Blogger Saima Johnson, 28, of Kotzebue, holds a bag of feed and oyster shells that she recently purchased in Anchorage for her Kotzebue chickens. (BILL ROTH / Anchorage Daily News)

By KYLE HOPKINS
khopkins@adn.com

After baking peanut butter cookies all morning at her mother’s house in Kotzebue, Saima Johnson stepped in to the ice fog to check on her chickens.

She’d ordered the hens as chicks five months before from the Triple D Farm and Hatchery near Wasilla — the one made famous in a news clip of former Gov. Sarah Palin talking to reporters as a man slaughtered a turkey in the background.

The $2 chicks arrived by mail in a cardboard box. As they grew, neighborhood kids told Johnson they’d never seen a live chicken before in the northwest Alaska city of 3,100.

Now it was mid-December. Saima entered the plywood coop as birds crowded the door, eager to eat snow. It took a moment to notice the dozen eggs, brown and green, dotting the nests. Finally, her “tundra chicks” were laying.

Another milestone in the adventures of a self-described “chicken momma” at the top of the world. Another blog entry in the making.

Witness: Tundra Chicks.

Saima, her sister and boyfriend belong to a small band of Kotzebue bloggers chronicling life above the Arctic Circle. Their Web sites are a diary of rural Alaska in 2010, as seen by 20- and 30-somethings who balance games of Halo 3 with ptarmigan hunts, and white collar jobs with ivory carving.

I met Saima’s boyfriend, John Chase, in early 2009 during a trip to Western Alaska. He lifted a walrus head out of a box in the arctic entryway as we made our way to the door. Saima hurried to work as John and I ate seal-rib soup and clicked through dozens of photos on his Mac.

It looked like this outside:

John writes a blog called "Eskimo Power" — a mix of bloody hunting pictures, family photos and meditations on the modern Yup’ik man. His favorite post is a picture of himself on a 20-foot skiff a few miles outside of Kotzebue, pulling the trigger on his first walrus.
Photo courtesy of John Chase

“It’s customary to give the walrus to elders in the community. We just got on the VHF and said, 'Hey, we got some walrus,’ ” he said.

Now a community planner for the Northwest Arctic Borough, he started blogging while teaching in the Bristol Bay village of Togiak. It was a lonely time for the transplanted 34-year-old, who grew up the youngest of 10 siblings in a deeply traditional Bethel household. Away from his family, he wrote to pass the time.

With “Eskimo Power,” he’s become a kind of spokesman for present-day subsistence hunters. “I’d like more people that aren’t aware of our culture to read it, to get an idea of what Alaska Natives out here do,” he said.

Across town, Saima’s sister, Maija Lukin, blogs about cooking, crafts and parenting. She comes across as the Rachel Ray to John’s “Survivorman.” Many of her posts feature tempting close-ups of cookies, home-made bread and sweets — what my wife calls “food porn.”

The daughter of a Finnish father and Inupiaq mother, Maija named her site “Finnskimo.” The people who think of rural Alaska only as a place for problems like abuse, alcoholism or poverty are the people she wants to see her blog.

“That’s all I hear,” she said of the various woes associated with rural life. “And people wanting a free hand out. And that’s not what it’s about at all.”

And then there are the chickens.

Chicken Momma
“I remember walking around my grandparents’ dog yard in Sisaulik with puppies in my atikluk pockets and bottles made for the puppies out of old Tylenol bottles,” Saima wrote in her first blog post May 23.

“A huge influence on my love of animals was my Ahna, who was always yelling at the dogs but loved them dearly,” she said.

Saima, 28, is a nurturer. She needs something to take care of, she said, but John isn’t crazy about bringing more dogs into the house. The couple compromised on chickens, considering Saima already bought dozens of eggs every few weeks for her extended family’s baking and breakfasts.

Except for her great-aunt, Saima doesn’t know of anyone else in Kotzebue who keeps chickens. She chose the breeds that didn’t poop much — Saima recently posted a poem called “$#!+ shoveler” — and can withstand the cold.

She hopes to get a rooster this spring and has been asked to visit the school and talk to kids about where eggs come from. When two of the birds died, even John couldn’t bring himself to eat them, she said.

'A man in his prime’
“I love seal hunting! Spring time seal sit on top of the ice. You want to avoid the males — they stink. Apparently, the males go into rut and stink. How do you know they’re males? They have a black face.”

A photo of a rifle laying across a snowmachine illustrates that post on John’s Eskimo Power blog. The entry is sandwiched between a quote from Al Pacino’s Tony Montana character in “Scarface,” Hawaii vacation pictures and a Yup’ik language lesson.

“Nukalpiaq” means a man in his prime, John wrote. A good hunter and provider.

He and a partner once sold T-shirts embossed with the word and other Yup’ik sayings. John now helps oversee a Facebook page called “I Am Eskimo,” with more than 3,900 members.

On his personal blog he posts pictures of his son holding a seal rifle, friends Eskimo dancing and John braiding seal intestine in the red-stained snow.

“We see some really cool things and do some really cool things that other people don’t even know about,” he said. “The blog is just basically just a little peek into what I see and what I do.”

The PG-13 site is irreverent, random and not exactly politically correct.

“This is a day in April that many, many kitchens in Kotzebue went dirty,” he once wrote under a picture of the city’s all-women’s snowmachine race.

“I have traditional views where the man is supposed to go out and provide for his family and the woman is supposed to stay home and keep the house,” he said.

In another blog post about older Alaska Native men lamenting that modern Native men are beginning to act more and more like women, John said he agreed.

Then he joked about buying himself $200 jeans.

Musk ox bourguignon
“When I was growing up, we wore mukluks all winter long. I remember, all I wanted for Christmas was a pair of those cool Sorel boots with the felt insoles. They were SO cool compared to my ugly mukluks. Only COOL kids had Sorels. And I didn’t,” Maija wrote in late November on her Finnskimo blog.

“Now ... I would give anything for a pair of Tuutulik Isiqtuuqs. (Caribou skin mukluks that go all the way up to your knees. You don’t know warm until you’ve had a pair of these!)”

Except maybe for a recent essay on childhood mice-slaughter, many of Maija’s posts are just as wholesome. Inspired by the movie “Julie & Julia,” she wrote about making musk ox bourguignon in August.

The night her company sent her home early because troopers were searching for a man accused of raping a policeman’s daughter in a nearby village, Maija wrote of selling candied popcorn at the Christmas bazaar.

Bad things happen in the Bush, she said, but her blog is meant to show another side of day-to-day living. Dressing the kids for school in elf costumes, sewing wool socks, playing Eskimo bingo.

“At night if I don’t have anything to talk about, I just take a picture of dinner,” she said.

NOTE: For more Kotzebue blogging and some great photos, check out Cathy Jones' Keeping it Real at 66 Degrees North Latitude.