34°

At noon, people had their first feast: reindeer, dried fish and that old favorite, Eskimo ice cream, known locally as akutaq.

It's just the opposite in Allakaket, up the Koyukuk River. The turkey dinner was Thursday, but on Friday, the community gathers for moosehead soup, beaver tail and bear. And of course, akutaq.

"Turkey, ham, muktuk, fish, potatoes, yams, you name it, a smorgasbord," he said. "The best of both worlds."

Thanksgiving dinners throughout Alaska featured a combination of foods unlike anywhere else on Earth, with tables dominated by turkeys and hams but spiced with the Native foods prepared locally for generations.

For an entirely new dish, look no farther than Kwigillingok, a Yup'ik Eskimo village near the mouth of the Kuskokwim River.

"Everybody's going to be having turkey, probably with mashed potato or potato salad, fruit salad, maybe some pumpkin pie. And mouse food akutaq," Rachel Igkurak said.

Mouse food is what they call bits of root gathered by mice and collected out of the rodents' nests after freezeup in the fall. The roots are sweet, Igkurak said, and make a tasty addition to akutaq - the rural Alaska treat made from whipped Crisco, sugar and berries.

Turkeys have replaced swans as the main dish in many Kwigillingok homes, said Emma Kiunya, but some will augment their turkey with seal meat and dried salmon strips.

Thanksgiving is not what it used to be in the Bristol Bay village of Togiak, Pete Abraham said. People still amble through town, stopping here and there for a full meal or a bite to eat. A guy like him can compare the skills of the village cooks, he said.

"It's sort of like a competition," he said.

But with turkey and mashed potatoes at every stop, he said, "this is westernized days today."

Still, many cooks offer traditional Yup'ik foods such as dried herring and smelt or salmon dipped in seal oil.

And a few may break out a dish called qerpertaq, which consists of dried fish eggs crushed in seal oil and "whipped like crazy," then mixed with cooked cranberries.

"Not many still make it," Abraham said. "Older folks, when they want something different, they make that."

Thanksgiving in Metlakatla, on Annette Island in Southeast, used to feature almost nothing but locally harvested foods.

"That's kind of by the wayside now," elder Tom Lang Sr. said. "Everything is the ham-and-turkey type of Thanksgiving now."

In his youth, the meal started with clam chowder, using clams they had dug the day before. There was usually a Canada goose shot a few days earlier and cooked slowly to render the fat. There would be salads of Dungeness crab and shrimp, and Sitka blacktailed deer, "a hindquarter or two, depending on how many there were," Lang said.

"Whatever you could get, that's what you would be thankful for. That was the true meaning of Thanksgiving," he said.

The holiday is a day of giving on the North Slope, said Brower, president of the Barrow Whaling Captains Association. Early Thanksgiving afternoon, the whalers, hunters and fishermen of Barrow and other villages give away the whale meat, muktuk (blubber and skin), birds, fish and game they harvested throughout the year.

"It's a big event," Brower said. People come to any of the local churches to accept the gift and visit with old friends.

"People look forward to that, then going home for turkey or goose," he said.

At the opposite end of Alaska, in the Kodiak area village of Ouzinkie, a proper Thanksgiving table should have mallard duck, if you ask Theodore Squartsoff. And fish pie.

"I like my ducks," said the 68-year-old Squartsoff. "I like turkey too, but I still like my ducks," stuffed and roasted just like a turkey.

Squartsoff fancies a good fish pie for Thanksgiving. This old Russian dish is common in Kodiak and the Alaska Peninsula, he said.

"Everybody makes fish pie," Squartsoff said.

The people of Allakaket enjoy a different type of fish dish, Ann Edwards said. They make akutaq the normal way - Crisco, sugar and berries - then add a boiled, boned pike.

And it's not just for Thanksgiving, she said: "Any time, any occasion."