interviews. They got outside that comfort zone not just in the journalism part, but in the social aspects, as well. They were willing to do what needed to be done for the work, but also to grow a little themselves.”
For Sandi’s and Welniak’s parts, however, the experience of relative deprivation and taking on tasks with which they were relatively uncomfortable at first, was all part of the changing attitudes they brought back to Creighton at the conclusion of the shoot.
“I was nervous about it,” Welniak said. “But to have an experience like that, to live it and to have a professional opportunity in that way was incredible. I loved it.”
To read more about the experiences on “Mother Kuskokwim” and see a brief trailer on the film, visit cubackpack.org/projects/2014-alaska/.
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