Cynthia Monroe, a Quaker in Anchorage, Alaska, was the second person who called me wanting to use Compassionate Listening as a way of responding to a conflict. There was a conflict in Alaska over the uses of hunting and fishing resources. Alaska Native and non-Native people who rely on wild food for subsistence and the professional and recreational hunters and fishers are treated differently by federal law and Alaska state law, creating a complicated situation that has become increasingly more heated over the past decade. Food supplies are precarious in the far North - there are no supermarkets, and supplies flown into remote villages are extremely expensive.

Alaskan Quakers had heard of Compassionate Listening and wanted to try it. Cynthia Monroe called me. She, like Leah Green, is beautiful, bright, and understood the program immediately.  (It is part of our Quaker tradition to listen carefully and caringly to both sides of a conflict. This was the process Quakers used in the 1800's, well before the Civil War, to persuade their members who had slaves to free them.)

Cynthia had worked with Alaska Native people, and Alaskans were trying many legal approaches to resolve the subsistence conflict, from the State Legislature to lawsuits, and still the strife continued. She had heard of the Mid-East program and called me to ask if I could come to Anchorage to train a group of eager listeners. When I arrived they had townspeople, members of the Athabascan and Yup'ik peoples, and Alaskan Quakers. They, too, were responsive learners, and 1 went back a second time to do more training. and then they went on their own.

For two years the team worked with small groups of urban and rural Alaskans separately, both Native and non-Native. They listened to each person's story. In January. 2001, Native villagers and non-Native., urban-based hunters and fishers came together and were able to listen to one another. As a result they came to agreement on seven core values. The report of this encounter is at the end of the next chapter.

For two years a dozen people have listened to both sides and now the participants so far want to continue the process so they can know each other better. and so they can address some of the more difficult issues in the subsistence conflict. The listening dozen have agreed to do it.

But, there are new challenges facing the Compassionate Listening group, which wishes to widen the circle of Alaskans being listened to, to address the most contentious aspects of the conflicts in the compassionate listening context, and to carry the message of what it is learning to the Alaskan community as a whole.

Meanwhile, Cynthia and her husband Jim had a baby girl last April who is named Néve Sustina. Cynthia took four months of maternity leave. Cynthia explained to me that Alaskans don't work at many tasks other than fishing and gathering food when it is warm and light outside, so she and the listeners will take up old and new listening in Autumn of 2001.