Glen Korstrom
Northern News Services

NNSL (Dec 04/98) - Dozens of relatives and well wishers packed the Inuvik Regional Hospital's long-term care unit Nov. 26 to help Annie B. Robert mark her 99th birthday.

Great great-grandchildren and others helped her blow out candles on a cake decorated to show how the woman has survived most of the past century.

Annie was born in the Yukon Nov. 26, 1899, and lived there a long time, according to eldest daughter, 78-year-old Elizabeth Greenland.

Three of Annie's nine children are still alive: Elizabeth, Jessie Robert in Whitehorse and Jane Charlie in Fort McPherson.

How does it feel to be 99 years old?

"What God wants me to live or how long, that's what I'm happy to follow. That's the way I think about it," Annie said in Gwich'in with Elizabeth translating into English.

When younger, Annie used to travel a lot by dog team from Dawson to Mayo in the Yukon.

"She went through all those things," Elizabeth says.

When Annie is asked about highlights of her life, she says, "Sometimes, I used to think about things I used to do, but now I'm poor and I don't think about it now."

Now living in the Inuvik Regional Hospital's long-term care unit, Annie says she loves it because the nurses are good to her.

"If I can be that lively when I'm 99, sure, I'd like to live that long," granddaughter Lori Greenland says.

"She knows what she's doing. She remembers everything from long ago. I wish I were like that."

Elizabeth says when she was a child, she was raised in Fort McPherson by her grandmother while Annie went off on the land to the Yukon with Annie's husband and Elizabeth's father, Alfred Bonnetplume.

"She left me with my grandmother and then they went over to Dawson and lived there for five years. She travelled around in the bush lots," Elizabeth says.

Elizabeth says she stayed behind because her grandmother had lost a daughter and wanted to raise another child.

And, as for why Annie and Alfred went off to the land instead of staying in Fort McPherson?

"We had to go off into the bush to live," Elizabeth says of the Gwich'in.

"We looked for meat. We looked for fur to make money."