"My fellow Alaska Natives, do you know what you can do to change the world

Go home.

That's right, go home.

We are stewards of the land; God put us there to watch the land. We are living in a world that is lost, therefore, when we got caught up in it, we got lost too. If we go home, we retrieve our identity and help our fellow humans find theirs.

So I will remind you of the importance of our homeland.

Three Aborigine children walked across Australia, escaping the boarding school, subsisting off the land, and got back to their grandma in the Northern Territories. When the great Jim Thorpe's dad dropped him off at a boarding school, legend has it, he ran across the mountains and got back to his reservation before his dad did. In Sidney Huntington's book, a Koyukon woman walked hundreds of miles from Yupik land back to her village on the Koyukuk.

See This is how strongly we Natives value our homeland. Home is not only where our heart is, it is where our soul and ancestors live. "

Get the Story:
Matthew Gilbert: Home is where we Natives can go to change the world (The Anchorage Daily News 2/15)

Related Stories:
Opinion: Only Alaska Natives can preserve culture (02/02)