#SportsCrunch: #DoYouKnow the #TamilNadu Cricketers Who Are Playing in #IPL2021? #IPL #T20 #Ashwin #Karthik
Today we bring you information about some of the Tamil Nadu Players in IPL 2021. Tamil Nadu has given sme past greats to International cricket like CR Rangachari, S Venkataraghavan & Kris Srikkanth. Some of these would go on to play the ICC Cricket World Cup for the country. With the advent of T20 cricket and then Indian Premier League in 2008, top domestic and international cricketers would form…
Reindeer aren't native to Alaska. Sheldon Jackson purchased them from Siberia to help with the food shortages in the late 1800s. He brought in 16 and by the late 1930s there were 640,000.
A Lutheran congregation and a Christian radio station have a long history in Nome, Alaska. But can they hold on to the next generation?
The Iditarod arch has greeted Iditarod Trail race finishers for the past quarter-century. It collapsed the week before my arrival in Nome, Alaska. Wood rot, according to the local paper. Surveying the town center, it is tempting to see the collapse as a metaphor for an isolated northwestern Alaska town facing the cumulative impacts of outmigration, declining birth rates, and climate change. Dilapidated, single-story wooden homes with cluttered lawns scatter the snow-covered landscape (it was 20 degrees Fahrenheit when I visited in early May). Some wooden facades still resemble Old West saloons, suggesting Nome’s origins as a 19th century Gold Rush town, as if Tombstone had been transposed just 100 miles south of the Arctic Circle. Its face set toward the frozen Bering Sea, Nome felt unwelcoming when I arrived, out of season from the hustle and bustle of the famous Iditarod race.
Appearances can be deceiving, though.
If Nome seemed forbidding to me as an outsider from the Lower 48, its denizens and regular visitors were extremely welcoming. The next day, I met with Amanda Van Vliet-Snyder outside of Our Savior’s Lutheran Church, where she is the pastor. Originally from California, she moved there six years ago with her husband, an Alaska Native from a small village 200 miles away, north of the Arctic Circle. Exchanging texts with Van Vliet-Snyder before my flight from Anchorage, I learned that her husband, Jordan Snyder, was also on my small commuter plane. When I found him in the waiting area, he told me he was headed home from a family member’s graduation. As we were speaking, the graduate in question passed behind us on a moving walkway, and the cousins exchanged friendly, casual greetings. He told me this kind of encounter is common, since in Alaska flying is a fact of life. Nome is only reachable from other parts of Alaska via plane, which cultivates a friendly atmosphere between staff and regulars at Nome’s tiny airport, and makes you realize the TV show Northern Exposure was probably closer to life than many viewers may have appreciated. Jordan drove me to my hotel, giving me an informal tour of Nome’s landscape and local characters on the short drive. Despite its unique history and atmospheric surroundings, in many ways, Nome is any other small town.
But the remoteness is still an issue for many. “A lot of congregations are just feeling, I think, kind of frustrated that there’s no pastors that want to stick around,” said Van Vliet-Snyder, “because it’s not really an easy place to live.” She pastors a small congregation, and a big part of her job consists of traveling to the remote places, like the fishing island of Shishmaref, that lack pastors of their own. It’s challenging work, complicated by a larger dwindling of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA) nationwide. The situation is a far cry from the denomination’s heyday in Nome, although a Lutheran legacy remains in two visible Nome institutions: the Lutheran Church and Christian radio station KICY.
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The Lutherans were one of several Christian denominations tapped by Jackson to bring Christianity and traditional American values to Alaska Natives. “Carved up” is an often-used phrase to describe Jackson’s attempted cultural overhaul of the territory, but it’s hard to think of anything more apt. A map from Jackson’s tenure, included in a congressional report from Alaska on his reindeer scheme (of which, more to come), illustrated how different denominations had different areas of responsibility. The Swedish Lutherans had Nome, with Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Methodists, and Swedish Evangelicals operating in the territory right next door. The Episcopalians were even farther north, and the Moravians a few hundred miles to the south in the Yukon Delta.
Since the relationship between religious indoctrination and public education was more porous back then than it is today, it is perhaps unsurprising that a general agent for education would concern himself with this sort of thing. What may be less intelligible is why this information was included in a congressional reindeer report, or what a congressional reindeer report was supposed to be.
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When he arrived in Unalakleet, Karlsson had already done a stint in Central Moscow Prison after a failed attempt to convert Russia. His presence in the Native Alaskan village on the Bering Sea was the consequence, a second foray into bringing Pietism to Russia, this time working westward beginning with Indigenous Siberians. But Karlsson soon switched his focus to Indigenous Alaskans after hearing there was a need for missionaries there.
He had a rocky start, but Karlsson soon managed to establish a school for Native children (“the children all got new names and clean clothes and promised to wash their faces each morning,” Karlsson wrote in his journal on the first day of class). He was joined by more missionaries two years later, who helped establish a children’s home, and Karlsson started to garner financial support from Mission Covenant Church leaders in the United States.
Karlsson’s missionary still faced challenges: financial challenges in the form of a depression in the Lower 48, theological challenges from the long-present Russian Orthodox Church, and moral challenges from the Gold Rush boom in Nome. Since the discovery of gold in the late 1890s, the population of 200 had ballooned by a factor of 100 by 1901. No less a personage than Wyatt Earp soon established a saloon in Nome to accompany the various other bars and brothels that had sprung up there to serve the new clientele.
All the same, Karlsson’s efforts bore fruit. “In 1890, there probably was not a single Christian Inupiaq Eskimo,” according to a 1994 essay by anthropologist Ernest S. Burch Jr. “Twenty years later, there was scarcely an Inupiaq who was not a Christian.”
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While KICY reached the original Covenant missions that Karlsson and his successors had established, their signal also reached hundred miles away. Indeed, the U.S. government received a letter from the Soviet government complaining about KICY, which indicated to the ECC missionaries that they had finally attained Karlsson’s dream of evangelizing Russia.
But devotional programming was only one part of KICY’s mission. At the time it was founded, many villages still lacked private home phones; it was not uncommon for a village to have one public phone for everyone. A nightly program called the Ptarmigan Telegraph became a vital communication link. According to the book on KICY’s history of the same name, “The Ptarmigan Telegraph (pronounced ‘tarmigan’) invited listeners to call or write in messages for family members, work colleagues, or distant relatives. These brief comments would then be read on the air so that the intended recipient would hear and respond in an appropriate manner.” The news and weather updates meant that, according to author Greg Asimakoupoulos, “[f]or the first time, listeners had up-to-the-minute forecasts and warnings of approaching storms, severe temperature drops, and low-pressure fronts moving in from the Bering Sea.” In a place scattered with remote villages where transportation was a challenge, such information could mean the difference between life and death.
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But the ELCA still has clergy, and a tech evolution in rural Alaska 2023 has complicated their mission. That’s when Starlink first appeared in the state and in 2021, Alaska’s largest telecommunications company brought fiber internet to Nome. Until recently, provider caps on data usage were common in rural Alaska. As broadband access has increased and data limits have decreased, Van Vliet-Snyder told me how technology has created challenges as she works to bring up the next generation in the faith.
She said that she had had to cancel the church’s summer camp this year, which she estimated has been running for about 60 years, when the church recognized Nome’s young people were underoccupied in the summer. The church purchased some land near Salmon Lake, Alaska, to start a youth camp. “Gorgeous place,” Van Vliet-Snyder said, where she had led a junior high camp and a high school church camp the previous summer.
She brought the weeklong junior high and high school church camps back in 2023, after COVID suspended them in 2020. But something was different. At one time, the church had attracted kids and pastors from around the Seward Peninsula. But Van Vliet-Snyder said that she partnered with only one other pastor for the revived camp, and he in turn could wrangle just two adult chaperones. She ended up calling her own husband in a panic to take time off work and come lend a hand with the logistics of feeding and entertaining the campers. “The thing was, the kids didn’t want to be there,” she said. “The kids that were from villages that have technology were so bored. Because our camp has no electricity, no running water, no cell, you know, no data, no Wi-Fi.”
A proposed Alaskan baseball game deteriorated into a fight for the limited outlets to plug in their devices. “They all refused to get out of the car,” Van Vliet-Snyder said. “They all had their devices loaded up, and they all downloaded stuff that they can do online.” A trip to some nearby hot springs didn’t yield much more interest. By contrast, she said, the kids without electronics “were having a grand old time.”
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KICY General Manager Patty Burchell sees it differently. “Radio is still king here,” she said. “For six weeks of the summer, people are out at their fishing camps. So the culture here is still very much subsistence.” Shipping costs drive up prices in rural Alaska, and according to the state’s labor statistics, unemployment in the Nome census area in July 2023 was 6.8%, almost twice the national average. Because locals in the region still augment their groceries with seasonal fishing, moose hunting, and even berry picking, they still rely on radio when they go out. Internet is “spotty” (a truth I can personally verify), and a 2023 Federal Communications Commission report stated that Alaska ranked 55th out of 56 states and territories in broadband availability coverage for fixed and mobile service, even after a 2016 FCC program to expand broadband access over 10 years. And while more people in and around Nome are adopting Starlink, it can be expensive to get started. According to a 2023 Nielsen study, Alaska remains one of the top AM-listening states in the nation, ranking seventh for its percentage of AM radio listening.
Although Burchell said there is a radio “on the table in every home,” KICY also broadcasts online, as well as over AM and FM channels. It is one of two radio stations in Nome (the other, KNOM, is affiliated with Catholic missionary work), and it operates out of a small, unassuming building, not far from the World’s Largest Gold Pan at the center of town.
KICY is no longer staffed by career missionaries as it was at its founding. Today, the station is operated by part-time staff and by volunteer missionaries who raise their own support to come work there, usually for one year. Covering the Iditarod race is a big part of their job, but so is Native-language programming featuring locally produced Native singing, and a Russian-language program that reaches Siberia.
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But Joseph is not that different from other young adults from the Lower 48. A conference on outmigration from the state at University of Alaska Anchorage concluded that the state’s demographic problem isn’t young people leaving the state, but that the ones who leave aren’t adequately replaced by new arrivals in their 20s and 30s. Research chief at the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development Dan Robinson said that for the past 12 years, more people have left Alaska than moved in, something he said was unprecedented.
Some of the demographic change is due to college-age Alaskans opting to attend college in the Lower 48. But Robinson thinks there are other factors keeping young people from moving to Alaska—a reduced military population at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, for one thing. The other factor is less quantifiable—“Alaska is an adventurous kind of place,” Robinson said. It would appear that the call of the wild that has long beckoned young people north no longer holds the same allure.
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The Seward Peninsula Indigenous culture “just loves music, loves singing,” said Burchell, “And from the early days translated hymns into their language, as well as created their own music, sacred music.” Even today, she said musical get-togethers still happen in the spring, “when a village will invite the three or four surrounding villages and anybody else who wants to come, to come in for a weekend of teaching, Bible teaching, and testimony, and song.” These gatherings occur in late winter and early spring, when longer days and a hard snowpack makes snowmobile travel over the hundreds of miles between villages doable. In the summer, there are no roads, and around the Norton Sound, there are no rivers to facilitate travel. Burchell said KICY sends representatives to record the testimonies and music for later broadcast, and a remote unit to broadcast the evening services live.
The hymns, many of which are translated into Native languages, have a unique sound all their own. Burchell describes it as reminiscent of Southern gospel with a “distinct flavor.” Southern gospel is popular and in heavy rotation at KICY, she said. But Van Vliet-Snyder said there is little in the way of syncretic pre-Christian practice mixed with Christian worship at her church.
It is a legacy of Sheldon Jackson’s twin senses of cultural supremacy and agrarian paternalism. Unlike the Russian Orthodox Church’s earlier presence in Alaska, which was a more-or-less organic process that embraced cultural syncretism, the Lutheranization of the Seward Peninsula had a more compulsory edge. Van Vliet-Snyder’s husband told me that his own last name, Snyder, was given to his Native Alaskan forbears by missionaries.
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Her challenge, however, is not to present herself as a new kind of progressive white savior, a 21st-century Sheldon Jackson trying to reform the Indigenous people according to her own view of what right looks like.
“Who am I to come in and say, ‘Let’s look at your Native values, and then look at what the missionaries were teaching you back then, and then look at how they came in and completely changed the way you think’”? said Van Vliet-Snyder. “How can I be a learner? How can I not be seen as, ‘There’s just another white person who’s going to come and tell us about her white Jesus.’”
She says her congregation post-COVID is only about 40 people, and “the next generation of kids, they’re like, ‘eh, whatever.’” But she said it’s still the place Native Alaskans turn for funerals or in an emergency, and Our Savior’s Lutheran Church is a popular place of worship for local Native Alaskans on Christmas Eve. “They still see that as their church,” said Van Vliet-Snyder, “even if we don’t see them every week.”
Tamil Nadu beat Saurashtra by 2 wickets to enter Vijay Hazare Trophy final | Cricket News - Times of India
Tamil Nadu beat Saurashtra by 2 wickets to enter Vijay Hazare Trophy final | Cricket News – Times of India
JAIPUR: Baba Aparajith smashed 122 to help Tamil Nadu eke out a two-wicket win over Saurashtra here on Friday, and enter the final of the Vijay Hazare Trophy One-Day Championship. This was after Saurashtra rode on a blistering 134 by Sheldon Jackson to post an imposing 310 for eight. But Saurashtra’s effort was overshadowed by Aparajith’s master-class coupled with half-centuries by his brother…
Vijay Hazare Trophy semi-finals: In-form Saurashtra face uphill task against Tamil Nadu; Himachal Pradesh hold edge over Services | Cricket News - Times of India
Vijay Hazare Trophy semi-finals: In-form Saurashtra face uphill task against Tamil Nadu; Himachal Pradesh hold edge over Services | Cricket News – Times of India
JAIPUR: Saurashtra run into an equally dominant Tamil Nadu, while Himachal Pradesh would have slight upper hand against Services when they face-off in the semfinals of the Vijay Hazare Trophy on Friday. Both Saurashtra and TN made it to the last four in convincing fashion. While the southern outfit thrashed arch-rivals Karnataka by 151 runs, Saurashtra slayed Vidarbha by seven wickets. Services,…
