Happy Nice Mall

For Mia Heavener ’00, most of life revolves around water. As a senior civil engineer for the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium (ANTHC), he designs water systems for communities in his home country. And in his spare time, he works with his family’s commercial fishing business, which usually started with his great-grandmother. Almost every summer, he joins a three-week expedition to fish for sockeye salmon in Bristol Bay.

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“I was working at 1 am this morning. You just follow the tides,” explains Heavener, who has Yup’ik heritage. The Yup’iks are one of the largest Indigenous groups in Alaska, where Indigenous peoples make up about 18% of the population.

“My grandmother was born in Nushagak Bay and I learned to work really hard here,” she says. “Besides, it was the last place I saw my father alive.” Although he lost his father when he was only 11 years old, he preferred to follow in his footsteps as a civil engineer.

After graduating from MIT and briefly working for a firm in Cambridge, Heavener returned to Alaska and got an engineering job at ANTHC. He also felt a calling as a writer (“I’ve always been a dreamer”) and took a break from that job long enough to earn a master of fine arts in English and writing from Colorado State University in literary studies. He had continued as an undergraduate student in civil engineering. His debut novel, Under Nushagak Bluff, set in an Alaskan fishing village, was published in 2019.

In a typical week, Heavener gets up early to write before long engineering days. Although headquartered at ANTHC, the central Native hospital in Anchorage, she travels all over the state. He says many of the roughly 250 villages in Alaska only have communal water supplies, and about 30 still have no running water or sewerage.

“Everyone should have drinking water – it’s a pretty simple right – but there are certainly places in Alaska that don’t have it,” he says. Its mission is to bring appropriate health and sanitation standards to as many communities as possible.

“The first time I designed a water plant was in the village of Eski Kasigluk,” he recalls. “They had nothing there. They just carry water and use a bucket [for their toilet]. I remember seeing the kids wash their hands for the first time at home – they just had a silly smile on their face, they opened and closed, opened and closed.