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Transcript: Reverend Dr. Michael James Oleksa, Ph.D.

Identifying an individual as a provider to others is the highest compliment one can offer

[Oleksa:]
The highest compliment you can pay an Inuit or Yupik man is to say he’s a [in Native language], one who provides for others. And to keep that focus, I’m not here just for myself. I’m here to be a provider and to take care of and to offer my strength, my talents, to the other people of my community and not just my family, in fact. In a healthy community, young boys, of course, learn their hunting and fishing skills. But whenever they catch their first of any particular species, their first little ptarmigan, or it could be a rodent for that matter, or bird, or muskrat, or beaver, or seal, or moose—
[Lindberg:]
It’s a feast for somebody else.
[Oleksa:]
—he never eats any of it. It’s always given away to someone who can no longer hunt, so the boy becomes a provider to the elders in the community, preferably not a relative.