Traditional Food Guide: Selma Oskolkoff-Simon

The Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium recently published a Traditional Food Guide so that cancer survivors could look up the nutritional values and recipes for traditional Alaska Native subsistence dishes. In this book, my own story about clam digging appears:

"My dad quit going clam digging. The whole family really enjoyed them. But no one said anything to Daddy about why he quit until the beginning of the third summer of not digging them. My sister asked him why he quit. He said he hated cleaning them, and really missed digging them, but he was tired of cleaning them. My sister told him, ‘Dad, you dig them and I will clean them.' So he did that for about five years (up until the summer before he passed away). My sister said that was the best memory of our Dad -- just listening to his stories as they cleaned clams together. After they completed the cleaning they would sit down for a bowl of clam chowder."