Merna Lomack Wharton is a Yup'ik artist who grew up in Akiachak Alaska, currently a resident in Anchorage. Merna enjoys finding art in natural elements and shares her experiences through her website, nasektaq.com. She enjoys preserving her traditional culture and art, gathering berries, greens, catching, cutting and smoking salmon and traveling in Alaska’s rivers and roads with her family and friends. Merna shares her worldview from a village girl’s perspective to today’s experiences in her poems that mostly arrive with raw emotions, river motions and erosions of change. Merna was one of the recipients of the 2017 Rasmuson Foundation Project for Folk and Traditional Arts and had several poems published in Alaska Women Speak. Additional information about Merna Lomack Wharton Nasek’taq’s traditional art project can be found at https://www.rasmuson.org/49writers/artist-profile/merna-wharton/.