Story last updated at 9/1/2010 - 12:10 pm
Last Saturday morning I joined a dozen people to watch Kirk Hardcastle fillet salmon at the Juneau Local Foods Festival. People took photographs, a few took notes; one man tried to stand nearly elbow-to-elbow with Kirk. "It's so great to watch a good filleter," someone said.
A few of the folks looked like tourists intrigued by their first glimpse of fish filleting, but most of the crowd was made up of locals, interested in learning how to fillet better ourselves.
All around the festival, at booth after booth, I saw vendors talking shop with the visitors. How to best grow garlic; the ins and outs of raising chickens and ducks; foraging techniques.
In this land of proud do-it-yourselfers, it's delightful when someone will help us learn how to do things ourselves.
Saturday evening I joined another crowd of Juneauites, this time packing Perseverance Theatre for the final public performance of Ishmael Hope's "Cedar House." Before beginning the show - in which Ishmael and Frank Katasse shared five Tlingit stories drawn from storytellers Robert Zuboff and Cyril George - Ishmael acknowledged the elders in the audience, then he acknowledged the students and teachers in the audience. Much of the discussion after the show was about how people could best be students of Native Alaskan culture and language.
The formal post-show discussion was short, but I left the theater energized by the thought of how much knowledge and wisdom exists in the hands and minds of our community members, and how many willing students and teachers there are.
I've mentioned this in columns around this time of year before, but I think it bears repeating: whether in school or on your own, fall is a great time to learn something new. And a few short hours at community events this weekend convinced me that for nearly anything you'd want to learn, there's someone around willing to teach you - or at least learn with you.
As the daylight dwindles, we start to trade long evenings running around outside for quiet retreats inside. Summer might be the time when we can get the most done, but fall and winter often provide more opportunities to contemplate the hows and whys of what we're doing. When we're not as focused on seizing the daylight or stockpiling Vitamin D, we can find more time to read, to discuss, to learn, to teach.
As we're planning for fall at the Capital City Weekly, we're working hard to learn as much as possible about what's going on in our communities so we can share it with our dear readers. We hope to be a comprehensive resource of community events throughout Southeast Alaska. We aim to print engaging feature stories about local people involved in interesting endeavors - starting a haiku stand or a roller derby league, to use two of this week's stories as examples.
We're always looking for ways to produce a better newspaper for all of our readers in Southeast Alaska. Please don't hesitate to contact us with any suggestions for things you'd like to see in these pages, stories you'd like to read, neighbors you'd like to learn about.
Katie Spielberger may be reached at katie.spielberger@capweek.com.
