The Bethel Regional High School cafeteria was a buzz of activity on the Saturday afternoon of the Cama’i festival. Tables were wheeled across the floor and unfolded. Siblings Jeremiah and Lily West poured neon orange and yellow powder into ten-gallon jugs.
“We're making lemonade and Tang,” Jeremiah said, pouring in more powder.
“You need more,” Lily said, stirring the vats with a commercial whisk taller than her torso. “Okay, that's good.”
Their mom, Amanda West, spread huge pans of salmon with herby mayonnaise from a bowl.
In the oven, other pans of salmon were covered with Japanese barbecue sauce and brown sugar, or butter and lemon pepper. Some were baked bare, to be made into salmon spread.
“The pretty ones were the lemon pepper, because people are going to see those,” West said. “They are very visual. The ones that weren't so pretty, we marinated in Yoshida.”
West has helped with the dinner for three years. She said the dinner crew started planning and prep around a month ago. Her favorite part of the dinner – besides the moose soup – is the way it brings people together.
“It's wonderful seeing everybody come in and just people helping the Elders and the kids, and it's just nice seeing the whole community coming together and eating,” she said.
Around the corner, Dina Justice stood over the massive stainless steel sink.
“We've been cutting fish for three hours,” she said. “We cut up moose, and then we cut up the fish, and now I'm doing the dishes.”
It was her second year helping with the dinner.
“It's not like anything I've ever seen before, anywhere else, really,” Justice said.
She said it’s touching how the community honors Elders at the event.
“I work at the Long Term Care Center, the Elders’ home, and just seeing their faces and hearing their stories, that you know they've got a lot of good stories and a lot of history, that's just interesting to me, and it's amazing,” she said.
Christine Richman wheeled more tables into the center of the cafeteria. She was the organizer for the dinner, a job she said she got through word of mouth.
“I was just helping out with the concession stand last year, and I impressed people, and they asked me to come on board this year,” Richman said. Compared to the concession stand, which serves reindeer hot dogs, dino nuggets and nachos all weekend, she said the Native foods dinner is much more organized chaos.
“I totally lost count on the salmon, but last year, they fed 800 plus people,” she said.
Richman said the biggest element of the dinner is donations. Ninety percent of the food to feed the Elders, dancers, and festival attendees is donated by families and businesses in the region.
“They take a lot of pride in giving us what they have caught, what they've worked hard for, whether it's akutaq or it's a fried fish, or it's dried fish, they are giving of their stores to give back to the community, and that's the heart of this dinner,” she said.
This year, one family alone donated 50 sides of salmon.
“It has been an all day process to prep our fish for the meal,” Richman said. “We have a great beef tongue chili going. We're making a seal soup. We're making a fish head and fish egg soup. So we've got a lot of really cool things cooking in our kitchen.”
Richman said that as someone who isn’t as familiar with Indigenous foods, she relies on the other volunteers with more experience to help her figure out how to provide authentic, quality food, “because we want everybody to find something that they love here,” she said.
Ultimately, Richman said the dinner is a point of pride for the community.
“This is an event that allows everyone to come together and celebrate the culture, whether you're first learning about it or you've grown up in it,” Richman said.
A few hours later, it was dinnertime. Cama’i festival organizer Linda Curda welcomed the crowd of Elders, led by living treasures Yaayuk Angela Hunt and Caara Isidore Hunt of Kotlik.
Helpers held trays for Elders as they moved down the line of serving tables filled with salmon and moose, fried smelt, ptarmigan, dry fish, fish egg salad, salmon spread, and huge pans of fry bread and rolls.
The Hunts sat in the furthest corner of the cafeteria with their daughter. Speaking in Yugtun, they said they got a bit of everything that smelled good to them.
Miss Cama’i candidate Joeli Carlson bustled between tables, delivering salt and pepper, and cups of tea, coffee, lemonade, and Tang. She said she loves interacting with the Elders.
“I just love when they realize that I speak Yup’ik, because I don't really look like I'd be somebody who would be speaking Yup’ik,” Carlson said. “And then they realize that, ‘Oh, she does speak Yup’ik,’ and they start conversing with me in Yup’ik”
At a nearby table, Lucy Carl sat by herself. She’s originally from Kipnuk, but lives in Bethel with her daughter.
“I'm here enjoying my dinner,” Carl said. “There's moose soup, some kind of a fish soup, some kind of a, I don't know, a sourdough cake, akutaq, and brownies, and they're so yummy when you're hungry.”
Agnes Phillips sat a couple of tables over.
“We like the salmonberry akutaq, and the blueberry akutaq with white fish, and I like the fish dip and chili,” Phillips said, pointing around the paper plates and bowls assembled on her tray.
“My granddaughter Ayaprun is in eighth grade Yup’ik immersion,” Phillips added. “So we enjoyed their dancing and pride in our culture.”
As more and more Elders, then dancers, then community members were fed, the dancing in the gymnasium continued, going until the wee hours of the night, only to pick back up in the morning. Back in the cafeteria, the only thing left to do was donate what remained to the community.
