News from rural America.

Rural students who face hurdles getting to college are getting noticed, Native Alaskans may want to live off the land but obstacles like climate change loom large and the Cherokee language is being preserved by kids in North Carolina. 

TRANSCRIPT

♪♪ For the Daily Yonder and Public News Service, this is the news from rural America.

Getting to college and graduating can be harder for rural students.

Smaller communities often have fewer resources and longer drive times even to visit, but an effort called the Rural Talent Lab is taking a charter bus into rural communities across five southern states to listen to students' needs.

Lab director Andrew Korosik says men in the higher-ed group are even ditching their neckties.

We're coming here and we're intentionally spending the night because it's important for you to see us leaving here in the morning, not running out of here right after the meeting's over.

Korosik says they want to build a relationship addressing the needs and desires of each rural community, and he says they'll stay flexible with solutions.

All right, so we've got these four.

Three of them worked, one of them didn't.

We're ready to try something else.

The high prices at Alaska's rural grocery stores show how fragile the state's food system is.

Ilana Newman reports that some communities are leaning on traditional subsistence strategies like hunting and foraging.

Fewer than one in five Alaskan towns are connected by road year-round, as Peter Heckendorn reported in the Daily Yonder.

Food comes into Anchorage either by boat or by plane, and then it's delivered out to remote Alaska on small planes, and there are all sorts of things that can disrupt that supply chain.

Native Alaskans have long lived off the land, but he says climate change, government policy, and economic pressures like commercial fishing can make that hard.

Heckendorn found communities are now sharing innovations and traditions online, at workshops, and in community gardens.

A lot of rural communities in the lower 48 could look to Alaska, where people have had to make do in a different way.

I'm Ilana Newman.

Cherokee is an endangered language, but you'd never know listening to students at North Carolina's Nukidawa Academy.

For 20 years, the school has run Cherokee immersion, preschool through sixth grade.

Dr. Hartwell Francis is their curriculum director.

There's a very cultural need to have Cherokee language to keep poetry of Cherokee language alive.

They are recreating their cultures after devastating loss.

The Cherokee language is thousands of years old, but grew critically endangered by the late 20th century after native children were sent to boarding schools for forced assimilation.

Francis says the Academy's 100 students are guarding something priceless for their people.

I guess you can think about it as guarding treasure.

A language is a community's greatest cultural creation.

A lack of teaching materials led Francis to partner with Western Carolina University, where college students create hand-printed picture books on topics like Cherokee myths and legends, or the ecology of Western North Carolina rivers.

For the Daily Yonder and Public News Service, I'm Roz Brown.

For more rural stories, visit dailyyonder.com.