When the tide is low, the table is set.

Sandy Churchill, a teacher at Tlingit & Haida Head Start in Wrangell, was referring to the ocean's banquet of sea cucumbers - known as yein in Tlingit - plus kelp, hooligans, beach grasses and fresh fish.

Harvesting the banquet is difficult for about a hundred elders in Wrangell.

That's why Churchill and Kassee Schlotzhauer, branch manager at Wells Fargo, organize a subsistence proxy program to help elders who can no longer subsistence harvest from the land themselves.

The program assigns a more able-bodied person to forage and hunt on behalf of...