Residents gathered for an awards ceremony and potluck Oct. 29 at the senior center to recognize students in grades six through 11 who entered the contest for the third annual Chilkat Valley Peace Prize.

Haines High School sophomore Karlie Spud earned top honors and $100 for her essay “Promoting Peace in Alaska.” The Klukwan resident wrote about her involvement in the Rose Urban Rural Exchange that brought her to both Service High School in Anchorage and Washington, D.C., as a Cultural Ambassador.

“The program aims to strengthen relationships between rural and urban Alaskans by building mutual respect and understanding, and fostering a statewide sense of community,” Spud wrote.

The Chilkat Valley Peace Prize had 85 entries this year, said event host JoAnn Ross Cunningham. Students submitted artwork, essays and poems, and judges selected three first-place winners ($75 each), three second-place winners ($50) and 11 judges’ choice honorees ($25), along with Spud’s grand prize.

One of the judges’ choice recipients was sixth-grader Ketch Jacobson, for his story, “Food Fight,” that chronicled a war between ice cream and muffins. Jacobson wrote about the summer when the two sides made peace after muffins hit a sales slump.

“That ice cream came forward to the muffins that day and told them that it wasn’t personal,” Jacobson wrote. “People didn’t like eating hot things in the summer as much as they don’t like eating cold things in the winter. It was all seasonal. The muffins understood. The ice cream also understood. They were friends again.”

The Chilkat Valley Peace Prize program opened with teacher Jeanne Kitayama’s second-graders, who sang about the need to “walk a mile in your shoes” and have “peace like a river.” They also sang “give us peace” in Latin.

Cunningham then presented awards. First-place winners included seventh-graders Kai Hays and Neil Little and sophomore Dawnelle Saxton.

“When we quit using force to show our beliefs, then using force will be no longer necessary for peace,” Hays stated in his song, “Siblings on Earth.”

Little’s song “Shining Pearl” advised, “Don’t fight with people because they’re different.”

Saxton’s poster featured the quote, “Can we take a break from the chaos to realize that this is everyone’s world, and that we should take care of it together?”

During a brief break in the awards presentation, George Figdor showed a portion of the documentary “Soldiers of Peace” that described how soccer eased conflict among African tribes.

He said the documentary had served as an in-school prompt for student topics, and a copy would be donated to the library.

Music from Burl Sheldon closed out the event, after Cunningham presented a $500 check to sophomore Royal Henderson of the Haines High School Student Council. She said the money was part of a new effort by Haines People for Peace.

“We’re calling it ‘Building Bridges,’ and what it is, is an encouragement to have the high school students reach out to an international organization – maybe students who need help in another country, maybe another country where they’re building a school,” Cunningham said.