MINNIE MORRIS

I was born in Noorvik on December 25, 1927. I believe I was born on the 23rd, but when they made my birth certificate in Juneau, they put the 25th. It was good growing up here. There was a lot of people here that moved from different places. A lot of them went back to their ancestor’s camps, like Kivalina. When my mom and papa were living way up river in the Kobuk area, they didn’t like it up there because the word of God wasn’t out. They heard about the word of God, and the school put in electric lights. They decided to move down here. They had so many kids, but I was the youngest one. My mom said there were fourteen of us all together. Growing up, it wasn’t easy for the people here. The old people had little income, no jobs. Little by little, the stores opened. My husband worked at the store, once he was out of the army. There was still a lot of fur that they would trap. Once they would get fox, that was the big income they would receive. That really helped for us people. They would get wood and hunt with dog teams beyond the mountains. We wouldn’t say it was hard, because we were kids and young. — Minnie Morris is Inupiaq and lives in Noorvik, Alaska.