Heather Douville

“Until I was in my late twenties, hunting was something my brother and my dad did. I moved away after high school, for college. I was gone ten years. One of the reasons I moved back was because anywhere else I lived, I missed the connection I had to the people, the land, and my culture. My dad took me hunting when I was 28, in 2014, and I got my first deer. Ever since then, it’s just something I’ve loved to do — hunting, and gathering your own food, and being able to provide for yourself. I feel like I missed out on so much in the ten years I was gone.

Through doing things like that, my dad and I became very close. Now he’s my best friend. I’ll never stop learning from him. When we get a deer, we make a backpack out of it and carry it out whole. We save the bones and make deer bone soup — one of my favorite meals. We use the hide for moccasins. And we try to use every single part of the animal that we harvest. My dad said his grandma would tell him to take the pancreas and bury it in the earth, where Raven can’t get it. She told my dad ‘If you do this, you’ll always get more deer.’ She was fluent in Tlingit. Doing that is a way of connecting to our ancestors, and to her.

When we walk through the woods we’ll see old pulls on trees from our People, who gathered cedar bark hundreds of years ago. The trees are still there, alive. Or you’ll come across an old-growth tree with adze marks chipped into it, to see if it’s of the quality to make a canoe. If it wasn’t, they left it, so it could continue to grow.

We don’t need to log old growth in order to sustain our lives here. Our People stewarded these lands for tens of thousands of years. You can’t even tell that they were here unless you see the canoe runs on the beach. And in one lifetime, the forest has been completely devastated. The aftermath is what we’re experiencing today. Depressed salmon runs. Less deer. Climate change, It's harder to get food and there are landslides from clearcutting. The stress and impact that devastation causes and has on our communities and our people — it’s just beginning.”

—Heather Douville, “Kootink” of the Shank’weidi clan,  Craig, Alaska