I volunteered to babysit the sled dogs. They’d just raced 1,000 miles - from Anchorage to Nome - in barely two weeks. While mushers recuperated in Nome hotels, the dogs had to be watched over in shifts to make sure no one harmed or stole them. My mom and I plodded through the snow toward the dog grounds between a bar and the Nugget Inn. It was zero degrees Fahrenheit. We could hear the distant murmur of a few babysitters talking sleepily across the dark rows of snoring dogs. I was 14 and we had returned to Alaska.
 

     My shift started after dark. It was March, and the days were growing longer. Come June, there would be 24-hours of daylight. I sat on a wooden crate at the head of a row of dogs. There were nine teams of mushers’ dogs to be guarded - 8 to 12 dogs per team. A few other volunteers circled and paced, waiting for their shifts to end. The dark sky reflected blue off the packed snow. My mom had dressed me in six shirts, four pairs of pants, and three pairs of socks. The tips of a polar-bear fur ruff hung in my face and tickled my nose; the coat was adult size, and still too big for me in spite of all my layers. All around, the snow was packed down and frozen solid, about three feet deep. Mom wandered in and out of the community center. Inside, mushers and Nomites warmed up with hot chocolate or beer. Trucks rumbled down Front Street, Nome’s main drag.

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     When we’d moved away from Alaska to Nebraska nine years earlier, my mom turned our house into a mini-museum of artifacts from her world travels, but the Eskimo art always took pride of place. A three-foot tall walrus skull hung at the base of the staircase; its creamy ivory tusks had a delicate, hand-chiseled image of an Eskimo hunter catching a walrus. My mom placed skull and tusks at the end of the main hallway in each of our houses while I was growing up in the various eastern Nebraska towns where we lived. When one of my friends made the long walk down the hallway to the kitchen, or rounded the corner to run downstairs to play with me, the enormous tusks were there.
 

     After babysitting the huskies when I was 14, I didn’t return to Alaska for another six years. By then, my mom had moved back to Alaska to work in Brevig Mission, a remote native Eskimo village 80 miles out of Nome, and I started college in Washington, DC. I went to visit Brevig the summer after my freshman year.
 

     There are no roads to Brevig. I arrived on a small, eight-person mail plane that had braved the fog and wind to land in the village on a dirt runway. It was just me, the pilot, and some boxes. Out the smudged window, I could see my mom waiting for me on her four-wheeler. She held up my winter coat and waved at me, grinning, and eager to show me her new home.
 

     Mom’s house in the village was about the size of my DC studio. The only thing that fit in the bedroom she’d prepared for me was a twin bed. I changed clothes in the entryway that doubled as a closet for my things. All of the houses in this region of Alaska are up on risers to keep the heat from melting the tundra and consequently causing the house to shift and break. Thankfully, Brevig is one of the villages in the region that has running water. Houses in Teller, our neighboring village, have “honey” buckets for toilets. Even the doctors in the clinic have to take turns pouring boiled mountain water over their hands from a bottle to wash up after seeing patients.

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     My first day in the village was full of excitement and things to see. After landing, I didn’t even make it in the front door before being hugged and squeezed by at least ten runny-nosed Eskimo toddlers. That same evening, my heart raced as we jumped on a four-wheeler and zoomed over to the beach hoping to catch a glimpse of a freshly caught whale. Alas, it had escaped. Around midnight, in broad daylight, I was finally able to go home to bed.

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     Over the next few days, I began exploring. The daytime high temperature was 40 degrees. While I donned a winter jacket, natives sported shorts and tank-tops in the “summer” weather. The village was so small that after ten minutes of walking, I had seen everything. So I shot photos and ran around with the native children until my legs were worn out, then went home and lounged for the rest of the afternoon.
 

     Growing up I had never really been allowed to touch mom’s carved-ivory treasures, but now that I was older, the natives approached me with their goods for sale. They loved to show me their new patterns and let me try on colorful necklaces. I wanted to buy everything, but it was pretty expensive. Since I’d always been creative, my mom bought me a few bags of red, blue, pink, and green beads, and a spool of flexible wire to work with and make my own jewelry.
 

     I began trying my hand at a few simple things – necklaces, earrings shaped as forget-me-nots, the state flower, a ring. Given the miniscule size of the two-millimeter period dot beads, and the sheer number of beads to be threaded, I had new appreciation for the intricacy of the bead craft. I learned how hard it was to force a thin needle through the tough sealskin to make a barrette.

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     One night in July, the midnight sun coming in the window, I sat on the futon in front of the TV, wrapped in an electric blanket. Mom kept the temperature at 60 degrees to save money on heating oil. I threaded beads for hours on end, watching movie after movie, from around 4pm to 4am. Occasionally I paused to scroll through the day’s photos. That was all I had to do in Brevig. There wasn’t even a café or a movie theater.

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     I had almost finished making pink flower earrings for a little Eskimo girl, Brenda, who had become my sidekick; I gave her life advice and she came to me for candy. Her parents, like most native parents, let their children run wild around the village all day and all night. I would encourage her to brush her teeth – most of them were already rotted out – and do her homework. Brenda came knocking on our door every day asking if I could come play. I hoped the earrings she liked so much would remind her of me, and perhaps my advice, too.
 

     Around midnight one night, an elderly Eskimo woman knocked on our door, waking up my mom.
 

     “Would you like to see some beading?” She spread out her plastic bag of goods on our doormat. These interruptions were frequent. Someone came to our door every other day.
 

     We bought a $200 hand-carved ivory and baleen bracelet.
 

     “That will look really nice with your gold, lacy dress if you go to an embassy event in DC,” mom said as she handed over the cash. The number of Eskimos who actually knew how to carve ivory was shrinking rapidly. Their work was cheaper in villages than in Nome tourist stores, so mom readily bought from her neighbors.

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     After that first trip to Brevig, I returned there every summer and Christmas for the next five years, and I began to shoot photos and video. I wanted to document traditional Eskimo culture in remote Eskimo villages. My Master’s thesis project began to take shape; I was making a documentary about the decline of the Eskimo culture due in part to failed government programs. It also hit home with me since I grew up surrounded by this culture.
 

     As part of my research, I paid a visit to the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC this fall. I had hoped to find out more in-depth history than what I already knew. After all, the Smithsonian’s resources were much greater than my own, and I expected to gather historical references for my documentary.
 

     I walked through the entryway metal detector and over to the information desk. The woman jumped up with a handful of brochures. But when I asked to see their Alaska native collections, her face fell. She pulled out the list of tribes on display in the museum. Yup’ik was the only Alaskan group on the list. While some of the natives from Brevig are part Yup’ik, they are mostly Inupiaq Eskimo. I took the elevator to the top floor, and found the exhibit, “Our Universes”. It took bit of wandering, but I finally found the Yup’ik display, buried in a file cabinet-like row of North and South American Indian tribes. Very sparse.
 

     Then I remembered my mom turning away from the display three years earlier. She’d visited me my freshman year of college, flying across the state of Alaska, stopping over in Anchorage, LA, and Houston, and finally arriving in the nation’s capitol. She’d been dying to see the new National Museum of the American Indian, specifically, their Alaskan Eskimo collection. We’d meandered through the museum and finally ended up in a small, tucked away area where the Eskimo “collection” was on display – a couple of parkas and masks, an old seal skin, and some nice pictures. We looked around for the main exhibit until we realized we’d just saw it all already. My mom looked annoyed and disappointed.
 

     “The two tiny gift shops in Nome have a far more impressive collection of carvings, jewelry, masks, seal skin slippers, and beadwork; they’ve got items that put the Smithsonian to shame,” she complained.
 

     Visiting now, I was more familiar with the regional villages and traditions. I saw a couple of dance fans from Bethel in the north. There was a drum, but no explanation of the way the natives stretch out walrus intestine and draw delicate, black outlines of the animal on the front. Wooden masks, but no traditional whale vertebra-carved masks inlayed with black baleen eyes and a piece of browned, ancient ivory standing in as a wart. There was only one photo of a fish camp that in no way conveyed the importance of subsistence in the daily lives of the Eskimos. As I passed by each piece, my mind immediately jumped to portions of my own documentary project that would have fit in nicely.
 

     I stood and mourned all that was missing, and thought of the rich culture that museum visitors would never see. There were no hand-carved ivory and baleen bracelets, none of the multicolored butterfly- and flower-shaped barrettes on sealskin that the Eskimo women like to wear. No miniature winter sled models made out of a caribou jaw. No ivory statues of men in parkas ice fishing. My mom’s own collection of jewelry, statues, and paintings was more extensive than what was on display.

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     I checked the museum website and saw they actually did have all of the same things and more available for viewing, but only online. Given the massive space available in the museum building, the cubbyhole that was allotted to the entire Alaska native community was pitiful and inexplicable. Considering Alaska is our country’s 49th state, it’s a shame that the Smithsonian was unable to allot even a corner of the space to Alaska native groups, and instead tucked an entire state’s cultures away among a series of walk-in cubbyholes.

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     On one of my recent trips up to Brevig, I asked a native how she manages to sell so much art while living in a remote village with no tourists. She smiled.
 

     “Ohhhhhh, onliiiiiiiine,” she said in a native twang.
 

     It was true, natives all over the region were selling their artifacts from dig sites and modern carvings at a high price through online auctions. There was also a man from New York who flies into the villages once a year and pays cash for art treasures.
 

     Flying “home” to DC, leaving my other “home” in Alaska, I thought again of how the tiny Alaska native display in the National Museum of the American Indian reflects real-life. Eskimo culture is dwindling, too, becoming a small, misshapen piece of the whole. Maybe the erosion started when public schools were established in the villages over thirty years ago and prohibited the use of native language. Current government health and sanitation programs in native communities throughout the country have a backlog of over 3,400 facilities to be built, according to the U.S. Indian Health Services. Many villages up in Alaska don’t have running water or flush toilets, even in the health clinics. Indian Health Services also reports that American Indians and Alaska natives have a lower health status and shorter life expectancy than other Americans. It’s a shame that our tax dollars are directly affecting this unique culture, and in such a short amount of time; Alaska has only been a state since 1949. By the time Eskimo children like Brenda grow up, there might not be anyone who remembers how to carve.
 

     Access to the rural Eskimo villages in Alaska is extremely limited to outsiders. I am only able to walk around Brevig freely and without paying a visitor’s fee of $100 because my mom is the village mid-level. Having such a rare opportunity, I feel compelled to use my knowledge of photography and filmmaking to document native traditions such as sewing, dancing, and carving that are quickly disappearing. And I am, in part, documenting memories from my childhood.