Museum manager talks about her year in Alaska

Lynn Atkins/The Weekly Vista Sarah Benson, the manager of the Museum of Native American History in Bentonville, spoke about Alaska to participants in the library Summer Reading Program on Thursday.
Lynn Atkins/The Weekly Vista Sarah Benson, the manager of the Museum of Native American History in Bentonville, spoke about Alaska to participants in the library Summer Reading Program on Thursday.

Sarah Benson, the manager of the museum of Native American History in Bentonville, spent a year working with the native population of Alaska and she's happy to talk about it. She presented at the Bella Vista Library as part of the Summer Reading program.

Some of her audience were too young to really appreciate her story of native elders fainting when the temperature hit 75 degrees. Children in Alaska were playing around the water when it was 20 degrees and windy, she said.

Benson, who lived in Anchorage, traveled in small planes, called air taxis, to northern villages. There are no roads to many of those villages, but lots of planes travel between them picking people up and dropping things off, she said. Often the villages have no running water, she said. And there are very few cars. People drive four-wheelers and snowmobiles in the northern villages.

Anchorage is a big city, she explained, and has all the conveniences of the 21st century, but it's an expensive place to live, she said. The youngsters in the audience weren't impressed, but their parents were.

She also had the chance to watch the start of the Iditarod and the annual fur auction that goes along with the race. But temperatures have been warm in recent years and snow had to be imported into Anchorage for the event.

One good thing about Alaska, she said, is that there are no spiders, flies or ticks. There are, however, mosquitoes that get so big, they are referred to as a state bird.

General News on 06/21/2017