RAYMOND LEE JR.

“I was born in Kotzebue and raised in Buckland. All my life, I lived here and I don’t think I will ever move away, only if I have too. I am a subsistence hunter and food gatherer. I eat anything and everything. Whatever you put in front of me, I will eat it, unless it’s really fermented. My dad and mom had eight kids, six boys and two girls and I myself, have five girls and three boys, so I had eight like my mom and dad. I also have 10 grandchildren. That’s a lot of mouths to feed. I love doing what I do, hunt, prepare food and share. I do a lot of bartering. Even for socks. I work on a lot projects for the Northwest Housing Authority, for Kotzebue, they finally moved me up to carpentry worker. I also just worked on a project for the Northwest Arctic Borough on the Subsistence Mapping Project as a coordinator for Buckland and Deering . I also helped them on Noorvik and Selawik when their coordinators quit. It was really good to visit the elders in the NANA [Regional Corporation] region. We were gathering important ecological information, marking where multiple people do subsistence gathering. So in the future, we protect the subsistence areas where people gather food. It’s really important, you know. I learned a lot from it and I think my life changed when I got the Hunter Fisher Award at AFN (Alaska Federation of Natives) in 2010.” — Raymond Lee Jr. is Inupiaq and lives in Buckland, Alaska.