Alaska youth celebrate Indigenous culture with Native Youth Olympics

(27 Apr 2024)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Anchorage, Alaska - 26 April 2024
1. Group blanket toss
2. SOUNDBITE (English) Nicole Johnson, head official:
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"The Native Olympics is a competition of traditional games, games that our ancestors throughout the circumpolar north have been playing for millennia, games that helped keep them in shape. They use these games to help them build the skills that they needed to survive every single day. And we play these games today to help preserve our culture and our heritage, and to teach our youth how difficult life used to be, and to share our culture with everyone around us who wants to know more about our people."
3. Various of event
4. SOUNDBITE (English) Nicole Johnson, head official:
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"Today we started off with the scissor jump, which is a game where athletes jump off of their feet, take four steps in a particular order, and this symbolizes and demonstrates jumping from ice flow to ice flow to cross a river. Or if you're out on the north on the ocean ice jumping from ice floe to ice floe."
5. Various of scissor broad jump
6. Colton Paul, current world record holder in the event, performing scissor broad jump
7. SOUNDBITE (English) Nicole Johnson, head official:
"The next game we're doing is the Eskimo stick pull, also called the Inuit stick pole."
8. Two youths participating in stick pull
9. SOUNDBITE (English) Nicole Johnson, head official:
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"This game demonstrates and builds the skills hunters needed every day for pulling seals out of the water, up onto the ice. Athletes sit facing each other, and they hold a stick or a dowel that's 20 inches long and an inch and a quarter in diameter, and they have to pull the stick away from their opponent. Now they have to do this without jerking, twisting, or regripping. If they fall over, they lose, just like in real life, if are pulling a seal out of the water and you fell over, you would probably lose your seal or you could possibly lose yourself."
9. Various of stick pull
STORYLINE:
The athletes filling a huge gym in Anchorage, Alaska were ready to compete, cheering and stomping and high-fiving each other as they lined up for the chance to claim the state's top prize in their events.
But these teenagers were at the Native Youth Olympics, a statewide competition that attracts hundreds of Alaska Native athletes each year and pays tribute to the skills and techniques used by their ancestors to survive in the harsh polar climate.
Events at the competition that wraps up Saturday include a stick pull, meant to mimic holding onto a slippery seal as it fights to return to the water, and a modified, four-step broad jump that approximates leaping across ice floes on the frozen ocean.
For generations, Alaska Natives played these games to develop the skills they needed to become successful hunters - and survive - in an unforgiving climate.
Now, today's youth play “to help preserve our culture, our heritage, and to teach our youth how difficult life used to be and to share our culture with everyone around us who wants to know more about our people,” said Nicole Johnson, the head official for the event and one of Alaska’s most decorated Native athletes.
Johnson herself has won over 100 medals at Native Olympic competitions and for 29 years held the world record in the two-foot high kick, an event where athletes jump with both feet, kick a ball while keeping both feet even, and then land on both feet. Her record of 6-feet, 6-inches was broken in 2014.
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