Leaving, staying or belonging: exploring the relationship between formal education, youth mobility and community resilience in rural Alaska

ABSTRACT

Rural Alaskan youth are encouraged to pursue higher education in order to enhance individual and community resilience. However, the dwindling number of youth that return to their home communities after attending post-secondary education is a concern. In the context of Native communities, some argue that a university degree has little value and prevents the youth from returning. At face value, this presents a dilemma in which rural Alaska Native youth must choose between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ ways of life – between staying or leaving. However, this process is more complex than can be understood from these dichotomies. This paper presents research done with an Alaska Native community (2011–2012), focusing on the role of youth in community resilience. Rather than the question of staying or leaving, maintaining a connection to the community is the main driver of youth mobility. The village does not try to control the pathways of its youth but works to instill a feeling of belonging in the youth by involving them in community planning and guaranteeing jobs and housing. By actively shaping its institutions and linking individual ambition with community well-being, the community is able to transform otherwise challenging conditions into sources of empowerment and resilience.

KEYWORDS:

• Youth mobility
• formal education
• sense of belonging
• community resilience
• rural Alaska

Acknowledgements

My deepest thanks to the community of Igiugig for collaborating with me on this research. I am also grateful to my former advisor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, William Schneider, and my current advisor at the University of Oslo, Karen O’Brien, for insightful comments. Finally, thanks also to the anonymous reviewer and editor of Polar Geography for valuable comments and suggestions. This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In 2015, some rural Alaskan boroughs had as high as 32.5% of their populations living under the poverty line, while the state average was 10.3% (United States Census Bureau, 2016). However, see Berman and Reamey (2016) for a critical discussion of the calculation of poverty in Alaska.

2. While the UN defines ‘youth’ as individuals between 15 and 24, other definitions have an upper limit of 32 and 35 (United Nations, n.d.). For the purpose of this research, the youth category was defined based on the cultural context and individual relationships between residents.

3. The reason for this dissonance is that some Elders and adults were interviewed together and one youth was interviewed twice.