Alaska Dispatch

The cloud cover lay close to the ground and the rain still fell on the flat and windswept Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta when U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan flew away back to civilization this summer. It would have been easy for someone from urban America to take home a view of this part of the world as a dreary wasteland.

There is no way of knowing, of course, what memories Duncan retains of his tour of the village of Hooper Bay out there on the edge of the Bering Sea. I'd call him and ask, but even if I could get through all the handlers to talk to the man himself, I'm sure his answer about what he learned this summer would only be a bunch of platitudes about how every child in America deserves a first-class education, and how the Obama administration is committed to providing that.

And every child in America does deserve a first-rate eduction.

Without education there isn't much hope of getting ahead in the techno-competitive world of today, and hope is the key to individual survival. That part of the equation hasn't changed in the history of mankind. Everything else might be different, but what keeps us all hanging on through the tough times is the hope that tomorrow will be better than today, or at least no worse.

The big problem facing people, especially young people, in rural Alaska these days is that it's hard to tell what hope should look like. As Duncan and a gang of Obama administration secretaries toured the Delta this summer, the unasked questions that hung in the air over the windy flat lands were these:

-- What good is this modern education?

-- What real help are all these federal handouts?

Almost everywhere you go in rural Alaska, there is a realization that what people need is not handouts, but a hand up. Give a man a check, and he will fritter it away. Give a man a job, and he will make a life for himself.

That rule, by the way, applies to most of us in the 49th state. Those Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend checks we get every year don't create their own, unique Alaska stimulus program because everyone puts the money in a savings account. It's a pretty obvious phenomenon that most Alaskans, when given handouts from the government, run out and spend the money. It's human nature.

And for most Alaskans that's fine. Most have jobs that keep them behaving responsibly most of the time. Imagine what it would be like if they didn't have jobs, if all they got was a government check every month?

For many in rural Alaska, this is the way life is. Will education help?

As the visiting secretaries from far-off Washington, D.C. toured the attractive, 74,000-square-foot, $30 million school in Hooper Bay, it was hard to avoid wondering about this. The school is far and away the nicest building in the village along the barren Bering Sea coast. Built on pilings, it rises above the surrounding tundra like a monument to the can-do attitude of Americans. Inside the building, there is a clean and spacious gym and auditorium, an understocked library and a variety of neat and tidy classrooms, where it appears that dedicated, concerned and interested teachers are doing their best to educate their charges.

Outwardly at least, the system here is doing everything possible to help students succeed, but it's hard to avoid deep and troubling thoughts about what waits at the end of the process. If government pours in enough resources, and if parents and children are willing to work with teachers to produce the best-educated high school graduates in the country, what then?

There are almost no jobs in Hooper Bay. Most of the few there are do not offer a lot of intellectual stimulation. Subsistence hunting and fishing, thanks to the 21st century convenience of gas-powered all-terrain vehicles and snowmachines, have become more like recreational activities than what the ancestors of the people now living at Hooper Bay knew as a grueling, time-consuming lifestyle.

As the secretaries toured the school, the superintendent for the region confessed that most of the best students leave the village after earning their diplomas, and it is hard to get them to come back even to teach -- and the teachers have what are arguably the best jobs in the village.

This is the reality of the Alaska Bush. The brain-drain is a problem almost everywhere.

Forget about the failures to meet the educational standards of "No Child Left Behind,'' or the media fixation on booze, or the continuing Alaska in-fighting over subsistence, the truly important issue is economic fallout. There are no jobs. And without jobs of some sort, people are forced to leave for jobs elsewhere, or revert to living wholly or partially on government handouts.

Forget about subsistence. The more than 1,000 people now living in Hooper Bay can't go back to living off the land in the way their ancestors did. There are too many people for the land around the village to support.

They can and do supplement their food supplies with what the land provides in the form of marine mammals, fish and waterfowl. It is a wonderful thing. Hopefully they can continue to hunt and fish forever.

But it's foolish, not to mention inhuman, to think Alaska can declare a subsistence priority for the Bush, and then leave the people there to live like wild animals on the land. No one can live that way anymore.

Besides, hunting and fishing aren't enough once your mind is opened to the world.

Trust me on this. No one loves to hunt and fish more than I. Few have spent more time doing it over the past decades than I have. Hunting and fishing provide all sorts of physical and emotional stimulus, but they don't meet intellectual needs.

I know. I was cursed with a brain that goes 100 mph all the time. Its reckless, pedal-to-the-metal approach to the world was encouraged by a few great teachers over the years. Now, it needs to be engaged in some sort of mental exercise on a regular basis, or I go crazy.

I'm lucky. I ended up in a business where I can engage thought all the time. I can wander the marshes of Southcentral Alaska, shotgun in hand, blasting waterfowl and thinking about the problems of this state, and then I can come home to a computer terminal and turn my fingers loose on a keyboard to ponder how to get other Alaskans to engage those problems.

Or at least ponder how I'd like to get other Alaskans to engage those problems. It's not easy. Nobody in this state really wants to deal with the issues of the Bush.

In Bethel this summer, Nick Tucker, a commercial fisherman from Emmonak, on the Yukon River, pointed to a tabloid about the Y-K published by Alaskan Newspapers Inc. and remarked that the cover pretty well summed up his feelings.

The cover was a full-page photograph taken by Alex DeMarban of a man dumping a bucket of crap -- a so-called 'honey bucket' -- off a patch of ice along a riverbank. Imprinted over the photograph was the headline "Forgotten America."

"That's us,'' Tucker said.

He was right, and he was wrong. Rural Alaskans aren't forgotten. Both the state and federal governments still send a hundreds of millions of dollars to the Bush each year to "help'' the people there. But the money, in some cases, really doesn't seem to be helping, and no one seems to really want to have a discussion about what might help.

Other than to engage in some sort of Alice-in-Wonderland belief that if everyone in the Bush simply quit drinking -- if all of rural Alaska were declared one big dry zone -- everything would be fine.

It wouldn't.

The problems out there go far deeper than booze. And this is where Tucker was right. The Bush is "forgotten" in the sense that its real problems are out of sight, and thus remain out of mind. Hardly anyone in Alaska wants to look at the real problems of the Bush, let alone come up with ideas to try to fix them because the real problems are difficult, very difficult, and because sometimes they require talking about things nobody wants to talk about.

Why, for instance, is the median age of Hooper Bay residents now down to 18? How does a village come to be comprised of almost 50 percent children? Whose responsibility is it to do someting when children start having children? And what exactly do you do?

Contact Craig Medred at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it