Apay'u Moore

“In 2005, 3 years after graduating, a Dillingham community member and business owner dropped this challenge and called me up and said, ‘Hey I know you’re an artist, and I want you to paint me this mural.’ I thought, ‘I don’t even know what a mural is, man. What are you talking about?’ And he said, ‘It’s just a bigger version of a painting, you could do it really easily. Maybe it could say Welcome to Dillingham.’ And then he said, ‘Everyone is going to want one of these, you just wait and see.’ He paid me to create the first public mural that I’ve ever done, on Bristol Express.

By the time the mural came into play, I finally started realizing that there was a whole big world around me, outside of Bristol Bay, and I was about to tap into this revelation of how special it was here. But there was heaviness with the idea of living here forever, and stigma for people who stay behind — the whole small town idea. If you don’t escape your small town, then you are a loser. The fear of being a loser, and following your heart; it was a contradiction. I love being here, but at the same time I don’t want to be a loser. So should I leave or should I stay? It was an inner struggle...

For college I ended up in Durango, Colorado, and that was about the time that Pebble started making aggressive moves and catching the eyes and ears of young people looking at life to decide what we were going to do. It was so absurd to hear— we don’t mine in Bristol Bay! I remember reading about what large scale mineral extraction was, and just being punched in the gut with absurdity, thinking this can’t even be reality. And that really drove the spark for activism.

In this time period where we were also writing college reports, I was using those college assignments as reasons to dive deep into the Pebble Mine. For my college assignments within the art track there was an art show that I had to complete. Those were my very first paintings specifically directed at the horror I felt with the threat of the Pebble Mine and reaching deep to decide what it was that I love about Bristol Bay. 

I decided then that loving Bristol Bay didn’t define me as a loser; loving Bristol Bay defined me as a confident person that could see a special thing when I saw it.”

— Apay’u Moore, Yup’ik Artist-Activist

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