Description: Kelsey Ciugun Wallace inside an office at the Alaska Native Heritage Center. Photo by Jovell Rennie

Kelsey Ciugun Wallace, president and chief executive officer of the Alaska Native Heritage Center, had just started her job when Typhoon Halong hit western Alaska last fall, displacing hundreds of residents from their villages to Anchorage, where they took shelter in hotels. Her daughter Kiah, who is nine, asked her how the people would eat. That gave Wallace the idea to start making calls about finding a big freezer. She asked on Facebook for traditional food donations, and Alaskans, urban and rural, Native and non-Native, opened their small freezers and delivered tons of wild food, including maktak from the North Slope, herring eggs from Sitka, seal from Haines, gallons of berries, and salmon from every major river.  

Kelsey explained that caring for people this way is a core Alaska Native value that influences Alaska’s culture as a whole.  

“In our Yup’ik culture, it’s called Ilakucaraq. It’s the way that you show up as a person and you are inclusive of everyone. I think that all Alaska Native people, and even just Alaskans in general, can all agree that food is our connector, right? And I’ve been in so many spaces throughout my lifetime, even as a kid where my first recollection of love and that feeling of being taken care of was through food, whether it was like my aunties, whether it was community members, whether it was a coming of age ceremony, or if it was, you know, something that we were having to face that was just really hard.

“It’s like our own people’s way of philanthropy… When you have somebody who comes to you and is giving something to you, no strings attached, saying, ‘I just want to give this to you because I love you, because I care about you, and because I see you.’ That is what I continue to experience, not even just through this project, but it’s that act of gathering, harvesting, processing, sharing that is so cyclical. 

“It’s just inherent in the way that our communities have always shown up and taken care of each other. We don’t do these things because it’s written in a book or because we know that by giving something away, it’s going to make us feel better. It’s just second nature, you know, you catch your first fish if you’re a kid, like my daughter did. She was seven when she caught her first fish. There was no second guessing it. She gave it to an Elder.” 

For Kelsey, being Alaskan means taking care of each other.  

“Being Alaskan” is a series of interviews with locals sharing what it means to be Alaskan, the community we share, and helping one another.