Alaska Native Teens Emulate Arctic Ancestors’ Survival Skills at Native Youth Olympics

ANCHORAGE, Alaska – Athletes filling a massive gymnasium in Anchorage were ready to compete, cheering, stomping and high-fiving each other as they lined up for the chance to claim the state’s biggest prize in their events.

But these teens were at the Native Youth Olympics, a state competition that attracts hundreds of Alaska Native athletes every year and pays tribute to the skills and techniques used by their ancestors to survive in the harsh polar climate.

Events in the competition that ends Saturday include a pole tug, designed to imitate holding a slippery seal as it struggles to return to the water, and a modified four-step broad jump that approximates jumping over blocks of ice. in the frozen ocean.

For generations, Alaska Natives have played these games to develop the skills needed to become successful hunters – and survive – in an unforgiving climate.

Now, today’s youth play “to help preserve our culture, our heritage, and to teach our young people how difficult life used to be and to share our culture with everyone around us who wants to know more about the our people,” said Nicole Johnson, the event’s chief official and one of Alaska’s most decorated Native athletes.

Johnson herself won more than 100 medals in native Olympic competitions and for 29 years held the world record in the two-foot high kick, an event in which athletes jump on both feet, kick a ball while keeping both feet level, and then land on both. feet. His record of 6 feet 6 inches was broken in 2014.

For “seal jumping,” a popular Saturday event, athletes get into a push-up or plank position and crawl across the ground on their knuckles — the same stealthy crawl their ancestors used during a hunt to sneak up on the ground. of unsuspecting seals dozing. the ice.

“And when they got close enough to the seal, they would take their harpoon and take the seal,” said Johnson, an Inupiaq originally from Nome.

Colton Paul had the crowd clapping and stomping their feet. Last year, he set a world record in the scissor broad jump with a mark of 38 feet, 7 inches while competing for Mount Edgecumbe High School, a boarding school in Sitka. Jumping requires strength and balance and includes four specific stylized jumps that mimic jumping through floating chunks of ice to navigate a frozen river or ocean.

The Yupik athlete from the western Alaska village of Kipnuk can no longer compete because he has graduated, but he performed in front of the crowd on Friday and jumped 38 feet, 9 inches.

He said the Native Youth Olympics is the only sport he has a passion for.

“Playing sports really made me feel like ‘my ancestors did this’ and I’m doing what they did to survive,” said Paul, who is now 19.

Awaluk Nichols participated in the Native Youth Olympics for most of his childhood. The events give her the opportunity to explore her Inupiaq heritage, something she feels is slowly disappearing from Nome, a coastal Bering Sea community.

“It helps me a lot just to connect with my friends and my culture, and it means a lot to me that we still have that,” said the high school student, who listed her best event as the foot-high kick.

Some events are as much a mental test as they are a physical one. In a competition called “wrist carry,” two teammates hold a stick at each end, while a third person hangs from the handstand by their wrist, legs curled up like a sloth, while their teammates run around an oval track.

The objective is to see who can hold the bat the longest without falling or touching the ground. The event develops strength, endurance and teamwork, and emulates the characteristics that people in the north needed when they lived a nomadic lifestyle and had to carry heavy loads, organizers said.

Nichols said her family and a few others still participate in some Native traditions like hunting and subsisting off the land like their ancestors, but competing in the youth games “makes you feel really connected to them,” she said.

“Just knowing I’m a part of what I used to be makes me happy,” she said.