College Gate Elementary School students now have about 70 new classmates. Their families were forced to move to Anchorage after last month's storm ravaged their homes and communities.
Most of them come from Kipnuk and Kwigillingok, Western Alaska communities where the tundra seems as vast as the ocean — compared to the mountains, trees, and tall buildings that crowd the Anchorage landscape.
But some of the new students say their new school still feels warm and familiar.
A good fit for Native families
On a recent weekday, the morning at College Gate started just as it did back home, with the Pledge of Allegiance, recited in the Yup'ik language, or Yugtun.
When College Gate began its Yup'ik immersion program eight years ago, it had just one kindergarten class and added a new grade every year. Now it's a tight-knit family that just got bigger. And you won't hear anyone here at College Gate complain.
"College Gate is ready," said Darrell Berntsen, the school principal. "Our community is ready, willing, and able to step up."
Berntsen said the plan to invite children, relocated from Yup'ik speaking villages to College Gate, was hatched during the Alaska Federation of Natives Convention with complete support from the Anchorage School District.
Berntsen is Supiaq, originally from Old Harbor on Kodiak Island. He said as soon as families arrived at shelters in Anchorage, he began to visit them to find out what their needs were.
How disasters disrupt learning
The Anchorage School District has a long history of helping communities struck by disaster, Berntsen said. In fact, he grew up hearing stories about how Old Harbor families sheltered in Anchorage after they lost their homes in the 1964 earthquake.
"My mother actually stayed on an Airport Heights floor when my community was evacuated after the tidal wave took out all of our buildings," Berntsen said.
The only building that survived the tsunami was the village's Russian Orthodox Church, which still stands today, the center of a fishing community that was rebuilt after the earthquake.
Berntsen said he knows well the history of how natural disasters and epidemics in Alaska have forced Native communities to relocate — and in the process, have lost their Indigenous languages. Only in recent years has Old Harbor been able to revive its Supiaq language and culture.
He hopes College Gate, with its Yup'ik language immersion program, can help communities like Kipnuk and Kwillingok keep their culture as they recover from the disaster.
"We're all cougars now"
"It'll be easy for us to bring our Native way to the people," Berntsen said. "It's tough for these people, who went through so much trauma, to be dealing with the Western response to this incident."
"We have a very strong Native community here at College Gate," Berntsen said, "and we're going to do our very best to comfort them."
As Berntsen stood by a big sign in the hallway welcoming the new students, he pointed to the mascot above it. "We're all cougars now," he said.
Berntsen said his entire staff has stepped up, including Lorina Warren, a teacher who is coming out of retirement to help absorb the new students.
"If the Yup'ik program wasn't here, to me, they would be a little bit more overwhelmed," said Warren, who helped to found the immersion program. She was one of the first in the nation to teach an Indigenous language at an urban school.
"Seeing other kids that are also Yup'ik, or Native, and hearing them be taught in Yugtun eases them just a tiny bit."
Four teachers and one teaching assistant from the Lower Kuskokwim School District have joined the team, so Warren and other staffers at College Gate will be able to give the children more support.
Warren said although Anchorage is bigger, the children are more restricted.
"Children are now in a space where they cannot roam free anymore. I can see that they want to, but it's hard in the city," Warren said.
Staff watchful for signs of trauma
In many ways, counselors say the kids seem better able to adapt than their parents. But Tracy Frost, the school nurse, said sometimes the challenges the children face catch her by surprise, like during a vision screening, when she told a little girl she needed glasses.
"She was fluently talking in Yup'ik, telling me that, with a smile on her face too, that her glasses are in Kipnuk," Frost said. "They probably were floating away, because her home floated away. She was happy that we were going to help her get some glasses."
Frost is originally from Togiak, a Yup'ik community in Bristol Bay, so she understands how vulnerable the children are now. She said there have been some meltdowns — a boy overwhelmed by home sickness, and another whose health has been affected by the change in diet. She worries about the lack of high-protein wild foods like fish and seal meat, which the children no longer have access to.
The school, Frost said, does one important thing for the children. With its familiar culture, it's helped to restore some of the routines of daily life.
"When you are rooted in your culture, you are more grounded," Frost said.
Children find comfort in each other
It's hard to feel grounded when you've lost everything like Ellyne Aliralria, a fifth grader from Kipnuk.
"I just felt like my house moved to the ocean," said Ellyne, who was inside the house with her family when the flood carried it off to a spot that was about 3 miles away.
"The house spinned really fast. And we were like going down to the river," Ellyne said. "We stopped. We hit something really hard. Two times. And my living room window broke."
It's a nightmare that Ellyne said her new friends at the school are helping her to forget — friends like Lilly Lowen.
"After something so big happening, they're still so cheerful, and they're so friendly. They're just so fun to be around," Lilly said. "I'm really glad they're here."
Lilly said this experience has been an opportunity to learn about something bigger than yourself.
"It makes me feel like I could be doing more to help, even though I'm a kid," Lilly said.
But simply being a kid may be a bigger help than Lilly realizes. Her friendship is helping students like Ellyne put the disaster behind them as they share jokes and play games like Boop, a form of nose tag.
In Boop, you attempt to tap another kid on the nose, who tries hard to dodge you. But when your finger finds the target, you cry out, "Boop!" Then, they're it.
Add a few pig snorts into the mix, and it's enough to get a real giggle-fest going among Lilly and her friends. And that includes another fifth grader, Rayann Martin.
Rayann said it was hard to leave Kipnuk. Her house didn't float away, but her neighbors' did — replaced by a jumbled mess of other buildings.
Before her family was evacuated from Kipnuk, Rayann looked out across her water-logged village. "Every time I looked at the places where I had fun playing, I start to see the memories I had there," she said, "Sometimes, I start to cry."
Rayann said at College Gate, she found out she could laugh and play again, and make new memories.
