Project Jukebox Survey

Help us redesign the Project Jukebox website by taking a very short survey!

Nate Becker

Originally from North Dakota, Nate Becker moved to Eagle, Alaska in 2009 to mush dogs and trap. Previously, he spent six years working as a seasonal employee for the National Park Service at Grand Canyon National Park as a flight medic and firefighter. After arriving in Eagle, Nate first worked as a winter guide for Wayne and Scarlett Hall with their business "Bush Alaska Expeditions" guiding tourists on multi-day and multi-week dog sled adventures, which later shifted into a full-time position. He worked various construction jobs in the summer. In 2011, he met his wife, Ruby, online, and she moved to Eagle from Oregon with her two young daughters. In 2012, they bought property 32 miles below Eagle on the Yukon River (Wood Island), built a cabin that they moved into in the fall of 2013, and spent nearly ten years living a remote, subsistence-based lifestyle with their three children. Nate worked in the tourism industry in Chicken, Alaska during the summer months to earn enough money to support the family and their lifestyle. After being faced with the challenges of homeschooling their children, in 2021 the Beckers moved into town and settled at Eagle Village. In 2022, Nate became the Village Public Safety Officer.

Nate Becker appears in the following new Jukebox projects:

Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve

Interview Title	Abstract	Archive #: Oral History	Project	Date of Interview
Becker Family	Ruby and Nate Becker and their thirteen-year-old twin daughters, Grace and Genevieve, and their seven-year-old son, Hunter, were interviewed on July 20, 2022 by Marcy Okada of the National Park Service and Karen Brewster of the Oral History Program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks at the Charlie Juneby Tribal Hall in Eagle Village, Alaska. In this interview, the Beckers talk about living at a remote cabin along the Yukon River inside Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve. They talk about the challenges of maintaining this off-grid lifestyle and raising children there, as well as the joys of living on the land and close to nature. They discuss their subsistence hunting, fishing, gathering, and trapping activities, using a dogteam and other forms of transportation, and staying connected with family and the outside world. All three children chime in at various times with their own memories and stories of particular events, such as seeing a black wolf or the rescue of a swan, and how they feel about their remote cabin living experience.	2021-03-09	Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve	Jul 20, 2022