Hold this Thought - History

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.
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We did not think of straight lines and pieces of paper as describing our relationship to the land.
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[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."

A Boring Evening at Home: Alison Hull

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 01:00:00 -0700

Gerda Weissman Klein, a survivor of the Holocaust, visited Alaska last year. In her book, A Boring Evening at Home, Mrs. Klein reflects on her life before and after her years in World War II camps. She tells this story of her son, James.

"He and his friend Andy had found a few small tadpoles, and each of the boys made a small pond. ... One morning Jimmy came back from the beach, his huge blue eyes brimming with tears. ...that morning he had felt so sorry for the tadpoles that he had decided to release them. ... He was facing a dilemma. He had freed Andy's tadpoles as well! Did he have the right to do so? When I asked why he hadn't consulted Andy before granting the tadpoles their freedom, his argument was that Andy probably would not have agreed to restore the tadpoles to Lake Erie. That was not enough, however. The next question was one of morality. Who had greater rights: the tadpoles or Andy?"

The Diary of a Young Girl: Rev. Beatrice Hitchcock

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 01:00:00 -0700

From Anne Frank's diary entry of July 15, 1944:

"Anyone who claims that the older ones have a more difficult time here certainly doesn't realize to what extent our problems weigh down on us, problems for which we are probably much too young, but which thrust themselves upon us continually.... That's the difficulty in these times: ideals, dreams, and cherished hopes rise within us, only to meet the horrible truth and be shattered.

It's a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart."

Anne was to have only two more entries before the Gestapo found the Annex on August 4, 1944 and sent her to Auschwitz, then Bergen-Belsen, where she died in March 1945. She was not yet sixteen.

Edward R. Murrow Address: John McKay

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 01:00:00 -0700

At the close of World War II, American journalist Edward R. Murrow made this timeless observation in his March 1946 farewell address to England over the BBC:

"I doubt that the most important thing was Dunkirk or the Battle of Britain, El Alamein or Stalingrad, [perhaps] not even the landings in Normandy or the great blows struck by British and American bombers. Historians may decide that any one of these events was decisive, but I am persuaded that the most important thing that happened in Britain was that this nation chose to win or lose this war under the established rules of parliamentary procedure. It feared Nazism, but did not choose to imitate it. The government was given dictatorial power, but it was used with restraint, and the House of Commons was ever vigilant.

... remember that while London was being bombed in the daylight, the House of Commons devoted two days to discussing conditions under which enemy aliens were detained on the Isle of Man. Though Britain fell, there were to be no concentration camps here. ... [T]here was no retreat from the principles for which our ancestors fought."

Letter from Sigmund Freud: Wayne Mergler

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

In 1925, Sigmund Freud wrote this in a letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé.

"Dearest Lou,

First of all let me thank your dear old man for the kind lines he wrote to me, a stranger. May he keep going as long as he himself wants to!

As for me, I no longer want to ardently enough. A crust of indifference is slowly creeping up around me; a fact I state without complaining. It is a natural development, a way of beginning to grow inorganic. The ‘detachment of old age,' I think it is called. It must be connected with a decisive turn in the relationship of the two instincts postulated by me. The change taking place is perhaps not very noticeable; everything is as interesting as it was before, neither are the ingredients very different; but some kind of resonance is lacking; unmusical as I am, I imagine the difference to be something like using the [piano] pedal or not."

Billy Blake's Trial: Lila Vogt

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 01:00:00 -0700

In "Billy Blake's Trial," essayist Brian Doyle describes why he put so many years into the study of William Blake, poet and printer:

"Because he told the truth.... Because, when he knew he was going to die, he lay in his bed singing softly. ... Because, even though he claimed much of his work was dictated whole to him by angels and prophets, he edited heavily. Because he and his wife used to sit naked in their garden and recite passages from Paradise Lost. Because, when he was asked to recite his poems at parties, he got up and removed his coat and sang his lyrics aloud while dancing around the room, which is why he was subsequently not invited to parties anymore. Because he taught his wife, a grocer's daughter, to read. ... Because he bought a new pencil two days before he died. Because the very last thing he drew was his wife's face.

It is this last detail that catches my heart."

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.
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"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."

A Boring Evening at Home: Robin Dern

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 01:00:00 -0700

Gerda Weissmann Klein received an Oscar for the documentary One Survivor Remembers, the story of her experience in the camps of World War II. In her book, A Boring Evening at Home, Mrs. Klein writes:

"In the glare of spotlights and amid the blaze of jewels, I held an Oscar in my hand, but my thoughts harked back to the icy, merciless winter days when I was on a death march during the last bitter months of World War II, holding a battered, rusty bowl in my hands. I was praying that when I finally got to the front of the line, there would be some food left in the kettle. And if the ladle went a little deeper and by some miracle brought forth a potato, I would be a winner!

I could not help but think that I do not want my grandchildren -- or any children -- to live in a world in which a potato is more valuable than an Oscar. Nor do I want them to live in a world in which an Oscar is so important that nobody cares whether some people still do not have a potato."

Blessed Unrest: Guadalupe Marroquin

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 01:00:00 -0700

In Blessed Unrest, Paul Hawken writes:

"We are made aware of the proverbial forks in the road of life from an early age. Whether at commencement or from the pulpit, we are told there is a convenient path, and a less traveled road of integrity. ... We face such forks a million times a day, even in the space of a breath. Life is permeated with possibility at every instant. What distinguishes one life from another is intention, the one thing that we can control. Rosa Parks's intentions were deep and unswerving, as were King's, Thoreau's, and Gandhi's.... While the events of the world were out of their control, their resolve was not.

... remember Emerson's moral botany: corn seeds produce corn; justice creates justice; and kindness fosters generosity. ... Individuals start where they stand and, in Antonio Machado's poetic dictum, make the road by walking. For [Thoreau] there were no inconsequential acts, only consequential inaction....

War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning: Jack Roderick

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 01:00:00 -0700

In War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, Chris Hedges looks at the soldier's actual reality of killing another:

"To say the least, killing is nearly always a sordid affair. Those who carry such memories do so with difficulty, even when the cause seems just. Moreover, those who are killed do not die the clean death we see on television or film. They die messy, disturbing deaths that often plague the killers. ... I have looked into the open eyes of dead men and wished them shut.... Even hardened soldiers drape cloth over such faces or reach out and push the eyelids shut. ...

Nothing is more sickening in war than watching human lives get snuffed out. Nothing haunts you more. And it is never, as outsiders think, clean or easy or neat. Killing is a dirty business...."

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!'

The Ruin of the Roman Empire: Jeff Silverman

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 01:00:00 -0700

In The Ruin of the Roman Empire, James J. O'Donnell describes a soldier at a dangerous border. We are all of us that soldier, standing over the dangerous border of an ancient conflict and a contemporary crisis. In the preface, O'Donnell writes:

"An American soldier posted in Anbar province during the twilight war over the remains of Saddam's Mesopotamian kingdom might have been surprised to learn he was defending the westernmost frontiers of the ancient Persian empire against raiders, smugglers, and worse coming from the eastern reaches of the ancient Roman empire. This painful recycling of history should make him -- and us -- want to know what unhealable wound, what recurrent pathology, what cause too deep for journalists and politicians to discern draws men and women to their deaths again and again in such a place. The history of Rome, as has often been true in the past, has much to teach us."

The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Sarah Mouracade

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 01:00:00 -0700

In her autobiography, Charlotte Perkins Gilman describes the genesis of her personal philosophy about religion:

"It is told that Buddha, going out to look on life, was greatly daunted by death. 'They all eat one another!' he cried, and called it evil. This process I examined, changed the verb, said, 'They all feed one another,' and called it good....

As to pain--? I observed that the most important continuous functions of living are unconsciously carried on within us; that the most external ones, involving a change of activity on our part, as in obtaining food, and mating, are made desirable by pleasure; that just being alive is a pleasure; that pain does not come in unless something goes wrong. 'Fine!' said I. 'An admirable world. God is good.'"

Robert F. Kennedy Speech: Gunnar Knapp

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 01:00:00 -0700

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Birthday. In 1968, upon learning of King's death, Robert F. Kennedy gave this speech:

"In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in.
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We have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond, to go beyond these rather difficult times.
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What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness; but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.

The vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings who abide in our land.

Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that...."

The Art of the Impossible: Peg Tileston

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 01:00:00 -0700

In a speech he gave in 1991, Václav Havel, the President of Czechoslovakia, commented on the privileges that begin to accrue to someone in high office:

"I go to a special doctor, I don't have to drive a car, ... I needn't cook or shop for myself, and I needn't even dial my own telephone....

In other words, I find myself in the world of privileges, exceptions, perks; in the world of VIPs who gradually lose track of how much butter or a streetcar costs.... I find myself on the very threshold of the world of the communist fat cats whom I have criticized all my life.

And worst of all, everything has its own unassailable logic. It would be laughable and contemptible for me to miss a meeting that served the interests of my country because I had spent my presidential time in a dentist's waiting room....

But where do logic and objective necessity stop and excuses begin? Where does the interest of the country stop and the love of privileges begin?"