[Female VO] Nestled in the heart of Appalachia, the University of Virginia's College at Wise is where students experience unique regional culture and the great outdoors.

UVA Wise, empowering students to learn and lead in their communities and the world.

♪♪ [Josh VO] Alaska.

People call it the last frontier, as if it were the final blank space on some old explorer's map.

A place tacked onto America only in 1959, late to the party, still half myth in the national imagination.

-Alaska is such a huge state.

And we have kind of five very distinct regions of the state.

[Josh VO] We grew up hearing that it's cold, dark, remote, an icebox at the edge of the world, populated by a single kind of people living a single kind of life.

But step into the real Alaska, and that mythology cracks like river ice in spring.

-You know, this world we live in is nothing like the Lower 48.

It's so different.

-And we have a saying up here, for those of us that are both Native and Caucasian, we have a saying.

It's learning to live in two worlds with one spirit.

And I just want to say, as Native people, we're an evolving culture.

We're not stagnant.

Our practices and our items are not museum pieces, [laughs] if you will.

[Josh VO] This place is crowded with human history, layered, ancient, and alive.

More than 200 Native cultures, each with its own language, its own memory of the land, its own story carried across thousands of years.

Their presence isn't a footnote.

It is the foundation.

And then came the newcomers, first in a frenzy of gold in the late 1800s, hungry and hopeful.

Chasing some shimmering promise buried in frozen ground.

-So we were put on the map in 1902 by a gold discovery just about eight miles north of here.

[Josh VO] Then again during World War II, and the long shadow of the post-war boom.

Builders, workers, wanderers creating new lives in a place that didn't promise much except hard work and big sky.

Fairbanks sits at the meeting point of all these worlds, a city shaped by migrations, temptations and long winters.

Where cultures don't just coexist, they collide, blend, and reinvent themselves.

In a land that seems empty on the map, you find a surprising truth.

Alaska is full.

Full of voices, full of histories, full of people who came here for wildly different reasons and stayed for reasons they can't always explain.

And that's why we're here, to listen, to look beyond the cliches, to catch a glimpse of what Alaska really is when the story gets quiet and the poetry rises to the surface.

♪♪ -It's not an easy place to live.

We have a harsh climate, but we have great community.

[Josh VO] They say the place you're from shapes you .

Maybe it defines you.

I've always thought you can't really understand yourself until you understand where you come from.

I'm Josh with PBS Appalachia.

In this series, I'm going from town to town, exploring the places people still call home, their hometowns.

From Appalachia to the rest of the country, I've found we share more than we think.

But it's the details, the food, the voices, the pride and traditions that make us different.

This isn't a story told from New York or LA.

It comes with roots embedded in Southwest Virginia and often overlooked, misunderstood corner of the map.

That perspective matters because the character of America doesn't just live in its big cities.

It's the small towns, the back roads, the kitchens and the bars where people gather.

That's the lens I bring to this journey because the character of America isn't written in headlines.

It's lived in neighborhoods, on porches, at kitchen tables.

And this season, we're pushing past borders into communities far from here, into new towns, new kitchens, new homes.

Searching for what home means here and everywhere.

♪♪ ♪♪ [Sharon] I'm the executive director of Dena'ina Qenaga.

And it's a Koyukon-Athabaskan word which means Our People Speak .

We have a elders mentoring elders culture camp every year in which our elders that know these traditional activities teach other elders that weren't able to learn those skills.

And there's about 65 elders that learn from each other.

When my mother was growing up, she wasn't allowed to speak her language.

She was beaten.

And so much so, she used to tell me and my sisters not to marry a Native person, that the white people were better.

And none of us did, though [laughs].

But it's that generational trauma.

You know they tried to take away our language, our dances, our culture.

People were sent away to boarding school and were abused horribly.

We had one elder that told us a story about-- and he's in his late 80s now.

He was sent away to boarding school.

And his mother was so excited for him because she thought he would be able to learn new things and be educated.

But when he was sent there, his hair was shaved off.

His clothes were burned in a bonfire.

And he was abused horribly.

And he never really spoke about it for a long time.

And so this resurgence of our culture is coming back, our languages, our dances.

People are not keeping it silent anymore.

They're talking about it.

And so we're trying to help here by doing this culture camp to help promote healing in a safe environment and learning traditional activities from one another.

-I think it's absolutely essential and critical to preserve your culture, revive it.

And then how do you pass that on to the next generation?

Is the next generation curious?

Is the next generation passionate about it?

Is it difficult?

The challenges with all of modernity just like encroaching at every angle, you know.

-Yeah, the youth want to learn.

They want to know these activities.

Because in addition to these activities, we always say our foundation for our culture is our values.

And those values include humor, storytelling, respect for others, everybody around us.

Treating each other with kindness, that sort of thing.

So that's our foundation as Native people, how we treat each other and how we treat other people.

I'm originally from a very small village in the Brooks Range above the Arctic Circle called Evansville.

When I was living there or growing up there, there was only about 60 people.

And the only way you can get into the community still to this day is by small airplane.

In the winter there is an ice road that you can use.

And that's how a lot of things get transported to there.

But now it's only 20 people that live in the village.

It was wonderful growing up in that small village because everybody knew each other.

I'm Iñupiaq Eskimo.

My mother was from the village of Noorvik.

[Josh VO] I learned that the term Eskimo is really just a generic European term for Native peoples living here.

But in addition to Sharon's tribe, I learned about the Athabaskan people who were a nomadic roaming tribe that moved from camp to camp depending on the season.

They passed on their culture and heritage through oral history and storytelling.

[Ann] You know this world we live in is nothing like the Lower 48.

It's so different.

You can tell me that, "Oh, I grew up in a small place."

It's different when you're raised in a remote village.

You cannot get in or out unless you fly in, fly out.

It was always a dream of mine to make sure that we were representing Athabaskan people, letting the world know who they are, you know more about their culture.

And we're not stereotyping all the whole Alaskan Natives there.

It's very... You have to be very respectful of all the other tribes.

-Yeah.

It's very diverse.

-It is.

-Yeah.

Very diverse.

-Eleven dialects in our region alone.

-Wow.

-Hard to learn.

It's hard to learn the language.

-Over 200 and over 220 tribes in Alaska.

And we all have our different dialects.

Even in interior Alaska, we have different dialects that are spoken.

There's the Gwich'in Indians, they're very strong there.

We have some tribes that are very strong that they're still very fluent in their languages and practices.

-Tell me more about that fiddle festival.

What goes on?

How many days does it go?

-It's a three-day event.

We provide a stage for Native people because there's not too many places you're going to find a stage for Native people.

It's like a grand old opera of keeping the culture that was started alive.

Miners and trappers came down the Yukon River.

Some of them remained in the villages, but they taught the local Natives how to play the fiddle and guitar was big.

[Josh VO] As I have these conversations with locals, I can't help but wonder why have so many people come here over the years?

And why do they end up staying?

Gold fever still clings here, decades past the last rush.

I met multi-generational gold miners whose eyes still glittered with the possibility of striking it rich.

The land remembers and they aren't letting go anytime soon.

♪♪ [Ilaura] Gold fever is real, and it causes booms and busts in all sorts of towns, including Fairbanks.

So we were put on the map in 1902 by a gold discovery just about eight miles north of here on Felix Pedro's, who discovered gold.

So it's on Pedro Creek now.

And that really put Fairbanks on the map.

This was just a town that people passed through you know.

It was nothing.

But that gold discovery really is what caused people to move here, to live here.

And Fairbanks is not an easy place to live.

So the people who did well, maybe they stayed.

But if you didn't, you were out of here.

It's very boom and bust because of our harsh climate.

And gold just has that allure where you will do anything.

You will suffer a long, cold dark winter for the chance to find something in the summertime.

Because you need it to be summertime to look in the dirt or else it's a solid, frozen desolate land.

So yeah, it's not an easy living.

And now with gold being-- it's literally at a record high today, passing $3,600 for just a spoonful of gold.

It's tripled in the 12 years we've been running our business, the value of gold.

So it's one of those things.

It's always had value.

And I think it always will.

I am co-owner, along with my sister Jordan, hence the name Gold Daughters.

We are sisters.

Our dad's a gold miner.

And that's how we came up with our name that genius.

[laughs] Yeah.

We actually grew up on a gold dredge that my dad restored.

He put it on the National Register of Historic Places.

And we grew up looking for gold that the old timers left behind in the tailing piles.

So we caught gold fever at a very young age, went off to college, and just missed home, missed each other wanted to start a business together.

And this was our first idea.

If we were to do any business in the world, what would we do?

And we came up with gold panning and just went for it.

And we've been doing it now for 12 years.

And we just-- we love it.

-Nobody had gold fever except for my sister.

-For your sister, okay.

-Yeah.

And she was kind of a black sheep.

She was an adventurer, a chaser of adventure.

She was very, very well-known in this community, both as a gold miner and as a political figure.

-So you said your dad is a gold miner?

-Yep.

-And was he like first generation, second generation?

Like where did this gold fever start in your family?

-It started with him, really.

My mom grew up here in Fairbanks, Alaska, moved here when she was seven.

Her dad got a job at the university up here as an art professor.

So she's been here ever since.

And my dad actually grew up in Florida.

-Oh, okay.

-Yeah.

He grew up on an old Indian burial ground, looking for like buried pottery and arrowheads and stuff like that.

And that, I think, just the mystery of what's in the dirt always stuck with him.

And he hitchhiked up here in the '70s when he was 19 years old and got his start on the pipeline.

So he got established then, but he's always just been enamored with buried treasure.

So it kind of came full circle for him.

And now he's the largest landowner in the state of Alaska with about 10,000 acres of mining claims.

-Really?

-Yeah.

-Really, wow.

-All of us kids, you would drop us off in the middle of nowhere and say, "Go find me some gold."

And that's where the gold fever really started for us.

-Tricia, are you from Fairbanks?

Where are you from originally?

-I'm originally from the Midwest.

And my then husband and our two preschool daughters and I drove up the Alaska Highway from Chicagoland in 1978, July 1978.

It was a clown car basically.

And we had 12 flat tires, -Oh, wow.

-A broken axle, and a broken tongue on this little homemade trailer that we were pulling with our household goods in it.

-Why did you guys come to Alaska in the clown car?

-In my book, I talk about the experience of it's like watching caribou from the air.

I was in a small plane and all these thousands, and then it goes down to here, here, here.

And up at the front, there's a single caribou, a juvenile sometimes, leading this mass of animals.

And he's unaware of the crush behind him.

But my aunt was the single caribou [chuckles] at the head of our herd.

And so we came up during pipeline.

-So help me to just the history, the time frame, like with the pipeline.

When was that?

What were the years or decades, roughly from what to-- -Right.

The action, the activity of the actual building wasn't until the '70s.

When they finished, the first barrel of oil went through in July 1977.

-Okay.

-So lo and behold, my dad's saying, "Come on up."

He was a realtor.

So he was selling us on Alaska.

"There's money laying all over the place.

-"Come on up."

-It's like gold fever.

-And there had been a year earlier.

-Uh-huh.

-But when we got here in '78, the oil had been running for a year.

People were leaving.

And the unemployment rate was 18% in Fairbanks.

So it was a long time until the two of us found jobs.

This is what we decided to do, so let's do it.

But it was really, really hard.

Our first year was brutal.

Weather-wise we were not used to the dark and the cold temperatures.

-Oh, yeah.

That's a whole different-- -Yeah.

-That's a whole different experience.

-Yeah, that makes you cry at times.

I think they invented seasonal affective disorder here.

-That's where they came up with it.

[laughs] -Yes.

[Josh VO] I'll admit I arrived in Fairbanks expecting isolation snowdrifts taller than buildings, a town that can make you question why you ever left home.

Instead, I got strip malls, gas stations and coffee shops with Wi-Fi.

Fairbanks is ordinary.

Or maybe it just wants you to think it is.

But then you leave the main drag, and Denali looms like a punch to the gut, massive, indifferent, impossible to ignore.

The people who've always lived here, the Athabaskans and other Indigenous communities, carry something heavier and older than ambition, villages full of art, song, knowledge, and survival.

They're not static.

They're evolving.

They're teaching.

They're alive in ways that make the ordinary streets of Fairbanks feel almost fragile by comparison.

Fairbanks isn't glamorous.

It doesn't pretend to be.

But it is unapologetically itself.

And under a sky alive with fire and a cold that creeps into your bones it left a mark I'll never forget.

♪♪ -Alaska is such a huge state.

And we have kind of five very distinct regions of the state.

And each region has their own history and cultures and weather and all of that.

So yeah, we're just like in an entirely different state here in Interior Alaska.

So in Fairbanks, in Interior Alaska, we're between two mountain ranges.

And it is typically very dry here.

And we have a very continental climate.

So it is very warm in the summer and very cold in the winter.

We're considered a semi-arid desert here.

So we only get-- -How much humidity are you-- -Yeah.

We only get about 13 inches of precipitation a year here.

-Oh, wow.

-Yeah.

So Tucson gets 11.

-The harsh climate makes it really quite good for farming.

Because in the summer, when the growing season is on, it's 22 hours of light.

-Yeah, right.

Okay.

And in the winter-- -Just bumper crops while you can get them.

-Oh, well, you can be like-- if you're growing greens, Asian greens, lettuce, you can cut it.

And the next week, it's ready for cutting again.

-Yeah.

-I was born in Chicago, grew up mostly in England.

My mother was English.

-Okay.

-Came back to Virginia, your home state for high school.

So I was in McLean right by D.C.

Went to college in the UP of Michigan, and then spent three years in West Africa with Peace Corps.

So this is our 25th year, and we have always been changing, morphing, and working with things.

So in the past we've had folks come from the Lower 48, what we call from outside.

You might hear that term here.

Outside means just not in Alaska, right?

So we've had folks come up, and then they go back to their places.

So we have friends in New England, Louisiana, Bellingham, all over the country who have learned some farming skills here and then gone back to their hometowns.

[Josh VO] Little did I know, as I stood there listening to Tom share stories about the waves of people who have visited his farm over the years to learn new skills and knowledge to take back home, that I would actually, in the same season, interview one of those people back in Virginia for our Wythe County episode.

The world truly is a much smaller place than we realize.

♪♪ -We were approached by some Indigenous leaders, two women from Dillingham and then also Nenana, which is just down the road from here.

And they said, "How can we help grow more food in the villages?"

-Wow.

Okay.

-So we now focus heavily on Indigenous agriculture.

And what we do there is we are hopefully cognizant of the past.

And we allow these folks to come onto the farm.

We do a training of trainers with Indigenous folks.

And then the next week, they teach their Indigenous peers.

So the farm becomes a catalyst for them.

And farming is not a, "I know this.

Done."

We are learning from these people at the same time.

So it's information transfer.

We have our local Fairbanks community.

But we also have our Alaska community, and community on many different levels.

-Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

-Diversity.

-So tell me a little bit about just the story.

How did you come to this point?

-Yeah.

Well, real quick, I could say that this is what happens to your life when you won't let your daughter have a pony.

-Oh.

-She loves-- she's a big animal lover.

The woman who lived here that we bought the house from had a horse.

She thought the house came with a horse.

Terribly disappointed that there was no horse.

I said, "Well, you've got to think of something more conducive to living here in the Arctic."

The university had a reindeer research program going at the time, and we were driving by there.

And it just sort of came like, "Oh, what about reindeer?"

And so she did two years of research and fundraising and got her first reindeer.

[Josh] So your daughter wanted a pony .

You thought you were tricking her, but you ended up with this.

-[laughs] -But you're giving tours.

But you mentioned something, too about being very much Alaskan.

[Jane] I am Alaskan through and through.

Sometimes I say kind of jokingly that I feel like a person has been in jail for too long and the outside world just doesn't work for me anymore.

So, you know, this is my home, and this is what I really love.

I think the thing about Fairbanks that makes Fairbanks, Fairbanks and why we're here because granted, it's not the most beautiful part of the state.

But the community here is pretty amazing.

[Josh VO] Every town has a name that carries weight.

In Fairbanks, it's Irene Sherman.

Burned, abused, raised as a ward of the territory, she lived on the streets with a revolver and a beer stein at her side.

They called her the Queen of Fairbanks.

Fairbanks didn't just see the damage.

They saw one of their own-- loud, generous, impossible to ignore.

True to the pioneer code, they fed her, paraded her, and now they're building her a statue.

To understand how a homeless woman became royalty here, I turned to author, Tricia Brown.

[Tricia] I saw her in '78.

My first full day as an Alaskan.

I was a brand new Alaskan.

-Okay.

-She's on her tricycle.

She was famous for this three-wheeled adult-sized tricycle.

And she was famous for being in the parade every year.

And she was a typical layered up, many layers of clothes with a parka on top, with like gay '90s garters on her sleeves, big flouncy like Easter bonnet.

And I'm going, "What is happening?

Why is she such a favored person?"

And my stepmother was standing behind me.

I was sitting on the curb.

She leaned over and said, "That's not a costume.

"That's our bag lady.

"She's our bag lady.

"Everybody loves her.

That's Irene."

And she continued to pedal by and you could hear the cheers as she went down the street.

-It's interesting that there's so much fanfare for her.

-Yeah, the thing is, they're old pioneer families that knew her story and knew her hardship and wanted hers to have every advantage they could offer.

I've written this in my book about the pioneer code.

And the pioneers of Alaska formed in 1904.

And in the early days, they donated money to a fund to help people that needed help where they could.

And so in Irene's case, the old pioneer families here still viewed the needs as need to be met.

It's not going to be some social agency.

If somebody needs help and it's going to do good, we're going to help.

I assert, I don't think there's another place or time where a person like Irene would have not only survived, but been celebrated.

♪♪ -It's home now, right?

So I've traveled all over the place, but I've spent now almost half my life here in Fairbanks.

It's not an easy place to live.

We have a harsh climate, but we have great community.

And the harsh climate builds that community too, right?

We have people from all walks of life working together.

So that's really important to me.

-Fairbanks is community.

It's filled with hardy folk.

You just can't survive here if you're kind of wimpy.

So a lot of hardy folk up here, and I appreciate that.

I think Fairbanks is filled with people who care about each other.

And Fairbanks is a fabulous place to see the aurora like the best in the world.

-Fairbanks?

The first thing that comes to mind is it's just home, which it probably is cheesy sounding, but it's the Golden Heart City to me.

And it always will be.

It will always have a special place in my heart.

It's got the best community, and I really just love it here and hope it's always home for me.

-Fairbanks is a place where it's real easy to live in the past, but my friends here drag me into the present, and I like that too.

-Fairbanks is my home, but it's like-- it reminds me of Galena in such a way that it's a large village compared to our small village.

It's where I work.

It's where I live, and it's where I raise my grandchildren.

I'm raising my two grandchildren.

So I've got a full life, and I'm happy.

And that's what's going to keep me going, keep me young.

-Fairbanks is a wonderful, fairly small community that is home to a diverse population and that, for the most part, celebrates that diversity.

And it's so unique because when you think of all the world, you know there's only so many Alaska Native people.

And that's what makes not just Fairbanks, but the state of Alaska so unique is that group of people that make it so unique and special.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ [Woman VO] Nestled in the heart of Appalachia, the University of Virginia's College at Wise is where students experience unique regional culture and the great outdoors.

UVA Wise, empowering students to learn and lead in their communities and the world.