LYNN M. CHURCH

“I am headed to Fairbanks, I am going back to school for business management. This is my last year, I am excited.

Right now I work with Qanirtuuq Inc. (Quinhagak Village Corporation); I have been Warren Jones’ assistant since ’09. We have done a lot of work to get it where it’s at right now. Basically, our strategy is “no bull shit, "just do the work and just get it done.” That’s been our motto, we don’t like mingling around, we just want to get the work done and see progress. That’s what we have been doing since ’09 and we have finally got it done at a local level and now we are ready to get into 8A contracting, maybe get some joint ventures, in the state and out of state, just to see our village corporation grow. We want to get the business to keep going for the next generation to take over. We want to get it done right the first time, so they won’t have to fix our mistakes. That way they can just go with progress.

In the Yup’ik culture, it says “The Soul resides in the bladder and it is reborn through its bones.” We wanted the same concept with us. Us to reside, but for our next generation to keep growing and growing and progressing. There are more people in this generation in Quinhagak starting to look into education, starting to do exchange programs. I know two of them went to Japan, they are there right now, they are just going to school and getting their degrees, because they know that in order to survive in the village or the real world, that’s what they’ve got to do. They’ve got to get out of their comfort zones and move forward. You can really see that with this generation. We have more enrollment at UAF now in different programs from culinary to computer science to becoming a doctor, like my sister in May.”—Lynn M. Church is Yup'ik, originally from Quinhagak, Alaska.