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Wednesday, February 1, 1989 / University Daily Kansan
Picture Yourself as a ...
Summer Orientation Student Staff Leader
- Act as a liaison between students, parents and administrators.
* Aid students with understanding academic requirements.
Position description & applications are available in 7 Strong Hall Office of New Student Orientation
Applications are due by 5:00, February 10, 1989, an Equal Opportunity Employer.
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Alaskans learn cold facts about sub-zero survival
Eskimo Scouts teach 4-day arctic strategy class
The Associated Press
ARCTIC VILLAGE, Alaska — Eye-stinging spruce smoke cloaked dimly lit figures huddled against sub-zero cold at the end of their first long day of learning the tricks of arctic survival.
"Nothin' but a bunch of Boy Scouts with bad language," someone offended.
He was partly right. The only scouts were a half-dozen Eskimo Scouts who taught the military how to stay alive when it got so cold that people from the Lower 48 states couldn't comprehend it.
The Scouts' weeklong course, 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle, is short on lectures and long on cold. At least four full days and nights are spent in the wilderness 500 miles northeast of Anchorage.
Students run the gamut from Army Special Forces troops to raw National Guard recruits. Alaska Adjuntant General John Schaefer said it was not just non-Alaskans and non-natives that needed the training.
Now in its third winter, the Alaska Army National Guard school has trained about 150 people to cope with temperatures that consistently range around 40 degrees below zero. It hit 45 below on the last two nights of January's class, and a couple of days after the students left, Alaska's great cold wave struck with temperatures down to 50 and 60 below zero.
"The type of Eskimo we are enlisting today doesn't have the survival skills of the older Eskimos," says Schaefer, a participant in the January class. He estimates about half of the Guard is Eskimo or Indian.
Because of cultural changes, natives no longer have to rely on the skills handed down for generations, said Schaeffer, an Eskimo from Kotzebu. "We've got a bunch of Eskimos and Indians around here who would have as much trouble (surviving the cold) as anyone else."
Schaeffer, an experienced arctic outdoorsmaster, said he had attended the class to lend it some credibility and assure its permanency and fund-
"We're doing what we should have been doing for years — taking the skills we've learned from centuries and helping them on," the two-star general said.
The school was started in response to requests from National Guard flight crews, who wanted training similar to that offered at the Air Force's "Cool School" at Eielsen Air Force Base near fairbanks.
Maj. Jerry Finney, the U.S. Army adviser to the Fifth Scout Battalion of the 20th Infantry, got together with Michael Gage image hunting buddy, Timothy Samu
Sam recruited other instructors from the nearby Gwich'in Indian villages of Venetie and Fort Yukon,
and they began showing students what it took to survive.
The practical experiences of the natives are backed by scientific data from Finney about human physiology and thermodynamics.
Finney said one of the most difficult survival obstacles was to overcome the macho approach to the task. He said he had been instructed to admit they are freezing, he said.
At 40 below zero, if a series of minor errors happen, severe frost-bite can occur within two to four hours. If you notice from one serious mistake, Finney said.
The worst injury in the six previous classes at Arctic Village involved a Special Services sergeant who suffered serious frostbite to nine nets. Part of the cause was an experimental boot, but much of it was a stubborn unwillingness to acknowledge the cold. Finney says.
"Nobody knows better than you if you're cold," Finney preaches. "If you're cold, do something about it. Deal with it."
Shelter construction is one of the areas of major emphasis at the school. Types of shelters depend on the materials at hand, and the footwear used can range near Arctic Village have plentiful supplies of stunted black spruce.
Instructors show students how to snare hares and catch fish to supplement their diet.
Manhattan teacher honored
The Associated Press
TOPEKA — The National Endowment for the Humanities announced yesterday that it selected Roger E. Moore as one of its 53 teacher-scholars for 1989.
Gibson. a fifth-grade teacher at
Gibson's project, titled "The Harlem Renaissance" will include a study of the writings of such authors as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay and Countee Cullen, and an examination of the development of the jazz age in U.S. music.
Manhattan's Roosevelt Elementary School, will receive a $27,500 stipend to spend the next academic year in independent study of the literature and poetry of 1920s' African-American writers
Kansas second in sunflower harvest
The Associated Press
North Dakota led the production with 1.1 billion pounds.
TOPEKA — Kansas farmers produced 240 million pounds of sunflower seeds last year, ranking the Sunflower State a distant second in commercial production.
It said about 86 percent of the crop was used to produce vegetable oil. The rest was used for seed, snack food and other markets.
Wild sunflowers have been a feature of the Kansas landscape for years, but commercial production is relatively new to the state.
The Kansas Agricultural Statistics Service, which made its first survey of the state's commercial production of sunflower seeds, said the Kansas crop was worth about $24 million.