The Village of Akhiok is situated on the southernmost point of Kodiak Island. Its isolation is only surpassed by its beauty. The village overlooks Cape Alatak where over 1000 years ago the Ancestors carved petroglyphs in the rock faces near the shore. The village of Akhiok is a place where the ancestral ways of subsistence hunting and fishing is not only alive and well, it is the way of life.
The Kodiak Island Borough School District has done fantastic work to connect the rural schools to broadband quality Internet service. The digital opportunities at the schools are competitive with the programing available in town! However, some students in the villages often do not have access to a high-speed Internet connection in their homes and will have to spend their evenings doing homework on the grounds of the school or library. This may not seem like a big deal however, in a village that typically has winds that double the readings in Kodiak, it can be much less enjoyable.
The Alutiiq Museum and National Digital Inclusion Alliance worked together to help to alleviate the need for after school access by donating two Alutiiq Online Chromebooks to the Tribal Library. The library allows people to use the tribe’s WiFi signal to access the Internet but, they did now have any computers to loan to people to use if they have access to the Internet in their homes. We teamed up with the tribe and demonstrated to the community members the capability of the machines. On Kodiak, we highly value our rural libraries and by expanding their capacity to provide access, it is a fantastic way to improve digital inclusion for our communities.