Well… It’s my last week in the office, again. We’ll see if this time it sticks. Things are still a
bit up in the air with my next semester, but I hope I’ll be able to make it back up to the Hill. In the meantime, I’ve been looking forward to the winter break. I’ve been feeling a building need to get back home. To get back to the mountains, to the snow. To my family. As I usually feel in D.C. towards the middle of December, I miss the winter. I miss the cold. Actual cold, not just the windy “cold” that gets everybody bundled up here. As things are now, I feel like I can’t even listen to Christmas music. There isn’t an ounce of snow on the ground, nor a bit of frost on the sickly, ochre and umber colored grass. The land feels more barren and dead than the dynamism of Alaska’s winter snowscape. In the midst of the pandemic, the differences between here and home feel greater than ever. I feel a deep need to go back. That being said, I leave the Senate this time with my heart already home. I take with me many great experiences, and a lot of reading material. You see, after a call I had with Kate earlier this week, she sent me reams of documents focused solely on the Chehalis v. Mnuchin case I wrote about a while back. Motions from the parties involved in the case, the decision from the district court, and more were all sent to me in consecutive emails at the very end of my last day. Knowing that printing the documents at my university or at home would cost me a fair amount of money, I printed every document I could before I left. Last I saw, I scheduled over 600 pages to be printed in the last half hour before I headed out. I still have to three hole punch the papers together and aggregate them all into a binder, but I should have a fair amount of reading material for my winter break. We’ll see if I actually get to reading it by the time break is over, but I’m grateful to have more information about a case that has captivated me so much over this past semester. Even if I don’t return to the Senate next semester, I hope I can still keep up with important events like this which may impact our Alaska Native communities. For now though? I’ve got a plane to catch, and plenty of reading to do.
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This week, I spent a couple of hours talking with a class from West Anchorage High School,
my alma mater. Invited back by my senior literature teacher, Mrs. Tinker, I talked with a group of high school teachers about my path from high school through college. In so doing, I flashed back to how I was finishing high school. The worries and stressors I had, as well as the focuses and ideals I held. Charting the path back from now to then, I was amazed at how much I’ve grown. Not only physically (growing from 6’1” to 6’3”), but also characteristically. I’m less shy now than I was then, more responsible than I was, and more sure of myself and my capabilities than I ever was in high school. I also feel more sure of what I want to do and where I want to be than I ever was in high school. Back then, I thought I wanted to do something government or policy related, maybe internationally, working with anybody from Congress to the World Bank. At the time, I was eager to get out of Alaska and not too sure if I would come back. Now, working in the Senate and in my third (and hopefully final) year of college at American University, I have a much smaller, well defined focus. I want to go into federal Indian law. I want to be a lawyer and potentially a litigator. I hope to get involved with the creation and implementation of federal Indian policy, and want to get to know the levers of power within politics. Bridging my mixed identity as both an Alaska Native and American Indian man, I want to reform policies concerning all Indigenous communities – particularly as it pertains to increased tribal sovereignty concerning issues of public safety. I solidly feel I know what I want to do, and the way to get to a place where I can actually do it. It’s a remarkable feeling. Talking with the class, I hoped to provide them with some of the building blocks I’ve used to get where I am now. I passed along advice from my dad concerning problems that may come up in life and how to get through them. Advice I gained from my physics class about how to move forward when you don’t know what to do. And how a universal truth to life is that everyone, even the most seemingly implacable person, doesn’t have it all figured out. How we’re all working and learning together as a collective. Fielding their questions, I reminded them to have faith in themselves, and confidence in their abilities. I encouraged them to take chances, and trust their instincts. And most of all, I encouraged them to ask every question they had, no matter how simple it may seem. At the end of it all, I affirmed my belief in their potential, thinking back to my own. Knowing that I never believed I would make it this far, but believed I had the skills to. Thankful as always that along the way I had people who supported me, teachers who believed in me, and opportunities offered to me. |
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Photo used under Creative Commons from Mike Juvrud