Joel Oyoumick Jr. has become the first Alaska Native pilot for Missionary Aviation Repair Center (MARC), a ministry based in Soldotna, Alaska, that flies children and staff to Bible camps across dozens of remote villages. This past season MARC carried 428 children and staff to five camps across thirty-six villages, packing as many as nine passengers at a time into Cessna Caravans and King Air 90s. For many of those young people, the flight is the only practical way to reach camp at all.
MARC's roots trace back to Covenant missionaries Roald and Harriett Amundsen, who served in Nome and Unalakleet for twenty years before founding the aviation ministry in 1964. Oyoumick grew up in Unalakleet, a community of about 700 people on the shore of the Bering Sea, where his father, Joel Matthew Oyoumick, pastored Unalakleet Covenant Church for thirteen years. The story was published by the Evangelical Covenant Church through its Covenant Companion magazine.
Oyoumick has said he wanted to be a pilot for as long as he can remember; after high school he attended Covenant Bible College in Canada, earned his private pilot's licence, and spent seven years flying mail and freight to more than seventy western Alaska villages. Curtis Ivanoff, former field director of the Evangelical Covenant Church of Alaska and the first Alaska Native to hold that post, called Oyoumick's appointment a milestone, while longtime MARC pilot Mark Swenson expressed hope that he would encourage other Alaska Native men and women to follow his lead.
Source: Evangelical Covenant Church / Covenant Companion — covchurch.org/2026/09/22/no-roads-no-problem/
