Gathering Greens | Life Below Zero

You ready, bun? I got to flip over my shoes so they don't get rained on. The hailstones spend their summer along the Koic River, where they only have a brief window to gather resources before the freeze returns. For Chip and Agnes, teaching their daughters how to survive in the Arctic is a priority and a valued native tradition.

"Okay girls, let's go to the green. We can start with sour docks, since the sour docks are ready. What we call sour docks in English, they call kok in Inupiat, and they're a local green that we like to eat. They're little, slightly on the sour side, so they're good with vinegar and oil, a little bit of salt and pepper. They're a really good green and they're really fresh, and the time to pick them is now."

"Well, you can spot these red stalks that are up and around. There'll be nice, succulent greens, and they're pretty tasty. Actually, I like them. I grew up eating this kind of stuff, but we used to go gather them, you know, on riverbeds, not much different than this. You girls got to make sure you pick the right, correct green so we don't get sick. One year, we thought we picked all greens, and then there happened to be a few poisonous flowers mixed in with those. I happened to eat them, and I got really sick."

"And after that, me and the girls started watching every plant we pick. They have it in their head: if they don't pick the correct plant, somebody's going to get sick. So it's very important for the girls to know what they need to look for. It's important for them to know where to go to pick these things and how to preserve them. If they don't have this experience, and if they don't know what flowers to eat, they might go hungry. Being out here, there's no reason to go hungry if you know what you're doing."

"We're really not scoring too hot here, are we? Yeah, we've picked most of the big ones already, and there's just quite a few smaller ones. We should just go down river. You guys want to go a couple miles? Yes, yeah, we could probably. There'll be bigger leaves. We're heading down to the coast. We pretty much picked out this whole little valley here."

"We don't ever want to impact an area too heavy that it wouldn't grow back. We go for quality, not quantity. So we're going to go wherever it's wet, wherever you see lakes, wherever you see rivers, creeks, things like that. That's where we'll be, and that's where the C will be."