Marie Rexford, 2016

I’m wondering where these are gonna go. She’s not cutting them up for no reason. And either she’s cutting it up for herself and her family to put into smaller bags to cache away to have throughout the year, or she’s putting it all up to bring to a celebration.

Uvaŋa Qannik. Utqiaġviŋmiuguruŋa. Aŋayukaaqak Richard-lu Arlene-lu Glenn.

I’m Alice Qannik Glenn. I was born and raised in Barrow or Utqiaġvik. My parents are Richard and Arlene Glenn. Savaktuŋa Rasmuson Foundation-mi. So I work at Rasmuson Foundation right now as a Program Fellow.

So this is an image called Marie Rexford taken by Brian Adams. And it’s a photo of Marie. I think she’s standing in front of her house in what looks like to be winter with little squares of maktak urrounding her on the snow. And it’s a lot. It’s a lot of maktak. And they look like perfectly little cut squares. And she’s holding, I think, driftwood—maybe to separate the pieces. It looks chilly but she’s wearing a parka. She’s ready. She’s got mittens on. She’s got a really endearing look on her face.

When I see this food, it does evoke a sense of celebration for two reasons. I think the first is hard work. Like, the relationship between hard work cus you could see all of these squares.

We were cutting up a huge box, like one of those boxes in the back there. It was filled with maktak to the top and so my sister and my mom and I—we were spending all afternoon cutting up the maktak. And I was like, man, Patuk. My sister—her name is Patuk. How small do we have to cut up the pieces? And she said, think of how small you would want to have the maktak cut up into pieces. And she also said, we have to think of our elders too, who might not have all their teeth so you need to have the pieces cut up for them to comfortably chew as well. So that’s the first thing that I associate with the food is I could see that took a lot of time.

We have various cultural, seasonal celebrations throughout the year and the first one that it makes me think of when I see this much food in one place, Iñupiaq food, is Nalukataq. Nalukataq is the whale harvest festival that’s done during the summer. Most people associate Nalukataq with the blanket toss. But what I really think Nalukataq is about is the food, is sharing of the food and the resources from the successful whale hunt. And so, there’s this idea hard work, sharing, celebrating, and I think nourishment. Our traditional foods are so healthy for us.