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Elizabeth's Full Interview

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Elizabeth Kvasnikoff, Port Graham, Alaska, Born 1985

Elizabeth Kvasnikoff.  I lived in Port Graham, Alaska, for most of my life. When I was a kid and adult.

I just remember about the cleanup and how messy it was.  My father was one who cleaned up. They’d find animals that were covered in oil that they had to clean up. Cleaning it off of the beach.  I was too young, yeah, I don’t remember.

I remember me and another kid, we were small, there was a picture of her and I and the beach, and in the background you could see leftover oil on the beach. That’s the only one I can recall.

I remember everybody had pretty much fishermen jobs there. My dad was one of them. They would have to go other places to get their seasonal—their fish or their crab or whatever they were doing. Because they used to do crab here and fish, they’d bring them back in boats, and it became pretty much less and less every year.  Our hatchery wasn’t made use as much as it used to be, and now it’s pretty much just shut down.

When my dad’s business went under, it affected us a lot.  He was a fisherman, had his own boat. Every end of the year he would bring back crabs or fish, loads of clams. No more. It stopped pretty much a year after the oil spill.  I mean, there were no more crabs brought in or fish or clams that we got. It kind of hurt us in a more family way, I suppose, than more business kind of ways. I don’t know. The way the oil affected our ecosystems, it pretty much demolished everything. We don’t really have a lot of what we had then. You appreciate what you get.

We tried to find work in hatcheries and fish that was imported from other places. That was our only job besides our council and our corporation. It kind of hurt our financial situation in Port Graham, less jobs.  We moved for more family and personal reasons.

When we came back, it had changed a lot. There were more hours of work at the hatcheries. But we got imported fish. But it did change quite a bit. I hear stories from the way it used to be before the oil spill, our ecosystem was abundant and animals that used to be here and sea life, and now it’s just small.

We used to eat snails a lot, and I remember bringing home buckets full when our dad would take us to the beach, and that just didn’t happen. Plus, the clams, we used to have lots of clams here, and hardly any you could find, mussels, pretty much all the shellfish, we hardly have any of that. It’s mostly just fish, octopus, otters. Not much shellfish any more.

Our foods, we have fish, we have seal, octopus, clams, we eat crabs. There are a lot of shellfish, I do believe that was diminished. Bear, birds, mostly sea life. Yeah.

Well, I don’t know how it was before. I don’t know how the supplies—how we used to put away stuff. I know that each year just got less and less of putting away our subsistence and there would be years when some of us wouldn’t have any food to put away.

It was lost, because we know we don’t eat as much of our subsistence here, because we used to—that’s what nourished us during the winter, and a lot of that would have came in handy, and I think between the village here in Port Graham and Nanwalek, that we would have been less dependent on money, in a way, yeah.  A combination, the lack of knowledge, the lack of subsistence foods and pretty much I think our people have become dependent on the state now. They no longer have the need for subsistence food.  Because the way my mom and my dad grew up, they grew upon depending on themselves for food, every year go out, get it, put it away. But after the oil spill and our lack of subsistence foods, we’ve become, I guess, dependent on money from wherever. A lot less people go out and subsist now, fewer and fewer.

I would say [to kids in the Gulf], try to stick to what your elders taught you, and hopefully it helps you in the future. When I was growing up, we didn’t have a lot of subsistence food to go through the winter. But I would say listen to your elders and try to respect what they tried to do for tragic things like that.

I guess back then, we didn’t really have environmentalists like we do now. That’s our major concern, mostly air, earth, water. That would have helped a lot with our ecosystem.