Greetings Alaska Dispatch readers,

This is a joint letter from Victoria Briggs of Ugashik and Ann Strongheart of Nunam Iqua. Both of us have been actively advocating to help our villages through these tough times. We are both currently working on Food Drives, bringing in food and supplies to our needy families.

We are sure that everyone reading this already knows of the Crisis in Rural Alaska, which came to light starting with a letter written by Nicholas Tucker of Emmonak back in mid-January. Since that time there have been many letters and articles discussing this Crisis.

Both of us, Victoria and Ann, feel that we are slowly meeting the "short term" goal of making certain our villagers are fed and warm this winter. Now it is time to start looking towards preventing this type of crisis from occurring in the future.

While we have been working on our food drives we have also been working with a lot of people on a website called Anonymous Bloggers.com. This website was created by a woman in Florida that is completely devoted to addressing the issues of rural Alaska.

In all the help that our villages have received we want to make sure we thank those that helped us find our ‘voices' to bring the crisis of Rural Alaska to light and hopefully towards finding long term solutions.

Those that first helped get the attention brought to the plight of our villages will forever be first in our hearts and minds when we think of this entire issue!

Here is a brief synopsis of what we are looking at and discussing in way of long term solutions to this crisis in not only Ugashik and Nunam Iqua but also across ALL of Rural Alaska:

The "Long Term" Discussion-

In an attempt to be part of the LONG TERM solution that allows our villages to travel into the future with dignity, we are going to open a discussion on the villages and our hopes for them.

We might be chastised, like many before us, but we are hoping that instead those whose hearts are in the right place are recognized and that we can have an open discussion. We are going to approach this, hopefully, without name calling but instead with calls for accountability of those that are there to ‘help' us.

An article was written, we feel fairly and with insight, by Elise Sereni Patkotak, for the Alaska Dispatch.

We would like to use this as a jumping off point to present some of the ideas we have that might be a start for our villages to work their way out of these issues.

We also recognize that economic development goes hand in hand with community development. Our villages have a great need for community development; roads, better/longer airstrips, docks, school buildings, water and sewers etc.

We also realize we can do some economic development to help justify the community development and not just wait for the investment in our villages.

We can invest in ourselves!

We can develop those resources we have while we weave our way into self sustainability. (some of this will raise questions as we use very Alaskan terms and discuss issues that are ‘normal' to us - please feel free to question. In your asking us to explain many times we learn more of how things work or take care of misinformation that even we might have)

Here are just a few of the ideas we have, and welcome input on all parts of these;

* First of all, work with our villagers to realize our rights to hold the local and regional governing groups accountable for their actions. (As many groups have learned over the year that an informed voter is a better group for all. We must work with many on this so we can effectively ask for the changes that are needed)