Marine Mammal Huntress: A tale of a Native woman on an epic quest.

• Author: Roberts, Hope
• Position: ALASKA NATIVE

When times are hard I tell myself, "Where there is a will, there is a way." I am a Tlingit-Gwich'in-Koyukon Alaska Native woman who owns a deep-sea fishing charter, Surreel Saltwaters. After twenty years in the Operating Engineers union, thanks to Local 3 in Hilo, Hawai'i, I have been built to work in an industry dominated by Caucasian males.

I have never felt accepted by many social arenas as a Native woman, and like my parents and their parents, I have been challenged.

My maternal grandfather was a child prisoner survivor who went to boarding school in Wrangell. My paternal grandfather passed from emphysema, which he contracted working as a laborer during the early pipeline days.

You can imagine how hard boarding school was on my maternal grandfather, a child under the age of 10, and the effect his experience had on my mother. Both my mother and grandfather succumbed to alcoholism, which led to cirrhosis of the liver.

Yet resilience is built in our DNA; where there is generational trauma there is also transformational grace.

I made myself accepted, I watched the people that I wanted to be like, and I have made myself into the person I wanted to be.

Divided from Culture

I was not afforded the opportunity to build a fish wheel with my grandfather or learn to smoke the fish into strips.

For years, I felt like my spirit was screaming to be on the coastal waters, and I did not know why. I had no idea that harvesting and learning to be a marine mammal huntress was embedded in my DNA memory. It is--I have never felt so at home before anywhere. Not when I harvested moose (with two little girls, one being a baby, in tow), not berry picking, not even fishing for salmon.

I was alive for the first time when I harvested my first sea otter, and even more so with my first harbor seal. The meat was the sweetest meat I had ever tasted, and the blubber was the best grease I had ever tasted as it melted in my mouth. I felt like my spirit, which always seemed to be a subconscious thing, was now conscious. It was everything I had been looking for.

I knew in my heart that there were more individuals who felt like me and I was going to find them.

The Business Transformation

I knew I was a businessperson when I was 8 years old. I started my first one based on hunger in a low-income apartment building in Fairbanks.

I used to play outside across the street from a grocery store called Market Basket. I saw that many people did their weekly grocery shopping on the...