Come for a short walk with me. You know, I really missed the snow this Halloween. Oh yeah, we had a little, the snow was up around my ankles but thats nothing compared to when I was a kid. By the time Halloween rolled around, way back when, the snow would be at the roof eaves. We would make tunnels, play fox and geese and build igloos to play house. We would build snow forts, and snow men, before it got so cold that the snow wouldn't stick together any more.

When I was in my twenties the snow along the highway was so deep it was like driving through a tunnel in some areas. Even though it's dark in the winter if your car lights hit a corner just right you could go snow blind. Thank goodness our dark isn't really as dark as it is down in the states and we still get to enjoy the Aury Bory.

I miss the musical tinkle of icicles falling off the roof when a good wind comes by. I guess I'm just going to have to buy some wind chimes, heh? I miss that hollow sound of walking on deep snow. The crunching that sounds like your walking on styrofoam. It's just gotten cold enough to have that sound back. It's alot easier watching out for moose if you're hiking, or crosscountry skiing, because you can hear them coming. I find alot more patches of rotten snow when I'm out walking now. Rotten snow is when it looks normal on top, but when you step on it your foot goes right through, and there's sometimes a mud puddle underneath.

Up here the global climate change isn't just a political issue it's a fact of life. If you want to see the real Alaska you'd best come up here soon. Our usual climate is just about gone and parts of our shore line are disappearing. i know that we as native people will have survivors of this disaster just as we always have in the thousands of years we've been here.

Our/my family should have seen this coming when my Uncle caught a hummingbird in his house on Little Diomede, way back in the 1970's. At the time we just thought it was an oddity, an aberation. An exotic little bird that had lost it's way. Now I think it was a portent of the future. Or, in the early 1980's when a ground hog a creature of the Great plains made it's nest in my yard in North Pole, or even a few years ago when a Polar bear had wandered 500 miles off course and ended up in the Fairbanks area.

Maybe the climate will go back to the way it was during Ekeuhnick's, and Aungayoukuksuk's, time. I just hope we don't grow body hair, like they had, that would just be to wierd. But, like Ekeuhnick we must strive to be helpers to our people. He prepared them for the coming of cold. Unlike him, we need to prepare ourselves for the coming of heat. we don't have an elder like Aungayoukuksuk telling anyone how the changes are going to effect the world around us, but we do have the scientists prognostications which are better than nothing at all.

It will be strange when all of the snow, permafrost, and glaciers are gone but that's how it was when we became intellectual human beings. The cold was good for our spiritual growth, and intellectual development. It taught us to be thinking human beings in order to survive. We once again have to encourage those skills in our next generations in order for them to survive as well. We've become lax in thier education. Not teaching them our native histories.

i lived outside for a few years, and they just see the climate change on a smaller scale, and don't believe that it is going to permanently effect thier lives. Therefore most of them don't seem to care one way or another. We are taught that we have a resposibility to the tribe, and whether we like it or not, during this time of global crisis the whole rest of the world are members of our tribe. We've tried to tell them and now thier scientists are warning them of disasters to come. i wonder if any will listen. Thier politicians sure don't seem to.