Vivian Faith Prescott is a fifth generation Alaskan of Sámi-American heritage born and raised in Wrangell, Alaska. She’s the founding member of Blue Canoe Writers in both Sitka and Wrangell with an emphasis on mentoring indigenous writers. Vivian also founded and facilitates a North American Sámi writers group on Facebook. In addition, along with her daughter, Vivian Yéilk’ Mork (T’akdeintaan), she co-hosts Planet Alaska, a popular Facebook page featuring Indigenous/Alaska Native issues and showcasing Alaska’s artists and writers. Vivian has an MFA from the University of Alaska Anchorage and a Ph.D. in Cross Cultural Studies from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee and is a recipient of the Jason Wenger Award for literary excellence, as well as a semi-finalist for the Joy Harjo Award. Her short stories and poetry have appeared in Drunken Boat, Cirque, Yellow Medicine Review, North American Review and other journals. She’s the author of one full length poetry collection, The Hide of My Tongue, and two chapbooks. Her short story collection is forthcoming from Boreal Books. Her website is http://www.vivianfaithprescott.com Vivian lives at her family’s fishcamp in Wrangell, a small island along Southeast Alaska’s Inside Passage.
Sami Diaspora
She is not a myth but a dark imagining. She is a dull murmur in the trees where the wind is praying its sorrowful primal story. But how does this story begin—with either the windswept tundra, or here on this bridge hovering over Sitka’s harbor. Beyond, there is no snowpack on the mountains this year. They say the world is melting. She knows how it feels to melt. She walks across the bridge to the coffee shop below. She stirs the black sky in her coffee. Her ancestors once stirred starlight. She opens up her laptop and searches for her anthropological self, her ancestral self, her historical self, her assimilated self. Skridfinn, Saami, Sámi, North Sámi, South Sámi, Mountain Sámi, Sea Sámi. Sometimes she is two seconds away from her people. Or 3,458 miles. Whichever is easier. Whichever fits into this global revolving hyper text markup language spin. Sitka, Alaska to Gáivuotna-Kåfjord, Norway: No Routes Found. Except she is a charged particle like the spirits in the aurora—she uses Google Earth. She is ever-present but appears and disappears, high altitude atomic oxygen colliding, turning red. She wonders how many grandmothers and aunties and cousins you can search for, back-and-forth in time, before the shoe bands of your world weaken. And below a woman stands alone, chanting in the morning’s depthsymmetry, sliding in and out of pitch, tightening her throat, her notes leaping up and down.