College, as mentioned on page two of The Grub Box, is meant to expand a students perspective to a more global view of the world beyond their own hometown. In that type of environment, many find themselves easily overwhelmed by the changes that this move causes in their lives. This problem is even worse for people who live in small towns or communities who have not traveled very far away from their birthplace. There is a lot of pressure to assimilate into the college culture and forget many values from your home, to forget your old identity for a new one. This was the case with Vivian Johnson from Alaska.

Even before Vivian left for college, while she was still in her small, familiar community, race was made a part of her life. When she was a kid, she was made quickly aware that she was not full Eskimo and that she was at least partially white by the other children at her school. This caused her to be more cautious about what she said and did in the future to seem less Ka’ssaq (page four) by her classmates. She was forced to try and act more like the other kids to seem less like an outcast. This is the same thing that happened later in her life at Dartmouth.

When Vivian decided to go to college, she was used to that small town feel where everyone knew each other and everyone had a similar background. Everyone in her village hunted and acted in the same way, even though she wasn’t always treated as full member of the community. She had never left the state before, and only occasionally gone to a big city like Anchorage with her father. Her best experience of the outside world was the pictures in the attic at her grandparents house as mentioned on page four. She acted like the pictures represented a far off, almost imaginary place. She would make up stories about the people in the pictures and none of it seemed that real to her. She had no experience with a world dramatically different from her own.

As she arrived in New Hampshire, her racial differences from the other students became jarringly apparent, but in a different way than in Alaska. This was not directly related to the other students statements about her race, like back home about how she was not pure Indian, but more to their ignorance about her past and the way she had viewed the world up to that point. This ignorance is a factor in most of the stereotypes there are about any race. Once this ignorance is replaced with knowledge, the stereotypes and misgivings tend to disappear. In this instance, there is an attempt on page eight where she tried to explain to some of her classmates about her way of life. However, it was difficult for her to explain her culture to people who had no basis for what she was talking about. It was also difficult to explain her life in Alaska as she had never really had to explain it to another person before now. Her experiences appeared to be as alien to her roommates as their point of view was to hers.