Growing up in a village of 50 people for the first thirteen years of my life was quite the experience. I grew up in the village of Karluk, Alaska, which is located on the southern part of Kodiak Island. The only way to access Karluk was by plane. If you come to Karluk there are no hotels, no restaurants, no paved roads, and the main source of transportation is by ATV. My father Gerald Sheehan Jr. owned the local store and was the only teacher in the village. This is when I started understanding poverty. People from the village would come into the store and purchase food with food stamps. The

What about drugs such as marijuana being brought into the village? Drugs are really expensive in city terms when someone tells you $60 for 1/8 of an ounce of marijuana, which weighs 3.5 grams. What would you think if you where looking for some marijuana and you where in Nome and somebody told you that for a gram it cost $100. You would freak the hell out and complain that costs too much. They would tell you to go buy some somewhere else then. Because they can find people that will pay that amount for that gram and usually its not even a gram. Alaska is the biggest indoor growing of marijuana in the nation. People will ship it by the quarter pounds from Anchorage to the villages to sell. You can buy a quarter pound in Anchorage for $1200 and then bring it to the village and make $6000 in profit. This causes many fights and deaths in these villages. People breaking into others houses to get marijuana and for what

Right now in Ouzinkie I live in government housing, which is exactly like all the other houses in the other seven villages. A small entry way and then there is a small kitchen, average living room, and depending on the size of your family you either got a two, three, or four bedroom house. I lived in a two-bedroom house with my mom, dad, two sisters and me. I slept on the coach of our living room of our house for the first eleven years of my life. My clothes and personal items where kept in my parents room. I kept my clothes in a dresser that I shared with my dad. Then finally my sisters both left for college and I got my own room. I know of a family in Ouzinkie that has thirteen people living in a three-bedroom house. This is what the government provided for them to use in the village. They have requested a move to one of the bigger houses in the village that would cost them more. Many of the government housing are not of great quality but it provides a roof and decent place to sleep.

What type of housing could you pay for with $100,000 dollars in Idaho? Some pretty nice houses from what I have seen in newspaper ads. On Kodiak many of the houses go for $350,000 to $650,000 because it’s an island surround by water so everything is oceanfront (Kodiak). It gives the retailers the authority to raise the prices of the houses by significant amounts. The houses are not all that great either they remind me of a nice trailer court. Many people on Kodiak live in Government style houses or low-income housing. I’ve lived in government housing up until my dad bought the house for about $33,000 dollars because the houses where made in the 60’s but just have been renovated many times (Sheehan). But I still ended up living in government housing when my dad got moved from Karluk to Ouzinkie.

Kodiak is ranked thirteenth in the nation for most expensive urban areas to live (Kodiak). Why? Because the job market pays more. This summer I worked for Alyeska Pipeline Company as an Information Tech. In other words I fixed computers and networked for the company. At the age of eighteen I was being paid $31 an hour. What

Alaska has always been a hard place to live since the beginning, because of the weather, the bears, or the economy. Prices have risen and will continue to rise but will they continue to affect rural Alaska? Yes, because nobody can afford to pay anybody to help, which is going to lead to unemployment and desperate means of income. Drug selling, bootlegging, and theft and any other means of survival. I hope this paper has given you a taste of what its like living in a village or rural Alaska in poverty.

Some topics in this essay:
Correctional Facility, George Shanigan, Sheehan Jr, Housing Authority, Alaska Troopers, Ouzinkie Ouzinkie, Alaska America, Squartsoff Sr, Alaska What’s, Coast Guard, rural alaska, government housing, food stamps, alcohol village, feed family, 2 weeks job, stamps people, job market, grew village, market pays, kodiak island, government housing dad, food stamps people, job market pays,