For many in Bethel whose contracts come to an end, summer is the season of goodbyes.
That goes for this year's cohort of Jesuit Volunteers, known commonly as JVs.
For the past six decades, these crews of mostly 20-somethings have landed in Bethel. The JVs spend the year volunteering at a service site around town as part of a nonprofit initiative rooted in Jesuit values.
If you live in Bethel, you probably know a JV. Many have stuck around after their year of service. But come each July, many of them say goodbye.
One such JV was Scotty Monteith. He volunteered with the Tundra Women’s Coalition (TWC) and could often be found running the TWC thrift store or voicing the cast of stuffed animals that promoted hot finds on the store’s Facebook page.
I spoke to Monteith a few months ago about a community project he initiated for Denim Day —a global day in recognition of sexual assault survivors, observed by wearing jeans.
Monteith cut out squares of recycled denim for the community to decorate. Then he sewed them into a quilt that was unveiled in a community presentation.
It was a story I never got around to producing. But it was one of my favorite kinds of interviews, where you go in talking about one thing, but end up somewhere totally different.
And in honor of this season of goodbyes, I wanted to play you some pieces from my conversation with Monteith at the thrift store, by the pants.
Scotty Monteith: So there's different styles of denim. There's, like, the more, because this is at more like polyester denim. You know, it's stretchy. I don't know if this makes a noise. It might not. But then you have your thicker denim that's cotton still, and it's more firm, and it makes, like a, it still makes the same noise. But it's it's real denim because it's less stretchy.
Samantha Watson (KYUK): Okay. Well, I learned a lot about denim just now in that last 30 seconds.
Monteith: At the thrift, like, maybe they're really paint stained or something, and it's, like, no one's really gonna buy it. Like aesthetically, like one in, like, 1,000 want like a paint stained denim jean, you know? Like, I don't, that's not an exact number, but or it's, like, really ruined. And so we we toss a decent amount of jeans, and so I was like, 'What if instead of tossing these jeans, we made a quilt? Denim Day quilt, and Denim Day is a very important issue.'
Denim Day is on the last Wednesday of April, and it came about during a court case in 1998. The judge ruled in favor of a 45-year-old, 48-year-old man over an 18-year-old girl who was wearing tight denim jeans, and he said, 'Well, your jeans implied consent,' you know, which is crazy. That's just a crazy thing to say. And so in 1999, people protested, and since then they've worn denim in solidarity with survivors everywhere.
Like, I just wanted to just kind of, like, have the community come together for a very important issue. I think community is super important, especially in this just, like, AI era where you're talking to a chatbot instead of your neighbor is just so alarming, and I think it was just a great way for the community to be, like, making a quilt together. That was really cute. I like that.
But yeah, it shows that the community looks all different, you know. There's my really messy handwriting on it, but there's also people's beautiful embroidery and really well done drawings. And then the kids that did it during, like, the library hour, it was just, like, sloppy handwriting that said 'be kind,' and that's good too.
On top of getting a ton of donations, they need someone to sort those donations and figure out what's good for the shelter. And what maybe the shelter doesn't need, but someone else in the community could use, and that's kind of how this thrift store came about.
It's keeping money in the community, which is great, and it's preventing waste, which is even more important because just something that I've been during my JV year, just always so interested in is the landfill we have because it's, at least according to the 2019 study that they did, it's running out of room, and I'm pretty sure 2045, which is in less than 20 years now, and that's just scary to me because we still are consuming, and there's no end in sight. And I really think we need to start trying to be, like, we have less than 20 years until that landfill can't take any more. We need to start cutting consumption.
Watson: Is there anything else I haven't asked you about Denim Day about TWC and the thrift store that you want to get in there?
Monteith: That's my favorite question because I learned that question in my high school journalism class. We interviewed [Catholic] Xaverian brothers. I went to a Xaverian school, and I asked him this question. And then he was like, 'Oh, I want the world to know that I love them, and I want like everyone to know that if you feel alone, I love you.' And I was like, this is only going out to high school, man. But I thought that was so serious. Here was this dude who was in a nursing home and a retired Xaverian brother who was, like, 86 and had lived just a very long life of serving the community. And no matter what, he wanted them to be loved.
And it was really meaningful, and I think that's why I like that question. That quote has just stuck with me. It wasn't by anybody significant. It was just, I love you. Like, I don't know you, but I love you. And I think, like, that's something I want to live by. Just being a source of love for everybody, and yeah, I think that's just one reason why I did [Jesuit Volunteer Corps], and I think that's a huge message. And I think a quilt shows it that the community loves you if you're a survivor. And just even if you feel alone, especially with survivors, you can feel like no one's gonna believe me, like, support me. It's like no, there's a whole organization here that's going to support you, and we believe in you and we love you. And it's, like, really scary and hard to do, but you're loved, and I think that's a huge message.
Scotty Monteith recently wrapped up a year of service as a Jesuit Volunteer at the Tundra Women’s Coalition thrift store in Bethel. Bethel will be welcoming its next cohort of seven JVs later this month.
