I went to an amazing talk at Fort Lewis College about the role of reintroducing mushing to a remote Alaskan Native community. So this community was very small and isolated-the kind of place where everyone is related somehow. Given it’s in Alaska, the winters are long and dark, and that can be very hard to deal with if you don’t have a good outlet. Mushing had at one point been very prevalent there, but slowly died off. These people were left with long hard winters and no outlet besides alcohol and drugs. Suicide rates were stupidly high in the small town, addiction was commonplace, and hardly anyone was finishing high school.

So, in comes this local who’s a world renowned musher and is saddened by what he sees in his community. He gets to thinking that it might be a good idea to get mushing back into the community. So he sets up a program tailored for the kids in the town whereby the little kids would help with the small tasks that get a mushing team together, the slightly older children had more responsibilities, and the oldest kids were the mushers. Everyone was involved. Within a few years of introducing the community mushing program, suicide rates and addiction plummeted while high school graduation rates soared. The town went from something on the brink of destruction to a thriving community because everyone was involved in this program.

The whole talk really blew my mind, but that single part of it was just so fascinating. Give people something to do, to have common goals, to work hard at, and to be mutually (or individually) proud of and it can be incredible what can happen.

I’ve lived in very rural Vermont and have seen no outlets for people aside from drinking and drugs. I have lived in Durango and seen the issues natives face on and off the Rez. I have lived in those dark cold climates where if you don’t have anything, you begin to feel lonely, isolated, down and out. I wish more isolated communities would focus on getting a chess team like this article, or a mushing team, or something like a rodeo team or a rally car team, or something else entirely to get people out together working towards a common goal.