Posts from Arctic Alaska
This is a story about genocide
This is a story about genocide. Joe turns toward me. His eyebrows are raised, his mouth down-turned, his salt-and-pepper hair sticking straight up.
I mean the dire harm we are doing to this planet and in so doing, the harm we are doing to you. I point at him with my thought.
He smiles and points to his T-shirt: a row of “lower-forty-eight” Indians and the words: Terrorism: We’ve been fighting it since 1492….” Oh yea, and happy birthday,” he says, grinning.
Joe keeps saying we’re losing daylight but I can’t see that there’s any to lose. The night sky is wiped clean by a white-out with short glimpses of the revolving airport light, or a snowmobile dashing by.
Joe says,
My mentor, Paul Tiulana, took me aside one day when I was young and said, ‘The society that rules us thinks we’re problematic. But we’ve lived here successfully for 15,000 years. Those who say we’re trouble have only been here for 200 years.’
“Pre-contact, we were one of the great civilizations alongside the Aztecs and Mayas and the Sioux. We were warned that going to school would teach us only one thing – to be a recipient of welfare. In the old days in Wales, our parents taught by example: ‘This is the way to live in order to be.’”
Wales
Ten a.m., minus 2 degrees, wind: 50 mph. Joe keeps saying we’re losing daylight but there’s hardly any to lose. Mid-morning darkness is pixilated by horizontal grains of white. We haven’t really “seen” the village yet. We’d get lost if we went out there. But from this new part of town – built since Joe was last here - there appears to be no houses, no people, no animals, no village all.
The florescent lights in the hall are bright but I’m groggy. These days, explorers, climatologists, and journalists have lousy carbon footprints: too much flying around. Joe is making kupiaq with his Italian stovetop espresso machine and nuking instant oatmeal. He has lived in San Francisco, had shows in Chicago and New York, but doesn’t go far these days.
Ray Seetonik stops by to visit. He’s one of the village’s four whaling captains and a venerable “elder” at age 67.
Last month we saw small birds around. Maybe 10 or 20 of them. They were dark, grayish, smaller than snowbirds (snow buntings). They were by the pond. Then we saw a couple of hawks. Never saw birds here in winter time.
In spring the seagulls come just when the bowhead whales arrive. Last year we were the only whaling boat out there. I harpooned one but it went under the ice. My sons were able to find it because the ice was so thin. One used an auger and the other son had a tuuk and we finally got it out. Oh, we were happy. It’d been lost for 3 days. Before that was the time I got the big whale. It was 47 feet long. I dedicated that one to Mom. It was so big, it almost tipped us over….
I can feel it when a whale or a polar bear is out there. I’ll be working somewhere, doing something, and suddenly I’ll just feel it and I tell my crew, “Hurry up, we have to go out now.” We’ve always had plenty of food. But so many young people these days, all they do is (makes gesture of sitting at a computer keyboard)……what’s that word? Type.
I always had sealskin pants and mukluks, harpoons with handles made of driftwood, and seal nets. No one has these things anymore. But I teach my sons everything I know. One day I shot a bear but it didn’t die. It didn’t even get wounded. Then it turned around and looked at me and I saw a black mark on its rump. My Dad told me never to shoot a bear with such a mark. I was careless. I felt so bad. That was another kind of bear, you know, the kind that can’t be killed at all.”
Anchorage to Nome. Nome to Wales.
Pointed hills, curving valleys, and saw-tooth mountains with oxbow rivers unwinding their white coils toward the sea. I’m accompanied by 65 year-old artist and Alaska native, Joseph Senungetuk who lives with his wife Catherine in Anchorage. We’re flying in a 6-passenger Bering Air plane northwest from Nome to Joe’s home village of Kingetkin, or Wales, population 150. This will be his first visit in 17 years. Ahead is a cerulean wedge, the almost-dark sky into which we will fly.
Below Norton Sound and the Bering Sea is open water. “It should all be frozen,” Joe says, remembering that he moved with his family by dogsled to Nome on the frozen sea.
Here and there threads of rotting ice are thrown between white-capped wind-swells. In some bays a white cuticle of shore-fast ice has been battered loose by storm waves. We pass Port Clarence and Brevig Mission. A tent-like white cloud shrouds a pointed mountain - a sign of strong winds. Wind has been one of the indicators of climate change in the Arctic: “It blows every which way and we can’t tell where it’s coming from next,” an elder told me.
Around another headland new ice has taken hold: the ocean is white and the land is powder blue, but the next bay is all whitecaps. The Arctic is always a place of reversals where darkness is a shade of white, where a man can become a walrus and a polar bear, turning in its tracks, has a human head.
We land in a hard crosswind. Our short snowmobile ride to the “multi-use” center where we’ll sleep is almost a blank as blowing snow fills the air. Joe says that nothing looks familiar, but I say, that’s because we can’t see anything. We stand outside the locked door of the building then a snowscooter roars up.
As she heads out the door, she turns back, “Oh yea…you can walk around but no one is doing it now because in December there was a polar bear right behind here. And we’re keeping our dogs tied up because there are rabid foxes everywhere.”
The door slams but not before a small mountain of snow has blown in. She mounts her snowmobile and roars off into the white-out. Joe, tall and wide with inquiring eyes and a growing gut, hums softly and waits for the “kupiaq” (coffee) to boil.
Joe wanders around the rooms of the “multi” in a daze. His wife, also an artist, has just been diagnosed with metastasized cancer, and he’s reverberating from the shock. Coming “home” is more poignant now.
We’re in the new part of town and nothing looks familiar. Once villagers move away it can be difficult to return because airfare is so expensive. But reminiscing goes on in every Alaskan city. The night before we’d visited an old Wales neighbor, Herb A. “It used to be so cold in the wintertime in Wales,” he said. “Twenty-five foot drifts. Had a hard time getting to school, sliding down drifts from the second story window. Now its windier and the storms are fiercer with more south winds occurring in wintertime.”
“Spring was beautiful. There was always a northwesterly wind about 5 to 10 knots. It played well with the migration of marine mammals. There’s a timeline for when the animals show up. The sea and the seasons have special laws, specific signs that are looked for, that tell you whether to go out hunting or not, and words for when the sea is moving into a new season, like when the salt content lessens because of meltwater.
We investigate the Kingetkin community room. There’s a showcase with artifacts from a nearby dig, a modern painting by Joe’s brother, Ron Senungetuk, long tables and folding metal chairs, a photo of old Wales from a missionary family, and an aerial photo of Kingetkin, its narrow strip of buildings and wooden houses on a strand cut through by a small river. The village lies between a lagoon and a marsh to the west and to the east, the Bering Sea. Beyond is the coast of Siberia, only 55 miles away.
Joe remembers his father’s skin boat made of two and a half split bearded seal hides. He remembers eating fresh walrus breast: part meat, part milk. He remembers dances that lasted a week, before the idea of schedules were imposed from the outside. He remembers a man who fell in love with a woman up the coast at Cape Espenberg, so he went out onto the moving ice in the spring – he knew which way it would drift - and used it as transportation to go see his girlfriend….He remembers a person on Little Diomede Island who became a walrus. When that walrus/person returned to live among humans, he found he could no longer stand their smell, so he lived alone at the edge of the village… ”Maybe I feel a little bit like him now,” he said. “Not repulsed, but apart from the others.” Soon word gets out that Joe is here and all that changes.
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All afternoon we’ve been like sitting ducks
All afternoon we’ve been like sitting ducks as Joe’s friends and relatives appear. Davis Ongtowasrok comes to take us to his mother’s house for dinner. He’s gaunt and toothless – testimony to the non-existent American health-care system – and dutifully moved in with his elderly mother after his father died. “Mom used to be the bi-lingual teacher,” he tells us. Her education went to the 4th grade, Dad’s to the 8th. Now the only time we hear Inupiat is when the elders come around with visiting dance groups. I can only understand the basics. No one young talks our language anymore.”
The ride to Faye’s house is snow-blasted. I ride behind Davis and Joe rides in the sled. “How can you see where you’re going?” I ask. A toothless smile: “I can’t, but the “snow-go” knows the way.” We flail through a deep snowdrift that hides the entryway. Blowing snow blasts my face. Impossible to see. I fall a couple of times, yelping and gulping snow. So does Joe. We’re like newborn children with no feet, no eyes.
Davis waits patiently, then jerks open the first entry door to his mother’s house. At age 78 she is bent but vigorous. She has an impish smile and scuttles around her cramped kitchen cutting up piles of reindeer meat and fermented walrus with her ulu: “I still get ice from the lagoon and driftwood from out on the beach with my sled,” she says, dropping the curved blade to shove a few more sticks into the ancient wood stove.
She serves platefuls of boiled reindeer meat and next to these, black bits of fermented bearded seal on squares of cardboard. Meltwater is scooped into plastic cups. “Before we had glass nursing bottles we used bearded seal intestines and squeezed the milk out of one end,” she says, remembering too, that Davis, now in his 40’s, was born in their summer camp up the coast about 20 miles, a place that has since been wrecked by brown bears.
The reindeer is chewy. She sprinkles soy sauce on the meat. “When we’re not eating reindeer, there’s some good flounder at this time of year - we lie on the ground at a lead in the ice and spear them. All the time, though, we are eating walrus, seal and polar bear. I boil the claws. They’re good. But if you eat the bear’s liver your hair will fall out!” She says, laughing, touching her thinning hair.
Davis is so gaunt and pale he looks ghostlike. But he’s kind-hearted and thoughtful: “I used to hunt walrus at night on the pack ice. We could hear them barking. Must have been a big herd. I miss that sound. Now the ice pack is so far out we can barely see it. Our family herds reindeer. They were brought in by…….in…….. They’re free ranging. We have three satellite collars and I used 4-wheelers or snowmobiles to find them. The rest of the time I track them on the computer.”
Faye brings more meat and we all chew in silence. She looks at Joe and smiles. “I remember your father, Willy,” she says. Joe’s parents moved the family to Nome when Joe was ten. This is the first time he’s been back to his village for 17 years. He and Faye look at family pictures hung around the room. There’s a picture of Wales’ orphans. “The whites brought religion and sickness and not much else,” he says. We had good lives. We had ice and lots of food. We didn’t need anything. My grandparents died of the flu. An old woman named Attoq lived at our house. My mother was sucking the milk of a dead woman when a neighbor found her.”
Faye says her father always took one teaspoon of seal oil every night before he went to bed because there were no medicines then. He died when Faye was a teenager in the 1943 flu epidemic. But the influenza epidemic of 1918 decimated the adult population of Wales. Faye says: “Many times the flu has taken the people of Wales away.”
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