Finally Some Answers!

Before I forget, there were a couple questions asked of me in comments the past few days that I haven’t answered yet.

I had mentioned that alcohol was illegal here and Tee asked if it was in the entire state of Alaska or just my community. Alcohol is not illegal in the entire state. There are a lot of social issues that arise from the over-use of alcohol, such as fetal alcohol syndrome and suicide, so many rural communities in Alaska choose to “attempt” to regulate the import of alcohol. There are communities who decide to be dry (having alcohol and its consumption completely illegal), damp (allowing alcohol to be imported but not sold), or wet (having the sale and consumption of alcohol legal).

I put attempt in quotes because regulation doesn’t always work. We are a dry community. We have been from day one. So even if you are of legal drinking age, you are still breaking the law by consuming alcohol while on the island. Yet we have a bootlegger almost on every block, people getting arrested every weekend for driving while intoxicated, and paranoid people “throwing away the cap” and trying to drink before getting caught. People don’t know how to drink socially here because they’re always in a rush to get rid of the evidence. I don’t know that I’m for legalizing alcohol, but outlawing it hasn’t worked.

On a totally unrelated subject, I mentioned that Mt. Edgecumbe was coming here for basketball and Connie Marie asked if we had to go to high school at boarding schools back in the day. I don’t remember the year our high school was built, but there was a time when the schools here only went up to 8th grade. If you wanted to continue on, not every one did, you had to leave home and go to boarding school.

A lot of people, my dad included, went to Mt. Edgecumbe. It used to be a strictly native school where students from rural communities throughout Alaska went to school. It is still predominantly native, but I don’t know if the policies are as strict as they once were. My dad went to Mt. Edgecumbe for his freshman, sophomore, and junior years of high school. By the time he was a senior, they had built a school here so he was able to move back home. When the school year started, however, most of his friends were juniors. I guess schools weren’t as quick back then at transferring records and such. My dad told the school here that he was a junior. He got through the whole first quarter before the school realized that he should have been a senior. By then they figured he was too far in to the year to catch up with his classmates so he was allowed to repeat his entire junior year. My dad had 5 years of high school and it was totally his own choice!

Well ladies, I’m sorry it took so long for me to answer your questions. Does anyone else have a question for me?