Hold this Thought - Alaska

Fifty Miles from Tomorrow: Willie Hensley

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 01:00:00 -0700

I have been asked to read this passage from my recent book, Fifty Miles from Tomorrow, about the loss of my family home in Kotzebue.

"This was the place where decade after decade the family had tied its dogs, beached its beluga, dried its seal meat and salmon, and moored its qayaqs and umiaqs. This was where year after year the father and sons would step out on the beach to assess the water, the clouds, and the wind before venturing out on the hunt.
...
We did not think of straight lines and pieces of paper as describing our relationship to the land.
...
[But] in Kotzebue, the BLM surveyors had come to town, surveyed the entire three-mile spit from the beach back to the lagoon, then auctioned off hundreds of lots. ... [T]he local Iñupiat never had a chance. Many were out of town gathering food for the winter when the auction was held. .... The result of the auction was to prevent future generations of Native families from ever owning land, dooming them to be renters or squatters on what was now considered other people's property."

What Happens When Polar Bears Leave: Marybeth Holleman

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 01:00:00 -0700

"I was thirteen on the first official Earth Day. Same age as my boy now. After school, I walked the neighborhood alone, thinking of the planet and of my adult life before me. It was the first time I'd thought of the Earth as a living entity, as something I could affect. I scanned the sidewalks and roadsides, looking for litter. I picked up one soda can beside the road, all the litter I found that day. Just one, but I still feel the coolness of that thin empty container, see a glimmer in the afternoon sun, still savor the heart-skipping lightness I felt the rest of the day.

What was reflected in that soda can -- I wanted more of that feeling. I wanted to be of use.

But one soda can is nothing. Did no good. What does?"

Conflicting Landscapes: Father Michael Oleksa

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 01:00:00 -0700

In Conflicting Landscapes, Clif Bates and I look at education and Alaska Native students.

"Of course we have some success stories. We do have Alaskan Native college graduates. We do have articulate, inspiring Native leaders, ... men and women in various professions around the state. But for every success we have twice as many tragic failures. For every graduate we have two or three drop outs. For every college alumnus we have five times more deaths, accidents, and suicides. For every star we have a dozen black holes.

I have buried too many victims of both suicide and accidents. I have shared the grief and the trauma, the anger and the sadness of elders and parents who have watched as their children drift off into lives of addiction, crime, sickness, suffering and death. And I am convinced that the seedbed out of which these destructive behaviors emerge is the school. Our schools are killing our kids."

Gathering Berries: Aleesha Towns

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 01:00:00 -0700

In "Gathering Berries," biologist Aleria Jensen describes picking tart, Alaskan berries.

Gathering Berries

"All we do is show up. Wake up, drink our coffee, jump in the car, head for these boggy slopes. Expect the land to provide. And it does. Despite the soggy ones, there are plenty of good berries. Plenty for us, for bears and birds and insect larvae. Plenty for muffins, pancakes, and smoothies. ...

I find myself feeling a huge gratitude, not only for what the land shares, but what it endures. ...

Within it, each fruit holds what I hold: an accumulation of place. The tangy explosion of these northern berries on the tongue is the landscape communicating itself, an expression of its essential wild character. Taste me -- here is your peat moss, your snowmelt, your glacial till. Here is your hemlock root, your jack pine, your overwintering bee. Taste me."

The Trap: Sarah Baird

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 01:00:00 -0700

The Anchorage Public Library's Community Reads program features books about Alaska Native culture. In The Trap by John Smelcer, Johnny must decide whether to go after his trapper grandfather in plummeting sub-zero temperatures in the Alaskan wilderness.

"Ravens may be among the most intelligent of creatures. Johnny had once watched a dozen ravens steal scraps from a wolf trying to protect his meal. While the others stayed a safe distance, one raven grabbed the wolf's tail and yanked it until the annoyed canine turned and chased him into the forest, momentarily abandoning his prize to the murder of ravens that quickly fell upon it. And no one in the village had ever seen a raven nest or hatchling. It was almost as if their presence in the far northland was by magic. And yet they were as ubiquitous as the changing seasons. It was no wonder the raven had become a central character in the myths belonging to Johnny's people."

Fifty Miles from Tomorrow: Willie Hensley

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 01:00:00 -0700

This is Willie Iggiagruk Hensley. I have been asked to read this passage from my recent book, Fifty Miles from Tomorrow, about current efforts to restore Iñupiat Ilitqusiat -- Iñupiat Values:

"I knew that the Iñupiaq were not a people who gave up in the face of struggle. Our people had made a life on the farthest fringe of the polar world. We had fought cold and deprivation, and through the ingenuity of the mind we had created implements and art from stone, flint, jade, ivory, bone, and wood and every usable part of the living world that helped us to survive. We had even turned snow into shelter and sod into a palace of warmth. Through trial and error, we had mastered the environment and passed on that knowledge through five hundred generations.
...
"It wasn't enough to claim our lands, we had to claim our ways of thinking, acting, and living -- the ways my mother Naungagiaq and her elderly friends and relations instilled in me, and that taught me patience, the ability to withstand pain and deprivation without self-pity, and the camaraderie of common effort. This was the true spirit of our people, and this was what was being resurrected."

Growing Up Native in Alaska: Dawn Dinwoodie

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 01:00:00 -0700

This is Dawn Dinwoodie. Growing up Native in Alaska is a collection of oral histories compiled for The CIRI Foundation and is also one of UAA and APU's Books of the Year. In my story in the book, I describe a Koyukon Athabascan language class I took.

I learned "it's taboo for women to say the Native word for 'bear' because 'bear' is such a powerful spirit. Women are very powerful because women give life. There were a lot of what you'd call taboos -- hutlani. When I was younger, I didn't understand why -- I always thought, 'Women's roles are so restricted. Why do they want to hold women back?" But it wasn't that at all. They had ways of doing things to honor the earth, to honor the spirits and to honor women. And these rules were designed because women's spirits are so powerful. It would clash with the bear spirit. Two very powerful spirits. Child-bearing women couldn't eat bear meat. They couldn't look at a bear. They couldn't say the Native word for bear. There was another word women would use, but it was a different word than men would use. Women had to use another indirect word that meant 'black covering.' In the Native ways, you are indirect when you speak."

Anchorage: Joan Kane

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 01:00:00 -0700

"Anchorage"

"How rapidly the tide turned, turns.
Still, turning now, gray wash and silt
Pivots on a finger of foam.

One could count time in its long
Trough, or lose it altogether:

Winter may thicken the air
Earlier than expected. Or,

An inflection in the shadow
Of the long crest is an increment,
And a small variation.

With it, we are joined, and continue.
A sharp-shinned hawk now wheels

Overhead, as each spring tends,
And shows its white underbelly."

The Stars, the Snow, the Fire: Jon Minton

Mon, 09 Feb 2009 01:00:00 -0700

In The Stars, the Snow, the Fire, John Haines writes that "Now and then people disappear in the far north and are never heard from again."

"... [H]ow easily I might be spilled and swept under, my boat to be found one day lodged in driftwood, an oar washed up on the sand, and myself a sack weighted with silt, turning in an eddy.

A drowsy, half-wakeful menace waits for us in the quietness of this world. I have felt it near me while kneeling in the snow, minding a trap on a ridge many miles from home. There, in the cold that gripped my face, in the low, blue light failing around me, and the short day ending, in those familiar and friendly shadows, I was suddenly aware of something that did not care if I lived. Or, as it may be, running the river ice in midwinter: under the sled runners a sudden cracking and buckling that scared the dogs and sent my heart racing. How swiftly the solid bottom of one's life can go.

Disappearances, apparitions; few clues, or none at all. Mostly it isn't murder, a punishable crime -- the people just vanish."

Fifty Miles from Tomorrow

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 01:00:00 -0700

This is Willie Iggiagruk Hensley. I have been asked to read this passage from my recent book, Fifty Miles from Tomorrow, which describes why I fought for Alaska Native land claims:

'...in the 1959 act of Congress admitting Alaska to the union, [it states]: "As a compact with the United States, said State and its people do agree and declare that they forever disclaim all right and title to any lands or other property (including fishing rights), the right or title to which may be held by any Indians, Eskimos, or Aleuts ...."

The United States had never won any land from Alaskan Natives in battle. It had never signed any treaties with the Alaskan Natives. Legal precedent was clear: if land had not been taken in battle or seized by an act of Congress, the federal courts had consistently found that Native Americans retained "aboriginal title" to it. That had to mean that we still owned most of Alaska!'

August: Susan Derrera

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 01:00:00 -0700

This is Susan Derrera, and this is my poem, "August" from Crosscurrents North:

This evening
as I rowed away
from the house,
my feet cool
under the collected
rainwater
on the bottom
of the boat,
I looked at the lake,
at how the rain
thrown across it
like children's jacks,
flashed
then disappeared--
and at that moment,
while rain curled
silver fingers
through my hair
releasing the wildness
there, I knew exactly
who I was
and what I loved,

and I thought of
you, whoever you are,
however lost you may be,
and I brought you
here
to listen
to the music
of the rain
on leaves and
the feathered backs
of grebes
and your own warm
skin.

When we rounded the island
the sky began to
lift and even the depths
were made clear-the smooth
gray rocks at the bottom,
your own
jeweled heart,

and after we were done,
tied off at the dock,
I brought you in
all wet and new
and offered coffee
in a small blue cup
and a piece of
rhubarb pie
hot from the oven,
the juices flushed
and running
on the plate.

The Trap: Karen Keller

Tue, 03 Feb 2009 01:00:00 -0700

Anchorage Public Library is presenting a Community Read through mid-March for the whole family -- a selection of books about Alaska Native culture. In one of the books, The Trap by John Smelcer, the grandfather speaks:

"They say the People of the North have a hundred names for snow. This may not be completely true, but anyone who has lived any time on a frozen land knows that snow has more than one name.

There is sleet, and hail so big around that the sound of it falling on a tin roof is deafening. There are dry, soft flakes that fall gently without hurry or anger, like the lazy flakes in a Christmas-card scene. There is wet snow that sticks to the branches of trees, turns to ice, and breaks their limbs when too much has gathered. Some snow falls straight down, some slant-wise, and some from everywhere, even from beneath as if the freezing earth itself is storming.
...
Only the foolish would say there is one word for snow. Anything that lasts so long and buries a world must be many-named."

Bones: Amy Purevsuren

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 01:00:00 -0700

This is Amy Purevsuren, and these are several stanzas from my poem "Bones."

"I am a thing sculpted by footfall
day after day, over rocks and tundra,
along game trails or no trails on high passes.

I cross over bear tracks laid in sand,
just formed, nearly warm. We each pass
our ways privately. In my tent

I read, write, invent sense out of this life,
humming words into lines: words,
raining thoughts, water for my landscape.
...
Sometimes I am visited.
After the wind spends days blow-
drying the sky, no breath left,
the valley lies stark naked of sound.
I lie at night under the giant starless silence
listening to flower petals curl to sleep
like wolf tails, to vole bellies
whisper through grass, and for
the breath of a bear, which does
come, if you travel for a time in the north.
Usually, we are equally startled;
I holler hey hey hey and the bear
grunts and thunders off.
I crawl from my tent and stand naked
so as to see the maker of sounds."

Do Alaska Native People Get Free Medical Care*?: Larry Merculieff

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 01:00:00 -0700

Do Alaska Native People Get Free Medical Care*? is the companion reader for UAA and APU's Books of the Year, from which this passage is taken.

'"Traditional ways of knowing" and "traditional knowledge and wisdom" are western terms that have evolved out of a gradual awareness on the part of western scientists and researchers that Alaska's Native peoples are experts about their environments and embody worldviews critical to the human future.
...
Because their lives have depended on the natural world for at least ten thousand years, Alaska's Native peoples have traditionally been trained to observe the subtlest changes in wildlife and environment, and are therefore often aware of trends and anomalies in their regions far in advance of the western scientific community. No other peoples in the world, and no science, can replicate what Alaska Native Elders and cultures know and understand about their immediate environments and the wildlife that breed in their areas.'

Precarious Preserve: Anne Coray

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 01:00:00 -0700

In my essay, "Precarious Preserve," I speak to the impact reading has had in shaping my views on conservation issues.

"I have thought deeply about the hidden costs of vegetarianism: the by-catch of birds and rabbits as combines sweep through the fields; the transport, with fossil fuels, of corn, wheat, and rice. Yet I never enjoy killing animals or watching them be killed. And every moose I have helped butcher has elicited that same sense of misgiving and loss. It does not seem fair that nature insists on the exchange of life for life.

My friend Sue asked me recently, ‘How is it that you are such an environmentalist, being born and raised in Alaska?' I paused. I wasn't particularly struck by the presumption that Alaskans as a group have few conservationist leanings. I'd heard that often enough. But I hadn't really thought about what had helped shape my views. 'You know,' I said, 'it's mostly from reading, and thinking about things.' Until that moment, the impact that reading has on me hadn't fully registered."