Of this I am certain: Even from my beginnings here on Fishers Island, in my unaware youth, I have listened to a raw call to humbleness. It’s like some sacred directive, to find my people, and then leave my people. I have at times even believed there is some middle ground, maybe even between two islands. It is purely an inherent feeling, this heeding. It starts with the winds, then the sea’s surge, then thought is catapulted into some boundless space where Now always was.

The Aleut tribes of the Pribilof Islands sing a song, “Atukan Akun” or “We are one.” From summer 2004 until winter 2010 I had the opportunity to live as an active community member in the village of Saint Paul, to be one of the one. During this peculiar time of my life I was eager to learn every Unangam word and dance step to the drum beats rhythm of “Atukan Akun,” but mostly I recognized the privilege to embrace its message of unity in my daily life.

My seal observation work atop the island’s Polovina Cliffs would be most telling on just how I would develop skills to adapt to the region’s remote and harsh environment. For six months a year during my first two years I spent hours every day among the Northern Fur seals. Equipped only with essential binoculars, foul weather gear, compass and note pad, I gained utmost respect for the seal species, the barren tundra, and variable and often turbulent weather. It was in this very desolate space that I developed and nurtured courage, consistency and patience — where furious winds whip off the dross and expose a refined gentleness of nature.

I don’t wonder anymore how it was I spent the middle of my life out in the middle of the Bering Sea. I don’t guess anymore that it was that certain directive. It’s my birthplace of awareness, my wide open space for healing, and for the life of me an unforgiving, seething sea surrounding a tribe; a people who would in some sense raise me and teach me that a life’s journey could be one’s own very detailed mapping for finding and giving forgiveness — that unalloyed and sacred state we long to give to ourselves and each other.

We call Saint Paul Island “Tanax Amix” or Land of Mother’s Brother. It is said the island in turn calls us with a deep, constant yearning to return. But I don’t think I ever left.

And so during these autumn weeks, I am returning to the Pribilofs honoring an invitation extended over time and seas. With great reverence I return to script and coordinate videos for subsistence hunting of sea lions and reindeer, record and archive Unangan youth and Alaskan scientists partaking in Bering Sea Days 2015, bridge a unique culture with Fishers Island school, maybe even jot a field note or two for a newspaper.

And at the very most, of this I am certain: I return knowing my people are of an island.

Justine Kibbe is the island naturalist for the Fishers Island Conservancy. A lifelong environmentalist, Kibbe spent six years on Alaska’s Island of Saint Paul among the native Unungan people to study fur seals. Now a Fishers Island resident, Kibbe offers weekly wildlife snapshots from her observations on the island and now from Alaska. You can reach her at bjkibbe@gmail.com.