High school students Ethan Lincoln, Kaylee King and Jamin Crow’s podcast about their livelihood experiences is a finalist in the NPR Student Podcast Challenge. The students are pictured here at the KYUK radio station location in Bethel, Alaska. Katie Basile / KYUK hide caption
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Katie Basile / KYUK
High school students Ethan Lincoln, Kaylee King and Jamin Crow’s podcast about their livelihood experiences is a finalist in the NPR Student Podcast Challenge. The students are pictured here at the KYUK radio station location in Bethel, Alaska.
Katie Basile / KYUK
Jamin Crow waited in silence for the bull elk to turn and look at him. In the cold, the teenager was standing in an open meadow, his gun resting on a branch. He waited and waited and waited.
Then the moose turned and his brother started screaming, “Shoot!” If Crow didn’t shoot, his brother would. So Crow took a deep breath and pulled the trigger.
“Your ears are ringing after the shot. And I look at my brother and he gives me the happiest look I’ve ever seen,” he says. “At that moment everything is perfect … you know you have achieved your goal.”
Crow lives in Bethel, in the remote Yukon Delta region of Alaska. His family has been subsistence hunting for generations to get food on the table. The process hasn’t changed much, other than the Crows now using motor boats and snowmobiles to get to their elk camp, which serves as a home base for hunting trips.
“The food is very expensive here. You have to ship everything, ”says Crow. “We don’t just go out for the antlers. We don’t look for trophies, we don’t hunt for something big. We look for meat to feed our families.”
Crow is one of three Alaskan Native students, along with Kaylee King and Ethan Lincoln, to podcast their hunting tradition. The students come from different cities, but got to know each other as interns at the NPR member station WUKY in their senior year of high school. Shortly before she graduated last spring, her podcast was selected as a finalist in this year’s NPR Student Podcast Challenge.
Ethan Lincoln, Kaylee King, and Jamin Crow. The three students say the hunt helped them break through the isolation of the pandemic when their schools and many other activities such as sports closed due to COVID-19. Katie Basile / KYUK hide caption
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Katie Basile / KYUK
The three students say the hunt helped them break through the isolation of the pandemic when their schools and many other activities such as sports closed due to COVID-19.
On the podcast, Crow went hunting with his 17-year-old brother Peter, but sometimes the whole family goes out, including his father and grandmother. King and Lincoln – who are cousins - also go hunting with their families.
“Everyone goes hunting these days. Fathers take their daughters with them, ”says Crow. “It doesn’t matter what gender you are.”
COVID-19 didn’t hit Bethel until August 2020 – when people started traveling to and from other cities. The virus spread quickly and closed schools until March this year. Meanwhile, King’s village of about 250 people managed to get away with very few cases and was allowed to finish high school in person; she was the only high school graduate in her town that year.
The students explain that as time goes on, fewer and fewer people hunt for existence. King in particular feels pressured to keep the traditions alive.
“It really makes me sad because the way we used to do things is so different than it is today,” says King. “Our language too [Cup’ig] is slowly fading. “
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Ethan Lincoln, 17, fishes for king salmon and red salmon with his cousin Avery Tulik in Kangirlvar Bay, Alaska.
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![A day's catch of king salmon and sockeye salmon can provide Lincoln's family with food for the winter.]()
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A day’s catch of king salmon and sockeye salmon can provide Lincoln’s family with food for the winter.
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Jamin Crow, 18, right, with his brother, father and grandmother (Peter Crow, Jack Crow and Lucy Crow) and a moose they caught that day. The meat will feed her family for four to six months.
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![Kaylee King, 18, poses with a musk ox after a day of hunting on Nunivak Island, Alaska. The musk ox will provide food for her family for the next year.]()
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Kaylee King, 18, poses with a musk ox after a day of hunting on Nunivak Island, Alaska. The musk ox will provide food for her family for the next year.
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The sun rises over Mekoryuk, Alaska.
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For the pupils, the hunting practice enables contact with older generations.
“Whenever I go hunting with my grandma, I always hear stories from the past, when my father was still a child and he went hunting or my late grandpa [and] how he would just take in the family, “says Crow.
He sees his peers like King practicing cultural dances, speaking the language, and hunting, and he hopes the traditions he grew up with will endure. He already knows that one day he would like to share the hunting experience with his own children.
“If we keep this pace our younger generation can pick it up again because we’re proud of our culture and we love where we come from and we don’t want it to fade.”
Sneha Dey is an intern at NPR’s Education Desk.
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