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JUNEAU - A few years ago Leilani Knight-McQueen was asked if she knew any Alaska Native students interested in internships in environmental sciences at the University of Alaska Southeast. At the time, Knight-McQueen, the environmental coordinator for the Central Council Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, couldn't name any local Native student ready to take an internship in environmental sciences. This bothered her, she said, especially since according to Southeast traditional tribal values, "It's a part of our responsibility to be stewards of the land, air and sea."

With this in mind, she and her colleagues wrote some grants. Last November, the Environmental Youth Leadership Team (EYLT) formed as a way to get Native youth interested in the environment through different channels, from science to media, and now boasts nine members.

"Our challenge," Knight-McQueen said, "is that they need to walk in both worlds."

The members of the leadership team are rising to the challenge, and Knight-McQueen can now proudly point to several young stewards who are already becoming leaders.

Many of these young leaders gathered with youth from Hoonah and Hydaburg at SAGA's Eagle Valley Center during the last weekend in June for Central Council's third annual Culture Camp. Based around the theme of water, activities included paddle making, canoeing, drum making, smokehouse making and salmon smoking.

One of the goals of the camp was to make connections between these activities and traditional values, to give youth voice to traditional values. "We're just setting seeds to have them ask the next questions," Knight-McQueen said.

At a traditional welcome ceremony Friday afternoon, leaders from the groups from Juneau, Hoonah and Hydaburg introduced their groups in Tlingit or Haida and then in English.

"It is good to see your faces," said Nahaan in a welcome on behalf of the Juneau group. "We welcome you here on this land, to participate in our culture, to help instill pride in our youth, to let the ancestors know we are here doing good work. Gunalchéesh."

Ray Paddock, one of the camp coordinators, joked that he was just a "glorified secretary" for the group, because the youth team did so much of the planning for the camp. Central Council had hosted youth culture camps in the past, but this year's emerged only because the EYLT group wanted to make it happen, he said.

How the agenda played out over the weekend surprised the adult organizers as well. The youth had planned for a hip-hop dance on Sunday night, Knight-McQueen wrote in an e-mail afterwards, "But what really happened by the end of camp was instead of the dance they ended up spending time around the fire doing Tlingit and Haida dance and songs and finishing their projects. ...This is what I dream of and can't plan for."

Immediately following the camp, some of youth and adult leaders headed to another event sponsored by Central Council's Native Lands & Resources department, the Southeast Environmental Conference.

The conference, held at the Vocational Training & Resource Center in Juneau, brought together representatives from tribal organizations, Native corporations, government agencies - and plenty of youth leaders.

On Thursday, Nicole George, one of the founding members of EYLT, spoke about the group's "Partners Against Plastic" initiative to reduce plastic bag use in Juneau by promoting reusable bags.

George's memories of life growing up in Angoon include collecting blueberries and smoking fish with her mother, experiences that resonated with stories of village life she'd been hearing elders tell over the last few days, she said.

But working as a courtesy clerk at Super Bear supermarket in Juneau as a teenager, using 20 or 30 bags for one customer's groceries, she started thinking about where those plastic bags would end up - "and I realized that's probably going to end up somewhere where it shouldn't be," she said.

"Today, we as a generation don't want to find plastic in our fish when we smoke it and give it to our elders," she told the group.

One of EYLT's ideas is to install drop boxes for reusable bags outside all the grocery stores in Juneau, so that shoppers can take bags to use for their shopping trip and then return them the next time they come to the store.

Elder Diane Olson, with the Douglas Indian Association, commented after George's presentation that in the old days everyone would bring their own dishes to eat out of at a memorial ku.eex', so there would never be any garbage at the end.

This kind of exchange of ideas, between elders who remember traditional practices and youth who will attempt to make differences in contemporary society, was one of the goals of both the culture camp and the conference.

"We know our elders aren't as familiar with Internet and campaigning and social media," Knight-McQueen said, "But we know our kids are very interested in that. And so with the combining of traditional knowledge and putting our kids together with elders, they're gaining that knowledge (and) they have the ability and interest in media (to share it)."

Another Southeast youth taking environmental action is the recent Yakutat High School graduate Maka Monture, a member of Alaska Youth for Environmental Action (AYEA), who recently received a prestigious Gates Millenium Scholarship. Her work on AYEA's statewide campaign promoting wild Alaska salmon even took her to Washington, D.C.

To the elders and adults in the room, Monture said, "I want to let you guys know as adults that there are youth out there that are fighting, there are youth out there that are literally giving up a portion of their lives and their time to fight for subsistence, to fight for land, to make a difference not only in this state but in Washington D.C., because we see what you guys fight for ... As long as we have your support and we can look up to you and learn from you, and you can teach us, we could possibly, and hopefully, be as effective and amazing as you. "

One of the elders Monture has learned from her whole life was sitting next to her at the table: her grandmother, revered Tlingit elder Elaine Abraham, the chair of the Alaska Native Science Commission, who over her life has made significant contributions to fields of health, education, linguistics and anthropology in the state.

Abraham discussed the importance traditional observations can play in western science, and the way that Western science can validate oral history - such as showing that Tlingit people have indeed been in Southeast Alaska for at least ten thousand years.

She encourages Alaska Native youth to study the science "that will validate their ancestors' history, and be our next anthropologists as well as archeologists and (scientists)."

Language is the heart of culture, Abraham said, "If I take the word 'environment' and I translate it into Tlingit there is no word for 'environment' there, but there is a center of life, of our land, that can be translated into 'environment.' You've got your air, your earth, you've got your animals, everything that makes you a person, as well as your related animals, that in our worldview are on par with us."

She said that when she discusses "environment" with non-Native groups, she often begins by making people look the word up in dictionaries. She worries that sometimes we make "too light" of the word.

"It's every speck of your life and the future," Abraham said. "It's what we breathe, it's what we eat, it's what we drink. And ... we pass it right on to the future of our children for years to come in our DNA."

Wayne Owen, director of the Alaska Forest Service's Wildlife, Fisheries, Ecology, Watershed and Subsistence program, also discussed the importance of cross-cultural communication, bringing up the word "subsistence" as a term that non-Natives sometimes interpret too narrowly.

"Subsistence is culture here," Owen said. "And I don't think most of the people I deal with in the Forest Service understand why that is so important. Because subsistence is not about food only. ... It's also about the interaction with the food and the interaction with the environment which food comes from. There's so much more that people from my culture often don't see or understand."

Owen mentioned several examples of networks to share traditional knowledge with government organizations, such as Alaska Traditional Knowledge and Native Foods Database (online at nativeknowledge.org) run by the EPA and National Science Foundation, which attempts to better understand food cultures across the U.S.

"Maybe in some places we've woken up to the fact that no one person or one group can know it all, that we're smarter together," he said.

Traditional knowledge has found forward-thinking application, he said, such as the Climate Adaptation Knowledge Exchange (cakex.org), which works to compile knowledge and strategies to help manage natural systems facing rapid climate change.

"Traditional knowledge is not about the past," Owen said. "It's as much about the future as it is about anything."

As the conference wrapped up Thursday afternoon, participants from high school students to elders talked about what they had gained from coming to the table together. Many mentioned how rare it was to have this type of open exchange between youth, elders, tribal leaders, educators and agency representatives.

We often build up walls between differing viewpoints, said Central Council Environmental Technician Howard Gray, who helped organize the EYLT last November. "This has really provided a place where all these walls disappear for a little bit," he said.

"We have lots of work to do," said Leilani Knight-Queen in closing, "But we have our elders speak to us who have come before and we have our youth behind us helping us along the way."