May Walton

May Walton is an Iñupiaq elder from Selawik, Alaska. Born in 1941 to Lenora Hammond and Art Skin, she grew up living a traditional subsistence lifestyle where the family of twelve moved to different locations depending on the season to follow the availability of the fish and wildlife they needed to survive. She spent time living at Niliq, up the Selawik River, where she remembers the various people living there, including the Rotman family and their store, and at Kuugruaq, where she remembers muskrat hunting with her mother, and floating down river back to Selawik in the spring on a log raft that her father built in order to bring important building materials and firewood into the village. When the children reached school age, the family moved into Selawik more permanently and May attended school. In 1972, she married Oran Walton, Sr. from Noatak, raised a family, and they continued to rely on fishing and hunting. May was a bilingual teacher at the Selawik school from the 1970s until she retired in 1988, and is an expert skin sewer.