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Mya's Full Interview

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Category: Mya's Full Interview

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Mya Howard

New Boat Harbor, Cordova, Alaska

Born 1987

*Mya was mending nets during this interview*

I’m Mya Howard.  I grew up here in Cordova and I’m from here as well.  I was born in 1987 and raised here.

I was two [at the time of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill] so I don’t really remember it very much.  My dad was working on a seine boat. He came up here for fishing and my mom and dad actually both were working on a seine boat that summer.  My dad just went out and helped out with the oil clean up.  He was gone all summer long.  I don’t really remember it. 

My dad and uncles were up here seining, a lot of them. My dad, he got out of fishing right after that just because of the decline in fishing because of the effects of the oil spill.  And I know that if he would have been up here, I probably would have worked more on like a tender or a seine boat or something when I was growing up but instead I didn’t have that opportunity. I could have taken that opportunity also, but I didn’t have that opportunity, so.  Then Joan taught me how to mend nets and so now I don’t need to anymore. Growing up, Joan, her husband was fishing and she’d always mend nets and we’d go over and help her flake out gear and always kind of around it that way and then she says, she’s always telling me “You ought to learn how to mend nets.” And I just never really, I was like, “yah, yah, sure I guess I could.” But then last fall, she asked if I could come help her, so I went and helped her, and it wasn’t as hard as I thought it was going to be, and here we are.

I remember in school and stuff we’d always have like Sea Week and learn about the sea animals and stuff and we went down to the beach one time and there was a sea otter there and it was just covered in oil from it.  I was in kindergarten.  I just remember it was on the beach and our teacher took us down there and showed it to us because we were just walking around looking at like --- just looking at all the things, learning about seaweed and little songs and just stuff like that.  And then one of the kids saw it on the beach and we all ran over to it and it was, I don’t know if it was hurt, but it couldn’t really move because it was just covered in oil and stuff.  I don’t really remember it super well, but – that kind of made an impact on me a little, because I saw how much it hurt the animal.  I felt really sad for it.  Then it talked to my mom about it later and she explained about the oil spill and kind of everything that happened and how it hurt all of the animals and the fish especially and so it made me feel sad for the little animal.

In school we’d always do stuff with like the Science Center and stuff like that and I don’t know if this answers your question, but I guess like that made me really interested in marine biology and so, like, that’s what I’m going into and that’s what I’m studying now in school, so it’s kind of, became I guess one of the focuses of my life which maybe, there might have been that influence.  It was always just around us, you know, and so as I got older in high school and stuff, there were a couple courses offered so I took those and it just kind of become what I wanted to do, what I was interested in.  They’d always come in and talk to us and show us different things and it was always fascinating to me.  I worked with Fish and Game for a couple years doing research on fish and counting fish and sampling, things like that.  And I think that’s what I’d like to do.

We always went out fishing and stuff like that.  That was always fun. We’d go out subsistence fishing out on the boat, take a skiff out.  We just did all sorts of fun things. We’d always go out hiking and camping and just go spend time out on the Sound and stuff and so it didn’t really have an effect on that, we still kept involved in activities and things.

Sometimes my mom and dad would talk.  They’d always talk about how it was before the oil spill, but like I said, I didn’t know anything different.  We might have grown up differently had there not been an oil spill.   He probably would have been a fisherman.  It would have made a difference in my life, that’s for sure.  Actually, I probably wouldn’t have had the jobs in biology and then that influence, so I probably wouldn’t have had the internships and stuff for school, so I don’t know if it would have been a negative thing or a positive thing.

I just remember everybody always talked about Exxon and it seemed like everybody was always waiting for Exxon to pay up because everybody had been so hurt by the loss of income and everything.  Just growing up in, that was just the constant thing: well, when Exxon pays up, then things will be better, but then eventually they did but the fishing never improved.   So that’s just kind of something that stuck with me from it.  Tragedies, things happen and you can wait and wait for things and even when they did pay up, it didn’t really solve any problem.   You just kind of have to make your own luck, you can’t wait for someone else to help with it.

Kind of like I said earlier, just that no matter what happens, things will get better as long as you make it happen.  That’s something that I learned from my parents.  And my neighbors.  Just everybody around me.  It just came through their examples and how they just kept working at things even when it seemed like things weren’t going to work out or things weren’t going quite the way they planned.  They just kept working hard in everything they did, so that’s always just kind of been what I’ve tried to do too, just from seeing their examples.