WISDOM KEEPER

Wisdom Keeper

One Man’s Journey to Honor the Untold History of the Unangan People

Ilarion Merculieff

North Atlantic Books

Berkeley, California

Copyright © 2016 by Ilarion Merculieff. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the written permission of the publisher. For information contact North Atlantic Books.

Published by

North Atlantic Book

Berkeley, California

Cover photo by Venue Herbito

Cover design by John Yates

Wisdom Keeper: One Man’s Journey to Honor the Untold History of the Unangan People is sponsored and published by the Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences (dba North Atlantic Books), an educational nonprofit based in Berkeley, California, that collaborates with partners to develop cross-cultural perspectives, nurture holistic views of art, science, the humanities, and healing, and seed personal and global transformation by publishing work on the relationship of body, spirit, and nature.

North Atlantic Books’ publications are available through most bookstores. For further information, visit our website at www.northatlanticbooks.com or call 800-733-3000.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Merculieff, Larry, author.

Title: Wisdom Keeper: one man’s journey to honor the untold history of the Unangan people / Ilarion Merculieff.

Description: Berkeley, California : North Atlantic Books, 2016.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015041102 (print) | LCCN 2016005037 (ebook) | ISBN 9781623170493 (paperback) | ISBN 9781623170509 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Merculieff, Larry. | Aleuts—Biography. | Pribilof Islands (Alaska)—Biography. | Political activists—Alaska. | Aleuts—History. | Pribilof Islands (Alaska)—History. | BISAC: HISTORY / Native American. | POLITICAL SCIENCE / Colonialism & Post-Colonialism.

Classification: LCC E99.A34 M473 2016 (print) | LCC E99.A34 (ebook) | DDC 979.8/4—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015041102

This book is dedicated to all the young people of the world who will take up where we leave including my son Ian, my daughters Leatha and Marissa, and my grandchildren Kanuux, Hamati, and Leah.

It is my prayer that they never forget how our peoples suffered and prevailed.

Acknowledgments

These stories are the work of more than twenty years of writing. I did not feel that they were ready to be told until now. I have many people I wish to thank. Most of all, I wish to thank the Unangan people of Saint Paul and Saint George Island. Without their help I could not have written this book. They were the people who inspired me to be who I am through their patience, fortitude, courage, love, ingenuity, humor, sharing, caring, unselfishness, humanity, humility, and persistence through trials and tribulations that would challenge the strongest of human spirit.

I wish to thank my ancestors for teaching me what it is to be a real human being. Their spirituality and ingenious technologies feed me to this day. Their intelligence as real human beings allowed us to survive and thrive under the harsh conditions of the Bering Sea. The fact that we are here today is a testament to them. Despite genocide, internment, and slavery that we experienced during the last 250 years, we are still living in our ancestral territories.

I also wish to especially give credit to Sergie Savorof, my Kuuyux, who gave me his name at age four; my parents John and Stefanida Merculieff, who gave me love and the liberty to explore who I was without interference; my Aachaa, Nick Stepetin, who showed me how to be a good hunter and a real human being; my aunt Sophie Stepetin, whose life wisdom lives with me today; my papa, Paul Merculieff, who shared his life with me openly and inspired me with his humility; Mike Zacharof, who shared his love for our people through his work; Howard Luke who taught me how to speak from my heart instead of my head; and my uncle Iliodor (Eddie) Merculieff, who inspired me to work for and with my people.

Of course, the list would not be complete without thanking all the Elders and spiritual leaders from the different traditions who shared their ways with me openly, including the Zulu, Indigenous peoples of Australia, Mapuche, Kechua/Ayamarra, Maori, the Maya, Tarahumara of northwestern Mexico, the Inca, Hopi, Sioux, Haundenasaunee (Iroquois), the Stoney Elders of Alberta, the Yupik, Tlingit, Unangan, the Dene of Alaska, and the Inupiat.

I wish to thank all my friends who helped me over the years by reading chapters in this book and giving me feedback and suggesting edits. I especially wish to thank Libby Roderick and Sumner Macleish—Libby for her undying belief over the years that these stories need to be written and published and for her role in unwrapping the traumas I suffered, and Sumner for her patience and persistence in helping to edit my manuscript before sending it to the publisher. And I wish to thank my faithful friends for sticking by me through my life, including George and Patrick Pletnikoff, Jenny Norris, Sharon (Shay) Sloan, Salila, and Susanne Swibold, and Helen Corbett for exposing me to spiritual experiences in my adult life. I also thank my siblings, Rinna, Eva, Thomas, and Eliah for their unconditional love and for what they taught me.

And finally, I wish to express my deepest gratitude to the Kalliopeia Foundation. Without their support this work could not have been done.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword

Chapter 1

The Unangan (Aleut): Real People Who Live Near the Shoreline

Chapter 2

Genocide and Slavery

Chapter 3

Callorhinus ursinus: The Northern Fur Seal

Chapter 4

Internment

Chapter 5

My Legacy as an Unangan

Chapter 6

Boxer Shorts and Seals

Chapter 7

Every Unangan Child: The Indirect Effects of Government Oppression

Chapter 8

Sealing

Chapter 9

Death of a Six-Year-Old

Chapter 10

A Personal View of Internal and External Oppression

Chapter 11

A Young Rebel Is Born

Chapter 12

School Without Love

Chapter 13

Death in a Village Is Very Personal

Chapter 14

I Was a “Hooker”

Chapter 15

University Life

Chapter 16

Lobbying for My People Begins

Chapter 17

Family Life

Chapter 18

The Government Pullout: A People in Peril

Chapter 19

Homer Gone

Chapter 20

Another Kind of Death

Chapter 21

The Boat Harbor and Private Enterprise

Chapter 22

The Creator Has a Sense of Humor

Chapter 23

The Spiritual Journey

Chapter 24

The Bear Claw Necklace and the United Nations

Chapter 25

As the Island Turns, Part I

Chapter 26

As the Island Turns, Part II

Chapter 27

An Unangan Love Story

Chapter 28

A Yupik Election

Chapter 29

The Heart of the Halibut: A Rite of Passage of an Unangan Boy

Chapter 30

The Bering Sea Council of Elders

Chapter 31

The Mapuche of Southern Argentina

Chapter 32

What the Elders Say

Chapter 33

Contemplating and Questioning Everything

About the Author

Foreword

This book is a treasure and a rare gift, for many reasons. The stories it tells—and the worlds it invites us into—offer profound insight, medicine, and teaching for this turbulent time we collectively face. While our planetary home and the web of life itself are shaken by loss, greed, instability, and violence, Wisdom Keeper illuminates ways forward by remembering a hidden past, practicing cultural healing and forgiveness, and revealing conscious, balanced, and caring ways forward, all at once.

Sometimes I wonder how we might all be different if we were raised in supportive communities of playful, attentive, and affirming adults in places of great beauty—in a reverent and reciprocal relationship with a wild and vital living world. When I first met Ilarion, I saw how that kind of idyllic upbringing could result in a person at once youthful and ancient, spontaneous and deeply considered.

What I didn’t know then, and understand better now, is how the multigenerational pain and suffering of his people have also contributed to the wise and eloquent elder he’s become. As I’ve experienced him over time, I learned that his way of marrying apparent contradictions informs a gifted messenger, advocate, and social healer.

I have had the gift of knowing and working with Ilarion for about ten years. During that time, I’ve learned that being in his presence is often, in itself, transformative. What I didn’t know previously was how presence could be conveyed or transmitted through written stories.

Presence is one of those elusive qualities we often read about or aspire to when we cultivate ourselves as human beings, as parents, as educators, or perhaps as leaders. Many self-help books and workshops attempt to teach it. Ilarion’s journey, and the hidden history of his Unangan people, reveal that presence is an embodied truth of their culture. Reading his story evokes and awakens that distant yet remembered memory in me. It may, I hope, offer the same gift to you.

His ways of seeing, writing, and being are informed by a keenness of perception—without judgment or blame—that by example, models an integration of diverse ways of knowing. This story, and history, weave intuition, gut knowing, heart perceiving and spiritual insight with mental clarity to model a kind of whole-person approach to living that’s rarely found outside of Indigenous cultures and knowledge systems. These stories are told in so accessible, lucid and palpable a way as to offer readers an integral experience of it.

From hearing Ilarion speak many times, I’d learned of his remarkable childhood and the ways he was raised by his community. The depth of acceptance, encouragement, and love he experienced growing up offer many vital insights into reimagining parenting and early childhood education. The ways he was mentored reveal key pathways and insights about how we teach and learn.

I had imagined from hearing his childhood tales that his Unangan people may have suffered less from colonialism, slavery, genocide, and oppression than many other Indigenous peoples. I now know that I had been wrong. The harms suffered by the Unangan people were as egregious, violent, persistent, and potentially soul-shattering as any conquest stories I’ve heard perpetuated elsewhere. But somehow, the beauty, power, and grace of their culture endured.

What’s remarkable about this book is the way that it weaves personal narrative (which doubles as instructions and insights for becoming a human being) with political history. Reading it awakens me to understanding previously hidden chapters of our nation’s lineage of conquest, greed, and violence, while enlivening me with an immersive story that conveys embodied and heartfelt teachings about humans’ correct relationship—with our selves, each other, and our mother Earth.

Wisdom Keeper integrates the wound and the gift of the Unangan people without shame or blame, but as an offering with true compassion, invitation, and warmth. With all that the Unangan people have suffered, it is their perseverance, kindness, and commitment to living in ways that honor the web of life, each other, and future generations that shines through.

I am not a scholar of Indigenous life ways or knowledge systems. I am a producer, communicator, and social entrepreneur who cofounded Bioneers, a nonprofit organization, in partnership with my husband, Kenny Ausubel. Bioneers identifies, gathers, connects, and disseminates visionary and practical solutions for restoring the Earth and people. We see the Earth as the mother of all issues, understanding that all of life is interconnected and interdependent. It’s all alive, it’s all intelligent, it’s all connected, it’s all relative. Our work helps to illuminate a positive and life-honoring future that’s within our reach today.

Since its inception in 1990, Bioneers has had Indigenous voices and Traditional Ecological Knowledge at its heart. This has been due to an honoring of First Peoples as the Earth’s old-growth cultures, and a recognition that their long history of living in right relationship to nature offers guidance for how to reinvent our own culture. My own journey has been inspired and informed by many Indigenous leaders, and my commitment to stand with First Peoples on behalf of Mother Life has deepened. Of many I have known, Ilarion has proven a most gifted and wise guide and teacher. I commend him to you.

In 1992, at Bioneers’ annual conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico, we gathered elders from several pueblos to discuss the anniversary of Columbus “discovering” America. I’ll never forget hearing Petuuche Gilbert of Acoma Pueblo say “Even before the Europeans came, the people who came from the West were welcomed. Even after five hundred years, in spite of all the bad feelings that have come about, we still welcome people who come to Acoma. We mean it, because we’re all coexisting together.” What I heard in my heart was: “Five hundred years ago, you came, and we welcomed you with open arms. If you came again today, we would do the same.”

My jaw gaped with wonder, awed by the forgiveness, inclusivity and equanimity that man expressed, after so much harm and violence had been loosed upon his people. That began my apprenticeship, as I realized that Indigenous cultures, rituals and lifeways contain keys not only to our planetary ecological survival but also to the evolution of our conscious awareness as human beings.

What I’ve learned from Ilarion (and from my life) is what a big difference there is between knowing something in my head, and integrating understanding through my heart. Our culture tends to laud mental understanding, to the exclusion of our many intelligences. We imagine that speaking from a place of factual data confers authority; what I’ve come to understand is that it’s true integration and embodied, being wisdom that is the most compelling teaching or leadership capacity we have to affect social change and healing.

My father used to say, when I was growing up, that people don’t change unless or until they became extremely uncomfortable. In my life, that has proven to be true. I’ve needed to be shaken deeply, sometimes to the core, before opening myself to a new way of being. Perhaps that’s true for whole cultures, as well. If it is, who better to provide insight than the cultures that have experienced and survived multigenerational trauma. I believe we are collectively on the verge of being shaken deeply and profoundly, as climate instability and rising social unrest challenge the core structures that Western civilization and corporate capitalism have been built upon.

Wisdom Keeper also speaks to the cultural necessity of reimagining what the true masculine and feminine really are, as human qualities that are integral within us each and all, and that imbue all of life. In this time of radical gender reinvention, reexamining the masculine through how the Unangan men understood it is revelatory, hopeful, and inspiring.

As studies around the globe consistently reveal, when you increase the leadership of women in governance, business, community organizing, or any enterprise, virtually everyone and every living system benefits. As more women enter leadership in every sector, the economy, ecology, health, and peacemaking improve. The Athena Doctrine revealed that among 65,000 people surveyed in thirteen countries around the world, over 65 percent “feel that the world would be a better place if men thought more like women.” The urgency of healing and elevating the feminine principle and creating spaces for women’s and girls’ emergence is essential, for without that, Ilarion notes, nothing new may be born into this world.

Wisdom Keeper illustrates how, by surfacing and revealing the truth of the wound, the medicine and gift it contains can be revealed. Perhaps our Western culture’s avoidance of facing the shadow and pain of our nation’s brutal history is related to banishing the feminine—that which is vulnerable and mysterious, changeable and complex—to the invisible underworld. In my own work with diverse women leaders, it has commonly been true that those who arrive with the most severe histories of injustice, abuse, or trauma are those who often have the most to contribute to collective healing.

I trust you’ll be nourished by this story, on many levels, as I have been. While so many hidden histories of conquest for gain are surfacing from Indigenous and other peoples all over the world, may the shame, pain and trauma that occurred be integrated through the telling into revealing healing pathways forward. Through healing storytelling, reading, and integration, may the beauty, grace, and spiritual wholeness that radiates through these enduring old-growth cultures invite us to embrace the feminine, redefine leadership and gender, and re-engage with the mystery and abundant wisdom of the natural world.

This is a story of hope. It’s a story of collective and cultural tenacity, endurance, and perseverance. It’s a beam of radiant and pure starlight shining through a shrouded history of dominance. It’s a story of resilience about how grace, kindness, and fully awakened human consciousness can prevail against immense odds. It’s a story of remembering who we really are, as we’re all indigenous to someplace. Wisdom Keeper is about cultural healing and communal, collaborative co-creation with our Mother, the Earth. May its beauty and vital life force inspire and enchant you.

—Nina Simons, cofounder and president of Bioneers

Chapter 1

The Unangan (Aleut): Real People Who Live Near the Shoreline

I come from a truly amazing group of people who are little known in the world. My people, the Aleut people, or Unangan as we say in our language, Unangan Tunuu, have survived and thrived along the remote Aleutian Islands and Bering Sea shorelines for more than ten thousand years. Anthropologists and archaeologists agree that the Unangan had one of the most sophisticated maritime cultures in North America prior to any contact with the outside world. Although they are uncertain about whether the original Unangan people came over from Russia and Mongolia by seacraft or across the Bering Land Bridge, they agree that our people settled on a group of some two thousand islands along an archipelago now known as the Aleutian Islands. Anthropologists and archaeologists have acknowledged that by the time the Russian fur traders, called “promyshlenniki,” found our people, the Unangan people were living in what was to become known as the most densely populated linear mile of shoreline in North America.

Archaeologists have uncovered an old settlement estimated to have been the home of as many as five thousand Unangan. This discovery later demonstrated how extraordinarily well our people survived harsh environmental conditions; how they thrived on rich traditions of art, dance, music, storytelling, ceremonies, and rituals; and how they successfully used their knowledge of science and technology. They accomplished these feats because they were “real human beings” or “real people” who lived in the present moment and in their hearts. The heart was viewed as the place where a being is in constant communication with “all that is.” It was from this great sense of connection to everything that our laws for living grew, as did our natural laws and our spiritual instructions. It was what kept the people safe while working under and with the often brutal conditions of the Bering Sea. We were a deeply spiritual people. Everything we did and developed, including our technologies, were spiritually based.

The Aleutian and Bering Sea islands were formed either by volcanic activity or are tops of submarine mountains and as such are relatively barren except for the summer’s rich carpet of green tundra grasses and colorful wildflowers. Other than arctic foxes, there have never been any indigenous land animals. However, the Unangan found the Bering Sea teeming with marine mammals, fish, and birds—wildlife that was to be the foundation for supporting an Unangan population estimated to range from twenty to thirty thousand strong.

The Unangan, an advanced seagoing people, used their seventeen-to-twenty-foot kayaks, called iqyaxes (one-hole kayaks) or oolooxtahns (two-hole meat boats), to travel to the South Pacific islands, the Russian coast, southern California, and throughout the Bering Sea and North Pacific for weeks. These highly advanced sea kayaks were considered the “second wife” of the Unangan hunter and fisherman, and used to hunt whales, walruses, sea otters, porpoises, Steller sea lions, and northern fur seals. Ingenious methods were designed to catch large halibut from the kayaks, using seaweed rope and V-shaped bone hooks that ensured that the halibut never got loose once hooked. The sea-lion-hide-covered kayaks one made of driftwood, shaped over nearly a year’s time, to create an incredibly quiet, swift, and durable high-seas craft. To this day, Unangan kayaks are considered some of the best open-sea kayaks in the world, designed to take high seas coming or going with amazing stability. The kayaks are built in such a way as to move with every nuance of the sea, as if they are part of the sea. Unangan kayaks are the first high-seas craft known to have a form of ball bearings, made of ivory, to allow every critical part of the craft to bend with the movements of the sea.

A friend and I built an iqyax one year. It took us nine months, the same amount of time that it takes for a baby to be born. From building this craft, I was amazed to learn how my people knew the sea. We built the iqyax as closely as possible to the original way it was done. It was seventeen feet long and twenty-two inches wide. A split bow prevented the craft from submarining in rough seas—the sea would go through the split bow and lift it up so the craft did not submerge. The rear was of such a design that it helped maintain control of the craft in a following sea when the craft is moving down a swell, no matter how large the swells of the sea. The “ball bearings” would allow the craft to move with every movement of the water, making one feel as “one with the sea.”

There are stories told to me by my Kuuyux, a special Unangan mentor, of Unangan men who traveled in their seventeen-foot iqyaxes as far south as the tip of South America, southern California and the Pacific Islands, and as far north as Point Barrow and the Russian Far East. Our people’s navigational abilities were unparalleled in North America at the time. Because the Bering Sea has an average of twenty days of sunshine a year due to the Japan Current meeting with the cold air of Siberia, creating clouds and fog, our people could navigate without the stars—a feat that requires tuning into, and merging with, the “spirit that lives in all things.” The real human being is able to navigate by feeling the energy of the sea and land, watching the direction of swells in the sea and the kinds of birds and seals that come through the fog, knowing the direction of tidal movements, feeling the rhythm of the water, listening to animals on the rookeries and cliffs, intuition, “gut feel,” and heart sense. All of this was done without thought of any kind,[1] and hunters passed down songs and stories about Unangan navigation for coming generations. Today, there are still some people who can travel this way without a compass or any modern-day navigation aid. Most of the men who fished for halibut when I was a child had this ability. However, today young men use modern navigation aids such as radar and GPS. Years later, I traveled to Patagonia, in southern Argentina, to see the Mapuche people who had invited Elders from Alaska to visit. It was at that time I found out something furthermore interesting about the travels of my people, which I write about in the chapter called “The Mapuche of Southern Argentina.”

Unangan men began their kayak training as young boys when they would be required to sit in the water along the shoreline for hours each day for several years. They were also required to run up and down hills while carrying large basalt rocks with outstretched arms before being considered ready to join the men. Bruno Frohlich, a forensic anthropologist with the Smithsonian Institute who studied Unangan cultures for three decades, noted that the average Unangan man would be considered an Olympic athlete today, with biceps that would shame most men.

Anthropologists have documented that the Unangan practiced a basic form of brain surgery, unsurpassed in the Northern Hemisphere, with words for every part of the body and a sophisticated mummification process that equaled that of the Egyptians.

With small poison-tipped spears and from iqyaxes and oolooxtahns, our ancestors successfully hunted large whales while they were foraging in bays for several days. When a whale was shot with the spear, the poison, rendered from a plant, would make its way to the heart of the animal and nowhere else. After three days, the whale succumbed.

The appreciation for aesthetics is readily obvious in everything made by Unangan craftspeople, from the intricately painted steam-bent wooden hats, the kayaks, spears, clothing, waterproof garments, tattoos, and ceremonial and hunting masks, to bone and ivory carvings. These items, in museum collections around the world, demonstrate that Unangan built beauty and utility into everything they crafted, with a keen sense of spirituality and connectedness with everything in Creation.

The nature of Unangan spirituality can be gleaned from the art and paintings on the wooden hats used in rituals and ceremonies or worn during the hunt or wars. Unangan men believed that the hunted animal is to be honored, so the hunter comes in his finest. The Unangan bent-wood hat frequently includes four- or eight-petal rosettes, indicating the use of the “sacred four” known in many Indigenous traditions around the world, and the famous Flower of Life, which has been found, for example, in Egyptian and Mayan glyphs. It contains the patterns of creation as they emerged from the “Great Void.”

The wings of the hat, called volutes, are made of ivory and display a spiritual worldview in their design that includes the “third eye,” balance of the masculine and feminine, one’s spiritual center, and the center of all Creation. The volutes were all carved differently, depending on where one was from and what station the person had as a hunter. However, all volutes contain a “hidden” message of Unangan spirituality.

The volute itself, when turned on its side, is shaped like a bird or bird’s beak, signifying the Thunderbird. The Thunderbird was known to our people as a bird with the power of death—a reminder that we must die the “small deaths” if we are to live. These small deaths may be loss of a loved one, a home, a friend, death of someone you cared about, death of the old “you” and birth of the new, etc. The piece, ranging from six to eight inches in length, would be carved with a curve on its length, ending in a spiral. The spiral represented Agox, the Maker of all Creation, which never ends—our people knew that life was a circle, but a changing circle. In the center of the spiral was the third eye, our center, and the center of the universe. The stem of the volute conveys the understanding that male and female aspects in all creation must be balanced in order to live as a real human being. Even the land, I found out, has a male and female aspect. A phallic symbol appears on the stem along with circles with dots in the center to indicate the “sacred circle” and the center; designs of three circles attached to one “originating” circle denote the sacred feminine number three, and the place from which we originated.

Intricate designs on the hat may depict a hunting story, or animals and birds. The hat, like all other Unangan objects, had a practical use. The beautiful hunting hat, with its elongated visor, was made specifically for the volatile Bering Sea; to prevent being blinded by oncoming waves, the hunter would simply look down whenever a wave broke across the bow of the craft.

Unangan culture, for its time, was advanced in its treatment and value of men and women. Unangan society was egalitarian in that the roles of men and women were equally honored, and both men and women could have more than one spouse if circumstances dictated. Use of a moon calendar demonstrated a reverence for the sacred feminine and its connection to water and thus all life. The sacred and great power of women was acknowledged in practice, in which a man would not hunt during his spouse’s moon-time. Because the moon-time was sacred and a time when women, at their greatest power, could disrupt normal, everyday living and hunting, women were separated from the community in what some may call a “moon lodge.” It was also the women who initiated the “shamans” because they have a more direct connection with the mysteries of life. Finally, people who had one gender and embodied the other gender in their persona were considered spiritually advanced because, in the spirit world, there is no duality—the two genders are merged into one.

Unangan spiritual development and understanding of the human being’s place in Creation were the foundation for our people.

Chapter 2

Genocide and Slavery

When Vitus Bering arrived in the Aleutians in 1741, looking for fur-bearing riches for sale to China, he found an abundant and thriving people. Little did Vitus Bering know that this historic event of contact would soon mark the beginning of the end for Unangan culture. By the time the Russian priest Veniamenov arrived in Unalaska in 1824, only two thousand Unangan survivors were left, having experienced genocide, disease, and starvation at the hands of the Russian fur traders, the promyshlenniki. In some cases, entire settlements were leveled without firing a shot, victims of diseases such as smallpox, measles, and tuberculosis.

Under Russian rule, Unangan shamans and their apprentices were executed; Unangan survivors were forbidden to practice any form of their spirituality, language, or customs; and they were required to learn Russian. Women and young girls were taken as concubines, and many were taken back to Russia. The Russian Orthodox Church sent missionaries to convert Unangan people into their form of Christianity. And any Unangan who joined the Church was required to take the name of a Russian saint. Unangan who joined the Church were treated more civilly than those who did not.

Eighty percent of the Unangan were wiped out within fifty years of the Russian fur traders’ arrival. Stories are still retold about the horrors the Unangan faced during this mass destruction. One story relates how a group of women and young girls jumped en masse off a cliff on Umnak Island, refusing to be the sex slaves of the Russian fur traders. Another story recounts a bet between two Russian traders about how many Unangan a musket ball could kill. Unangan men were lined back to back and shot point blank. The answer was nine. And yet another story about how the Russian fur traders found out that it took almost a year to build the kayak used to hunt the large marine mammals needed to keep a large community nourished: Russian fur traders went into a village on Akutan Island early one morning and destroyed all the kayaks. The residents of the village starved to death.

In 1763, many Unangan organized an uprising against their cruel enslavers and killed dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Russian fur traders. A Russian captain by the name of Soliev decided to teach the Unangan the cost of resistance, and to take revenge. Soliev organized a small war fleet with a plan to kill every Unangan on the three largest islands in the Aleutians: Akutan, Unalaska, and Umnak. After the killing spree began, many Unangan from the three islands, mostly women, children, and old men, escaped to a small island off Unalaska Island to seek refuge. In a short period of time, after the Russian fur traders had already killed or imprisoned thousands of Unangan on the three largest islands in the central Aleutian Chain, up to three thousand more Unangan may have been killed on that refuge island once the Russian fur traders found them. Subsequent investigations of that site indicated that the traders had slipped powder kegs down the entrances of Unangan semi-subterranean houses, killing all inside. It was to be the last major battle between the Unangan and their oppressors.

The traders make little or passing reference to this dark period in their ship’s journals. And the Russian Orthodox Church, to this day, only speaks of the good things the Church brought to the Unangan, who were forbidden to speak of the Russian conquests until most stories were forgotten. In fact, having forgotten accounts of these events, Unangan collectively have never grieved their own enslavement and genocide.

The remaining survivors of the holocaust were enslaved by the Russian fur traders to hunt and kill fur-bearing animals to the south and north of the Aleutian Islands (going as far south as southern California). Having heard stories from Unangan about fog-shrouded islands filled with millions of northern fur seals, Russian fur traders sent expeditions to find them. Even today people tell the story about a chief’s son, named Igadagik, whose kayak was blown away from Unimak Island during a three-day storm. When the storm settled, Igadagik could hear the tumultuous barking of seals in the fog and headed toward the sound. When he could see land, Igadagik was astounded by the teeming numbers of fur seals filling every space on basalt boulder–covered beaches. He stayed on the island for a year. It was only during a low tide and clear spring day that he could see the mountain tops of the Aleutians. Upon his return to Unimak Island, Igadagik recounted his experience, and the Pribilofs became known as Tanax Amix or Land of Mother’s Brother. The shamans told the people that this place could only be visited for hunting and never inhabited. It was a sacred place.

A Russian sea navigator, Gerassium Pribylov, with a handful of carefully selected and enslaved Unangan men and their families, set sail in 1787, and uncovered one of the islands, naming it Saint George, after the Russian Orthodox saint whose birthday fell on the day Pribylov found the island. The following year, he then uncovered the neighboring large island and named it Saints Peter and Paul, later to be called Saint Paul. Along with three smaller, additional islands, the group of five islands became known by the Russians as the Pribylov Islands (later, when the United States took over, the name was changed to Pribilof Islands). With Pribylov’s captive Unangan labor force now forcibly resettled permanently on the Pribilofs, a new era began: thousands of seals were killed in a back-breaking process each brief summer when the animals came to the islands to breed. At that time the Pribilofs were estimated to have 4.5 million northern fur seals.

Life in the Pribilofs must have been brutalizing for my people during this time. A handful of men killing upward of twenty to forty thousand seals in a few months, skinning the animals, and then transporting the pelts from as far as twelve miles away to the newly established settlement in large fifty-foot Unangan crafts called nixalax (baidar in Russian). It had to have left the men exhausted and spent at the end of each day.

Food was relatively abundant during the summers as the seal carcasses had no value to the Russian fur traders but were a staple in the Unangan diet. But winters in the Pribilofs were in stark contrast to the summer abundance. The Siberian low systems, bringing stingingly cold and moist winds, would batter these remote islands every winter, with wind speeds as high as a hundred miles an hour. Large snow storms buried the subterranean homes, and all marine mammals and cliff-nesting seabirds migrated to warmer climates. What few marine mammals remained did not come to shore. The winter seas were tumultuous and too dangerous to negotiate, even for the accomplished Unangan seaman. One can only imagine how the Unangan, left behind for the winter by the Russian fur traders, fared during these extremely harsh times. But somehow, the Unangan survivors, slaves in a brutally conquered nation, persisted against all odds.

The Pribilofs: A U.S. Territory

Under the rule of Russia for more than 120 years, the Unangan were forced to learn Russian, adopt the Russian Orthodox faith, take Russian surnames, and, eventually, embrace the Russian ways, some even inter-marrying with their oppressors and migrating to Russia. The people with Unangan and Russian blood became known as Creoles. The Creoles took on the work of the Russian fur traders, and even became Russian Orthodox priests, interpreters, and captains of the Russian sailing vessels that carried furs back to Russia.

The conditions of privation under Russian domination continued until the 1867 Treaty of Cession when Russia sold jurisdiction of Alaska to the United States and the Unangan once again had to change their ways, this time under the heavy hands of U.S. government oppressors. Learning English was mandatory and speaking Russian or Unangan (outside of religious practice) was forbidden. The Unangan were only allowed to retain their Russian Orthodox faith, stubbornly holding onto it perhaps because it was the only thing they had that brought them hope. The language used in the church was, and still is, Slavonic and Unangan Tunuu, written with the Cyrillic alphabet (prior to the establishment of the Russian Orthodox Church in the Aleutian Islands, the Unangan language was never written down). I found out from Father Michael Lestenkof, an Unangan priest, that Unangan shamans had encoded Unangan spiritual messages in the Lord’s Prayer, written in Unangan and passed down through the generations.

The U.S. government contracted with private companies to continue killing northern fur seals for their thick luxurious pelts. The Alaska Commercial Company received the first twenty-year contract, and the North American Commercial Company won the second twenty-year contract before the U.S. government took over direct jurisdiction in 1910.

What hard-won gains the Unangan managed while surviving under Russian domination were wiped out after the Treaty of Cession, including being treated as people with the rights of Russian citizens, attending Russian schools in Russia, and becoming Russian Orthodox priests. The private companies followed by the U.S. government insisted that the people learn the Western ways, a practice carried on from similar oppressions against Native Americans. Speaking a language other than English was subject to washing one’s mouth out with soap or being hit with a specially designed stick with holes in it to increase the pain.

As Elder Gabe Stepetin once said about his childhood under U.S. rule, “they did not want us to get too smart. Only to learn how to say ‘yes sir, no sir’ and that was it. We would listen to music played by the teacher all day long, then go home.” Stepetin also talked about the food they ate one winter, as detailed in a journal he kept, “It was my birthday and all we ate that day was bread and tea. We had nothing else. It was always like that. Look at my journal entry here . . . we ate bread and had tea for most days. This day I wrote that we had bread and tea, don’t know what we are going to have to eat tomorrow.”

These conditions lasted through the early 1960s.

Chapter 3

Callorhinus ursinus: The Northern Fur Seal

I grew up hearing the sounds of tens of thousands of seals as I went to sleep every night and as I awoke every morning. I loved the sound of the seals. When I was a child, there were as many as 1.4 million fur seals on the Pribilof Islands. Eighty percent of the northern fur seals bred on the Pribilofs. The bull seals would arrive in May from the Bering Sea, where they stayed most of the year, to establish their territory and await the arrival of the females in June. They would never leave their territory, even for food, until they finished mating. When the females arrived, having spent the winter thousands of miles off the coast of southern California and Southeast Alaska, the bull seals would “grab” them, some as little as a fifth of the size of a bull, to be part of their harem, which during my childhood consisted of as many as one hundred females. Once a bull impregnated a female, the bull left its territory and went to sea to feed for the first time since its arrival.

Female seals have two uteruses, one to deliver a ten-pound pup and the other to become impregnated again about three days later. The pups congregate with other pups in the breeding rookery when their mothers venture out to forage. Upon return, the pup and female find each other among the thousands of fur seals through the sound each makes. The female is known to be out foraging for three to ten days, but in the Pribilofs the maximum was seven days before fur seals began declining in the 1970s.

Over time I learned a lot of the language of the northern fur seals. I knew the sounds of a bull seal mating, the warning roars as some bull seal’s territory was encroached upon by another bull, bull seals fighting, a bull seal alerting others that he is moving without threat to other bull seals, a seal awakened by surprise, the bleating of pups calling for their mothers, and a mother searching for her pup. All such sounds mixed into some kind of chaotic and rhythmic melody from every rookery day and night.

Growing up with the 1.4 million seals in the Pribilofs was magical and mysterious. I would watch the seals for hours either from the land, or when I was out with the men fishing for halibut. The seals are extremely agile, alert, and highly social animals, always in groups onshore or at sea. The prime breeding males had manes, just like lions or bears—in fact, they are known as “sea bears.” If you watch a seal run on land, its front and hind quarters move exactly as a bear would. Like a bear, the males are highly territorial and the females aggressively protect their young regardless of the source of danger. The prime males are as dangerous as any grizzly bear; no one messes with these males. They can move faster than any man over the rocks and within seconds can cause severe injury as they sink their canine teeth through flesh or fur with a viciously strong shaking action of their muscular necks. Fights between these males are frequent, intruding younger or older bulls are very likely to have large parts of their fur and skin ripped out by the prime males, and several bulls may attack an intruder together. Rarely, however, do such encounters end in the death of a territorial intruder.

At sea, the seals are a contrast to their lives onshore. Most of the time, the seals at sea are simply floating aimlessly or playing. They are not aggressive there except in the case of a bull seal chasing a reluctant female to mate in the water. They are unafraid of humans and can come up to the side of a boat, craning their necks high out of the water as they curiously stare at us. All seals move very quickly and gracefully in the water. I have always been amazed at the agility and flexibility of the seal’s body, as it twists and turns rapidly in an underwater ballet that is as graceful as anything anyone would hope to see in their lifetime. No one can tell me that seals don’t play. On certain types of stormy days, when the waves would break far from shore, the seals, young and old, would “catch a wave” and surf either on top of the wave or immediately inside the wave. I loved watching the silhouettes of seals inside the clear water of a steep wave. When the wave was expended or ready to break onshore, the seal would turn around and catch another wave offshore. Sometimes, under the right conditions, the seals would play like this for a better part of an hour. In the fall, I would watch the seal pups, born in June and July, play for hours at sea, finding and playfully shaking seaweed picked off the sea bottom, surfing on small waves, or chasing after other seal pups.

The only threats to the seals, besides humans, are the orcas and Steller sea lions, the latter of which are not like the gentler California counterpart. They are larger and much fiercer—the female is larger than the male and is responsible for finding food so that her pup can survive on her milk. One fall day I watched as a male and female transient orca pair moved up to the rocks along the rookery where seal pups were gathered in pods. Astonishingly, the orcas started “playing” with the pups. The orcas would nuzzle below the pup and gently toss the pup into the air. The pups would twist, nose down, back into the water, like some kind of Olympic diving-board exhibition. The pups obviously loved this play and gathered around the orcas to get “their turn” to be thrown into the air. Suddenly, as if a signal passed between the orcas, they simultaneously attacked the pups when their defenses were down. What pups survived, the sea lions would then chase in open water and eat when caught. That day, I saw at least a dozen seal pups eaten in a matter of a couple of minutes, two and three at a time.

More frequently, orcas at sea would stalk and even steer seals toward other waiting orcas. We could always tell when this had happened as there was the inevitable large circle of blood on the water surrounded by four or five orcas. We would never purposely dare to come into the circle of orcas when a seal was taken—many times a female orca and her calf would be feeding on the seal while at least two large male relatives would maintain patrol in an invisible defense perimeter around the vulnerable pair. One time, we accidentally wandered into this invisible perimeter in a skiff and soon after spotted two huge dorsal fins speeding toward our boat. The boat operator quickly started up his seventy-horse power outboard and headed in a 180-degree direction at maximum speed. We ran for ten minutes before stopping, when we didn’t see the flukes anymore in the direction we came from. We sighed in relief; however, the boat operator then looked below the outboard and saw the two huge males looking up at him. They had followed us to make sure we didn’t turn back. Once we were an adequate distance from the feeding area, they turned around and headed back to the female and her calf.

Today, sadly, there may be three to five females to the northern fur seal harem instead of a hundred, with many bulls, upon establishing territory, waiting in vain for a female. Northern fur seal numbers in the Pribilofs have declined over the past 30 years to about 450,000, probably due to climate changes affecting migration patterns, location of food, and availability of food sources; discarded plastics and rope wrapped around seals’ necks causing them to slowly choke to death or die of infection; and the likely contribution of commercial fishing by factory trawlers that target food sources eaten by the seals, sea lions, and seabirds of the Bering Sea.

Gone are the times I remember the most, when I would go to a rookery and see the seals by the tens of thousands.

Chapter 4

Internment

I was born into a community on Saint Paul that was subject to a form of slavery created by the U.S. government after the Treaty of Cession in 1867. I was seventeen years old when we finally gained our civil and human rights in 1966 by an act of Congress. The experiences of my childhood under U.S. government domination, the efforts of our freedom fighters, my Unangan legacy of two hundred years of servitude to first Russia then the United States, and the heroic struggles of my people have formed the basis of my life’s trials, tribulations, and triumphs to this day.

My mother, Stefanida Zacharof, and my father, John Paul Merculieff, were born in the Pribilofs, and experienced both the beauty and the ugliness of the islands we call “Birthplace of the Winds” and “Galapagos of the North.” My mother was born out of wedlock on Saint George Island. Her mother had had an affair outside her marriage, and this was the source of great pain for my mother who was raised by her mother and stepfather. Her stepfather verbally and emotionally abused my mother for years in such a way that she rarely spoke of her childhood as an adult. I do know that when the family got together for meals, she had to sit alone. The only other stories, though scant, I heard from my mother began with World War II, where she was part of a U.S. government evacuation and subsequent internment of Pribilof Aleut people in abandoned canneries at Funter Bay in Southeast Alaska. It was at Funter Bay that my mother and father met as teenagers.

I investigated this period of internment in my people’s history while in my early twenties. In 1942, the Japanese military had invaded the Aleutian Islands of Attu and Kiska and bombed Dutch Harbor on Unalaska Island. Attu Aleuts were taken to Hokkaido, Japan, as prisoners for the duration of the war. It had been the first time in contemporary history that a foreign power had invaded and occupied U.S. shores and captured American prisoners. Consequently, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the U.S. War Department were concerned that the Japanese military would move on to the Pribilofs because of their source of rich and thick northern fur seal pelts. The coffers of the U.S. Treasury, long supplied forcibly by my people, were at risk.

The MV Delarof, a U.S.-commissioned vessel, arrived on Saint Paul Island in June 1942. The Unangan people were given a few hours’ notice to prepare to abandon the village. Everyone was to bring no more than one suitcase and leave everything else in their homes. The government officials gave little information about where or why they were going, or even when they would be returned. They didn’t even know that the U.S. military would occupy their homes when they left. These homes now belonged to the U.S. government.

The Delarof then picked up the Saint George Island people under the same circumstances and set sail for Funter Bay. The people were kept in the holds of the ship, and many got sick. When the ship arrived at its destination, the people were dropped off along with two large crates of dried bread, the only food the government provided. Apparently, the government believed that, since Unangan were an Indigenous people, they could live off wild foods that were abundant in the area. They didn’t understand that none of them knew how to live in a rainforest, having lived in the Pribilofs since they were forcibly removed from Unalaska and Umnak by the Russian fur traders in 1767.

It wasn’t until mid-life that I began asking my mother questions about her experiences during the war:

“Mom, what was Funter Bay like for you?”

“I was only sixteen then, and we thought it was fun because it was different. But a lot of people died there. We didn’t have much food, and our people were crowded into these old buildings. Nobody lived there. It was an old cannery a long ways from Juneau. There was no privacy. We put blankets up on rope to have some privacy, and we slept on the floors. There was only two cook stoves for all of us.”

“How did people die?”

“They were mostly old people, sickly people, or babies. They got diseases like measles, or sometimes it got too hot for them there. We didn’t have sanitation, and even the government doctor left because he said there were no medical supplies. We buried them there. It was hard one year because all the men were taken back to Saint Paul and Saint George to kill seals for the government. The men wanted to stay because so many people were sick, but the government forced them to go.[2] We were so happy when they came back.”

“Didn’t some men leave the internment camp during this time?”

“Yeah, some men left to join up with the army. They sneaked out of our camp and went to Juneau to enlist. But the government agent told the army that we weren’t U.S. citizens. But the army said we were U.S. citizens, and so the men joined up. Two people got some kind of medals from fighting in the war.”[3]

“And when did the government bring you back?”

“It was 1945. When we got back, we found all our homes wrecked and lots of things were stolen. I guess the army stationed people in our houses when we were in Funter Bay. Most of our houses were a mess. They must have used some of our furniture to burn in the wood stoves. Our [Russian Orthodox] icons were stolen, and most of the stuff in the church was stolen too.”

As I listened to my mother tell this story, a lot was not mentioned because either she didn’t want to remember or, English being her second language, she didn’t know all the words. I knew the facts already, though: The World War II Commission documented from firsthand accounts of survivors that ten percent of the interned Unangan, primarily the elderly and the infants, died from malnutrition, disease, and heat prostration in the two years they were imprisoned by the U.S. government in these abandoned canneries. The government doctor resigned in protest of the squalid conditions and lack of medical supplies.

Several Unangan men escaped from these camps to Juneau to join the war effort. The U.S. government agent in charge of the Unangan, not wanting to lose the men skilled at killing seals, charged that the men were not U.S. citizens, but the War Department decided otherwise. It was during the time the men were in Juneau that they discovered that other people didn’t live like the Unangan were forced to live. They were free to go and do as they pleased, and a government agent didn’t dictate every aspect of their lives. It must have been a real shock to these Unangan to see what freedom really was. This realization led the Unangan men to the Alaska Native Brotherhood (ANB), organized and led primarily by the Tlingit people of Southeast Alaska. The ANB was at the forefront of the battle for Alaska Native human rights and had hired a brilliant lawyer, Felix Cohen, to represent their cause. The ANB instructed Mr. Cohen to help the Unangan as well, and this was to mark the beginning of the Unangan fight for freedom that would take twenty-one years after the interned Unangan were returned to the Pribilof Islands in the summer of 1945.

In 1943, the Unangan men left behind were forced to leave their families in Funter Bay to kill seals on Saint Paul and Saint George Islands in order to supply the oil to lubricate war machinery and weapons. The men did not want to leave as there was so much sickness in the camp. They were afraid that they would come back to find their loved ones gone. But, forced to go by the government agent, they returned to Funter Bay three months later to find many of their fears had been realized: scores of people had died that summer from pneumonia and other sicknesses.

Upon their return to the Pribilofs in 1945, the Unangan discovered that their homes had been trashed and valuables stolen by the U.S. military personnel when they were stationed on the Pribilofs. Everything considered valuable was taken, including most of the old Russian Orthodox religious objects in the homes and church.

Unangan from the Aleutian Islands of Akutan, Unalaska, Umnak, and Atka had also been evacuated and interned in Southeast Alaska and suffered equally. When Unalaska Unangan were returned, they found that most of the land they had lived on had been sold by the U.S. military to private fish companies without Unangan knowledge or consent. And the Unangan taken from two Unalaska Island villages, Chernofski and Makushin, were returned to the village of Unalaska after the war without means to return to their communities. Many of the Unangan from Attu Island who had been taken as prisoners of war in northern Japan, subsisting only on rice, died before release. Those who survived were forcibly relocated to Atka in a U.S. government decision that determined it was too costly to rebuild the homes on Attu that had been destroyed by the Japanese military. Most of the survivors of this ordeal never talked about these times, not until the U.S. government commissioned an investigatory body headed by Hawaiian Senator Daniel Inouye in the 1970s. The World War II Commission was charged with documenting abuses of Japanese-Americans and Unangan during their internment and to recommend steps to redress the abuses.

The Unangan men who had seen and experienced what real freedom was like, and what it was like to be treated like a real person, set out in earnest to strategize how they would change the Unangan status as a captive labor force for the U.S. government. With the aid of ANB leaders and Mr. Cohen, they set out to establish the Unangan as a federally recognized tribe under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934—a law that recognized Native Americans as U.S. citizens and tribes as their vehicle for self-government.

Since the U.S. government had established rigid rules about Unangan gatherings—only gatherings for church services were allowed—Terenty Philemonof, Gabe Stepetin, Irish Stepetin, Alexander Melovidov, Elary Gromoff, Mamant Emanof Sr., and my uncle, Iliodor “Eddie” Merculieff, secretly devised a plan for covert meetings among themselves: Gabe Stepetin came up with the idea to propose to the government agent that the men be allowed to put on a play or performance for the white government employees on the island, and to do so required rehearsals. The government agent swallowed the story and allowed the men to gather. The men actually produced a play during this time, but no one remembers what it was about.

As a result of these meetings in 1948 and 1949, a petition was smuggled off the island for recognition of the establishment of the Unangan Communities of Saint Paul and Saint George under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 as amended in 1936 (to include Alaska Native peoples). The men sought to gain the human rights that the Pribilof Unangan had been deprived of since first being enslaved by the Russian fur traders, who had brought them to the islands, and then by the U.S. government.

From the time the U.S. government gained control of the Pribilofs after the Treaty of Cession with Russia in 1867, Unangan had been a captive labor force, first for two private companies the government had contracted with, then for the U.S. government when it assumed direct administration of the Pribilofs in 1910. From 1910 until the early 1960s, Unangan were not allowed to leave the islands, own their own homes, or write letters to anyone on the outside unless such letters were first censored by the government agent. The government agent served as judge, jury, and law enforcer in a colonial dictatorship over the Unangan. Food, government housing, and clothing were rationed as pay for the back-breaking work of the Unangan men who worked seasonally up to seventeen hours a day for three months, killing seals and removing and processing their pelts. Men were debilitated by the time they reached the age of thirty-five.

The Pribilof Unangan men directed Mr. Cohen to draft an Indian Reorganization Act charter, which he formally submitted to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. When the charter was granted in 1951, as their first official act, with the aid of Cohen, the first organized Unangan tribal council launched a claim against the U.S. government for failure to deal with Pribilof Unangan fairly and honorably, and for violating the terms of the Treaty of Cession that required the U.S. government to treat Unangan as U.S. citizens with all the rights and privileges of citizenship. This lawsuit was filed with the Indian Claims Commission, which had jurisdiction over claims of Native Americans throughout the United States. The lawsuit was vigorously opposed by the U.S. government, and so it took twenty-seven years to reach a judgment in favor of the Unangan. The government lawyers, however, appealed the decision to force the Unangan to settle out of court in 1978. By this time, most of the men who began this effort were dead.

From beginning to end, Pribilof Unangan were represented by five different attorneys, all of whom took the case pro bono. A former state supreme court justice, Roger Conner, was the first to take over the case from Cohen on behalf of the Unangan. After Justice Conner died, Anchorage attorney Lloyd Miller took over the case. After Lloyd Miller retired, Don Green and Stephen Truitt finally won the lawsuit. Through the efforts of these good men, the Unangan were able to prove that the U.S. government had rationed an equivalent of 1,700 calories per day for each working man to kill seals in extremely arduous labor over 8 to 17 hours daily during 3 months of every summer. In dramatic contrast, the attorneys demonstrated that German POWs received an average of 1,900 calories per day to do essentially nothing.

Meanwhile, the seals were the reason the U.S. government was on the Pribilofs in the first place. Seal pelts brought a considerable profit to the government every year on the backs of the captive Unangan labor force who were the only ones who knew how to kill the seals so efficiently. No one else would do such dirty work without just compensation and fair treatment, but the Unangan didn’t know that they were the only labor force held captive by the U.S. government in the entire United States, and the only labor force in U.S. history that made a profit for the U.S. government. The Unangan thought everyone was treated this way by the government, having already had over a hundred years of slavery as their legacy before the U.S. government appeared on the scene.

The Pribilof Unangan finally achieved political independence after the first director of the Alaska Human Rights Commission, African-American Willard Bowman, led an investigation in the early 1960s. The Commission’s report eventually reached Congress, and Senator Bob Bartlett led a congressional investigation in 1964 that led to the Unangan civil rights bill, ironically called the Fur Seal Act of 1966. This act recognized Pribilof Unangan rights to vote in state and federal elections, own their own homes, and receive full civil service wages. Little did the Unangan know the challenge to the human spirt that lay ahead.

Chapter 5

My Legacy as an Unangan

My generation was the last generation that had a fully intact traditional upbringing. The entire village raised me, literally. For example, at age four, I was placed with my grandfather, my Papa, Paul Merculieff, twenty-four hours a day for two years so we would get to know each other. I slept with him, I hunted with him, I prayed with him. That was the tradition at that time and was a significant thing. My grandfather, who had been the janitor for the government colonial agent’s house, was a physically strong and humble man who did his work with attention, discipline, and pride. When I was four years old, he took me with him to hunt murres at one end of the island during the early spring. Murres are fast-moving migratory seabirds that come to the Pribilof Islands to nest. They actually look like penguins; only, they fly above and below water. I was always fascinated to watch these birds swim under the clear Bering Sea waters in search of food. They use their wings to move, as if they are flying under water.

That day I witnessed what an accomplished hunter my grandfather was. We were not seeing too many murres as most of them were flying a hundred yards or more off the spit where we sat waiting. The other hunters with us were commenting on how far offshore the birds were flying. Murres may fly some twenty miles an hour against moderate winds, or faster if they fly with the wind. Soon one murre appeared quite a distance from shore—flying with the wind. My grandfather raised his twelve-gauge shotgun and took aim as the bird came from our right side toward our left. He followed the bird for maybe thirty seconds. I could see that he wasn’t even aiming at the bird, but ahead of it—quite a way ahead of it. He fired, and about seven seconds later the bird plummeted out of the sky. The other hunters yelled in acclamation of my grandfather, and it was from their comments that I realized he had made a remarkable shot.

On another day my grandfather and I walked a sand beach after praying near the shore of the Bering Sea at sunrise. It was an incredibly beautiful day in which the sun was up and there was no wind. We could hear the seagulls calling out and the seals bellowing in a distant rookery. The sea air smelled fresh and everything was alive and intense. Small waves crested in rapid succession along the beach. The sky and sea were expansive with a myriad of blue hues. I could see horizon for 180 degrees.

“Oh, I love this day; it is really good!” I proclaimed out loud as we walked in a rhythmic, slow pace along the dark-colored sands of our volcanic island.

“Anaan eestahnaan Laakaiyaax,” my grandfather said softly in Unangan Tunuu. “Tutuuthax.”

I knew what he meant. In his characteristically gentle way, he shared what was likely the foundation for Unangan existence for millennia. He said not to say anything but to listen and experience without words. Words were not only superfluous but would diminish the fullness and understanding of any human experience. It is an age-old Unangan way that likely is central to how and why Unangan survived and thrived in the Bering Sea for over ten thousand years. I learned later, having experienced extreme conditions, the wisdom of refraining from defining everything, as is so pervasive in much of the rest of American society.

At age five I had an “Aachaa” (pronounced “ah-chah”), a profound relationship that just develops unplanned, between an older person and a child, in which the connection between the two is more “energetic” and spiritual than anything else. When that feeling of special connection occurs between an older and a younger person, they become Aachaas. My Aachaa’s name was Nick Stepetin, a beautiful man who married my aunt, Sophie. It was with them that I escaped the weekend drunkenness in the village, spending all day hunting with my Aachaa. One aspect of an Aachaa relationship is mentoring—thus, my Aachaa took me under his wing from age five to thirteen and taught me much of what I know about being Unangan, being a man, hunting, Unangan ethics and values, reverence for all life, and my relationship to creation.

Between the ages of five and seven, I began to be invited into many circles within the village. The Elders would take me camping with them and I would hear their stories. The women would take me out berry-picking and show me women’s ways, and the men, including my Aachaa, would take me out hunting and fishing. All that was expected of me at this time was to watch, listen, learn, and help. I was not given verbal instructions or explanations of any kind; I was simply expected to use my own intelligence. In his role as mentor, my Aachaa spoke, maybe, about two hundred words to me during the eight years of my formative childhood. We were together in silence the rest of the time. My Aachaa, as well as all the other adults in that community, never scolded me, never put me down, always affirmed who I was as a human being every day of my life as a child, and treated me with the same respect shown any adult. The only distinction is that the child has less experience with life. So the beauty of that kind of a system of learning is that it allowed me to reach my maximum potential, because what I learned depended totally on me. The adults neither presumed any limitation to my intelligence or ability to learn nor tried to tell me what it is I should learn. They simply provided learning opportunities.

Many adults in modern society have a preconceived notion about children and what they should or should not know. They may treat a child in that fashion, perhaps at the expense of the child not learning as much as the child could learn, and certainly at the expense of the child’s creativity. Nothing was held back from me, however. Anything I wanted to do, learn, or know, I could—without concern about my age—and the only time adults would intervene was when I may be in danger.

The Elders really challenged me to learn by gauging their response to me based on the nature of the question I would ask and how I conducted myself. Thus, to the rare question I may ask, the kind of answers I was given came from their assessment of how much I understood, as reflected in the question I was asking. For example, a common mistake of scientists and researchers when talking with Indigenous Elders is to focus on a single issue around what they are studying. Have you noticed a decline of the harbor seal in your area? Do you think more females than males are declining? Even though the Elder knows that the context of the information he or she provides is more important than the actual observation, the Elder sees that the researcher is only interested in the observation. The Elder, therefore, answers the question in a manner that is responsive to the question and leaves the substance out.

In today’s mainstream society we are often expected to give the “right” answers, or at least try to. And these “right” answers are derived from instruction and learning by rote. The reverse is what I grew up with. None of the things I learned about being Unangan came from books, and there were no wrong answers, only better or different ones. I think this age-old wisdom, present in many Indigenous cultures, of the Unangan learning process helped me to think creatively and critically, something that has helped me immensely in my life and career.

Unangan people understand that human intelligence is not simply in the mind or in the brain. The center of human intelligence is the entire body and spirit. So, for example, I used all of my senses—hearing, feeling, smelling, seeing, and tasting—as well as intuition, thinking, emotion, and body signals in learning. This intelligence synthesizes information from all the sensory and nonsensory inputs. That’s what Unangan consider to make up a real human being. Underneath all of this is heart and a profound relationship where we feel connected to all that is. In fact, thinking with the brain without first checking in with the heart interferes with the growth of one’s intelligence.

One day, when I was seven years old, while visiting my Aachaa, he said to me, “Lakaiyux, aakaathaax” (“boy, come”). “Way, suuthaax!” (“here, take this”). It was a combination rifle and shotgun. I knew what this meant, and I beamed brightly. “Kaaxaasukux ungoonesh!” (“thank you very much”), I said loudly. I was being acknowledged as a hunter for the first time in my young life, something I will never forget for the rest of my life.

I didn’t have to take a competency test or be asked any questions. My Aachaa knew I was ready because I had the qualities of a good hunter, the qualities I had learned by using my true human intelligence, using my senses, using my intuition, using my “gut feel,” listening to what my heart was saying, and using my sixth sense (inner knowing).

At times I could feel a sea lion before I would see it. More consistently, I could feel a halibut before it hit my jig fishing line. I could tell how a halibut was hooked—by the lip, jaw, or torso; I could determine the size of the halibut; and frequently, I would be able to tell if the fish was male or female. Then, I could tell how it was going to fight on its way up. This information determined how I would bring the halibut up. If it was hooked by the lip, we brought it up gently; if it “swallowed” the hook, we had more freedom. That is the inner knowing that is inexplicable by any modern-day empirical standards. It also includes qualities I had learned that exemplified manhood to me and my people: patience, soft spokenness, gentleness, nonaggression, cooperation, presence in the moment, consideration of others, respect for all wildlife, and reverence for all life.

When my Aachaa took me out hunting, we hunted Steller sea lions and eider ducks. Sea lions are to us like the bowhead whales are to the Inupiat in the North and bison are to the plains Indians. We only hunted sub-adult male sea lions. We never killed females. We understood that taking female sea lions would harm the population over time. We would go out to a reef jutting out from the island to hunt both ducks and sea lions in the late fall, winter, or early spring. We never hunted during the summer breeding season. Unangan strongly hold to the understanding that no animal should be disturbed when breeding.

We would sit for hours waiting for a sea lion to “ride” by the reef. Sea lions rarely come ashore in the cold fall, winter, and spring seasons because exposure to wind makes it colder to be on land than at sea. Sometimes the sea lions would travel alone, or in small packs. Steller sea lions are not at all like the well-known California sea lions. Stellers are much larger and fiercer, and old adult males weigh as much as two thousand pounds and tout a huge dark gold–colored mane. They mature between the ages of eight and ten. Females are much smaller and sleeker, are slightly lighter-colored than the males, weigh up to seven hundred pounds, and mature around age five. A sea lion pup is considerably smaller and much darker-colored, weighing as much as 250 pounds between the ages of 2 and 9 months. I grew to love these magnificent, bold, strong, highly intelligent mammals.

Sea lions swim very differently than the northern fur seals for which our islands are world-renowned. While sea lions plow through the water when traveling from place to place, fur seals porpoise, or jump, through the water. When the animals are spotted miles away and only a “dot” on the horizon, this is how we are able to tell the difference. Historically, we used every part of the sea lion, wasting nothing—sea lions provided skins for kayaks, sinews for ropes, intestines for waterproof gut parkas, throats for waterproof baskets, whiskers to decorate the classic hunting hats, bones for spear points and other implements, and food. A staple food source for Unangan people for over ten thousand years, sea lions are 98 percent lean meat. The fat is rendered for oil, and tissue inside its flipper is used for a kind of gel we call “stuudenux.” The heart and liver are delicacies, and the meat is cooked in the same kinds of ways we cook beef today.

When I was a boy out hunting Steller sea lions, we were never boisterous; everyone was quiet inside and out, and we were always completely aware of everything going on around us. Conversation distracted hunters who could spot that sea lion out in the water five, sometimes ten, miles away. “Cowax ukaakox!” a hunter would proclaim, “a sea lion is coming!” The hunters would know uncannily that a sea lion was coming even before physically seeing it. It was important for a good hunter to have this awareness not only because it maximized the prospect that he would get the sea lion, but also because it kept him from inflicting undue suffering on the sea lion when it was killed. I later found out how they, and ultimately we, did it.

Each individual sea lion has a different pattern to its swimming. Some swim faster, some slower; some are bound for a particular destination, others may be feeding. And each one has its own dive rhythm. So, for example, one sea lion may swim on the surface for two minutes, decide to dive, and then be under the surface for several minutes (sea lions take an extra-large breath immediately before diving). Knowing the pattern of the sea lion allows the hunter to accurately predict when the animal will fill its lungs full of air, allowing it to float instead of sink once killed; good hunters always hunt where the waves are moving shoreward, which bring in the body quickly (within minutes).

Once the sea lion was spotted and its dive pattern determined, we would wait for it to fill its lungs at the moment it was within a forty-five-degree angle from either side of our body to allow for the appropriate killing shot right behind the ear. We would synchronize our shooting, taking our lead from the most experienced hunter, and firing within a few microseconds of each other—we were so aware of each other that we could function as a single unit. Acting in complete synchronicity was important because the sea lion would react quickly and begin to dive within a couple of seconds of the first shot. If one hunter fired two seconds too late, he would hit the back of that animal, only wounding it and thus causing suffering. As a result, we always seemed to know that we had killed the animal even before the bullet struck its target.

On average three to six men hunted with high-powered rifles. In my childhood, we always killed the sea lions; we never wounded them. Unangan hunters were incredible marksmen. Imagine trying to shoot at a fast-moving target the size of a basketball (sea lions expose only their heads when engaged in directed swimming), bouncing up and down in rough water and stiff winds, 75 to 170 yards away. Equally challenging are the fast-moving king and common eider ducks that fly by at dawn. Sometimes flying with the wind rather than against it, it was not uncommon for the ducks to be moving thirty-five to forty miles an hour at distances up to one hundred yards away from us. During such times, I would frequently witness hunters discharging their twelve- or twenty-gauge shotguns far in advance of the ducks, wait for a few seconds, and then watch the duck drop and hit the ground almost a quarter-mile away from where we were.

We would sit out on volcanic basalt boulders, next to the sea, for hours, frequently six, seven, or ten hours, waiting for a sea lion to come by. No one can tell me that a five-year-old child does not have the ability to sit patiently in one place for more than ten minutes. I was able to sit for hours at this age and be perfectly content. At my young age, I found that it would be very easy for me to be lulled into a serene stupor by the rhythm of the waves and the wind, and the sounds from thousands of boisterous seals swimming in the water. There is a background cacophony of sound in this wild environment. When we are quiet in a natural setting of redundant and rhythmic sound, we can easily drift away into a dreamlike state. I used to wonder how the hunters were never lulled as I was. A good hunter has to be fully present, taking in all of these rhythms without being lulled into a semi-conscious stupor. Otherwise, the hunter won’t be successful with the hunt.

In a seemingly unrelated way, I found out that the only way a human could be there without going into a “mind lull” is to be present in the moment and aware as an unattached witness—to be the watcher side of ourselves. Beginning at age six, I took to walking out of the village very early in the morning to a place three miles outside the village called Tolstoi, so I could be where tens of thousands of seabirds nested and raised their young. I made regular trips like this until I was about twelve years of age, arriving early enough to be present just before sunrise when the seabirds stirred to begin their foraging for the day, eating sand lance, herring, capelin, pollock (a species of oil-laden fish), and tiny sea creatures called copepods.

Near sunrise, birds began to slip off the ledges and circle around in front of the dark basalt cliffs. Soon, thousands of thick-billed and common murres, tufted and crested puffins, red-faced and pelagic cormorants, least and crested auklets, fulmars, and red- and black-legged kittiwakes would be flying in every direction in loops around the face of the cliff; the air was filled with the rich sound of wings and calls. Some species flew quickly like the murres, some slowly like the kittiwakes. The puffins had burrows near the top of the cliff ledge. The murres and kittiwakes had nests made of tundra grass on the main body of the cliff. The cormorants preferred the promontories sticking out from the edges of the cliff face. Least and crested auklets nested in crevices underneath basalt boulders at the base of the cliff.

I watched as the birds would expertly maneuver around each other, land, and take off repeatedly from the tiny ledges. I loved this place because it resonated with the intensity of life, and the birds seemed to be celebrating the arrival of another day.

One day, after about a year or so of making these trips, while underneath the bird cliffs, I was marveling at how thousands of birds could fly up-down, right-left, down-up, left-right, and diagonally, and never did I witness any bird hitting another or even grazing a wing. I contemplated their ability to do this and finally saw a connection between these birds and the hunters who never were lulled into a hypnotic state when hunting. The birds were full of life and intensely present in the moment. And somehow, this awareness allows the birds to sense and know where the others are at any moment. It was then I realized the power of being present. I wanted to be a bird. I practiced dropping out of thought and just being. I was doing it all along in watching these birds, and began to understand how I was taking everything in without interference of thought. Now my grandfather’s teaching about not using words, but to experience, came to life for me.

I could not put words to it at the time, but in this state, one becomes nothing but pure consciousness, not attached to anything, even thought. As soon as I got into my head, into thoughts, I got lulled. I found that simply “being” in awareness and without thought profoundly enhances the experience and opens up new dimensions of human capability. As I applied this knowing to my hunting experiences, I too was able to stay fully alert, to feel the sea lion before it came, and to feel a deeper connection with the hunters and all life. And thus, I learned, hunting is a meditation, a spiritual practice. No one had told me of this way of being; however, though unstated, it was implied in old Unangan stories. Perhaps if I had been told, my mind would have interfered and fooled me into believing I had achieved that state. This learning was clean. It was my learning without interference of any other person’s spiritual constructs. But it is what the other hunters knew and practiced.

I learned that the Unangan hunter suspended ego for group cohesion and hunting success. I learned how Unangan hunters deferred to the most experienced hunter and fired their rifles within microseconds of each other, and how everyone knew, even if we all fired a killing shot at the sea lion, whose bullet actually struck the animal first. This hunter got the first pick of the meat. I watched as the hunters all worked to retrieve the sea lion, taking turns cutting the carcass then dividing up the parts in roughly equal portions, no matter how many hunters were present. And, I knew that each hunter gave meat to others before his own family, especially the elderly and widows.

I am so thankful that my male role models, like my Papa, my Aachaa, my father, and the hunters and fishermen, showed me that being a man means being patient, keenly observant, considerate of people and wildlife, cooperative, not macho or aggressive, soft-spoken, and present in the moment. Western society calls these qualities “feminine,” and somehow that is a negative, but in the Unangan worldview, these qualities are necessary to be a true man and a good hunter and provider. Without these qualities one cannot be an accomplished hunter and fisherman, or be safe when hunting or fishing.

No Unangan hunter can kill an animal without knowing the profoundness of killing a conscious being. We were taught to have a reverence for all life and all life forms, that all life has the same kind of spirit as we do. Life comes from the same place, the same source, Agox or “The Maker.” It is one thing to intellectually know the sacredness; it is another thing entirely to embody this knowing.

I was eleven years old the first time I came to know the true sacredness of life. One day I was alone on the reef while my Aachaa was about a quarter-mile away. A sea lion came by in front of me, and I shot it. I knew the moment of its death, not because I was sure of my marksmanship, but because something inexplicable had happened. In an instant, an extremely subtle electrical impulse rushed through my body. There was no doubt in my mind that what I was experiencing was the spirit of this animal. In the instant that the life force came through my body, this sea lion told me it had consciousness, it had intelligence, and it was surrendering itself to me. That experience changed the way I looked at all life on this planet. My reverence and regard for all life expanded exponentially in that instant. I later told my Aachaa what I had experienced, and he looked at me, smiled, and said “Exumnaakoxt!” “Good!” That was all he said to me. In that single word, he affirmed that what I had experienced was real and not a figment of my imagination. In one word, he told me that he knew what this experience was and that it was natural and real.

I could see why my people always had a reverence for any animal they took. And I understood why they developed a relationship of reciprocity. Pribilof Unangan are People of the Sea Lion. The Steller sea lion has provided for us through good times and hard times. In return for the sea lion sustaining us, we protect these animals from wanton killing; we protect them and their habitat from disruption; and we honor each sea lion we kill by eating it and using every possible part of the body and sharing each animal with as many families as possible. When we finish taking the meat off the animal, we return the remains to the sea with a prayer of thanks to the animal and to The Maker.

In experiencing the profoundness of a sea lion’s death in the way that I’ve described here, I truly came into connection with what it means to touch and be part of the Divine, to sense the proverbial oneness with all Creation. In that experience, when I killed that sea lion, I realized we are connected at the deepest level. We are not separate no matter what our minds tell us.

Chapter 6

Boxer Shorts and Seals

We were on the beach one summer day—only a quarter-mile from the village—all rolling in the sand, immersed in fits of laughter, and unable to muffle our raucousness even at the risk of being discovered by federal agents. These “feds” were not FBI agents; they were government overseers, and we had just broken the law by killing four seals.[4] This was my first glimpse of civil disobedience; it was illegal to do what our people have done for at least ten thousand years—take seals for food.[5]

It was a time when Unangan families had little money, and most of the food we ate still came from the land or sea—halibut, sea lions, cormorants, seals, wild celery, berries, and whatever the land and water offered to us to eat. The government rations of salt, sugar, potatoes, rice, onions, and salt beef were never enough for our household of nine people: two brothers, two sisters, my grandfather, my uncle, my mother, my father, and me. I remember being hungry from late fall to early spring every year. I always looked forward to mid-spring and summer when the seals, halibut, and birds returned to our mystical island.

I remember all the times my mother would put off preparing dinner, confident that my dad, who hunted the entire day, would bring her something to cook. We children and my mother greeted him eagerly at the door, but I was always first to spot him through the window. I would watch how he walked—if he was stooped over from the weight of his packsack, I knew he had a sea lion or a lot of birds. If he wasn’t stooped over, he probably had a bird or two. It was easy to tell what he had in the packsack before my mother opened it because it would smell of meat or wet feathers. My dad rarely failed, even if he only brought back a few cormorants. Cormorant meat was tough, but it made good soup—enough to fill our stomachs. We called the cormorant the “Unangan turkey” as that was what we usually had to eat for Thanksgiving.

So here was my uncle, Iliodor, or “Eddie,” a serious, upstanding leader of the Russian Orthodox church choir, president of the traditional council, and high-level federal administrator on a federally controlled island; his best friend, “Kusukahx” (the name means “Russian” in the Unangan language); and Kusukahx’s wife, Tina, out on the most visible (right next to the village) rookery on the island at 4:00 on a Saturday morning poaching fur seals. As a five-year-old, I was struck by the strange incongruity of this scene—adults sneaking around on the beach, whispering intensely as if speaking normally would give us away to the “government man” who might be up at this time on a weekend morning, listening to us through the foot-thick concrete walls of the government house a mile away.

We were like caricatures of real people, stooped low, creeping toward the herd of seals sleeping on the beach at the break of a very quiet dawn. Uncle Eddie and Kusukahx went ahead, carrying thick, heavy pieces of driftwood found at the edge of the beach, their eyes fixed on the herd of seals with the singular intent to get seals for food.

Prudence dictated expeditious action and quick movement. Too long on the beach and we risked discovery by the government agent. Uncle Eddie and Kusukahx returned, each dragging one seal up with each hand—four total—toward the road. Tina and I were far enough up on the beach, toward the road, that we could only see their silhouettes. The man closest to us had a much smaller frame than the other, so he was Uncle Eddie. Suddenly, behind him, Kusukahx collapsed!

Tina called out in Unangan Tunuu, “Something’s not right with my husband!” My uncle dropped the dead seals he’d been pulling and ran back. To our amazement, he too collapsed. Tina and I were both bewildered, watching the two men rolling back and forth on the sand. We thought something bad must have happened to them.

We started running toward them, Tina in the lead. As we got closer, it became clear why they could not get up—they were in fits of hysterical laughter! Kusukahx struggled to get out an explanation in Unangan Tunuu, “My suspenders came off and I was so worried that we would be spotted, so I kept running. I tried to keep my pants from falling by making bow-legs, but it didn’t work too good! My pants fell to my ankles and let me trip. When I understood what was happening, I started to laugh so hard that I could not get up again!”

We couldn’t help it. Tina and I joined the two hapless men in doing what we all pledged not to do that morning—make loud noises. We engaged in a chorus of stomach-busting, incapacitating laughter, made all the more comically extreme by the implausible sight of a grown man with his pants down, wearing polka-dotted boxer shorts, next to a dead seal. I love so much that Unangan always had room for humor no matter how difficult or trying the situation was, and perhaps that is how we survived what life brought us.

Chapter 7

Every Unangan Child: The Indirect Effects of Government Oppression

No child in my generation escaped the terror, chaos, confusion, and lack of safety posed by intoxicated adults on their weekend binges that occurred every weekend except during Russian Orthodox lent. I witnessed these events from perhaps the age of three until I left for boarding school at the age of twelve.

The men of the island worked brutalizing hours killing seals for the federal government, sometimes seventeen hours a day during the three to four months of summer when the seals returned to the island. While they had a breakfast of pancakes, powdered eggs, and bacon, the rest of their day the workers had meager rations to fuel their bodies—they only had coffee and a sandwich during the lunch hour, and coffee and a sandwich after 5:00 p.m. To these “sealers” as well as the men who worked in the village, it was not uncommon to hear the agent bark commands while saying such things as “you stupid Aleuts, it takes five of you to dig a ditch,” or “you think you are so smart—get on the garbage truck.” For years, day in and day out, the men were subjected to these kinds of verbal abuse. The only time the men were left alone was on the weekend—when they perhaps let off steam from the indignities they suffered by drinking “peeva,” a homemade brew that they made in fifty-gallon barrels. The brew was mixed with raisins, sugar, fruit, and potatoes. It was awful stuff. But the men, joined by their wives, would drink to a stupor every weekend. Except for just a few families, the entire village of adults would be drunk. The men frequently got into fist fights, and I remember once seeing my uncle, Eddie (aka Iliodor), on the floor after being knocked out by Tracy, a family friend. It was not a safe place for kids during these times, especially for girls.

Once, when I was nine years old, I heard my seven-year-old sister, staying in her own room downstairs, screaming for help. I ran to her room, but the door was locked. My sister screamed that some man was inside. I could not get the door to budge, so I ran outside to her window and opened it. There was a thirty-five-year-old man, drunk, trying to fondle my sister; I screamed at him to stop as I crawled through the window. I guess he saw the rage in my face and heard it in my voice, so he quickly unlocked the door and ran out. The next day, we told our parents what happened as soon as they were sober, but they did not believe us. Everything went on as “normal” that day and the days afterward. This was the story of many girls in the village: the girls would tell their parents, when they were sober, what had happened over the weekend, but their parents would not believe their own children. The adults acted as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened during their weekend drinking binges.

The drinking intensified during American holidays such as the Fourth of July, Christmas, and Easter, although most of us kids found a way to have fun during these holidays anyway. My aunt and Aachaa liked to share what they had with others, and prior to Christmas I would help them by carrying presents to other houses on my sled. I loved doing this. On Christmas we looked forward to our presents after we, the children, put on a Christmas program rehearsed for weeks—Santa would arrive to a chorus of “Here Comes Santa Claus” sung by the entire community gathered in a large hall. The tribal council would always have a very large Christmas tree, decorated to the hilt, on the left side of the hall, and underneath would be presents for every child in the village and large bags of fruit and candy provided by the Fouke Fur Company, one bag for every member of the community. The Fouke Fur Company had the exclusive contract with the government to process the fur seal pelts into luxury coats that, at the time, cost at least four thousand dollars apiece.

After the Christmas program the adults would drink while the kids would open up presents from their parents. My first Christmas present from my parents was a wooden gun carved by my dad that shot rubber bands. I loved it. At the time, I still believed in Santa Claus, but that ended when I saw “Santa” drunk. The man had come to our house to “party,” but my dad intercepted him at the outside door, saying that he shouldn’t enter in his condition because the kids would see him.

Of course, all holidays were times when the community would gather to celebrate. After seven weeks of lent, the entire village would attend the Russian Orthodox church for Easter service. Afterward, children would go to their godmother’s house to receive some delicacy then have an Easter feast back at their own houses. The feast usually involved halibut fish pie and “moss” berry pie, delicacies reserved for special occasions. To this day I still love these dishes. Easter and lent were the only times during the year the adults wouldn’t drink. However, it all resumed the day after Easter services.

There were things that happened that no child should ever see or hear or experience. And although the sober days were happy days at home, the stark weekend contrast was, at best, confusing to the children. At worst, it created a cycle of fear, terror, and violence that these children never escaped.

Later in life I better understood the legacy of spiritual sickness and internalized oppression that my people developed first when the Russian fur traders arrived and 80 percent of the Unangan died from disease, malnutrition, and genocide over a fifty-year period. This misery continued for another hundred years under the U.S. government enslavement of the Unangan.

Chapter 8

Sealing

I vividly remember my father, John Merculieff, coming home beyond exhaustion five days a week. He was one of the “higher-ranking” sealers because he was a clubber, or “stunner.” To become a stunner, one had to work through the ranks over a period of years. It was the highest-rewarded position in the killing fields because it required skill to use a five-foot hickory club to kill a fast-moving seal with one blow to the head and do this over and over again. Six or seven men kill up to four thousand seals each day.

When I was allowed to go out “sealing” at age five, I saw firsthand how hard the men worked. As a child, it was a special event to be allowed to go out with the sealers. Sealing always began in June and ended by mid-August of each year. We had to be ready by 3:00 a.m. to go to the government breakfast hall if we wanted to get some food. Breakfasts were the same every day: small pancakes, powdered eggs, bacon, and coffee.

The government always wanted to herd seals before the day’s temperatures rose into the lower to mid-fifty-degree range because, any later than that, the seals would overheat and die, becoming what it called “road skins” when the pelts lost their high quality thus bringing in a lower price. Road skins were very hard to remove from the seal carcass and were frequently torn. So, by 4:00 a.m., we loaded up in government dump trucks used to haul seal carcasses and pelts from the field. The older men and clubbers would ride in the only covered truck, what we called the water truck because it contained fresh water for the sealers. It was always chilly in these moist pre-dawn days as temperatures usually were in the lower forties. I would crouch down below the cab to avoid the bone-chilling wind created by the moving truck.

We were part of a caravan of about ten government trucks and would head out to one of the seven fur seal rookeries where “bachelor” seals, non-breeding sub-adult males, congregated by the tens of thousands. We were headed toward the Northeast Point rookery, the largest rookery on the island. When the trucks arrived at the location, drivers would park the vehicles in a straight line on the tundra. I could tell where the seals were usually killed because the grass in the killing fields was always much greener than any surrounding grass, made fertile from the blood of hundreds of thousands of seals killed over the past 150 years. I thought about how my ancestors had to labor when trucks didn’t exist, rowing a fifty-foot, one-ton traditional craft, called a baidar (or nixalax), to and from the killing fields and the village.

Arriving at the killing fields, men would congregate around the trucks, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, talking in Unangan about the day. The conversations would typically be about the number of seals they probably would kill that day, whether or not the weather was good enough to go halibut fishing after sealing, and how people and their families were doing.

“Looks like a big kill day.”

“Yeah, this rookery always has lots of seals.”

“Hope we finish fast. Looks like a good fishing day. My family could use halibut.”

“Better watch out for the boss man. He looks grouchy today.”

“Yeah, last week the boss man was grouchy, and he sent five guys home without pay just because he thought they were too slow.”

“My back sure hurts from yesterday. They told me we killed 2,500 seals yesterday, and I sure feel it. Hope it doesn’t slow me down today. It could make it harder on everybody.”

Unangan sealers were the personification of teamwork because a central aspect of Unangan culture is cooperation and service to others without thought for oneself. The teamwork would begin when the sealer foreman signaled everyone to go. The thirty or so men would first walk toward the bachelor rookery, then run collectively as they approached the rocks near the shoreline where the seals rested and slept, coming between the seals and the shoreline and cutting off their only escape route.

I could hear the raucous roar of the tens of thousands of seals covering every inch of the rookeries where basalt boulders stretched for miles near the shoreline. There were breeding rookeries composed of prime males and mature females, idle bull rookeries where bulls past their prime rested, and non-breeding seal rookeries of sub-adult males. We never entered into breeding or idle bull rookeries.

I chose to run with the men, knowing that boys were allowed to participate in the “seal drive.” Everyone had to be alert. The black-colored seals matched the color of the rocks, even in daylight, and this was morning twilight. A threatened seal can be as fierce as a wild African lion, moving faster than a person can run in the rookery of large slippery rocks. The seals have large, very sharp canine teeth, and sometimes, although rarely, a seal would rip into a man’s thigh or leg, requiring multiple stitches. I had vivid visions of what the torn leg of a man must look like, and that certainly made me hyper aware as I ran through hundreds of snarling seals with the men. Although most of the seals were sub-adult males, ages two through four, there were some fierce bull seals in the groups, weighing as much as six hundred pounds. The men would move toward the shoreline, preventing the seals from escaping, and herd the seals inland. The men and boys would whistle and carry sticks that made sounds to keep the seals moving. I was reminded of movies where men were herding cattle. The sounds were very similar, to me.

The men made sure there weren’t any road skins by allowing the seals to rest frequently on their way to the gruesome killing fields. Fur seals have no sweat glands and let off heat through panting that then releases clouds of heat hanging over them. A seal that would die from heat exhaustion would be no good to eat, and its pelt would be hard to clean.

Frequently, bull seals and females would get mixed in among the sub-adult males and were let go on the way to the fields. I would see the bull seals and females run a few yards from the herded animals and stop to rest. The rest of the herded seals seemed terrified and confused. When they arrived at the killing fields, the men would take a break while the herd of seals tried to collect themselves. The seals would be guarded by three or four men and boys to make sure they did not run off. The men would know how long of a day it would be by the size of the herd that was collected. Most of the time over two thousand seals were collected from various parts of the rookeries (seven of which had non-breeding sub-adult male seals). That would mean about an eight-hour day killing seals.

When the sealer foreman gave the word, someone would cut out a pod of six or seven seals by making a loud noise with a large metal coffee can on a club. The “pod cutter” would then drive the small band of seals separated from the rest toward the stunners who used six-foot hickory clubs to stun the seal in the head, frequently killing it with the blow. These men were handpicked for their accuracy in stunning a seal. It was brutalizing work. I wondered what effect this job had on the men, especially my dad.

Within seconds the dead or stunned seals would be dragged away and lined up in rows of five. Then a “sticker” would cut the main artery of each seal to make sure it was dead and cut around the flippers and head. A crew of three or four men, called “rippers,” would attach a large pincer-type tool to the fur that was cut around the head and pull the skin off the seal. Once the skins were removed, they were placed in another line for collection. Either in the middle or at the end of the seal kill, the pelts were loaded onto the truck using pitch forks. When the truck was full of pelts, it would continue to the fur seal pelt-processing facility where the pelts would be soaked, “blubbered,” and put into fifty-gallon wooden barrels for shipment to further processing into fine furs by the Fouke Fur Company. The “blubbering” process was another grueling job in which the men would use large-curved cutting instruments to remove the fat layer from the flesh. The remaining seal carcasses were taken to another location where they would be processed for mink feed. But, before that happened, local people were allowed to take what seal parts they wanted for food. They would take hearts, livers, tongues, shoulders, and ribs, and it was the only time the federal government allowed our people to take seals for themselves.

It was no wonder that the men became debilitated by age thirty-five. The brutal labor took its physical and spiritual toll.

Chapter 9

Death of a Six-Year-Old

For a Pribilof Unangan, sickness was always serious business in a remote community in the Bering Sea. The only clinic is far from the nearest fully equipped medical center in Anchorage, eight hundred air miles away. When I was a child, our parents had to cope by themselves with the myriad of diseases we contracted in the village, as most formal health care was reserved for white people. Impetigo, an infectious skin disease, was one of the worst experiences I recall. My sister Rinna and I, and most of the children in the village, suffered from unbearably itchy sores covering most of our arms, legs, torso, and faces. The treatment involved bathing in a tub of salt water, but, with open wounds from constant scratching, the bath was excruciatingly painful. We also suffered from mumps, measles, body and head lice, flu, polio, smallpox, and otitis media or inner ear infections from too much exposure to the incessant winter winds. The government-run clinic took in only life-threatening cases among our people. One day I was such a case.

I remember my mother, father, grandfather, and sister sitting down to the lunch-time family meal, the biggest meal of the day when the men weren’t slaughtering seals. Instead of joining them I walked into the living room. I wasn’t feeling quite right. My mother always kept this room immaculate. The living room was home to the Russian Orthodox icons, and it was where the priest and local choir would come to say prayers and sing when they went from house to house during the Christmas and Easter holidays. My left arm was hurting so fiercely that I began to cry. My mother came into the room and asked what was wrong with me. I told her how bad my arm hurt and that I was getting dizzy. She felt my forehead and cheeks. I was burning up.

She told me to put my jacket on because she was taking me to see the government doctor. I did as instructed, and we began the short half-mile walk to the clinic. As we walked, everything began to spin wildly. I had severe vertigo. My mother grabbed my hand and pulled me along as I cried, terrified. She was young, and had been a mother only for the six years of my life, given that I was her firstborn. She had never had to deal with something like this before as a mother and she was scared.

No one liked to go the clinic because only really sick people went there, and villagers associated it with death. It was an austere place and smelled of ether and rubbing alcohol. The local practical nurse took my temperature: 106 degrees. Another degree and my brains would have begun to fry. “Doctor, you better look at this boy; he’s really sick!” the nurse said, somewhat insistently.

The doctor, a white man, was a federal employee brought to the island from the lower 48. Most of these imported employees wouldn’t associate with Unangan outside of their assigned responsibilities; those who did were then strongly discouraged from doing so by the other government employees or agents. All the government doctors I had encountered before had seemed cold and distant to me, and this one was no exception.

The doctor looked at the thermometer, a frown appearing on his face. He shook it down and placed it back in my mouth. Then he put a cold stethoscope underneath my shirt and listened front and back. “His lungs and bronchial tubes are congested,” he said to no one in particular. Ignoring my mother, worry etched all over her face, he told the nurse to prepare a bed for me because I probably had pneumonia, and both my lungs were engaged. “Put him in a tub with cold water first, to lower his temperature” the doctor ordered. He then turned to my mother and informed her that my condition was very serious and that I might die. Hearing this, I became terrified.

“Don’t leave me, Mama! Don’t leave me!” I pleaded.

The doctor looked at me sternly. “You have to stay here and your mother can’t; it’s against the rules!”

Crying, nauseated, dizzy, confused, and terrified, I went with the nurse to what was to be my bed for the next six tortuous weeks. “Take all your clothes off and put this on,” she said as she handed me a white gown. “I am going to set up your bath and come back to get you.”

When she left, I struggled to get my clothes off. I was feeling so sick that even the simple task of bending down to take my socks off was difficult. Bending down seemed to make me dizzier and more nauseated. By the time the nurse came back I was too weak to get out of the bed. It was all happening so fast. That morning I had felt perfectly fine. Now, a few hours later, I was immersed in cold sweat and barely able to move.

The nurse carried me from the bed to a large tub, though barely large enough for me to fit in. She set me into shockingly cold water. I cried even more as I gasped for air at the shock of the coldness. Huge goosebumps rose on every inch of my body. At that point, everything started to go dark as I began to lose my vision. I couldn’t understand what was happening and no one bothered to explain it to me, but the doctor’s words that “I might die” were stuck in my head. I was beyond terrified, but I could not give voice to the terror anymore. Then everything went black. I remained mostly unconscious for the next two weeks.

My first recollection of brief consciousness during that period is that of waking up alone in the darkness. I looked around and could only make out strange and sinister outlines of the only ward on the second floor of the clinic. I was the only person in the entire building, and to a little boy, the room I was in felt huge and ominous. The nurse’s station was located somewhere downstairs.

I still felt horribly sick and nauseated and leaned over to vomit on the floor as I went unconscious again. Actually, this was the moment I began to choose unconsciousness as, in my child mind, I told myself I didn’t want to be there. “I’m going back,” I said to myself. The place I would go to was comforting. It is difficult to describe this place I went to; it was something like an infinite void, where there was a peace beyond anything I ever experienced. I felt like I was connected to everything in existence and yet maintained my own sense of being. There were no physical or energetic boundaries of any kind. I could connect with anything past, present, or future and go anywhere on Earth or outer space with just my intention. It was a glorious experience and a place I far preferred over my current physical reality. As a child, I had no sense that this place was unusual, just familiar and welcoming. Later in life, the vivid memory of this “no-place” or void would haunt me.

I had no sense of time whenever I gained consciousness intermittently, except that I knew it was night when it was dark and day when it was light. I do remember sometimes waking up in the dark and wondering if I had gone blind again as I had the day I arrived at the clinic. I knew what it meant to be blind from movies I had seen and comic books I had read.

I recall the consistent sense of terror that I was going to die and die alone. I wanted my mother, my father, my uncles, my sisters, anyone, to be there with me. Where were they? Unbeknownst to me, the government doctor, possibly worried that Unangan people would steal things from the clinic if they were unsupervised, prohibited visitors in the clinic. Not knowing this, I could not understand how my parents, siblings, and relatives could all leave me there alone. I felt completely abandoned in a state of abject terror and did not understand what was happening to me.

One day I awoke startled by a pinching pain in my rear. The doctor was administering a penicillin shot with a long needle. I turned so abruptly as I awoke that the needle broke inside of me. The doctor looked irritated. “You have to stay still while I give you this shot; it will help you get better!” he said brusquely. He asked the practical nurse to get a pair of pliers. I tried to read his face to get some idea of whether or not he was worried about my condition. His face was stoic. The nurse returned, and the doctor proceeded to remove the broken needle with the pliers. “Now I have to do this again, so you have to be still, understand?” he asserted. I nodded, braced myself and bit down on my lower lip as he proceeded to stick the five-inch needle into me. It hurt a lot. It hurt more when the needle hit bone.

After these first two weeks, I was no longer drifting into unconsciousness, only fitful sleeping bouts. Nevertheless, my days merged into nights and nights into days for another four weeks in the clinic. Sometimes I would wake up in my own urine or excrement. I seemed to be exhausted all the time, and every bone and nerve in my body hurt badly. And still no visitors and no other patients in that building. I was alone.

The night nurse would come up to “check on me” or to see if I had wet or pooped on myself. One night, after she cleaned me up, she began fondling my private parts. “Does that feel good?” she asked. I didn’t know what to say. I knew she wasn’t supposed to be doing what she was doing. Then she said she had to check my temperature and had to stick the thermometer in my rear end. I felt her finger go up me. She said this was to make it easier for the thermometer to go in. I didn’t know any better. She did this routine several times over the course of the following weeks. Every time I just lay there quietly, not saying a word. I was confused and afraid she would not bring me food or watch over me if I didn’t let her do what she wanted with me. I learned later that she had a rumored history of sexually abusing children.

Finally, the day came when I was told I could be checked out of the clinic. I don’t remember being elated. It was more like extreme relief that I would leave this place of horror. My grandfather came into the room at around noon, and my mother arrived later. My father was hard at work for the government.

“Aang laakaiyaax,” my grandfather said, greeting me in Unangan Tunuu. “Aang, Papa,” I retorted. My Papa was good and kind to his grandchildren. He would always give us special treats, and this day he reached out to me with an orange in his hand. An orange in those days was very special. Islanders were given a sack of oranges once a year during Christmas, but only white people got them anytime the supply ship arrived. It wasn’t Christmas, so this was really special.

In my little child mind, however, I blamed him and my parents for leaving me alone in this place of hell. I turned my head away abruptly, shaking my head, refusing to take the orange. My Papa, looking to the nurse, said, “what’s the matter with him?” The nurse said she didn’t know. He left, and the nurse and I were alone.

“I won’t let you leave the clinic unless you give me that orange,” she said nonchalantly. I didn’t know if she was teasing me, and I felt terror rising in me once again. I quickly handed the orange to her, and she proceeded to help me dress. I began to feel extreme relief that I finally had my “outside” clothes on—I knew I was leaving. The nurse didn’t give the orange back to me.

My mother arrived to take me home. I said nothing and didn’t look at her.

After I checked out of the clinic, I determined that this would never happen to me again. And I was beyond anger at my parents and grandfather for not protecting me and for leaving me alone, not knowing that the government doctor had prevented them from seeing me for six weeks. I closed myself off from them and adults in general. The only adults I still trusted were my aunt, Sophie, and her husband, my Aachaa. I did not even trust my own body. I felt it had abandoned me. It was years later that I understood how this experience had kept me from trusting any adult, including myself.

When I returned home, I secluded myself in the bedroom and limited my interactions with my family. When we had lunch, I would take my food into the bedroom to eat alone, every day. I became a loner and had only three friends: Nicky, Victor, and Peanuts. They were to be my only consistent friends through the ninth grade, except for two white boys I befriended over those years, Roland Doe and Craig Euneau.

The traumas I experienced in that clinic set the pattern I was to live out for decades. Every single morning, for much of my teen and adult life, I actually re-created my pneumonia symptoms and experiences in the clinic. I would wake up in abject terror, and I would sneeze five to ten times until my lungs and bronchial tubes filled with phlegm. In cold sweats, I felt like I was going to die. It was not until tens of thousands of vets started coming back from Vietnam with similar symptoms that a name was given to what I had: post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

I lived a life of not trusting anyone. I would escape into the “spirit world” to get away from what I felt was the ugliness of humankind in its violence, disconnection, and separation. The spirit world felt like my “real home.” I shielded my thoughts and feelings and became secretive. I trusted no one to touch me, and I became supremely suspicious of Western medicine’s abilities to help anyone. Subconsciously, I carried a deep sense that I could not trust my own body to keep me well. Until I got sick again, to the point that others were concerned about whether or not I was going to live, I did not fully tie this experience at six years old to patterns I carried through life. Even after losing my first and then my second wife in divorce, it was only mortal illness that made me realize that, to prove my point that others cannot be trusted, I had put my loved ones to impossible tests until they left me.

I isolated myself from others to the point that I could have been a monk or hermit. I spent much of my childhood years, beginning at six years old, seeking the comfort and bliss of nature. Daily I would connect with the island. I immersed myself in the wonder of the passing clouds, pushed by the mysterious winds. I loved to lie in the tundra by myself, listening to the bumblebees and blowflies buzzing around, the sound of the wind, the rustling of the grass, the song of the Lapland longspur that sang only when it descended in flight, the chirps of the snow bunting we simply called “snowbirds,” and the call of the rosy finches that we knew as “muskies.” I would take in the wonderful smells of grass and the fresh salt air and the feel of the life that surrounded me. It was here that I felt protected and embraced.

Other times I would go to the shoreline to wander through the intertidal zone, exploring the myriad of living things I came across—the green spindly sea urchins that we called “aagonin,” kelp, snails we called “chimkaiyoon,” starfish, tiny rockfish we called “kundoolin,” sea anemones, the occasional octopus, and sand fleas we called “kootmies.” Unangan had words for every creature around.

I walked inland over grass-covered basalt boulders to sit atop the highest hills on the island. From this vantage point I could see most of the island and surrounding Bering Sea. The island is only twelve miles long and five miles wide at its widest point. Occasionally, hundreds of reindeer would pass below, grunting as they moved with incredible ease over the rocky hummocks. In the early evening I noted how the clouds descended, first only over two hills that later I came to know as the masculine and feminine aspects of this ethereal island, then later the rest of the hills. The masculine aspect is known as Bogoslov. This Russian name means “the voice of God.” Bogoslov is a dormant volcano that prominently extends its rocky form upward in the center of the island. The feminine aspect is called Polovina, which means “halfway” in Russian. Its emerald-colored grassy profile appears like a pregnant woman with rounded breasts.

Beginning at age six, I began walking the three miles outside the village at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning to get to the many seabird nesting sites on cliffs sprinkled around the island shoreline. I wanted to get to these cliffs before sunrise when, by the thousands, the seabirds would stir and begin their circular flight in front of the cliffs.

I came to love the soup of smells along the island shoreline and the wonder and mystery of all this life that, intuitively, I knew was somehow beautifully and seamlessly intertwined. I floated with it, losing all sense of separation to the point that I could not tell where I began and where it ended. This experience was so profoundly familiar, like the place I found when I was sick and unconscious with pneumonia.

The deep connection to nature I had discovered would sustain me through the many trials and tribulations that lay ahead.

Chapter 10

A Personal View of Internal and External Oppression

Later in my life I thought about what oppression does to people. I can only imagine what horrors my people faced, which then developed into a legacy of spiritual sickness and internalized oppression. We still have some stories of those times.

In the early 1990s, as part of a Discovery Channel–sponsored sea expedition to explore old Unangan settlements, I visited the island of the Unangan “Masada,” the place of the last stand between the Unangan and the Russian fur traders led by Soliev as described in Chapter Two. I was probably the first Unangan who dared go back to this place since that atrocity happened. On our team, we had a forensic anthropologist from the Smithsonian Institute (Bruno Frohlich), a geologist who had been specializing in Aleutian geology for twenty years, and a museum curator. We found that the island had settlements just about everywhere we looked. I sang an old Unangan song as we approached the site of the massacre and asked the film crew not to film the island from a distance, only close up. I didn’t want treasure hunters to know its location.

I separated from the group and followed two eagles, my “guides,” to one end of the island while the group went to where the atrocities took place. I knew these two eagles. Every island we went to these two eagles would be there. And I knew there was some reason for this, so I followed the direction of their flight until I was at the cliff next to the sea. I felt strongly that I should sing an Unangan song in this place, and I drummed and cried. Inexplicably, a voice of one of my ancestors came into my head saying, “We are still here waiting. We are here to remind our people that they have not grieved the pain, suffering, and death that happened here and everywhere on these islands because they have forgotten.” I was stunned to actually hear my ancestor. I had heard of people who experienced such things, but I had not paid that much attention to such stories. Now I experienced it. It struck me right in my heart. I knew that this message was absolutely right.

When people experience trauma, it is important to grieve in order to let go. Since that horrific day the Russian fur traders arrived to this place, however, my people have not grieved. I knew why. The survivors forced into slavery took on behaviors that led to depression, addictions, suicides, domestic violence, and murders—behaviors that deepened the traumas. They became parents and passed along these behaviors to their children, and these children became adults and had their own children. This intergenerational trauma compounds the sickness resulting from living with a colonial oppressor at the hands of the Russian fur traders and then the U.S. government. We suffer from this today not because the oppressor is physically present with us but because we internalized the oppressor so that we think we are no longer real human beings. I can’t learn, I am stupid, I am less than a white person. Everything that the original oppressors used to say about us we now say to ourselves; we have become our worst enemies.

To reverse the internal dialogue and related external actions, we must first grieve. Grieving is an individual process and may take a long time. Fortunately, grief counselors and the Alaska Native Medical Center are available to help, and we must take advantage of such support.

Once we have managed to grieve, we must become aware of how our losses resulted in the decisions we made in our lifetime. Once that is done, we must be big enough to forgive ourselves. Unless and until we forgive ourselves, we cannot forgive anyone else. It is only then that we begin to understand forgiveness of and compassion for others: our parents, our ancestors, the Russian fur traders, the U.S. government.

Without grieving, we will continue to carry anger and rage toward ourselves first, then others. When we carry anger or rage, we contribute to destroying our people and ourselves. It is the cause of violence toward ourselves and others. It is the cause of wars between peoples.

Once we separate from our hearts, it is easy to separate from others, including Mother Earth. The Elders say that “nothing is created outside until it is created inside first.”

Chapter 11

A Young Rebel Is Born

“The doctor is going to operate on all the boys who are nine years old!” Buxaa exclaimed, in a state of high anxiety.

“What do you mean?” I replied.

“My daddy told me that the doctor is going to cut all the nine-year-old boys! You know, down there!”

“What does that mean?” I asked, not knowing anything about circumcision at the time.

“My daddy said that the doctor will have to cut our skin around our poonies (Unangan Tunuu for penis) so we can stay clean, and we all have to go—you, me, Junior—everybody that is nine years old!”

“I don’t want to go!” I said, scared and defiant. I didn’t trust the doctor. Not after what I went through with the double pneumonia when I was six. And the thought of being cut horrified me as I knew that the doctor wouldn’t use any painkillers. I only found out later that such patients were put to sleep with ether, a primitive “knock-out” gas applied with medical gauze to the nose and mouth. The dosage and duration a patient received depended on the doctor’s experience and personal judgment, however. Too much and we could die; too little and we would regain consciousness during the operation.

In those days, the doctor’s orders carried the same weight as orders from the government agent. Everybody followed those orders, lest they suffer the repercussions—demerits reflected in the already meager pay the men received, assignment to a lower-paying or less “prestigious” job (such as working on the garbage truck or “road gang”), jail, loss of home, or deportation (for the greatest offenders). But I had the inspiration of people like my uncle, Eddie (aka Iliodor), challenger of the federal government when he was the tribal chairman and launched the 1951 claim accusing the U.S. government of failure to treat Unangan fairly and honorably. I was adamant that the doctor would not touch me, no matter what!

When I arrived home, my parents already had the order from the government doctor to take me to the hospital for the surgery. “I am not going!” I screamed, half crying and half angry. “I don’t care what you do; I’m not going! I’ll run away if you try to make me go, and I will never come back!” I proclaimed in a hysterical voice.

“Okay, okay,” my father said, in a voice of real concern. “We won’t make you go, but the doctor will have to come and get you if you don’t go,” he said.

“Let him; I don’t care!” I cried out, tears streaming from my face, realizing that my parents were not going to protect me from this horror. I knew they were forced to obey the government, just like everyone else in the village, lest our entire family suffer the consequences.

My mother and father talked in Unangan Tunuu. My father was telling my mother to go to the clinic to tell the doctor that I refused to have the surgery. My mother dressed in her finest.

For whatever reason, whenever Unangan people went to talk with one of the white overseers, they dressed up. In retrospect, I think our people were shamed by government agents and other white people terming us as “filthy” people, and dressing in Sunday’s finest was intended to show the agent that we were not filthy at all. Most of the women in my mother’s generation still keep their homes immaculately clean as a matter of habit due to all the years that the government doctor, wearing a white smock and carrying a clipboard, would inspect our homes weekly for cleanliness and sanitation. If something did not meet the doctor’s standards, the “man of the house” was given demerits that would affect food rations or his job performance rating and ultimately pay. I remember how my mother would wash and wax the floors until they were spotless, wash the windows, clean all the cupboards, carefully fold and put clothes away, and wash every pot, pan, and cup in the house before the government doctor would come.

The government agent, likewise, ran the community like a military camp, insisting on “order and cleanliness” in everything. The government-owned concrete houses, sitting in neat rows, were repainted every year white with green trim. The roads, built from red volcanic material called scoria, were frequently graded; the “road gang” would walk behind the grader, picking up loose rocks and pitching them off the road until it was relatively smooth. There was no junk machinery anywhere in the village; the government owned all the vehicles and machines in what was essentially a government-run company town. Unangan men maintained the machinery; women were expected to stay at the house, cook, take care of the family, and keep the house clean. We never used the word “home”; it was always “house.” Every spring, the family would “spring clean” the house, washing and painting the walls, and cleaning the windows.

I waited by the open door for my mother to return. Our house was at the end of the first row of houses, at the top of the hill on the south side of the village. The clinic where the doctor worked was on the lower part of the north side. I saw my mother coming around Apaloon’s house in the second row, on her way back from the clinic. She was clearly distraught and, in tears, spoke to my father in Unangan Tunuu. She explained that the government doctor was so angry that his face got red and he hollered at her, saying that he would come up and get me right away, calling her an unfit mother because she couldn’t get me to obey. I was sorry that I had created this situation for my parents, but it was not enough to make me change my mind. I was not going to be tortured by this man, no matter what the consequences.

My father, thinking I would acquiesce when the doctor arrived, told me, “Get ready, the doctor is coming for you!”

I stood at the doorway watching the area around Apaloon’s house. Soon I saw someone in a long white coat walk up the road past Apaloon’s and the Russian Orthodox Church school, until he was on the straight road that led to my house. I screwed up my courage and determination, staring at the doctor as he walked quickly down the road toward me. Our eyes locked when he was just two houses away. In his eyes I could see nothing but sheer, almost crazy rage. No Unangan had ever dared challenge his authority. He was going to make an example of me.

I moved down the two concrete steps outside my house, waiting until there was just one house between us. Then I bolted down the road, and the enraged doctor came after me. Although I was only nine years old, I was big and strong for my age. At least four of my nine years had been spent running free on the island. I was a running fool; everywhere I went as a child, I would run, never walk—even when it was miles outside the village. The doctor was probably in his forties and obviously not in good physical shape. I knew I could outrun him.

As I ran down to the third row of houses, I could hear him huffing and puffing. This made me even more confident—I wasn’t even winded. I stopped in the middle of the road. The doctor thought he had me, but I bolted again when he was about two hundred yards away. I kept this up, running through row after row of houses. In my bolstered self-confidence, I was toying with him. When he discovered what I was doing, he started screaming at me, promising to whip me when he got hold of me. I said nothing, continuing this act of ultimate defiance in silence. When I hit the bottom row on my side of the village, two of my best friends (of the same age) joined me. Now there were three of us running away from the feared authority figure. We started to laugh and giggle nervously as the doctor, now quite tired, continued to chase us.

I led my friends up the hill below the Russian Orthodox church and past the “government house” to the bottom row of houses, planning to run each row from bottom to top this time. By now people were watching us, either from outside their houses or through their windows. I could see grins on some peoples’ faces. That made me feel really good.

As we banked up the second row of houses, now on the north side of the village, the doctor hollered out to two young men ahead of us and ordered them to stop us. I slowed down as my two friends went ahead and were unceremoniously grabbed by the two Unangan who were just “following the doctor’s orders.” Later on in life, I realized that most people took an entirely different meaning from that phrase than I did. If the Unangan men hadn’t done what was instructed of them, they and their families no doubt would have suffered for it later. As the doctor passed the two men, he ordered them to take the boys to the clinic. They complied.

Meanwhile, the doctor, having gained his second wind, started to pick up the pace. I had to make my move to get away from him. I visualized the hiding place I needed. I outran him, sprinting up the grassy slope known only as “Village Hill.” The grass smelled heavily of the fifty-gallon drums of gasoline the government stored atop the hill, many of them leaking and leaching their lethal content into the tundra overlooking the town proper. It was to be a year later, recalling this incident, that I got the idea of doing something about the foul-smelling grass that covered the hill.

I ran up the hill as fast as my body would carry me. When I reached the top, I jumped down among the large rocks on the other side of Village Hill, stealing inside a “mini-cave” created by basalt boulders and hidden by the subarctic alpine tundra’s emerald-green grass. A couple of minutes later I heard the doctor’s heavy breathing about twenty feet above me. I knew he was scanning the area. I held my breath. Surprisingly, he didn’t climb down the rocks or stay very long. I waited for an hour before slowly coming out of my safe haven among the rocks and tundra grass. The doctor was nowhere to be seen. I crept back to my house along the hills at the edge of the village, keeping just below the hills’ crests to minimize the risk of being seen. The government might put out orders to “bring me in”—I neither wanted to put anyone in a compromising situation that could hurt them, nor did I want to be caught by those who always followed the orders of the colonial oppressors.

I was convinced that, eventually, the doctor would try to surprise me at school or get my parents to physically force me to the clinic; curiously, that never happened. To this day I don’t understand why the doctor didn’t try to either get me again or make a disciplinary example of me. No word of what happened was ever mentioned beyond whispers in the village. My friends were not so lucky. It took them weeks to recover from the physical trauma of the experience due to infection, and perhaps a lifetime to deal with the emotional trauma. This was the beginning of my journey toward a life of questioning authority, never passively accepting decisions by those in control, and challenging injustice wherever I found it. But there were many adventures in between, like the day I lit a match to a gasoline- and diesel-soaked hillside adjacent to the village. But that is another story.

Chapter 12

School Without Love

At age twelve I was in the tenth grade. I had jumped several grades and could have jumped more, but my parents, wisely, decided that I should be with kids closer to my age group. I had always excelled in school. I had taught myself to read at four years old, reading comic books, which I loved, especially Superman, Batman, Richie Rich, Wendy the Good Little Witch, and Casper the Friendly Ghost. No one had taught me how to read, and Mrs. Dallums, my first-grade teacher, had me help the second graders.

The teachers always paid special attention to me because I excelled in every course subject. I was a “model” student, and the parents of other children would tell their kids to be more like me. The boys hated this and so would take every opportunity to harass and “beat” me up. Nevertheless, I had three friends: Peanuts, Buxaa, and Nicky. They were my best childhood chums; we would play “cowboys and Indians” and share our toys with each other. When I was an “Indian,” I would use beach grass as arrows to attack the cowboys. Sometimes we “Indians” would win, sometimes the “cowboys” would win. We did not know of the oppression toward Native American people who were shown in the films of the day.

I was the youngest tenth grader of six hundred children from throughout the West at a Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school in Chemawa, Oregon, five miles north of Salem. It was the first time I went “outside.” I turned fourteen in November of that year. Most of the non-Alaskans were Dine or Navajo from Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico, and we stayed in dorm rooms that would accommodate six students. Four of my roommates were Navajo; I found out very quickly that they did not like Alaska Native peoples. In fact, each group stayed to themselves for the most part. I was puzzled by this. My Elders taught that we should treat each other with respect, so I had never been racist toward others. The Elders taught through their actions and words that we should never think badly of any one. Later I would marvel at how the Elders did this despite the demeaning way the white overseers would treat our people. As a result, I made no distinction between Alaska Natives and other races. I even developed a crush on a Navajo girl while I was at Chemawa, and we became good friends.

Going to a Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) boarding school in those days was not easy. We had a dress code and had to have military-style haircuts. We woke up to a loud claxon at 6:00 every morning except on weekends when the claxon would go off at 7:00. We had to make our beds in such a way that we could bounce a quarter off them. Then, after a group shower, we would do our assigned dormitory cleaning tasks. I liked using the buffing machine on the floors. After that, we went to the cafeteria to eat breakfast. Even though I hated what we called “shit on a shingle,” some kind of meat in gravy that is poured over bread, I was always hungry despite what they fed us.

We couldn’t leave the school without a pass, and even when we got the pass, we could only go across the railroad tracks to a store. We did not see our home and our families for nine months. I lived in anticipation of receiving a letter from my mother once a month and her care package that contained cookies and other things I could eat. We called it “going to school without love” because, though we got to talk with our parents by marine radio during Christmas and Easter, that was it. Back on Saint Paul, I had listened to the father of my white friend, Roland Doe, talk on the radio. He was a marine radio operator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that was responsible for overseeing administration of the islands. I learned the protocol for talking on the radio from him and used it when talking with my parents. The conversation was always short as the government agent on Saint Paul would allow only two minutes.

“Hello, Mama, Daddy, how are you doing? Over.”

They would respond similarly, “We are doing fine, son. Over.”

“I can’t wait to be home and I miss you. Over.”

“We miss you, too. Did you get my package? Over.”

“Yes, I got it, and we ate it all up. Over.”

Laughing, my mom responded, “Good, I will send you a package every month. Over.”

“Ok, Mom, thank you. I really like those packages. Over.”

“We will see you soon. Take care of yourself. Over.”

“I will, Mom. I love you both very much. Over.”

“We love you too, son. Over and out.”

Like on Saint Paul, I was a “model” student, excelling in everything I did. In my typing class, I was known to be the fastest typist in school, typing 110 words a minute. One day, my math teacher who was a retired Air Force pilot, approached Peanuts and me, saying, “you two don’t belong in this school. It is for what we call ‘social referrals,’ kids who have trouble learning. You two would be better served by going to the BIA school in Alaska.” I was surprised at this since the students in Chemawa didn’t strike me as troubled students. Nevertheless, Peanuts and I were told later that we would go to Mt. Edgecumbe High School in Alaska the following year, thanks to that math teacher.

In this school, all the students were Alaska Native people from throughout Alaska. Like my other schools, I excelled here as well, but I felt more at home as there was a large contingent of students from Saint Paul and Saint George. We lived in a dorm with about sixty or so other boys in bunk beds that were lined up neatly in rows. The beds had to be made up in the same way as in Chemawa, and we also had assigned chores. We ate in the same kind of cafeteria, and we never got enough food to last us until the next meal. Still, I was with students with similar values and ways as me.

I was fourteen when I embarked on my first political action at Mt. Edgecumbe. It was my junior year, and I had a girlfriend. The thing was, we were not allowed to hold hands except when we were dancing, and we could not kiss each other goodnight at the end of a social function. By this time I had begun to challenge the system if I felt it necessary, so I drafted up a petition that said: “We, the undersigned students of Mt. Edgecumbe, demand to be treated as young adults who have a say in the rules and regulations we are told to live by.” I circulated this petition throughout the school, and every student signed it. I turned the petition in to the superintendent’s secretary, and that evening a dorm aide gave me a message that Superintendent Crites wanted me to have dinner at his home. This, by itself, was an accomplishment as no student was ever invited to his home. We had dinner and afterward Mr. Crites said, “that was quite a petition you turned in today. I thought about it, and I’ve decided that we will give a blank check when it comes to making rules you are expected to live by.”

“You mean we can write our own rules?” I asked.

“Yes, as long as the rules set by the student council are reasonable, we will abide by them,” responded the superintendent. I was jubilant and told everyone I encountered about this astonishing turn of events. The next day I met with the student council to inform them of the superintendent’s declaration and asked, as their first order of the day, that students be allowed to hold hands and kiss their partner goodnight after a social function. They all agreed and passed the measure. I was the BMOC, Big Man on Campus, as word got out. I received a unique honor in being named the honorary president of the girls’ dormitory, the first male to receive such a title in Mt. Edgecumbe’s history. The next year, in twelfth grade, I became the student body president.

During my senior year, I met with a guidance counselor to discuss my plans after graduating. My counselor said to me, “you should pick a small college to go to because you will have a better chance of success.” I didn’t respond, and, despite the well-intentioned counselor’s advice, and perhaps because of it, I looked at the largest university I could find on the West Coast. The University of Washington had 34,000 students at the time. I applied and got accepted.

Chapter 13

Death in a Village Is Very Personal

Death was very personal in the village. Local carpenters like my dad, John Paul Merculieff, built the coffins. Local people dug the graves and reverently washed and clothed the bodies. The coffins, frequently open, would lie in state in incense-filled living rooms or be taken to the church for three days. Mirrors would be covered in the homes because too many had seen the ghostly image of the deceased in them. All the members of the community would come to the deceased’s home to pay their last respects and to demonstrate emotional support for those left behind.

After three days, the body was removed to the Russian Orthodox church where final ceremonies were performed. The church was always packed with community members. Muffled crying was heard as cathartic a cappella funeral songs were sung. The priest sang as if he were moaning, symbolically expressing the pain of loss felt by everyone. There were no seats, so everyone would stand through the one-and-a-half-hour ceremony—men and boys on one side, women and girls on the other, all wearing their best Sunday clothes.

I was no stranger to death; no one in a village is. But I had the peculiar experience of being handpicked at age nine to watch over the coffins when they were placed in the church. I was given this job because I was willing to take it. It was a job few chose because it required a person to be alone in the church with the body throughout the night (unless he or she had a friend willing to join). I was never able to get any friend to join me. I can’t say I blamed them. I don’t know how many times I imagined the person moving inside the open coffin if I looked at it long enough. My hair would stand on end, and I would go into cold sweats. Nevertheless, I stayed at my post.

The tradition of watching coffins before burial began many decades before because something inexplicable had happened to one coffin in the church when it wasn’t watched. When local people returned to the church the day after a closed coffin had been left alone there, they found it off its pedestals and on the floor. Thinking someone was playing a cruel joke, they locked the church doors. The next day, they found the same thing, so the priest asked folks to stand guard outside the church even though the doors and windows were locked. The next day, they found the coffin on the floor again. From that day forward, all coffins were watched.

I can vividly remember during the funeral services how I always just stared at the dead person lying in the open coffin, trying to make sense of death and the fact that this person I had seen smiling, working, or playing was now gone. I half expected the person to move. But the cotton placed in the nose and ears to prevent drainage of blood, the beautifully engraved paper band around the head, the arms crossed over each other, the icon clutched in stiff hands, the closed eyes, and the coffin all made it undeniable that the person was no longer here.

Before the coffin was closed, everyone would pass by the body and perform personal rituals to release themselves and the deceased from old wounds that may have arisen between them—a fight, an argument, an unkind word, anything that needed forgiveness. Some people would kiss the forehead, the hands, the lips of the deceased. I did this and was always struck by how cold and lifeless the person felt to kiss. Others would take the icon from the deceased’s hands and bless the person with it, making a movement of the cross. Others would stand by the coffin, just taking in a last look while silently saying prayers and asking for forgiveness or simply crying or wailing.

When everyone completed these rituals, the coffin was ceremoniously closed to a song of grieving that wrenched everyone’s heart when sung. The coffin was then placed in a vehicle that led a solemn parade to the graveyard where twenty generations of my people had been buried. After the burial, a wake was held in the home of the deceased, where people feasted, expressed condolences, and shared funny stories of the departed. It was a great way to experience a death, a beautiful way.

Once my mother, Stefanida, told me that Unangan people would cry when a person was born and celebrate when a person died. This is because Unangan people understand that to be born into the body from spirit means to experience the suffering and heaviness of the human body. Death is understood to be a reverse birthing process, a release into the spirit world where one is again free beyond imagination and limitations. It is a great way to understand and accept death.

But I knew that no one who killed themselves or died while drunk would be treated in this way by the Church. I had had powerful lessons in this, so powerful it led me to leave the Orthodox Church that was the spiritual lifeblood of my people, my parents, and all my ancestors buried on that hill across from the village. I was only sixteen.

I was returning home on a cold winter’s night after having been to the local movie theater. The shortest route home from Irish’s theater was either through the churchyard or a road adjacent to the church. At night, alone, I always felt spooked when walking through the churchyard where all the deacons, readers, and priests were buried, so I chose to walk on the road. It was a dark and very cold, windy night, typical of the Pribilof winters, when clouds covered the sky. As I neared the church I could make out a dark form on the ground lying up against the rockery that made a small wall. I knew it had to be a person. It was an old lady named Perscodia, obviously intoxicated.

“What are you doing here, Grandma?” I asked in a voice of deep concern. “You could die here in the cold like this! Let me take you home,” I said, half commanding, half asking permission, out of respect for her age.

My parents taught me always to respect the “old people” no matter what; Perscodia’s intoxication made no difference in how I would treat her. This beautiful woman looked directly at me with her sad, wise, ancient eyes that showed a clarity I did not expect from someone in her state. Intuitively, I realized she was going to say something she considered to be of extreme importance.

Perscodia talked to me in Unangan, in a strong, clear, and deeply loving voice. “Please leave me be, son. I know what I am doing. I want to die with the church I love.”

This woman had been an Orthodox Christian all her life. I was unprepared for how this struck me. Her tone, her demeanor, and the power of her words all touched my heart in a direct way I had never experienced before. This woman is preparing to die, and I interrupted what may be one of the most private and powerful moments in her life! I thought. My God, she is asking me to honor her dying wish!

My mind hesitated, but my heart knew I had to do as she wished.

“I love you, Grandma!” I said.

“I love you too, son. And I thank you in a big way.” I walked slowly away, profoundly affected by the courage, beauty, dignity, love, and lack of fear this woman had shown me in a few minutes. It changed my view of all my people for the rest of my life.

Miraculously, Perscodia didn’t die that cold night. I don’t know how she managed. Perhaps someone else came along and forcibly took her home. I felt so relieved; I didn’t know how I would take it knowing I could have saved her life but didn’t. She died a week later, drunk. “Elders always know when they are going to die. It’s God’s gift,” my mom’s voice echoed in my memory.

The local priest made the decision that Perscodia would not have the honor of an Orthodox burial—no prayers, no ceremonies, nothing but placement of her body in a grave separate and apart from all her ancestors, an action that symbolized the view that she had died in sin and disgrace. All I could think was how her dying wish had been to be with her Church and how the Church abandoned her through the decision of a misguided priest. I determined then and there that I could not be part of the harsh judgment of beautiful people. At the time I blamed the Church rather than the priest, not knowing if it was Church policy or simply an individual decision. To me, it didn’t matter at the time. I left the Church for many years because of this incident.

Chapter 14

I Was a “Hooker”

My first job was something probably only a handful of people in the United States have ever done. I was fifteen years old and preparing to go to the University of Washington. I needed to make money as my parents were financially poor like the rest of the community. My friend Craig Euneau, son of the island manager at the time, suggested that I work alongside him for Lee Paola. At the time, Lee offered the only non-government employment in the village and that appealed to me, although his business was not entirely unconnected to the government. Lee operated the fur seal rendering plant through a federal contract to grind up fur seal meat carcasses, not taken by local people for food, to be used in a second-generation fur business: feed for mink farms.

Lee was a friendly but tough man and an extremely hard worker. “So, you up to working for me? I need someone who is reliable and strong, willing to work long hours doing whatever is needed!” Lee stated firmly, gazing intently at me. At the time I was a skinny teen, but I had, as they say, plenty of pluck. “I can do the job!” I replied firmly.

“Good, then you start first thing in the morning. Craig will show you what you need to do.”

I felt proud. I am not working for the government! I said to myself, feeling satisfied that I was still a rebel. Little did I know what was in store for me. I began working on the day of the largest kill of fur seals: some 3,000 seals. The people had taken no more than a 100 seals for food, leaving about 2,900 seals to be processed that day.

I showed up at the processing plant at 6:00 the next morning. Craig took me to the gear room where we suited up in heavy rain-pants and jackets, with rubber gloves, rain cap, and hip boots. I wondered why we needed all this gear and protection, but I didn’t have to wonder long.

Craig was a big guy for his age. He was the same age as me, but, except for a few of us, most Unangan boys stayed away from the son of the government island manager. I was taught to be kind to everyone, however, and my parents and grandfather never said a bad word about “white people” despite the horrible treatment they received throughout their lives. In all the years before Craig’s father showed up, the government agents were relentlessly condescending and racist, never believing that Unangan people were their equals. Even the law did not recognize Unangan as citizens of the United States until 1966. Until then, we were “wards” of the government, to be treated like wayward children, to be pushed into becoming like the “white man.” Unangan were not allowed to vote in U.S. elections, or even in state elections after Alaska entered the Union in 1959.

I befriended Craig, nevertheless. I liked the fact that this awkward young man was a rebel at heart, but a kind and intelligent rebel. His father was a Native American himself, from the lower 48, and that’s probably why Craig was not racist. Most of the adults in the village liked his father. Howard was the first outside agent to treat our people like people, even if all the other government employees on the island did not.

“Okay, the trucks are going to start coming in from the killing fields and we gotta be ready,” Craig said. By ready, he meant standing inside the chute where the large trucks would raise their dumps and discharge the bloody cargo into the building. Adjacent to the chute was a conveyer line of grotesque hooks that circled around to the meat grinder. Our job was to grab the forty-to-fifty-pound skinned seal carcasses and impale the heads or necks on the hooks. That was it. I thought that this job would be a cinch. I thought.

The first truckload of some two hundred seals was unceremoniously dumped into the chute, and bloody carcasses spilled all across the concrete floor. The sight of these once incredibly beautiful, graceful, strong animals transformed into ghoulish-looking bloody husks, with bulging eyeballs still attached, chilled me to the bone. The way the carcasses were treated was in extremely stark contrast to the way my Aachaa taught me to regard the animals, even when we killed them for food. I was utterly disgusted, nauseated, and horrified. Then my teenage self took hold. “I will show them I can do the job as good as any white person!” I lifted the first carcasses and flung them onto the large hooks. Craig followed. “We gotta make sure every hook has a seal!” he hollered over the din of the truck engine and conveyer motor. “And we gotta keep up, because it is going to get tough!”

It took us about a half hour to handle this truckload, but before we were finished, the next truck came, then another shortly thereafter, then another, until we were literally waist high in dead, bloody, seal carcasses. Each truck carried about 200 to 250 seal carcasses. Now I knew why we had on all this gear. After the first six hours of nonstop “hooking,” we had a lunch break. I was so beyond relieved, but even after six hours of “hooking,” seal carcasses were piled up five feet high off the floor and stretching at least thirty feet in any direction, and there were more truck loads coming in the afternoon!

I was already exhausted, and my back, neck, shoulder, and arm muscles ached. My fingers were tired in a way I’d never felt before in my life. Every inch of my outer gear was covered with dry blood, and the smell was abhorrent. Taking my rubber gloves off, my hands were yellow. The blood had actually soaked through the rubber! And there was dark encrusted blood underneath all my fingernails. Even my hair was encrusted in dried blood.

I hopped on Craig’s small Honda, and we rode the mile into town to my house. When I arrived, my grandfather, brothers and sisters, my uncle, and my mother were all preparing to eat at the dinner table. Unangan have their main meal at midday. It was a strategy for survival as the men needed the energy to do hard work every day. My dad, however, was still out on the killing fields, having begun his grisly work at 4:00 a.m.—the government made it clear that the stunners would receive a special bonus at the end of the season.

Gathered at the lunch table, my family looked at me aghast as I arrived at the house. I must have looked like some kind of monster, covered with blood the way I was and smelling quite foul. “Wash up real good!” my mom ordered. I washed for fifteen minutes. When I thought I was presentable, I went to the dinner table. My sister Rinna plugged her nose in disgust. “Eeeee, you smell terrible!” she exclaimed. “I’m not sitting here with you!” Everyone quickly left the dinner table, leaving me to try to eat alone. My stomach was still nauseated, but I knew I had to eat. I looked down at my plate. We were eating seal meat that day.

Chapter 15

University Life

That fall, after I graduated from high school, I traveled to Seattle to attend the University of Washington. I was the third person in my village to go to college. Two others had gone before me but never returned to the island, and one person from Saint George. So I and a childhood buddy of mine, Pat Pletnikoff, who was accepted at Western Washington University that year, did not have anyone to talk to about what life would be like at the university.

I did not know how to take a bus or use a telephone when I arrived in Seattle. Still, I found my way to campus and to Terry Hall, the dorm to which I was assigned. It was ten stories high!

I was assigned to the top floor on what was, as I learned later, one of two floors housing the “crème de la crème” of students who lived in that dorm. Most of them were white and came, as I learned, from relatively rich families—including my roommate. We greeted each other and talked about where we came from. As it turned out, we became good friends. Still, I could not relate to the rest of the students in the dorm, and I found they could not relate to me. They have a strange sense of humor, I thought to myself. Quick-witted would be a term that fit. Native humor is much slower and usually self-deprecating, so I often could not join their conversations. In fact, I had difficulty relating to most conversations around the campus, so I felt very alone.

The next day at registration I was asked what classes I wanted to take. I had gone through all the university classes in the book they had sent me on Saint Paul and already had classes in mind. I did not know that a student’s average class load was twelve to fifteen credits. I thought that classes were organized the same way they were in high school, so I signed up for twenty credits, which was six classes.

The campus was so massive it took up to half an hour to walk between classrooms. I remember the time my sister Eva visited me at the “U of W.” I was giving her a tour when she remarked, “Wow, the University of Washington is sure big,” to which I responded in the affirmative, not knowing what she meant. She was commenting on one building at the “U” and not the whole campus.

And the class sizes were huge too, averaging about three hundred students—half the population of my village! At first I was a bit overwhelmed by this, having come from an average high school classroom of about twenty students. It took some time to adjust. I neither had a face-to-face conversation with the instructors during the entire four years at the university, nor did I ever see an academic counselor. I had been taught to figure things out by myself from my traditional upbringing, and with some effort I did.

Not satisfied to just study the issue of Native American economic poverty, I decided, in my sophomore year, to ask the university president why there were only four students who identified themselves as Native American at a university with an enrollment of 34,000 in a state with twenty-two Indian reservations at the time. I knew that the quickest way to get an answer or decision about something was to talk directly to the person in charge. I went directly to the president’s office complex where his secretary asked me if I had an appointment, which I did not. “He is a very busy man, and anyone who wants to see him has to make an appointment,” she said kindly.

“Well, maybe I can just wait here in case he has some time to talk with me,” I replied. This response prompted her to ask why I wanted to see him. “I am an Unangan Native American from Alaska, and I was wondering why there are only four other Native Americans at a university surrounded by Indian reservations. I thought the president might tell me why.”

She studied me carefully and decided I was sincere about seeing him. “Just a minute, I will see if he can see you,” she said. A few moments later she returned, saying “the president will see you, but he has only a few minutes.”

I thanked her as I entered the large office of the president. He was in his fifties or sixties, wearing a three-piece suit, milling over his paperwork when I walked in. “Good morning, young man. I am President Odegaard. I understand you have an issue with the university that needs some attention,” he said in a soft voice.

“It is embarrassing to the university that it would educate 34,000 students and only four identify themselves as Native American,” I said. “And on top of that, this university is in a state with twenty-two Indian reservations!”

He thought for a moment, then said, “Okay, you are right. How would you like to start a program to recruit Native Americans to the university? I will give you a state car, an office, and a small budget. Not only would you recruit them but counsel them if they need help. What do you say?” I was dumbfounded at this outcome. I did not think he would make such a decision on the spur of the moment and ask an eighteen-year-old to do such a job, but he did. Thus began my work, at five hundred dollars a month, visiting Indian reservations to recruit students to the university, and I had use of a large state car for travel. I credit the people of Saint Paul for always affirming me every day. By the time I went to the university I was raised to believe in myself, never to see obstacles. The program I started became known as the American Indian Education Program, which still exists today. And the University of Washington now has a department dedicated to Native American studies.

It took me four and a half years to complete the university requirements for graduation because, by the time I reached my junior year, I was still unsure about what I wanted to major in. I approached the Dean of the School of Community Development and asked if I could take independent study for the remaining years I had left. I proposed a study of the reasons most Native American tribes were in a state of economic poverty. I planned to visit several reservations in and around Washington State. The study was approved, and in two years I visited thirty or more reservations in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Arizona.

During this time I was also visiting Phyllis and her parents. I first saw Phyllis on Saint Paul when I was fourteen and she was eleven, and she came running out of the community hall one day. I didn’t yet know her, but I knew she would be my wife. She and her parents later moved from Saint Paul Island to Bothell, Washington, approximately twenty-five miles north of Seattle. I had never let Phyllis, or her parents, know about my childhood premonition, but we reconnected and grew very close. Phyllis and I married when I was twenty and she was eighteen.

As the youngest director of a university Native American program, I was invited to be part of the Convocation of American Indian Scholars. The gathering was composed of one hundred selected scholars who were dedicated to addressing human rights violations of Indigenous people in the western hemisphere. The first meeting I attended was at Princeton University. It was a heady crowd for an eighteen-year-old. This was where I met N. Scott Momaday, the first Native American Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist; Vine Deloria, who wrote Custer Died for Your Sins; and Buffy Sainte-Marie, an internationally recognized Native American singer/songwriter—to name just three.

This was also when I first became aware of the brutality of some governments toward aboriginal peoples. We watched a homemade movie showing Indigenous people from a South American country being slaughtered by a machine gun from a helicopter. The people being attacked were throwing spears at the helicopter. The killing was that government’s effort to stop the Natives’ resistance to construction of a road to access precious metals and oil.

For the better part of the week we discussed how to stop these atrocities. Finally, a decision was made we thought would not only end the persecution, but restore land to the Indigenous people. We would quietly reveal the footage to the government and private companies involved, with the threat that it would be shown for all the world to see if they did not comply with what the Convocation wanted. An agreement was reached and the atrocities stopped, with provisions to restore some lands back to the Indigenous peoples.

A Young Lobbyist

In the summer of 1968, the tribal president of the Aleut Community of Saint Paul, Gabe Stepetin, asked Patrick (Pat) Pletnikoff and me to meet with the council. I thought that this must be some kind of big deal, especially since the entire council was seated when we arrived. Gabe explained, “Congress just passed the bill giving us rights as citizens, including the right to form a city. But, we don’t have any money to create a city. We would like to hire the both of you to represent us in Washington to seek funds for this effort and any other thing that may help us. We know both of you are in college, and, therefore, you speak English better than us and have experience working in the white world, which is why we selected you. We will give you four thousand dollars to cover your expenses and pay. What do you say?”

I was surprised that the tribal officials would even consider hiring two kids with just a year of college under their belts to be the tribal representatives and help implement the Fur Seal Act of 1966. I stood up and answered affirmatively. While I was responding, Gabe said, “Larry, why don’t you speak English?” I realized then that I had picked up the way the white people spoke, which was not village English. “I am sorry. I did not mean to speak this way. It was just something I picked up in college. I will speak English from now on.” What Gabe was saying was that I talked like a white person.

So, Patrick and I were hired as tribal representatives that summer. We knew that Flore Lekanof from Saint George, the only person who went to college, besides Patrick, and graduated from Saint George, worked in DC for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, so we called him. He agreed to arrange a meeting with Senator Stevens, the senator from Alaska. As representatives of the tribe, that was all we knew what to do.

We arrived at Dulles Airport. I decided to rent a car for us but did not have the presence of mind to ask for a map. I must have driven for six hours before we found DC. It was only twenty miles from the airport. I stopped at the first hotel I saw. It was the Marriot and expensive.

The next morning we drove into DC and hit Dupont Circle. I got into the Circle okay, but couldn’t find a way out. I drove around and around the circle. Cars were in every lane. Finally, I decided that the only way to get out was to cut across three lanes to an exit, and to the sound of honking horns. At last, we found the office where Flore worked. He introduced us to the Commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, then took us to Senator Stevens’s office on Capitol Hill.

It was an ornate office with a couch and a large mahogany desk. Mementos from all over Alaska were on every wall, including photographs. Senator Stevens greeted us warmly, while Flore explained that we were representing the tribe on Saint Paul. I said, “I am glad you agreed to meet us, Senator. We are here to see if it would be possible to get some funds to create a city as authorized by the Fur Seal Act of 1966. And possibly to see if we could get a boat harbor started. We are still dependent on the government for jobs and the maintenance of critical systems that support the island. Although we pay for these services, it is subsidized.” I had added the boat harbor because my uncle, Eddie, who had passed away a year earlier, thought it would be a great economic base. I thought so too, so I brought it up without consulting anyone.

Senator Stevens thought about it for a moment and said, “Okay, I will see what I can do. I realize that the people of the Pribilofs have had it hard under government rule, and you all don’t have much money. So, I will see what I can do.” That was it. After saying appropriate goodbyes, we left the office feeling as if we had accomplished what we had set out to do. When we got back to the car, I had a parking ticket. In fact, during our stay in DC I received seventeen parking tickets.

No one heard from Senator Stevens until that fall, several months later, while I was at college. The tribal council received word from his office that it would receive fifty thousand dollars to start up the city and that the senator would come for a visit perhaps the following summer. He made good and visited Saint Paul and Saint George in the summer of 1970, at which time, in preparation for the visit, the tribal government of Saint George ordered the public works crew to bulldoze across a road adjacent to the village. That was to be the first airstrip on Saint George since flights first stated operating in Alaska. Prior to that point, mail had been dropped from an airplane.

Chapter 16

Lobbying for My People Begins

Upon returning to Alaska after graduation, I first worked for the Alaska Native Foundation for which I secured a major grant from the Kellogg Foundation to link village corporations with the University of Alaska, then, at age twenty-three, as the youngest land director of a Regional Native Corporation. By that time the U.S. Congress had passed the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, which provided a billion dollars to Alaska Native peoples and titles to forty-four million acres of land they had historical ties to. Land was parceled out according to population within each village and region. Most villages and regions chose to form private for-profit corporations to receive the titles and money that were the centerpiece of the legislation. The Unangan people formed The Aleut Corporation (TAC) under this legislation in 1972, and its president Michael Swetzoff, hired me to lead the effort in training people from twelve villages on land identification and selection under this new law. I hired two people for my new department and set out to help the villagers select land in our region. We were the first Unangan, with a few exceptions, to get to see all the villages in their region and to fly over all two million plus acres of land available for selection.

After successfully training the people in the villages and making land selections for TAC, I was hired to be the first business manager for the village corporation in my hometown of Saint Paul in 1975 and subsequently asked to serve as its president. We engaged in the first businesses, other than coffee shops and a movie theater (the people had never had the wherewithal to develop other businesses during the government domination, and the government did not want us to have enough money to leave the islands), based in Saint Paul, which included a construction company, ownership and operation of the International Inn (in Anchorage), and leasing of lands for small boat harbor operations.

In the ten years I served the village corporation, we made consistent profits from our ownership and operation of the International Inn. A hotel/restaurant and tourism operation on Saint Paul Island also made consistent profits, along with a fish processing operation and small boat demonstration project. We also put money into lobbying for a boat harbor on Saint Paul, which was built in the mid-1980s and has been a centerpiece of the Saint Paul economy ever since. The harbor, originally the dream of my uncle, Eddie, had been put aside when he died in the 1970s. After it was built from funds from the Army Corps of Engineers and State of Alaska, we had gone from a ten-thousand-dollar per capita income during the height of government-paid civil service wages,[6] to thirty thousand dollars per capita in less than half a generation, re-tooled from a government-run company town to private enterprise.

In the small boat demonstration project, we hired an “old salt” retired halibut schooner skipper out of Seattle, Sig Jaeger, to teach us the basics. Sig had skippered a halibut schooner in the Bering Sea for over twenty years. He and I designed a twenty-one-foot boat that we could launch and retrieve off the beach and carry enough commercial halibut gear to make it worthwhile. We had two skiffs built and delivered to Saint Paul. Half the time the volunteer men were in class, and half the time at sea fishing. The first year we caught four thousand pounds of halibut and thought that was remarkable. But, it was nothing compared to the million pounds we delivered onshore four years later, when the traditional council agreed to back individual purchase of small boats.

I was one of four skippers who got the first commercial fishing boats, again co-designed by Sig and I. They were modified twenty-one-foot Oregon dories capable of being launched from the former government docks. I wanted these boats to be able to pay for themselves from the first year’s catch of halibut, so they were designed to minimize expense while maximizing their ability to catch fish. We learned how to set gear and to retrieve them even in foggy weather, which frequented the island during the summer months, by using LORAN. At the time, LORAN (which stands for Long Range Aid to Navigation) was the state-of-the-art technology for marine navigation, giving one’s location in longitude and latitude at any moment through triangulation of LORAN signals from three stations in the Bering Sea. One of those stations was on Saint Paul, and the other two were in the Aleutian Islands. We all became proficient in navigating by LORAN, which brought us within fifty feet of our gear, even in fog. Later, local people bought larger boats and now use GPS and radar to navigate. Today there are over thirty small boats owned by Unangan people on Saint Paul, which, at the fishery’s peak, brought in a million dollars a year to local pockets. Now, probably due to climate change and overfishing by factory trawlers from Seattle, the halibut stocks are plummeting, leaving the future of the Pribilof small boat fishery uncertain.

It was during the early 1980s that the U.S. government executed its plans to leave the Pribilof Islands without negotiation with the Pribilof Unangan people.

Chapter 17

Family Life

It was on Saint Paul that Phyllis and I decided to have children, as we had felt that there was no reason to raise children in a city and had waited until we were in the village. Our daughter Leatha was born in 1976 and Marissa in 1978. They both were beautiful children with distinctly different personalities. One thing they have always shared in common, however, was a love to be outside. I had a pickup truck, and whenever I drove with the family, both Leatha and Marissa wanted to ride in the bed of the truck, summer or winter. Phyllis and I loved the island, so we spent a lot of time outdoors as a family.

Marissa was always different from the other girls in town. One evening we were walking down the road at night when she was five years old. There were few street lights and no clouds in the sky, so the stars could be seen in all their brilliance. Marissa asked, “Dad, what are the stars?”

I thought for a while then gave a scientific explanation, “there are billions of stars, and they were created billions of years ago by the ‘Big Bang.’”

Marissa thought for a while, then said, “No, Dad, you are wrong. Stars are spirits of people.” Even at that age, Marissa always knew what she was going to do. “Dad, I know what I want to do. I want to get enough money to retire at age forty-five, and I want to be buried under the Great Pyramid of Giza.” To this day I wonder how she could have possibly known about the Great Pyramid at her age.

When Marissa finished high school, she enrolled at Arizona State University where she graduated and then entered law school there. She now has two law certificates, one in Indian law and the other in environmental law. I asked, “How did you choose Arizona State?” Her response was memorable, “I just looked at the pictures of the schools and chose the first one that didn’t have snow.”

Marissa’s first job, just out of law school, was to work at retrieving the water rights for the Maori. In one year she and her associates did just that. She now lives on the East Coast with her two sons, Kanuux and Hamati. She is the chief lawyer for the tribe on Saint Paul, our hometown.

My oldest daughter, Leatha, is equally accomplished. She was a vice president of the Alaska Native Medical Center, which provides medical services to all Alaska Native villages in the state. She is now Vice President of Administration for the Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium (SEARHC), which provides medical services to communities in Southeast Alaska. Both daughters are beautiful, accomplished, and very intelligent. Yet as polished as they are, each retains a measure of the village girl from how they were raised, and both return to Saint Paul as often as they can. I feel blessed that they are both doing very well.

My son, Ian Alexander, born sixteen years after Leatha, during my marriage to Sumner MacLeish, was also given to remarkable statements at an early age. Returning from playing with his best friend, Ian said, “When I grow up, I am going to marry Alix, and we will live in a farmhouse with roses attached to the sky.” He was four years old at the time. Now, in his mid-twenties, Ian is working in the culinary arts here in Anchorage, but his heart and soul are drawn toward a different form of art. He is a talented writer and is working on a screenplay in between work and being a father to his one-year-old daughter, Leah.

Chapter 18

The Government Pullout: A People in Peril

In the early 1980s, the Unangan of the Bering Sea’s remote Pribilof Islands survived a profound crisis that ultimately would prove to be a spiritual, cultural, and economic turning point in their lives. For two hundred years government commercial sealing had provided the sole economy for the people on Saint Paul and Saint George, and it ended abruptly in 1983. Pribilof Unangan history documents three murders, four suicides, and perhaps a hundred suicide attempts that fateful year. In contrast, no suicides and only one murder had been recorded in the previous one hundred years.

Although the fur seals had fared well under the conservation regime founded by the North Pacific Fur Seal Convention of 1911, the Pribilof Unangan did not. The treaty had been put in place to stop the taking of fur seals on the high seas, a practice that was bringing the animals to near extinction. In return for sharing the pelts taken from the Pribilofs, the other participants agreed to enforce the treaty on the high seas. This conservation regime increased the number of northern fur seals from two hundred thousand to nearly one and a half million within twenty years.

Of far less concern to the U.S. government than the fur seals, and treated as second-class citizens, the Unangan lived under the arbitrary, oppressive, and sometimes cruel control of the government agents who administered the Pribilof Program. These Unangan were subjected to many cultural indignities ranging from the forced restructuring of their customary work methods to the censorship of their communication with the outside world. Traditional Unangan methods of dealing with problems and conflict were ignored, and government agents assumed the role of police, judge, and jury. Protests by the Unangan were quickly suppressed by the government’s threat to deport troublemakers, or kick them out of their homes, limit their rations of food, clothing, or housing, or take away their jobs.

In the early 1960s, however, this all began to change. Alaska’s only Native-owned newspaper, the Tundra Times, published letters, successfully smuggled off the islands, that detailed these atrocities and led to investigations by the Human Rights Commission and the U.S. Congress. Though legislation was passed in 1966 granting Pribilof Unangan the rights of other citizens of the United States, their economic base did not change; they continued to depend on the U.S. government to provide jobs in the federally managed fur seal harvesting program.

In 1969, the non-profit organization Friends of Animals initiated a campaign to stop the federal take of fur seals on the Pribilof Islands. Other animal rights groups, involved in the Canadian anti-sealing campaign, joined them in the late 1970s. These organizations launched well-funded media campaigns against the seal harvest, taking out full-page ads in national newspapers that characterized the Unangan as brutal, bloodthirsty, greedy killers of animals. Islanders received hate mail from all over the world. At the height of the anti-sealing campaign in 1980, the U.S. Congress received thousands of cards and letters from Americans protesting the U.S. government’s role in the fur seal harvest. Under pressure from the public, the Humane Society of the United States, and other animal rights activists, the U.S. government announced its intention not only to stop the commercial seal harvesting but also to completely withdraw from the Pribilofs within a year.

With such a decision, the Unangan knew this meant elimination of their only economic base, eighty percent of the local jobs, and all government services that provided marine transportation, operation of the electric power plants, airport maintenance, and provision of home heating fuel and groceries. Predictably, the government’s decision created community-wide anxiety and uncertainty, and left the Unangan feeling angry and powerless over their future. The resulting depression was profound and widespread; the tragic number of deaths in 1983 remains a testimony to the fear and futility the Unangan experienced at the hands of an impersonal and distant bureaucracy. During this time, the Pribilof Unangan people also faced critical concerns about declining marine mammal and seabird populations around the islands. Time and again they expressed their concerns with detailed information; time and again they and their observations were marginalized in favor of reports from single species scientists who visited the island for only six to eight weeks a year.

The number of fur seals began to decline in the mid-1970s at a rate of six to seven percent a year. This fact was seized upon by the animal rights groups that claimed the government’s commercial seal harvesting was causing the declines. The Pribilof Aleut leaders, however, argued that these declines were symptomatic of something seriously wrong in the Bering Sea ecosystem, and that it was probably related to the lack of customary food. In many forums the Unangan leaders noted their observations of unusual wildlife conditions and behavior. Chicks were falling off cliff ledges and dying in large numbers, Steller sea lions were eating fur seal pups in greater frequency than ever in living memory, and fur seal pelts were thinning.

Nevertheless, the Unangan voice was stifled. Scientists characterized these Indigenous observations as anecdotal and thus of little value to research and management. Despite this, in 1983 I proposed a conference of scientists and Alaska Natives to address the declines and focus on food stress as a causal problem. I worked with the Dean of the School of Fisheries at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau to host this conference in an effort to meet scientific protocols and standards. I even received ten thousand dollars from the World Wildlife Fund to help pay for the conference costs and was able to get the commitment of every bird and marine mammal scientist conducting research in the Bering Sea. Unfortunately, the “powers that be,” whoever they were in the federal government, put out the word that they did not want their scientists to participate, so they all pulled out. The conference was never held.

When the Unangan made their first observations about the declines in the Bering Sea ecosystem in 1977, they knew six wildlife species were in trouble. Thirteen years later, northern fur seals had been classified as depleted under the Marine Mammal Protection Act; Steller sea lions had been classified as threatened under the Endangered Species Act; and a group of scientists from several disciplines called for an “Is It Food?” conference, saying that the declines were probably related to food stress. Uninvited, I attended that conference anyway. In fact, not one Alaska Native person was invited. Moreover, the scientists met in their respective groups and shared what they had learned with each other, but they did not allow scientists outside their field to compare information, contrary to what I had proposed for a conference in 1983.

In 1992, the spectacled eider was classified as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Four species of seabirds, which are made up of murres and kittiwakes, have declined in the Pribilofs by fifty to eighty percent since the mid-1970s. Kittiwakes are now classified under a Category II watch list by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service due to their declines in the Bering Sea. Today, more than eighty species may be in decline, and the reasons continue to baffle the scientists and resource managers. Meanwhile, the North Pacific Fur Seal Treaty was allowed to lapse, along with the treaty provisions that required an internationally coordinated research program. The Unangan leaders argued that the research provisions should remain in force as the fur seals were still declining in large numbers throughout their migratory range; without the research, the reasons could not be uncovered. However, there was no support for the Unangan’ call to help the seals.

Having lost the battle to protect their livelihood and the research provisions of the international treaty, the Unangan leaders then focused on protecting their right to eat seals for food. Seal meat has been a staple in the Unangan diet for more than ten thousand years. Some animal rights groups argued against allowing the annual subsistence harvest of approximately 1,600 non-breeding male seals (from a population of almost a million seals), claiming that the Unangan could buy hamburger, fish, and chicken in the local grocery store. As such, several Congressional staffers wanted to know why Unangan people needed to eat seal meat anyway.

Though the Humane Society of the United States was unsuccessful in its attempt to pressure the U.S. government into promulgating regulations that would specify which parts of the fur seal could be taken for food by the Unangan, rules and regulations were developed to strictly monitor the subsistence harvest: essentially, each seal was to be weighed by a government official to ensure no meat was wasted. Many Unangan Elders were angry, pointing out that no other American citizens had to have their food weighed by the U.S. government to ensure every edible piece of food was used. However, the Unangan arguments, again, were ignored. Most of these regulations remain in place today.

Meanwhile, the bulk of the fur seal pelts removed from seals during the subsistence harvest must be thrown away because of laws prohibiting the commercial sale of the pelts. Villagers are allowed to take the pelts for use in traditional arts and crafts, but, since 1867, due to the government’s past restrictions, traditional technology and art skills have been lost. The irony of this situation is not lost on the Unangan people. Animal rights groups argue passionately against wasting seal meat, but they are content to have the useful pelts discarded. Today, however, the local people have regained their technologies to tan seal pelts and are working toward developing their other lost traditional skills.

In the year before the government pulled out of the Pribilofs, the Unangan leadership was under enormous pressure to come up with quick solutions for providing a new economic base for the people. At one point the situation was so desperate that plans were made to buy one-way airline tickets to the mainland for all villagers. Another time the young men of Saint Paul devised a plan to secede from the United States, declare war, and take over the local U.S. Coast Guard station by armed force. It took a potentially tragic suicide pact between two teenagers and a child to wake up villagers to the need to work together in an atmosphere of relative calm and collectedness.

The urgency of the situation prompted the Unangan leadership to take huge risks in their decision-making processes. They discarded conventional Western economic and community-planning approaches and devised their own. The first challenge came in throwing out the standard democratic, one-person, one-vote system to which they had become accustomed. The leadership realized that unity among the islands’ governing bodies could not be achieved with such a voting system because of the distrust that had developed over the years—each organization had their own ideas about what should be done and they had their own interests to protect. So, it was decided that unity and elimination of divisiveness required a focus on the process rather than the goal.

The people thus realized the wisdom of their ancestors who had always placed great importance on the process of reaching decisions. Western society has become almost exclusively goal-oriented because a process approach takes considerable time and patience. The Native American wisdom keepers, people who are tradition bearers and considered wise, understood that if the process is constructed with the right spirit and intent, the whole, or result, would always be greater than the sum of its parts and would exceed individual expectations. Thus, the Unangan leaders decided that unity and elimination of divisiveness could only be achieved by acknowledging and respecting each other as truly equal in the decision-making process.

They decided that every representative of the community, including not just the governing organizations but also Elders and the Unangan priest from the local parish, would sit at the decision-making table with total veto power over any major decision. At first, the Unangan leaders had strong reservations about granting such power to each individual representative. The historical distrust made the leaders wary of decisions being made out of self-interest instead of through a more altruistic concern about the future well-being of the community. So, they established rules: no personal attacks or criticisms within or outside the circle of decision-makers, no use of derogatory terms or nuances of behavior that signal something negative in any context, and total honesty. Simply put, the Unangan leaders were able to reestablish their traditional values of mutual respect and honor in the decision-making process—and it worked. Individual leaders were careful not to abuse their power, and no one spoke derogatorily of others because they understood it would hurt their ability to move their suggestions within the decision-making circle. Everyone felt they were heard and listened to when they spoke within the circle. Egos were put aside as everyone was treated equally and with respect. Deliberations went as long as was necessary to achieve a consensus because people realized that without consensus no decision could be made. During this period, the Unangan leadership went to unprecedented lengths to keep the community informed of the daily process.

The wisdom keepers, whom the Unangan drew upon during this crisis, were absolutely right. Results far exceeded expectations as the focus shifted from goal to process. Ten years later, Saint Paul developed one of the most robust economies of any rural community in Alaska. However, it was not an easy road and required much effort and persistence.

Chapter 19

Homer Gone

“We propose that we declare war on the United States government and secede from the Union!” stated a nervous young man. He was part of a delegation of young men, ranging in age from seventeen to twenty-seven, who demanded an audience at a critical last-minute meeting of community leaders and Elders I had called. He was the oldest of the group.

Officials from Washington, DC, were about to follow through with their intention to abandon the Pribilof Island communities of Saint Paul and Saint George, as announced one year before. The government had offered no solutions as to how our villages would survive after it left, leaving it up to us alone to figure out how we would survive as Unangan communities. It was a desperate time.

Deep within me I felt that we were being guided by unseen forces—that whatever would transpire after this moment in time was necessary for us to move to the next phase of our lives and spiritual journey. We had tried everything to stop this day from occurring, but no time-tested skills, abilities, commitment to our people, and persistence could stem the tide of the unseen forces. It seemed that a great weaver was creating this fabric of human drama in such a way that we could only hold on for the ride.

On the eve of the official withdrawal, all the village leaders of Saint Paul Island gathered in City Hall to plan. We wanted to avoid community-wide panic over the drastic changes and try to find a way to restore hope in a community that felt hopeless. We had no idea what was happening on Saint George, but it had to be similar.

Now we faced the mirror of desperation and anger in the community, reflected by these young men. By their grim demeanor, it was clear that they were very serious. As chair of the meeting, I told them that they had just as much stake in these decisions as anyone, so they could speak their mind.

“Our plan is to declare war against the United States, bulldoze across the runway so no planes can land, station armed guards around the island, and take over the U.S. Coast Guard station by force! We want your support!”

Stunned by this proposal, the entire gathering of Elders, organizational heads, and spiritual leaders held its silence. I knew we were all thinking the same thing—if this is not handled properly, we would have an even greater disaster on our hands than the one we had gathered to discuss.

I felt it was my place to guide the discussion—but for the first time in my life I was at a complete loss as to what to do or to say. The slightest mistake could provoke serious trouble in our village. Like most of our community leaders, I was already exhausted and stressed, almost beyond the point of human endurance. At the time of our meeting, the entire community had struggled through a year of unfathomable grief, pain, violence, and death, while living in a state of deep depression and widespread panic. In addition to the increased suicides and murders during this tumultuous year, alcohol abuse and domestic violence had skyrocketed. The four police officers, the physician’s assistant at the clinic, and our five-member Emergency Medical Technician Squad were severely fatigued from responding to emergency calls around the clock for months on end. In a community of this size, everyone is like family. We share in every tragedy at a deeply personal level.

As the scene with the young men unfolded, I thought back to one of the numerous tragedies I had witnessed or been a part of in the past eight months.

I was sitting next to the community store in my pickup. I had left my window open as we always did in the village, so that we could talk with passersby. People approached me constantly during these very trying times, seeking help of some sort or consolation because of my position as a community leader. There was nowhere I could go, day or night, without being approached by someone seeking hope or solace. Therefore, I did not think anything of it when a twenty-two-year-old young man approached my vehicle, obviously quite drunk. His eyes were unfocused. He staggered, barely able to keep from falling down. As he leaned up against the truck door, he pulled out a .22 caliber pistol, cocked it, and put it to my head.

“I want a job! If you don’t give me a job, I will blow your %#$%& head off!”

My heart froze. I knew this young man well. I had watched him grow up. He was always troubled, but he had never done anything beyond getting into fistfights and drinking alcohol. This was different. I could feel his desperation and sense of powerlessness at the confusing events we had all faced in the past year. He could not take any more. I knew he was so drunk, so full of rage and hopelessness, that he was capable of killing me—or killing himself. Someone in such crisis could just as soon kill himself as others.

My mind raced through options for a response. The people nearby watched in disbelief, afraid to intervene lest the gun go off accidentally and kill me. I was on my own. Should I open the door quickly, forcing him to the ground? I thought to myself. Maybe if I swing my left arm up quickly enough, I could push his gun hand away from my head!

Then a clear voice “dropped” into my head—it was the voice of my beloved grandfather, Paul Merculieff, long dead. Always speak the truth! the voice said loudly. I swallowed hard, looked the young man directly in the eyes and said gently and clearly, “You’re drunk. You know that this isn’t the way to try to get a job! Shooting me won’t get you the job. It will destroy me and you. Please go home, sober up, and I will talk with you anywhere at any time about this.”

Internally I braced, holding my breath, not knowing if what I said would precipitate his firing the gun. I realized in that moment that I would accept whatever happened. Each second was the proverbial eternity. Finally, he lowered the gun and staggered off. Feeling immense relief, my heart went out to him. I knew his demons and what he must be going through.

He never did sober up, and I returned to my frenetically paced work—dealing with the anticipated government pullout, not giving the incident any further thought. Two weeks later, while I was working on my skiff next to my house, he passed by. He lived two houses down from me. We exchanged greetings. I did not know that he was going home just after falling off a cliff. He died the next day from internal hemorrhaging. Tremendous grief overtook me. I will never know if I could have done anything to prevent his death, and I was haunted by that thought for years.

On another day, as I was driving through the village, I heard frantic screams and headed toward them. It was my cousin. When she spotted my truck, she ran alongside, screaming wildly, “My brother is trying to kill himself down by the dock! Help me! Help me!” She had an utterly wild look in her eyes, her long hair chaotically blowing in the stiff wind, her face contorting as she screamed. She looked like a demon possessed.

I left her behind as I raced to the west landing dock. Sure enough, there was Tata—hip-deep in water, half-naked, two men fighting to bring him back to shore. I jumped out to help bring him in, but the two men were already returning him to shore. The Bering Sea water was bitter cold and the night, wrapped around this unfolding tragedy, felt ominous.

Tata sobbed uncontrollably, “I want to die! Let me die!” The men escorted him to a truck and drove off. I found out later that he was okay, thanks to his friends who stayed with him until the crisis passed. Ironically, sometime later, he single-handedly stopped two teenagers and one pre-teen from doing exactly the same thing collectively, one very early morning. These children were so intent on killing themselves that they kicked and scratched him as he physically fought them back to shore. He saved their lives.

Yes, that year of horror profoundly changed the character of our people and our community forever.

My attention refocused on the meeting of village leaders as the silence and the tension in the room grew. These young men stood with determination, like warriors waiting for a blessing from the Elders to go to war. I could not blame them for feeling that the U.S. government had abandoned us—we had been in its service first as a captive labor force and then as civil servants for over one hundred years.

I studied these young men and watched the body movements and expressions on the faces of the community leaders. I felt like a witness to a historic human drama. I knew I would always remember these times—an ultimate test to the character of my people once again.

I wondered if we had what our ancestors had—that which allowed them to survive so that we could be sitting in that room on that night. Like the Jews, our ancestors had survived a holocaust. Like the African-Americans, we had suffered enslavement. Like the Japanese-Americans, we had suffered forced relocation during World War II. However, unlike the Japanese-Americans, we had lost ten percent of our people—infants and Elders. My grandmother, Alexandra, died in the camp. Her remains, along with all the others who died in the two years of internment are still on Admiralty Island, marked by Russian Orthodox crosses. Yet, despite such challenges to the greatest of human spirits, our ancestors persisted. It is a testament as to how remarkable my people are.

And at that moment, in the room with the leaders and angry young men, we were experiencing a trial that required the use of our hearts, not our minds, if we were to avert more tragedies. Finally, an “Elder in training” decided to speak. I knew him as a brother and mentor who helped me learn the Unangan ways of hunting. His name was Mike Zacharof—known to his peers as “Dead Eye” because not only did he have one “lazy” eye that cocked off to the side, but he was also a skilled marksman in his day. Anything that he took aim at in a subsistence hunt was dead.

“Okay, we will agree to declare war against the United States government and take over the Coast Guard station, but on one condition: you have to do it our way.” Mike said in a calm and steady voice.

The leaders and Elders remained silent, watching this surreal scene play out, not sure what Mike had in mind. No one interfered. The young men clearly did not expect this proclamation. They knew their plan was so outrageously bold that the leaders would not accept it. This was too much to hope for.

The young men caucused to decide whether to accept or reject Mike’s terms. The decision was quick because they wanted to seize the moment. They accepted.

Mike said, “Alright, here is the plan. We take one rifle with one bullet out to the Coast Guard station, fire one shot into the air and declare war against the United States government, and then we immediately surrender!” The young men were so stunned by this proposal that they didn’t know how to respond. We leaders were equally dumbfounded.

Mike continued, “Look, everybody knows that anyone who is at war with the United States and surrenders gets all the foreign aid in the world that they could possibly want! This way, we lose and we win—how can you beat that?”

Everyone, including the young men, laughed hard at this twisted but strangely wise logic. We laughed until there were tears in our eyes, partly out of relief that the tension had been broken, partly out of sheer physical and emotional exhaustion, and partly out of the realization that we were actors in a stranger-than-fiction scene that could only have happened in the movies. Unangan humor had prevailed as it did so many times in past personal and community trials and tribulations.

The young men, seeing that there was wisdom in the room, decided to leave us to our eleventh-hour deliberations—the government was physically and symbolically moving out by the end of the next day, October 28, 1983. Thankfully, we never did have to act on their proposal, not knowing what a rejection would cause them to do.

We estimated it would cost us at least five million dollars a year, at the bare minimum, to keep both Saint George and Saint Paul as viable communities, to maintain the costly infrastructure the government had put into them, and to buy and ship food in bulk from Seattle.

At that moment, in that room, everyone was afraid that we might not succeed in saving our village. The three million dollars needed for Saint Paul was a lot of money for people who lived on government rations, subsidies, subsistence wages, and traditional foods such as halibut, seal meat, reindeer, and ducks. We had to be prepared for the worst, so we planned to buy one-way airline tickets for everyone in both communities to Anchorage, on the mainland. Just in case. We had no further plan as to what to do if we became refugees in the city. Life was and is so profoundly different in a city than on our two tiny, remote, pristine islands—inhabited by two million seabirds, one million northern fur seals, seven hundred Unangan on Saint Paul, and one hundred Unangan on Saint George.

I had no idea how we Unangan people—who had lived for two hundred years on these remote islands, under colonial governments, never being allowed to make decisions for ourselves until the early 1970s, with no money, no savings from our low-paying seasonal work, and having lived mostly on traditional foods—could make it in a city. I knew that, if forced to evacuate, our people would be in a whole world of hurt and many would not make it.

We had to succeed. Failure was not an option.

I stoked up my courage to speak. “We have to give hope to our people, even if we don’t have the answers now,” I said matter-of-factly. “The one thing that kept our people together is that we did things together, as a people. We should have a parade; get all the people out, show everyone that we are in this together and we will stick together no matter what.”

“What do we have to celebrate anyway? The government pulling out? I don’t think it’s right,” Sam stated, with the strain of the year obvious in his voice. I heard the uncertainty and the fear that we all felt.

“Sam is right! We can’t celebrate. We can’t celebrate a disaster!” Jimmie[7] said angrily.

“Well, maybe you are right, we have nothing to celebrate,” I replied. “But, how about honoring our ancestors who went through really tough times and still made it? We could say that this parade is to remember that Unangan are strong people when we stick together like our ancestors did. They went through worse times than we did.”

Silence.

Then Mike spoke up. “Well, maybe we could do that.” The decision was made. We would have a parade to commemorate and honor the will and courage of our ancestors who went through times that would try the best of human spirit and—somehow—prevailed. I was to write up something for a plaque, to be dedicated next to the symbol of government control, the large government house where the agents had lived as overlords since the late 1800s. We would parade through the village, beginning at the government machine shop in the industrial section of town at 11:00 the next morning.

I arrived at the appointed hour at the appointed place. We had announced the parade on the VHF radio. I invited Tony Smith, our lawyer, and a reporter from the New York Times to ride with me in the parade. Tony, a former Navy Seal who had served in Vietnam, had been our attorney for a decade. He was a brilliant strategist and lobbyist, qualities that proved immensely valuable later on in our efforts to secure our future. We had become best friends, having worked together in the 1970s in a derivative stockholder lawsuit I launched against my regional corporation, an entity created by Congress from the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971. With Tony’s help and at great risk to his legal career, we uncovered corruption and prevailed in the lawsuit that went all the way to the State Supreme Court.

I felt apprehensive, however, not knowing whether this parade would work or not. Overnight I had worked with Widdy Shreves, an employee hired from off island to work with us, on words for the plaque to be placed on a large stone in front of the old government house. It seemed appropriate to dedicate a plaque next to this symbol of oppression, honoring our ancestors whose courage and will to live allowed us to be here today.

We waited an hour for others to join us in the mobile commemoration. My heart sank as I realized no one was coming. Nevertheless, as a community leader, I felt I had to show courage. Come hell or high water, I was going to go through with the parade, even if it was a one-vehicle parade! Just as I decided this, I watched Anthony Melovidov walk down the road toward us. We affectionately called him Antooney.

“I’m going to get the fire truck out for the parade,” he said nonchalantly. I was elated and relieved that I would not be the only one fool enough to go through with this. We waited another half hour hoping, in vain, that more would join. No one did. I gave the signal to go, and Antooney fired up the old red fire truck, complete with siren and flashing red lights. What the heck, two cars can be a parade, especially if one is an “official” vehicle!

An eighth of a mile into the parade, we were joined by another car, then a motorcycle, then another truck. My spirits rose. This might work! I thought to myself. Then another car, a four-wheeled all-terrain vehicle, another, and another until anything that could move on two, three, or four wheels joined in the parade. Horns blared, people shouted.

Unbeknownst to us, the high school students had made up placards with slogans like “Aleuts Are Survivors!!!”; “Aleuts Are Strong”; “Aleuts Are Forever!”; and “Remember Our Ancestors!” The students were on back of pickup trucks. I knew that Edna Philemonof, my cousin, had put the students up to this, bless her heart.

Then the most powerful and poignant moment, in this drama filled with poignant moments, told me that we would make it and that nothing could stop us. The Elders in the community were waving white dishcloths and banging pots and pans, hollering “Homer Gone! Homer Gone!” Inexplicably, all the Elders in the village did the same thing without talking with one another. These beautiful and wise people who had suffered greatly in their lifetimes were showing us the reason for hope. Everyone on the island understood the symbolism of the white dishcloths, banging pots and pans, and shouting “Homer Gone!” These Elders had resurrected an annual ritual performed in the 1920s by Pribilof Unangan people: When the loathed federal agent would leave on a government vessel, called Homer, at the end of the sealing season, not to return until May or June of the following year, everyone celebrated by banging pots and pans, waving white dishcloths, and hollering “Homer gone! Homer gone!” My heart was bursting with joy and pride. I felt so proud of the people on that fateful day.

At the end of the parade, we gathered in the yard of the government house, in front of a large basalt boulder I arranged to have placed there. Attached to the boulder was the plaque fashioned the night before, with words honoring our ancestors. It was a powerful moment—the mansion symbolized the yoke of bondage placed on our people by the U.S. government over a hundred years before. We prayed and read the words on the plaque:

Unangan Wayaamulux Ngan Kayutuugan Ixtakun (Unangan Must Be Strong for the Future)

Let it be known to all, after 196 years of valiant struggle, through periods of slavery, genocide, disease, abject poverty, and outside control, conditions which challenged the strongest of human spirits, the Unangan dream of Unangan control over Unangan destiny became a reality October 28, 1983.

In commemoration of this historic occasion, we honor the will and spirit of all Unangan people whose survival on St. Paul served as inspiration to each generation of leaders, which carried on the struggle from the shores of St. Paul to the steps of our nation’s capital.

As a further testament to the strength, courage, and wisdom of my people, they decided that October 28 would be celebrated as Unangan Independence Day. The people of Saint Paul Island, taking a dark day and transforming it into something positive, celebrate this day every year.

This part of the story would not be complete without acknowledging the leaders who were involved in decision-making during this period of our history on Saint Paul, including Mike Zacharof, John R. Merculief,[8] Victor Merculief, Anthony Philemonoff, Alexander Galanin, Douglas Melovidov, and our revered Elder, the Right Reverend Father Michael Lestenkof. All of these men demonstrated courage and wisdom under incredibly trying circumstances.

Chapter 20

Another Kind of Death

One of the most emotionally powerful years of my life was 1984. It began on New Year’s Day when my Aachaa, my Unangan mentor, one of the most important men in my life, lay dying in his home, and I walked into my Auntie and Aachaa’s house with my wife, Phyllis, who loved this man as much as I did. I had been truly dreading this moment, feeling my chest tighten up and my breath shorten. I didn’t know what to expect. The entire extended family, including his wife—my aunt, Sophie—were on a death vigil at his bedside. This formerly vital, strong, wise, kind, and intelligent man lay on his bed unconscious after days of terrible pain and wasting away from stomach cancer. I saw him lying there thin and frail on the bed, his face locked in an awful grimace. I gasped and felt utter shock and profound grief. I stole quickly into the bathroom and sobbed, my body shaking uncontrollably. Just a week ago he had been up and around taking pictures at the community Christmas program. My Aachaa loved to take pictures of children in their Christmas costumes, and he had done it every year since I could remember.

My Auntie was strangely peaceful after he passed away. I guess I could understand after having seen him suffer so. They loved each other fully in their marriage of over forty years. In fact, at times I was amazed at how they still played with and teased each other throughout their entire marriage like newlyweds. They were truly beautiful and deeply loving people. My aunt told me of one scene that occurred in the final week of his life.

“I had to help him go to the bathroom a lot of times,” she said. “But last week he couldn’t even walk, and so we crawled to the bathroom. Then he started laughing halfway up the hallway to the bathroom, and I couldn’t help myself and I laughed too!” He said in Unangan Tunuu “Aiyakaax, I can’t even help you help me anymore!” and laughed some more. “We laughed so hard.”

I looked into the incredibly beautiful face of my aunt, Sophie, and saw her smiling and yet sad eyes as she visualized this deeply private moment of incredible dignity and love they shared. They found strength in a time of utter pain through humor and surrender to the reality of what was happening.

I will always remember the last sight of him before he died, as Phyllis just sat beside his bed to hold his hand. She held his hand until he died hours later.

After my Aachaa’s death I thought about everyone I knew who was dead. There was “Old Man,” Alex Melovidov, one of my dad’s best friends, a charismatic leader, captain in the National Guard, and father of six children. There was my uncle, Iliodor, or Eddie, who along with all the other great men in the 1950s, had the courage to lead our people through their fight for independence and freedom from servitude. And so many of my people I knew, now gone, who lived through times of great hardship, many of whom were graced with English or Unangan nicknames:

“Half Can”; Poopoochee; Perscodia; Pinky; Apaloon; “Snuff Can”; Elary Gromoff Sr.; “Tweet”; “Kusukux”; “Cowax”; my uncle, George Zacharof, who fell off a fishing vessel and drowned; my uncle, Isaac Philemonof; “Andeethah”; “Yakuu”; Aggie Galationoff, a very wise Elder; Victor Misikin, who had the tough job of being the government foreman for decades; “Totskootchah”; Joe Melovidov; “Coffee Dan”; Zachar, who died from overdosing on cough medicine; Jacob Pletnikof, who had killed himself the previous year; Johnny Krukoff, who was murdered; Metrofan; Leonty; Ya Top; Useenewyax; Iliodor Kozloff and his wife Virginia; John Hapoff; and Maxim Buterin. I especially remembered those I loved so much—my mother, Stefanida; my dad, John Paul Merculieff; my Aachaa, Nick Stepetin, and my aunt, Sophie; my uncle, Sergie Shiashnikoff, and his wife; my godmother, Nadesda, who always took me out camping, on picnics, or berry picking; my grandfather, Paul Merculieff, who always had good words for all his grandchildren; and all the other aunts and uncles I came to know. Most of these adults had treated me as if I were their own child and always greeted me on the street with a smile and words of praise or acknowledgment.

My Aachaa’s death, which struck me so very hard, was a dark omen of what was in store for me that year. This man meant the world to me and I loved him deeply.

I was still recovering from the horrendous year of the federal government pullout and grieving the loss of my Aachaa when, a month later, my wife told me that she was leaving me. My heart began to break.

Less than a week later, Phyllis left, taking our two young daughters with her. The house no longer had the sounds of children or my wife doing things. It felt empty and stone-cold dead. Though I felt emotionally stunned, I managed to head in to work the next day. As president of the village corporation, I had to attend to many pressing items and issues. I walked into the office, closed my office door and just stood there shaking. The emotional pain I felt seemed bigger than life. I left to return to my house.

Three days later the phone rang. I picked it up. It was a member of the village corporation’s board of directors. “Larry, the board of directors are worried about you and wonder if you can still lead the corporation. They want to come up there to meet with you.” I was completely stunned and still emotionally broken. Twenty minutes later five members of the board arrived.

Only Johnny spoke. Johnny was the spokesperson and leader of the group. The others looked down at the floor. “Larry, it seems you are no longer able to lead the corporation, and the board wants me to take over,” he said.

The village’s population is very small, so every one of these men knew what I was going through. And, I could see clearly that there were some very political motives involved. I felt angry that these fellow Unangan would make such a move at a time of great personal pain. And I felt defiant. I told them I would be fine and be back on the job a few days later.

I did return to work that Monday, but I was a shattered man. Sensing that I no longer had the confidence that kept me a leader in this village for fifteen years, my political opponents in the corporation made their move to take over control. I was told I would no longer be president.

I had lost my family, lost one of the most important men in my life, and now lost my job. I was the business manager for the corporation for three years and was its president for six years after that. I had built the businesses that became the cornerstone of its financial success for years to come. I had poured my heart and soul into this work because I was dedicated to my people, and this was my way of giving to them. Now that too was gone.

During this time my seven-year-old daughter Leatha decided she wanted to live with me. Leatha’s presence in the household forced me to stay anchored and centered when everything seemed to be coming apart inside and out. Life went well for a while. I cooked all her favorite foods, bought her a rabbit, and took her to a ski resort south of Anchorage. However, soon after we returned to Saint Paul, several strong March storms blew across the island. My furnace broke down one day, and the pipes froze before I could have repairs done. Then a seventy-mile-per-hour storm blew off a section of my roof. I still remember snow piling up in the living room. Leatha and I started wearing winter clothes to bed. Then one night I heard Leatha crying in her room. I walked in and saw her standing in a corner of the room weeping.

At that moment, what was left of my heart shattered into a million pieces. The pain of this wonderful child was overwhelming. I knew she would be much better off living again with her mother and sister.

I dropped Leatha off at Phyllis’s house around midnight. I felt sick to my stomach and was filled with guilt, anger, and an extreme sense of loss. My mind spun as I thought how I could not be there for my daughter when she needed me. My life seemed like a furious storm. I had lost my family, lost my Aachaa, lost my job, and lost all my credit. And now I had lost my desire to live. I pulled away from Phyllis’s house and drove through the dark empty night.

I’m not sure how long I sat in my truck out at North Point. I don’t remember hearing anything until I reached over the seat to pick up my revolver. Then, a fox’s voice called out in the distance. I recognized the sound of the lonely arctic blue fox instantly, with its high-pitched, nighttime call that comes in rapid, short bursts. “Yip. Yip.” It was the call of a lone fox. At night, the fox’s voice always made me feel alone and strangely melancholy. Tonight the effect was even more profound.

I turned toward the sound, but all I could see was a bank of fog below North Hill. Fog on that cold winter night was strange enough, but a single fog bank on a clear night with no other fog in sight was extremely unusual. This particular bank seemed to be emanating fluorescent silver colors just like the clouds in the moonlit sky.

The fox’s call continued. Suddenly, the fog bank began moving toward me, with the fox’s voice coming squarely from the middle of the bank. The fog moved rapidly in my direction, to within an eighth of a mile of me, and the fox’s call got louder and louder and louder.

“Now I know I am losing it!” I said out loud, reaching for the comfort of a familiar sound, even if only my own voice.

Suddenly, the fox’s call changed into a human voice: “Go back! Go back!” it screamed.

Goose bumps rose quickly on my arms and my hair stood on end. Terrified, I jumped into my truck and raced back to the village, driving what must have been sixty to seventy miles per hour on the precarious and winding volcanic road. I had asked for a sign and I had received one! I couldn’t even think about what had just happened; I was in a state of shock. That night I slept the sleep of the dead. I don’t remember any dreams, just a deep and dark silence of mind.

The next morning I awoke a completely changed human being. I felt a lightness of being beyond anything I had ever experienced, even as a child. Colors were more intense and I could see objects and people as if I had more than perfect vision. I could distinguish the slightest of smells in the air and felt life in everything: the rocks, the sleeping winter grasses, the wind, the sky, the clouds—everything! And, I realized, I feared nothing, not death, not loss of loved ones, not friends, not financial insecurity, nothing! The loss of all my fears made me feel as light as if I could walk on clouds. It was as if my old mind had simply disappeared and a completely new one had been put in its place, free of attachments of any kind. I was beyond myself with sheer jubilation.

People in town thought I had gone over the “deep end” because I was laughing and joyful, joining the kids in playing games, hugging folks as if they were my long lost brothers or sisters. I even went back to the Church at age thirty-five, after having left nineteen years before. People couldn’t understand how I could be so happy and joyful, knowing what I had so recently lost.

Chapter 21

The Boat Harbor and Private Enterprise

Through collaboration with a private contracting company that the village corporation had hired and the Army Corps of Engineers, the design of the harbor was finally complete in 1984. I had wanted a harbor that would support only the local small boat fleet. However, there were national laws governing the use of public funds for construction, which dictated the size of what was eventually built.

As the village corporation president, I had been part of the team that negotiated with the private contracting company that eventually won the contract to build the port. I insisted that local people be hired to at least drive the large Terex trucks needed to transport rock to the proposed harbor site. The contractor agreed. I subsequently insisted that the company hire local women to drive the trucks. This took some doing, but eventually they agreed and asked me to identify those women who would be trained as drivers. For Saint Paul, this was revolutionary because local women did not even drive personal vehicles in the 1980s. I knew there would be resistance. The attitude was that women had their place, and that place was not doing the work of men; driving trucks was men’s work.

I intentionally picked two of the brightest young women in town because they were not afraid of doing something completely new. I recall teaching one candidate who happened to be my cousin, Anita Zacharof, how to drive my pickup truck, which had a stick shift. Terex trucks were much, much bigger than the pickup, but I assured her that the principles were the same. When I told Anita she was ready, she said, “really? I don’t know. I can drive this pickup now, but a big Terex truck? Those trucks are so big. The tires are as tall as a man!” I assured her that size didn’t matter. It was the attitude.

I then approached another young woman in town, Zenaida Lestenkof. She was going to college at the time and knew how to drive a car. She readily agreed as she wanted to, among other things, show off to the guys who thought women should not drive any vehicle, let alone a monster Terex truck. I remember Z, as we all called her, driving the Terex truck from the rock quarry to town, waving to the driver of a car who was a man. The two women drove those big trucks the entire summer with only one mishap.

During this time, the U.S. government contracted with the village corporation to conduct the seal harvest. Though the contract was short-lived, lasting only two years before the North Pacific Fur Seal Treaty finally terminated, it gave me another opportunity to bring more women into our local workforce. Until that year, women had not been allowed to be involved with the seal kill. Since I thought that very few people should be allowed to kill seals because of what it does to the person, especially women because they represent life, I decided to place women in the skin processing plant.

I approached Zenaida Melovidov, also called Z, because, knowing that the men who worked at the processing plant would tease and make sexual remarks about their women colleagues, I also knew Z wouldn’t put up with any of that behavior or language. I was there the first morning she showed up for work. Sure enough, the men were gathered and the leader immediately started making sexual remarks in front of everyone about her. Z was prepared for this and said, “Okay, if you want to do it, let’s do it right now in front of everybody. Take your pants down! Let’s see if you are as good as you try to make everyone believe.” The leader didn’t expect this. His face got red, but he didn’t say anything and walked off. From that moment on, no one harassed the women.

Taking over the seal kill was no easy task. I knew that, by now, the men were used to “government time,” which meant officially working at 8:00 a.m., quitting at 5:00 p.m., with two coffee breaks in between. (I had changed the time for sealing from a 4:00 a.m. start to an 8:00 a.m. one as well as a cessation of work at 5:00 p.m. because it was more humane and to avoid having to pay overtime.) And even then, the workers would push the limits because that was how the government had run the town in the past. Many of the men would show up for work at 8:20, take twenty to thirty minutes in coffee breaks, and leave work early. This had to change, but, rather than handing out punishments, I set up a policy that “work offenses” would be counseled. Almost every man in the sealing team was counseled by me, but the pattern continued. Because we were supposed to be a for-profit corporation and this behavior was costing the village corporation thousands of dollars, we had to convert the government-run mentality to private enterprise as soon as possible. I felt that if the villagers couldn’t grasp the principles of private enterprise, we would go under.

Frustrated, I decided to do something that would make me very unpopular and even hated. I chartered a plane and brought in people from Atka Island to conduct the seal kill for one week. Atkans were known to be hard workers and I knew they would do well. They agreed to come and did not tell the local people of my plan. When the plane load of Atkans arrived, I fired all the local workers without telling them I would hire them back at the end of the week. After that week, I thanked the Atkans and saw them off to the charter plane. I then had a meeting with all the previously fired Unangan men.

“You saw that I would not hesitate firing anyone and bring in other people who could do the job. But, you didn’t know that I hired the Atkans to be here only for a week. I did this because I feel that it is important for you men to learn about private enterprise. It will be private enterprise that will make the money for us to continue living here, but these businesses won’t tolerate slacking on the job.” I paused and continued, “Let me show you how much money we as a corporation lose when an employee slacks off.” I proceeded to explain the amount of time lost when everyone goes to work at 8:20, takes extended coffee breaks, and leaves early. I explained that every dollar lost to slacking on the job is money taken away from the shareholders of our corporation, which is every Unangan on Saint Paul. “It is up to you. Either do what you’re supposed to do on the job, or we all lose,” I said. “The ones who want to continue working, you are hired. Show up at the shop tomorrow at 8:00, and we will go out sealing.”

Torn between my actions and the men’s reactions, I felt I had to take the risk. Thankfully, all the men showed up the next day and every day thereafter on time.

After a storm destroyed the first one due to a design flaw, the harbor was finally operational in 1986. The village corporation negotiated a contract to lease land to a processing company, and Saint Paul has been processing fish ever since. In 1991 the City negotiated a rental contract with a processor to moor at the city dock, and they stayed for several years. Combined, the processors and a city tax on processing resulted in a per capita income of $34,000 during the height of the crab and halibut fishing activities, and city revenue increased 400 percent.

Chapter 22

The Creator Has a Sense of Humor

I drove to Southwest Point—approximately ten miles out of town via one of the island’s three roads—to watch the fury and majesty of storm-driven waves. This part of the island always seemed magical and different from other parts. Elongated twelve-foot-high basalt rocks peppered the landscape, lobbed by a now dormant volcano in the center of the island, giving it an eerie look, especially at twilight. During summer, the winds come gently from all points south; in the winter, waves are driven in from the west by cold Siberian storm systems cycling down into the center of the Bering Sea. The storms push waves in from the west so that they breach the tops of the sixty-foot basalt boulder cliffs. I loved to watch the awesome power of the water, its highly variable shades of blue. Sun shining through the clouds illuminated a diverse palette: some parts of the turbulent waters were sinister and dark, while the surface near shore was a very light blue.

One cold, blustery winter day the snow was coming down sideways as it often does in this place we call the “Birthplace of the Winds.” I watched from my four-wheel-drive pickup as an occasional lonely gull flew by, surfing precariously in the forty-mile-per-hour winds. I always wondered at the skills and abilities of what some might call the lowly gull. It is able to stay near the island year-round, even in the winter when food is scarce and the moist sea storms are bone-chillingly cold.

I grew to love the seagulls in my childhood. My childhood home was next to the town dump, put there by the federal government. Every morning I would wake to the sound of gulls foraging in the garbage. I could tell, by their calls, when they found food because they sent out calls for others to come to the feast they had uncovered. Great teachers, these gulls. Even though they were highly competitive, they didn’t hide their finds. Even as they wrestled with each other over the scraps, they called out for every gull to join and never hurt each other, ever.

I loved to hear a particular kind of call that would tell me, without looking out the window, that it was going to be a glorious, wonderful day of play—sledding or ice skating, as the sound of many gulls sang out a long “currrrrrrrrrrr, currrrrrrrrrrrr,” signaling that it was a beautiful sunny, windless morning with snow on the ground. It was the only time they made that particular sound.

Now, watching the thunderous waves crash against the cliffs left me feeling . . . what? Humble? Awed, strangely peaceful in the knowledge that there are powers greater than we humans, comforted by my security and warmth inside the truck, I was in a state of reverie when, suddenly, the truck engine quit. I quickly looked over the gauges. Gas tank was full. Engine didn’t overheat. I cranked the engine over. Nothing. Maybe it is flooded, I thought. I will wait awhile. I waited, headlights and all electrical items off. A couple of minutes later I cranked the engine again. It kicked over, but no ignition. “Whuh, whuh, whuh, whuh, whuh, whuh.” I waited another few minutes. “Whuh, whuh, whuh, whuh.” Nothing.

I looked outside. I could tell a storm was cooking—a blizzard was beginning to stir as the snow moved from right to left across the windshield. “Whuh, whuh, whuh, whuh, whuh, whuh,” the engine said. I got out to look under the hood, not sure what I was looking for—maybe a loose wire? I checked the oil: full. I tried to start the engine once more, with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. It isn’t going to start, I thought to myself. Shit! What am I going to do if it doesn’t start? “Whuh, whuh, whuh, whuh.” I could hear the battery starting to run down. Damn! I couldn’t walk or run back. I was wearing a pair of jeans, gym shoes, a parka, and a pair of work gloves, but that was not enough. If I tried to walk back, I would freeze to death after a short time in the growing wind and snow. The chill factor had to be at least thirty below zero.

I centered myself to think. Well, this is a frequently traveled road; there are only three roads on the entire island, and my fellow Unangan like to “joy-ride” as much as I do. Someone will come, I thought hopefully. I will wait it out. By this time it was about 4:00 in the afternoon and getting dark. In Alaska, we have only a few hours of daylight in the winter months, and this was February when the total was about three and a half hours. I could only wait and hope. Six, seven, eight, nine o’clock came and went—still no one came up the road. By ten o’clock, I knew I was there for the night. No one would drive out there at that time of night. I hunkered down in my truck, feeling sure someone would come the next day. The windows of my pickup iced over as my moist breath hit the cold glass. Soon the entire interior was frosted a thick white. I could feel the beginning of a chill setting into my body. “Must keep moving, must keep awake,” I said to myself, taking comfort in my own voice as the wind whistled and groaned in the complete darkness.

As a hunter, I was used to sitting next to the sea and waiting for hours in cold wind for ducks or the occasional Steller sea lion to come by. This is easier, I thought.

Daybreak came around eleven o’clock the next morning. I felt a mild sense of accomplishment—I had gotten through the night in good shape. I was cold but not shivering cold. Anticipation rose in me as I thought of having a hot cup of tea when I got home that day. I got out of the truck and ran briefly in circles to keep my circulation going while I waited for somebody, anybody, to drive up. Noon, one, two, three, four o’clock came and went, and nobody came. It was getting dark again. Six, seven, eight . . . my heart sank. God, am I going to have another night here? My last sleep was two nights ago. If I fall asleep tonight, I won’t live to see another day! I will stay awake; someone will know I am missing, and they will come looking. I bolstered up my determination. I was beginning to shiver. Not good if I do this for hours, I thought, too much energy loss. “Think warm, think warm, think and feel warm, think and feel warm” became my mantra throughout the night. Finally, after what seemed like the proverbial eternity, daylight finally came again. I was cold but alive! I knew someone would come that day—they had to. I wouldn’t be able to stay awake another night. One, two, three o’clock . . . noon. My feet were getting very cold, and my thighs were starting to feel numb.

I rubbed out a circle from the frost on the windshield so that I could watch the road. I was startled to see a bulldozer flying over the hill toward me, then a front-end loader, then a truck. Flying! Oh, shit—now I am hallucinating! I realized that if darkness came again, I would die. By four o’clock on the third day, I decided to make a run for it. Hallucinations were not a good sign. At least I was doing something, and that was good!

It was twelve miles through blistering cold wind and snow, through four- and five-foot-high snow drifts, to get to the village. I figured that if I could hold a steady trot, I could do it. About a quarter-mile into the run, my lungs began to hurt from taking in gulps of extremely cold air. Within a half-mile, my legs were numbing out. My body got so cold, so fast. I was still determined to live, but my body was not cooperating too well.

I decided to stop and say a prayer of release. I gazed into the blizzard, toward where the sunlight was barely coming through in the west, and I prayed in that direction: “Creator, I surrender to you. If it is time for me to leave my body, then I go knowing I led a good life and I thank you for that with all my being! I thank you, Creator. I thank you for giving me this life and now I let go to you. But, Creator, if you would send even a drunk driver out here right now, I would be equally grateful!”

No sooner had I completed the prayer and turned to trot again that I saw what had to be headlights shining through the twilight blizzard, careening from side to side down the road toward me. When it got close enough, I could see it was a VW Beetle. I wondered if I was hallucinating again. “I don’t know how that car is staying on the road in a blizzard,” I said in a somewhat dazed state. What a ridiculous sight. “The Creator is playing with me!” I laughed, not caring if it was a hallucination or not. It was such a funny sight as the car struggled to stay on the road, zigzagging its way toward me. When it stopped, I recognized the people, and it was obvious they’d been partying.

“Looks like you need a ride, eh?”

The small car was full—six people. I got in, sitting on the lap of a guy who grinned at me, nearly toothless. I loved these people, and I didn’t care if I was sitting on another man’s lap for the first time in my life. I had made it! I survived! Not only that, I also found out that the Creator does have a sense of humor!

Chapter 23

The Spiritual Journey

Shortly after the “dark night of the soul,” I visited two dear friends, Susanne Swibold and Helen Corbett who lived in Calgary, Alberta. I had met Susanne and Helen on Saint Paul when they would come there every year for several years on a self-financed research project about the people of the Pribilofs in modern times. I was now visiting them to conduct sound recordings of the people and the islands. From that they produced four films about the Pribilof Islands: Amiq (the Unangan name for the islands), San (the Unangan word for seabirds), Laakux (the northern fur seal), and Peter Picked a Seal Stick (a story about how Unangan boys cut seal reproductive organs off the carcasses that ultimately were sold in Asia as an aphrodisiac). The films received critical acclaim, and throughout the years we had become good friends.

While I was in their Canmore home in Canada, I received a phone call from the Stoney people at the reservation in Morely, inviting Susanne, Helen, and me to attend a sacred ceremony they had not performed in 150 years, not even in private. When we arrived at the reservation, we went to the women’s shelter where the ceremony was to be held. The people conducting the ceremony were all Elders with pure white hair, wearing traditional regalia of beaded buckskin. They spoke in their language the entire time. Susanne, Helen, and I, knowing we were guests, just watched and listened even though we could not understand the language.

The ceremony preparation included sacred pipes laid out in the four directions in a circle, and offerings of the people who attended. The Elders chanted and sang songs in their language until about two hours into the ceremony when an Elder spoke English for the first time. “I am speaking English for the benefit of our friend from Alaska. We know why you are here. We have been praying to the Creator, and we have a message for you to take back. We know that many people believe they have lost their way spiritually. This is not so. It has been kept for you in the unseen world, waiting for you to wake up in spirit.” As abruptly as the Elder stopped the ceremony to speak English, he continued with their ceremony for another two hours.

I was struck by this message. I had thought I was at the ceremony because the Elders had invited me, but the Elders knew the true reason: I did lament the fact that our people had lost the spiritual ways, or so I thought. When I returned to Alaska, I was invited to speak at many forums and to thousands of people that year. It was inexplicable. I even emceed a concert by the Indigo Girls. At all the venues I was invited to, I spoke of spiritual things and that message from the Stoney Elders. I realized that the message had affected me profoundly and set me on my spiritual path.

My experience at the Morely reservation did not end there. When I visited Susanne and Helen again, they told me about a man called Chief Sitting Wind, who was revered throughout Canada because not only was he an Elder but also a Chief, a medicine man, and what we call today a shaman. He had quite a life. Shortly after he was born, he became seriously ill. His mother lived in a shack that was always cold because the wind would penetrate easily. Being a traditional woman, she decided to ask a medicine man to help her baby. When the medicine man arrived, he instructed her to take him out into the snow and leave him until the next morning. The mother thought this prescription would kill the child because it was snowing out and the wind was strong. The baby will freeze literally to death, she thought to herself. But, being a traditional woman, she did not want to dishonor herself by refusing to obey the medicine man from whom she had asked for help, so she reluctantly agreed. She placed the child crying in the snow and left. The next morning she came back to find a strong and healthy child! The medicine man returned and told her that her baby would be a great medicine man, chief, and shaman.

I wanted to meet this man, so I called him. A “go-between” answered the phone, and I told him I would be honored to meet Chief Sitting Wind. The go-between said, “okay, but it will require two things of you. First, you must bring tobacco wrapped in red cloth because that is our tradition when seeing someone like the chief. The next thing will require deep thought about whether or not you want to do this, and, if so, then you have to let go of the dearest thing you cherish in your life. Call if you have decided to do this.”

I thought this was a strange request, but nonetheless I thought about what I cherished most in life. I thought of my own physical life, my work, my parents, and my two daughters who were now adults. I realized, that when push comes to shove, that my daughters were the most precious aspect of my life. My daughters. Why would I give up my daughters just to see this man? I thought to myself. After a couple of days, I thought, this man would not ask this of me unless there was a good reason. He is a very wise man. If I don’t really do what he asks, he will know. And so, I decided to work at letting them go inside myself. When it hit me that I must let them go, I cried and cried for a week, day and night. Exhausted, I finally felt I had let them go, so I called Chief Sitting Wind’s home again. This time Chief Sitting Wind answered. He had a voice I envisioned a wise man to have, soft and filled with love. He said, “you don’t have to see me anymore. You got what you came for.” I was stunned. He hung up. That was it. From that point forward I realized that my daughters had been spirit beings first, and I had been their temporary caretaker, not a parent who could claim them possessively.

Later, Susanne told me that, for some inexplicable reason, Chief Sitting Wind realized from our contact that he also needed to go into a healing ceremony for himself. He had forgotten to honor the wind that gave him his life.

The spiritual journey continued the very next time I visited Susanne and Helen. Susanne, the older of the two, is a person who lives her passion for life and living. She is an accomplished photographer and artist, and an excellent researcher. She has an ability to see things that most people cannot see. Her photographs are incredible. She showed me some she was doing as a series that I called “Spirit Within,” in which she photographs particular scenery then places it with its mirror image. What appears is a distinct “face” or “spirit being” each time.

Susanne told me that a friend of hers wanted to meet me to share a story she was given. I knew that Susanne would not ask me to do anything unless there was a good reason. Of course, I said I would meet with her. Her friend wanted to meet at a particular forest. Susanne drove me to the place and left. I will call her April, not knowing if she wants her real name revealed. She was gracious, and I could feel that she was a “heart” person. I trusted her intuitively. Walking through the forest, she said she was given permission by the Hopi and Maori Elders to share the story with me. I wondered how the Hopi and Maori Elders knew about me. She first recounted how the two groups always communicated with each other through the “inner net,” not the internet. I learned that there are people who still communicate this way, the Original Language or the Language of One as it might be called. April then told me that the Hopi have sacred stone tablets that contain their laws for living and their prophecies. She told me in detail what the stone tablets contained.

At the end, she asked me if I would carry the messages from the Hopi and Maori. The essence of their messages was that humankind is at a crossroads, that we can choose a road to destruction or change our consciousness to live in harmony with all that is. The way to harmony is to be in the heart and not the mind. I agreed, but I had learned from past experiences that each time I agree to carry messages from spiritual leaders, I would have to then face something within myself that would be difficult.

Susanne picked me up, and we went to her place where I was staying. Her house is worth commenting on. Everywhere in her living room where I slept were artifacts and sacred objects she had collected over the years, a sacred pipe, bones from animals, sacred pouches, and amulets. Outside her house was a genuine teepee that I had witnessed put together by a retired chief and his wife. At first, Susanne had asked architectural graduate students from the local college to help. It was funny to watch because, even with blueprints, they could not figure it out. After an afternoon of trying their best, the graduate students let Susanne call the chief and his wife to show them how it is done.

One night when I tried to sleep in this living room, a strange thing happened. The sacred objects became alive! They were moving from their places where Susanne placed them to the front of my face and back. This continued for several minutes. I thought I was imagining this. Then everything became totally dark. I could feel my spirit go out of my body. Before I knew it, I was carried to a distant place in the cosmos where I could see the stars surrounding me. Then the stars transformed into one ball of light. My spirit body was pulled toward this ball of light. Closer and closer it came, and I became afraid that I would be absorbed by it. And then the vision stopped. I was completely startled. It took me awhile to fall to sleep after that.

The next day, when I was to leave Canmore, Susanne gave me a manuscript written by a person who obviously was on a particular spiritual path, as I found out later when I read it. Susanne said, “this manuscript has a way of showing up in people’s lives when they need it.” I said my “see you” goodbye to Susanne and Helen, then boarded the plane. My people do not believe in saying “goodbye” to anyone. They say “see you” in the understanding that, if we don’t see each other in this lifetime, we are still connected through the heart, so saying goodbye is not true.

Anyway, while on the plane to Seattle I read the manuscript. In it the author told how he went out of body and was guided by an angel into the cosmos. When there, the angel asked him, “What do you see?” The man said, “I see a ball of light.” Then the angel brought him closer, “Now what do you see?” The man said, “I see several balls of light.” Closer yet, the angel said, “Now?” “I see many balls of light,” the man answered. The angel was the Angel of Life and told the man, “You are a child of light. You see many balls of light, and they are children of light. When you shine, you join those children of light until the whole universe can see you.” With that the man was brought back into his body.

Susanne was right, the manuscript finds its way into people’s lives when they need it. I could not understand my vision the night before until I read that manuscript.

A Healing Experience

After returning from my visit with Susanne, I became aware that I was re-living, every day, the childhood trauma of being in the Saint Paul clinic with double pneumonia. Each day of my adult life I would wake up in the morning, nose running and bronchial tubes and lungs filled with phlegm. I had difficulty breathing and I would feel anxious. I was finally aware enough to see the link between my experience as a six-year-old to my experience as an adult.

At that time, I began participating in peer group counseling, which involves the individual selecting a peer, from a group counseling session, who sits quietly and nonjudgmentally while the other releases whatever he or she wants to release and be free of. The peer counselor sees the other as he or she truly is—whole, well, intelligent, and healthy, regardless of what is happening in the moment. If the one being counseled wants physical contact, it is provided. Sometimes the peer counselor says or asks something in an effort to get at the issue the individual is trying to tackle. This type of peer counseling is one on one, although sometimes pairs volunteer to go through the session in front of the entire group so that the group leader can demonstrate proper counseling. The group may include up to a dozen people.

I asked a dear friend, Libby, if she might help me with my “problem” directly since she was the group leader. She said she would try. Libby was and is an accomplished peer group counselor—I trusted her implicitly. She said that it would be necessary for her to be present when I experienced the symptoms, so she spent the night at my place in order to be present in the morning.

Like clockwork, my physical symptoms and emotional state appeared in the morning. Libby then laid down next to me and said, “It’s okay, go into it and let whatever happens happen while being aware that this experience is just re-living the six-year-old’s trauma that isn’t real anymore. Go into it.”

I did as she instructed while she held her hand on my chest, over my heart. I got to the point at which I could not breathe anymore and was in a state of panic. Libby was there to remind me that this was okay and that this was only a memory, nothing more. I was reassured by her presence, her physical contact, and her words. The process lasted about an hour. When I regained my breath, I sobbed and sobbed while Libby held me. She held me until I stopped crying and my process ended, not saying a word the entire time.

What I experienced afterward was a profound sense of freedom from this childhood trauma. I no longer had panic attacks, and I no longer suffered from physically re-living my childhood horror. I am grateful to Libby for having the courage, love, and compassion I needed at that time.

Much later in life I realized, to my chagrin, that I still carried old wounds from that childhood experience. My sister Rinna finally told me that when I returned home after the pneumonia, I had changed and recounted how I would no longer sit with the family to eat and would take my food into my bedroom. I began to realize that I had blamed my parents and my grandfather for the trauma because they had left me in the clinic and never visited me. My pattern of distrust for any adult was set by this. I had continued to believe they would always leave me. I was shocked at this realization. It had colored my entire life, even to the point that I had sabotaged my relationships with the women I loved and who loved me. I would subconsciously test their love to prove that I was right about them leaving me by doing and saying things that hurt them, and over time I was proven “right.” I had fulfilled my own belief time and time again.

I also realized, to my horror, that I was prepared to die to prove my point. I had developed an illness that, after a year of tests by Western medical doctors and alternative medical doctors alike, no one could identify much less treat. I had lost seventy pounds over the course of a year, and my friends were worried about me. It wasn’t that I wasn’t eating—I ate more than I ever did and I still lost weight. I developed inexplicable pains around my groin, stomach, and back that were persistent. The pains became almost unbearable to the point that I couldn’t do anything. I was a public speaker and got invitations all the time, but I had to turn them down because I was in such pain. That lasted about seven months.

I also began to realize that my experience as a child left me not trusting even my own body. After all, it had gotten sick to the point of near death. As a result, I always felt I was going to die from any number of illnesses.

At last, I had an “aha” moment when I discovered that this illness and its consequences were the result of my trials and tribulations from my childhood trauma! At that point, I began to heal the “mysterious” illness—the pains disappeared and I gained weight with the help of a medical intuitive who was recommended to me by a trusted friend.

The mind is an interesting aspect. It hides the truth from us for a period of time, sometimes years as it did with me. Rita Blumenstein, a Yupik Elder, is someone I learned to admire and trust. She said to me, “You know, Larry, that sometimes even the spiritual can be a place to hide from things in life.” I thought about this and it is true. When I was sick and unconscious with pneumonia, I would awake to find myself alone and many times in my own excrement. I would then go back into unconsciousness saying, “I don’t want to be here. I’m going back to the place where I feel safe.” It would continue to be the place I would go to throughout my life whenever I felt that I was not of this place of chaos, violence, ignorance, stupidity, and destruction—until Rita shared her wisdom with me. “Sometimes the spiritual can be a place to hide from things in life.” I realized that I had done just that throughout my life. It was easy to the point of being second nature. Now, I go there consciously, not to escape the present moment but to experience what it is like to just “be” without any thought or emotion created by the mind.

Now I am thankful for the experience I had when I was six. Without it I would not have learned some of the most important lessons in my life: to trust in life and life processes, to trust my own body, to trust others, to forgive and have compassion for my parents and grandparent, and to forgive and have compassion for myself. Perhaps forgiving and having compassion for myself was the most important lesson I learned from this. The Elders say that “we cannot offer the world that which we do not have.” Until I forgave myself and developed compassion for myself, I could not forgive or have compassion for anyone else. Now I have compassion for all who take this human journey.

It is not easy being human. We are born into a world in which we experience all kinds of things—tragedy, physical and emotional suffering, violence, love, moments of happiness and sadness, confusion, longings, moments of bliss, moments of joy, judgments and criticisms of self and others, and loss. This is the present reality of what it is to be human, and we are still here. The human spirit is amazing.

Chapter 24

The Bear Claw Necklace and the United Nations

What happened to me after my “dark night of the soul” in 1984 was inexplicable and magical. One day that fall, I received a phone call from someone from Montreal who had gotten my name from an Alaska Native leader.

“Larry, the person from Alaska who was supposed to be a delegate to the gathering of Indigenous leaders from the western hemisphere to discuss the World Conservation Strategy is sick. We need a replacement to go to Montreal, and you were recommended. Would you be interested?”

I was at a point in my life when I knew everything that came to me had a purpose, so I agreed immediately. Little did I know what magic was afoot. Since I knew nothing whatsoever about the World Conservation Strategy, immediately following the phone call I began wondering what possible use I could be at such a gathering. Then I had what I would later call my first “vision.” It was simple and startling in its form. As I was driving on the island’s red-colored road, a three-dimensional picture of a necklace appeared before my eyes, as clear as day. I thought I was hallucinating, but I knew immediately that what I was seeing was a bear claw necklace. I didn’t know how I knew this, since I had never seen bear claws before—we don’t have bears on Saint Paul. I also inexplicably knew that it had something to do with the upcoming meeting in Montreal.

Armed with the feeling that I was somehow being guided and would know what I was to do at the gathering, I traveled to Anchorage, Seattle, and finally Vancouver, BC, to catch a flight to Montreal. In Anchorage, I received faxed materials about the World Conservation Strategy, a United Nations blueprint to guide nation-states in developing environmental laws, regulations, and policies. Apparently, this document, to which 125 nations around the world were signatories, was up for amendments. I knew that my role must be to represent Alaska Native and other Indigenous peoples’ interests in this process.

On the flight to Montreal from British Columbia, I was assigned a seat at the rear of the aircraft, so I could see the passengers as they came onto the plane. I paid only casual attention to the people boarding until a man turned to place luggage in an overhead rack above the seat in front of me. He was obviously Indigenous, given his dark brown skin and long, braided hair. As he pushed his luggage into the compartment, he turned slightly toward me. He was wearing the exact bear claw necklace I had seen in my vision! My heart started to beat faster. This man is going to show me what I need to do in Montreal, I thought to myself.

The dark-skinned man with sharp black eyes looked at me just before sitting down and nodded his head. I nodded back. “Headed to Montreal?” I asked.

“Yeah, going to a big meetin’ there,” he replied.

“Me too, something called the World Conservation Strategy meeting,” I said.

“Well, then, we are going to the same place,” he said. “My name is Joe Sarcasha.”

“Pleased to meet you, I’m Larry Merculieff, from Alaska,” I reciprocated.

“Good to meet you, brother. I’ll be representing the Aboriginal Trappers Association.”

“At least now I know somebody going to this thing.” I responded cheerfully. He sat down, and we said nothing more for the entire trip.

When I arrived at my assigned hotel, I was greeted by an Indigenous woman who gave me a packet of information about the meeting to begin the next day. She told me there were to be five hundred tribal chiefs from throughout the western hemisphere at the meeting, and I was to have ten minutes to address all of them in a plenary session on the third day. I gulped.

“What am I expected to say?” I asked, as nonchalantly as I could.

“Whatever you feel you need to say,” she responded, matter-of-factly.

I knew that this opportunity and honor to speak to five hundred tribal chiefs was no accident. But I was still quite nervous. I’m not even a tribal chief, I thought to myself. There must be a good reason for this. They are asking me to speak, and they don’t know anything about me!

On the first day of the meeting, I could see that this was quite an important event. It was no small feat to bring so many important Indigenous leaders together from so many countries in the western hemisphere. I had never seen such a gathering in my life. We all gathered in a very large conference facility with chairs placed in concentric circles. I knew that this traditional arrangement of chairs signified that everyone sat in the circle as equals. There was no “head table,” only one central microphone strategically located at one side of the great circle of people and wireless microphones that allowed individuals to interact with the speaker if need be.

The issue at hand was how to amend the World Conservation Strategy document to reflect the needs and desires of aboriginal peoples, and how aboriginal peoples were to be treated when making environmental policies, regulations, and laws. The meeting was being held in the hope of achieving a unified position on behalf of the world’s aboriginal peoples before a meeting with United Nations officials. I listened to the speakers as they stood at the microphone, one by one. Everyone who wanted to speak was given a few minutes of time. Only a few speakers were formally scheduled. I was one of them.

I loved the dignity of the proceedings. They seemed right and honest. No one interrupted. Everyone listened intently to each speaker. And, as each speaker came forward, not one delivered arguments against anything any previous speaker had proposed. Each simply stated his or her case. I saw none of the behavior so common in proceedings in the United States in which people argue in favor of their points and against what others may have proposed.

Over the next two days, I watched, listened, and learned. I could see that all the leaders took this meeting extremely seriously given the tone, tenor, and dignity of the proceedings. Throughout those days I looked for opportunities to interact with Joe Sarcasha, thinking he would somehow offer me insight into what I was to do at this gathering. When we weren’t interacting, I watched him carefully. But he said and did nothing that struck me as significant or guiding, a fact that became ever more disconcerting the closer it came to the time I was to present.

A half hour before I was to speak before the gathering, I still had no idea what I was supposed to do. And the gathering was preparing to take some kind of action on the World Conservation Strategy issues. I watched Joe like a hawk for clues. Finally, he did something I took notice of. He was handing out flyers to everyone at the gathering. I made my way toward him and got the flyer. It pointed out how the non-Native “system,” the “powers that be,” had never served Indigenous peoples, how the greatest suffering and problems experienced by Indigenous peoples were created by Westerners. From what I had heard from many who had already spoken before this gathering, this line of thinking and feeling was pervasive. The flyer advocated withdrawal from the World Conservation Strategy process as a form of protest. On reading this, I knew immediately what I was supposed to say to the five hundred Indigenous chiefs.

When the time arrived for me to speak, I began slowly.

“Respected Elders, Honored Leaders of the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island,[9] it is with great humility that I come before you here today. I bring you greetings from the Indigenous nations of Alaska and their prayers for a successful gathering. I prayed that I be guided in what I say here today. Up to this moment I did not know what I was to say, and my prayers have been answered. I come here to appeal to the compassion of this great gathering, and to ask that we make these decisions with the wisdom that can come only from our hearts and not our minds.

“We know our peoples have suffered great injustices at the hands of organized governments in the Western world, injustices that continue to this day. We know that our voices have not been heard in the countless forums we go to. Our lands continue to be taken from us. Development continues to despoil our waters and fields. Our trees continue to be destroyed. Our sacred grounds continue to be violated. Our voices are ignored in government. Many of our people are in poverty because developers and governments take the most productive grounds and sometimes have forcibly removed us from our ancestral lands. We see how many of our sacred ways have been violated by those who seek to use them for profit or ego, or who use them as symbols for superficial things such as school logos and mascots. And we see the results on the spirit, hearts, and minds of our great peoples. We see how many young ones are lost, prone to violence, addictions, suicides, and murders. We see how many of our people have become sick mentally, physically, and spiritually with emotional disorders, diabetes, heart problems, high blood pressure, cancers. We see the continued erosion of our cultures and spiritual ways as the pressures from the outside come into our villages and families.

“We understand how this is the most subtle and insidious form of genocide because these symptoms are largely invisible to good-meaning peoples from mainstream societies. Our people die slowly, but it is death caused by the disconnection of peoples from their hearts and ignorance on a grand scale. We can choose to fight people over these things. We can choose to work in anger, rage, and maybe even hatred toward those groups, organizations, and individuals who have done these things to our peoples. We can choose to fight the governments for the injustices wrought upon our peoples. It is always a choice, and I appeal to you to think about this.

“These things have been brought to our people only because the people who do such things are asleep in spirit. It is a spiritual sickness from which they suffer, and they do not know or understand this. They cannot know any better unless they are shown another way. A way of love. A way of compassion. A way of wisdom. Our ancestors understood what it means to be a real human being and conducted themselves in this way of beauty. We must continue to honor these ways. In doing so, we honor our ancestors, and we create the only kind of energy and intent that we want to bestow on the next seven generations. If we choose to fight, then we give a legacy of disconnection, ignorance, and continued violence to those yet to come. Let us bring our hearts together in a good way to create something born of love and compassion. Only in this way can we make lasting change. The decision is up to you.”

I breathed a sigh of deep relief that I was done. I was perspiring and shaking out of sheer nervousness and surprised at what had come out of my mouth. I didn’t know if what I said would make any difference until several of the most revered Elders and chiefs stood up, each in turn, to voice their support for the thoughts I presented.

In the end, the delegates unanimously agreed to proceed with the process and to do so in the way of the real human being. I and two others were chosen to draft language reflecting the desires of the delegations to include language in the World Conservation Strategy that acknowledged and affirmed that Indigenous peoples were part and parcel of environment, and that Indigenous people must be meaningfully involved in the decision-making processes of signatory governments. As drafters, we were also charged with negotiating the language with UN officials. As the drafting and negotiating team, we had no difficulty reaching consensus on language. The only difficult issue for our team was to find a word to refer to the peoples we represented. I learned, for example, that there are groups in Africa that illegitimately call themselves “Indigenous” in order to receive government and foundation support. One person offered that the word “aboriginal” has been used derogatorily in Australia and may have those connotations. We agreed to use “First Peoples.”

Four years later, the language recognizing First Peoples in the World Conservation Strategy was accepted and made part of the document adopted by 125 nation-states in a plenary session of the United Nations. When it was all done, I gave many prayers of gratitude and thanks to the Creator and the ancestors for all their help. I recognized that I could not take credit for any of it, only that I was given a humble vision of a necklace, and that I came with an open heart asking for guidance. And it was there.

Chapter 25

As the Island Turns, Part I

After serving in the governor’s cabinet as the head of the Alaska Department of Commerce and Economic Development, as it was known at the time, under Governor Steve Cowper in the late 1980s, I was hired to be the city manager by the city council in my home town. It was 1990, and I did not yet know the dramas I would witness and be part of in the ensuing four years.

On my first day as the city manager, driving through town, I was shocked at the number of outside commercial fishermen who were staggering in the streets drunk. On that first day, I saw a fisherman sitting on the ground adjacent to the bar, openly drinking beer. Yet another was carrying a case on his shoulders as he chugged down a can of beer. When I arrived at the city hall, I toured the premises. The city hall was home to the city administration, the local police force, the magistrate’s court, and a radio and TV station. The upstairs used to be the community gathering hall where I recalled our Christmas plays and the twenty-foot tree, richly decorated with colored bulbs, tinsel, fake snow, candy canes, and a giant star at the top. I also remembered how, each year immediately after the Russian Orthodox Christmas, the community would gather to watch ingenious and incredibly funny or scary performances by local people.

It was tradition, during these performances, for some men to dress up as women, and some women to dress up as men. The costumes were worn in a way that exaggerated the physical features of the gender they pretended to be—the men would attach gigantic water-filled balloons to their upper body and overstuffed pillows to their behinds; the women, not to be undone, used cucumbers in one particular location.

I always loved this skit: One “woman” would be in her ninth month of pregnancy and in labor. This “woman” would be placed on a gurney, with “men” doctors performing the delivery.

“Ow, ow, ow,” screamed the pregnant woman, “that really, really hurts!”

“Let me fix that pain for you,” the lead doctor said as he proceeded to massage the woman’s chest and then pop one of the balloons. “There, now doesn’t that feel better?”

“Ow, ow, oooooooooooh,” the woman crooned.

“That’s better. Now let’s get back to work, doctors. Her water bag has broken!” the doctor proclaimed.

“Chainsaw!” the lead doctor commanded with his palm out.

“Doctor, watch out for my bloomers! Don’t cut my bloomers!” the woman screamed.

“Chisel!”

“What are you going to do with that?” cried the woman.

“Oh, I don’t know, I just like to feel a good man’s tool,” the doctor replied. “Hammer. Quickly, I’m going to nail this sucker!”

“Oh, Doctor, this isn’t supposed to feel good, is it?” the woman moaned.

“It’s a side effect, just don’t urinate as I push on your stomach.” A focused stream of yellow water squirted at least four feet in the air as the doctor pushed on her abdomen. “Now you’ve done it! I told you not to do that! Now I feel the urge to go! Bucket!” the doctor commanded. Sounds of liquid hitting the bucket were heard, and the doctor grinned, full and silly.

The doctor then removed a can of pop from the woman’s “womb,” then a box of cereal, a box of Cracker Jacks, some bedsheets, an apple, a shoe, a bra, a pair of shorts, and finally out came the baby—a Raggedy Ann doll!

“Oh, she’s got red hair!” a nurse proclaimed. “What is an Unangan doing with a red-haired baby? And look how flexible she is!” throwing the doll ten feet into the air.

The community would then burst into a series of laughter and applause as the New Year’s baby arrived. The man who thought he was the most macho in the village would be picked to play the role of the baby. He would be dressed in diapers, with a baby’s bonnet, and a “suskaax,” or baby’s bottle, filled with milk in his mouth. The man had to cry and act like an infant throughout that night. I thought to myself, how wise this is—making overly macho men think twice about demonstrating their macho too much, and the idea of using humor in a good way to make an example of the over-macho.

“Well, our work is done here,” the doctor said. “Now let’s get back to our real work fixing plugged toilets!”

The rest of the night the men dressed as women had to continue to act like women, and the women dressed as men had to continue to act like men. This was always hilarious as many of the “women” were looked up to as “men’s men,” and a “man’s man” doesn’t have the hang-ups about behaving in a feminine way. The live band of locals would play homespun guitar and piano music as the “women” and “men” went out into the audience to select partners of the “opposite sex” to engage in slow dance. The local Russian Orthodox priest, always a man, could only dance with his wife or other men, never other women because of the laws of priesthood.

Our people love to laugh. That night was no exception, even though we might have watched a similar skit the year before, and the children were always very happily mesmerized when adults did silly things. Later in life I reflected that such traditional performances were a wonderful way to playfully poke fun at the opposite sex. It was also to remind ourselves that we all have innate aspects of the opposite gender in each of us, and that was not only okay, but celebrated. I am grateful that these ways continue.

My thoughts came back to the present. As I walked into what used to be this wonderful place of community celebration, I was shocked to see large video-gaming units that took up two-thirds of the hall. What had been a large dance floor was now relegated to an area one-fourth its original size. I checked out these gaming units, all violence oriented, with programs that awarded points for gunning down or hitting and kicking one’s opponents before killing or knocking them out. I was horrified that this precious hall that had nurtured togetherness and a sense of community was now being used for games of destruction. As my first official act as the city manager, I immediately ordered all the gaming units and partitions removed and destroyed and the community hall restored to the way I remembered it as a child and teenager. Most of the children and teenagers who played these games were vocal in their protest within the community, however. Several parents were very upset.

“Why did you do this?” one woman shouted at me. “Now our kids don’t have anything to do, and that means trouble!”

I replied, with as much sensitivity and diplomacy as I could muster, in a somewhat pleading voice: “Look, Molly, these kids are playing games that are only about hitting and killing one another. It’s not good for them. I will help the community find other, better things to do, and I ask for your help to do this, please! And besides, don’t you remember how we used to have the Christmas programs, community basket socials, dances, and muskahraatax skits here? Don’t you think it would be nice to bring all that back?”

“Well, I guess, but what do we do for kid activities?”

“I will meet with the young people at the school and see what they would be willing to work with me to do something,” I replied. She was satisfied. Subsequently, I did meet with the students who decided to make the environment their central focus. They decided to build rat traps (because the ships that came to Saint Paul’s harbor carried the risk of rats, which were known to devastate bird colonies), clean up debris from the beaches, and lobby for cleanup of the seven fishing vessels that ran aground on fur seal rookeries or adjacent to bird colonies on the island.

The Elders and older adults were elated that the community hall had been restored. We celebrated this when the community Christmas program was held in the hall for the first time in four years. All the Elders voiced their approval and joy at the restoration. That was the best affirmation I could have received.

I then asked the police chief to resign and hired a new police chief, Scott Stender, who was a member of the existing police force. Scott is a soft-spoken, large-framed guy who had served in the military police and then joined a police force in Washington State. Scott had experience with working on Indian reservations when he applied for police work on Saint Paul Island. I gave him orders to enforce the city ordinance against drunk driving, public consumption of alcohol, and illegal bootlegging of hard liquor.

My mother said, “I’m not afraid of the drunk fishermen, but I’m afraid of the teenagers who drink and drive.” I understood her concern because fishermen would blow off steam when their vessel came to the harbor, and that usually meant drinking alcohol. I had witnessed fishermen lugging six-packs of beer around and sitting outside while they drank themselves to a stupor. They had no care for how the town viewed them. They acted as if they owned the town.

That first month of local enforcement, we had thirty DWI arrests. The following month we had two, and no more fishermen or anyone else continued drinking beer in public.

To ultimately stop outside commercial crab fishermen from “running” our town, it took an incident that seemed to have come directly from a movie script to get out the message that this is one town the fishermen needed to respect.

One of the line officers, Jeff, called the police chief on the police radio: “Uh . . . Chief, we have a problem at the ballfield. There are somewhere between twenty and thirty guys here ready to kill each other and they have lethal weapons!”

“Roger. I am on my way!” Scott grabbed two stun or “flash” grenades and a shotgun and relayed his plan to Jeff and then me. “Boss, we got a situation here and I need your direction,” Scott said to me calmly over the radio phone as he explained what was going on. “I have a plan, but I need you to back me up on this.” He quickly explained, and I told him I’d back him up. “Thanks, boss. Would you come down as an eyewitness?”

“Affirmative, Scott, I am on my way.”

“Jeff,” Scott continued. “I plan to get their attention with flash grenades and hopefully give me a chance to use the vehicle loudspeaker to talk them down! And we gotta split them up, so when we do, you take one group!”

“Roger that,” Jeff replied.

Scott arrived on an incredible scene along with Jeff, who was in another vehicle. Jeff and Scott are brothers and both trained police officers. Local men were fighting with about twenty commercial fishermen who had come ashore on leave that night. Many of the men, on both sides, had knives, wooden clubs, and metal pipes. Some had large rocks in their hands.

Scott jumped out of his vehicle and ignited the flash grenade that went off with a dramatic, loud bang and a bright flash. The rioting men stopped in their tracks. Scott quickly grabbed his shotgun and announced over his vehicle’s PA system, with a trained and strong voice of authority, “This is the Saint Paul Police Department! I want all of you to drop your weapons and hit the ground immediately or face the consequences!” All but two dropped whatever they had in their hands and fell to the ground. Jeff then drove his vehicle between the men to split the groups in half. One guy kept ahold of his knife, and Scott walked to within ten feet of him.

“Mister, if you don’t drop your weapon right now and get on the ground face down, I am going to assume you are intending to use it!” Scott stated, holding up his shotgun. The man let go of his knife and dropped to the ground. As Scott handcuffed the fisherman, he said, “You are being charged with inciting a riot and use of a deadly weapon with intent to do bodily harm!” While locking the handcuffs, Scott turned to the other man still standing. “If you don’t want to join your friend in our small jail with riot and weapons charges, lose your job, and find your own way off this island, you better drop your weapon now!” Scott commanded. The second man quickly complied and backed off.

“I want all the non-locals out of here now and back to your boats! You are not welcome in this town anymore, and I will make sure your captain knows that!” Scott stated on the PA system. Some local citizens, watching the drama from on the hill, cheered.

Twenty commercial fishermen made their way to the dock as Jeff in his vehicle and Scott on foot, shotgun in hand, followed behind. Scott then ordered all the locals to disband and go home. Scott also ordered the only bar, owned by the tribal government and selling only beer, closed. The local tribal president agreed that it was a good idea. Later I found out that the riot had been incited by some lewd remarks from an off-island commercial fisherman made to a local married woman in the bar that brought quick reaction from the local men.

And so it went that first year as city manager in a small, remote village in the middle of the Bering Sea. At first it was surreal—as if out of some B-grade movie script in which a new sheriff comes to clean up a wild west town. But life in the community became more peaceful, and the Elders were walking the streets again, relaxed.

Chapter 26

As the Island Turns, Part II

After working at cleaning up the town, I set my sights on an environmental issue on the island. The people took pride in the island and were active in protecting it. I recall how at least a dozen households had called to tell me that processing boat workers, on leave, were scaring the fur seals off the beach next to the village. Mike Zacharof and I mobilized a group of men to go down there and got them to stop. I then told Scott to tell the processors to recall the men on leave and tell them they would not be welcome on the island should this happen again. They had no choice but to comply. We never had problems with the process workers again.

Another issue at hand were seven vessels that had run aground on Saint Paul. The abandoned vessels were strewn next to fur seal rookeries and bird cliffs. When one of them, the 370-foot Ruyuyu Maru, ran aground next to the bird cliffs across from the village, the U.S. Coast Guard at the LORAN station on the island didn’t know what to do or how to rescue the men because there were no roads to access the vessel. The storm-driven waves made it impossible for the men to disembark to walk to safety. The local men knew what to do, however. They made a pulley system on a tripod on top of the two-hundred-foot cliff and pulled the shipwrecked seamen to the top. It worked, but the vessel was then left to rust next to the bird cliffs. I recall how sad I felt that the birds would suffer the consequences. So, remembering this and how I felt about all the other vessels that had run aground on the island during storms, I thought we could and should do something.

We first contacted the owner of one of the vessels to ask about any plans to remove the remains of the rusting ship. We were told the vessel had been abandoned and to go see the owner’s insurance agent. We contacted the insurance agent, who said the asset had already been written off and that there were no injuries, so no liability. We then contacted the National Marine Fisheries Service because several of the vessels had run aground next to a fur seal rookery. The response was, “We can’t do anything, why don’t you try the Fish and Wildlife Service?” We received a similar reply and a suggestion that we contact the U.S. Coast Guard, who told us that they had no jurisdiction over such matters because the United States was not party to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Basically, all parties denied responsibility, so we decided to sue all of them at once. Authorized by all the organizations on the island, we called and notified the parties of our intent to sue. That broke the ice. We were able to secure the funds necessary to dismantle all the boats and get rid of them.

Unfortunately, the village corporation that got the contract to clean up the mess decided to bury the hunks of metal in a ditch on the island. I was outraged. I decided to approach the school kids who used to use the video arcade in the community hall. I requested a school meeting to explain the situation: “We were able to get those responsible to pay for removal of the vessels that have run aground on the island, and this is a good first step. The village corporation (now under new leadership) got the contract to remove ships, but they are planning to bury the metal on our land. Do you think this is good?” I asked.

“Noooo,” was the group response.

“Well then, do you want to do something about it?”

“Yesss,” came the reply.

So I let them in on a plan that could possibly work, which was to ask them to make posters and to lobby their parents to have the metal removed off island and to a recycling center. The students eagerly agreed, and before long there were posters around the village that said things like “Don’t Make Our Island A Dump,” “Let’s Keep Our Island Clean,” and “Let’s Recycle.” They lobbied their parents and even made arm bands they wore everywhere to broadcast this student effort to keep the island clean. In the meantime, I told the students to find out what recycling companies were out there. Their research led them to a company in Tacoma, Washington, that accepted large metal scraps, and the students gave this information to the village corporation. The village was then able to negotiate with the company to accept the metals that came from the dismantled vessels. Soon, all the vessels were dismantled and shipped off the island. To this day, I am proud of those students who participated. Without their intervention, we would have a vessel boneyard. And kudos to the village corporation leadership that listened to the students and their parents.

Having cleaned up the abandoned vessels from the island, I set my sights on other things. A Fish and Wildlife field rep, Art Sowls, asked me if we could do something about rats that came off the fishing vessels when they came to the harbor to offload crab to a private processor. I said, “Yes, we should do something about it. What do we know about these rats?”

Art replied, “Well, we know that these rats leave fishing vessels, and they are so prolific that if a male and female rat come onto the island, the island will soon be infested with them. We know, from the rats on the Aleutians, that they can decimate seabird nesting colonies. I know of a guy who understands these kinds of rats. He is considered a world rat expert. We should talk with him.”

I agreed. After talking with the rat expert, we installed the toughest rat ordinances in the United States. Any motor vessel coming into the Saint Paul port would have to be inspected by locally trained people, and any vessel that had indications of rats would be forced to leave the island immediately. Upon leaving the island, crew would have to show proof the vessel had been inspected and found rat free in order to return to Saint Paul. In this effort, we got the students involved once again. They made rat traps and painted them with whatever message they wanted to convey about rats. We placed these rat traps around the docks and at the community dump. Thus far, these measures have worked.

After demonstrating our success at preventing rats from coming onto the island, the Fish and Wildlife Service focused on destroying the rats in the Aleutian Islands. This took extensive effort, but they have been able to recover one entire island from rat infestation thus far.

Chapter 27

An Unangan Love Story

Perhaps the most poignant of experiences I had as city manager came when a man, ten years younger than me, came into the office seeking help. I had known this man since he was a little boy and I was a teenager. In a village one gets to know the life stories of everyone in the community, and I knew his.

This man had come from a family troubled by alcohol since the day he was born. In those days, Unangan people made homebrew, or peeva as it was known in Unangan Tunuu, an illegal activity as far as the U.S. government agent was concerned. Peeva was made in large fifty-gallon wooden barrels and included canned fruits, potatoes, raisins, and quite a few other things I will not list. The mixture was allowed to ferment for several weeks in the water-filled barrel. In an effort to limit the quantities that could be made, the agent made sure the government store rationed everything, including items that could be used in homebrew. But somehow, anyone who wanted to make peeva, in whatever quantities they desired, could do so.

As a child, I hated homebrew for all it did and represented. It was foul-tasting stuff, but potent, and brought nothing but grief, trauma, and drama into every Unangan household. Every weekend, beginning on Fridays, and every holiday was sure to include the adults drinking homebrew to the point of drunken stupor. I had spent a lifetime healing the traumas of these times when most adults could not be trusted. Many of my peers were sexually molested, including my sister and me, when our parents were out “partying.” I will also never forget when someone partying in our home got into a drunken brawl with my uncle. I vividly remember this man’s fist connecting with my uncle’s jaw with a sharp thud that instantly knocked my uncle to the floor unconscious. I was stunned, afraid, and finally astonished that my uncle was snoring loudly, as if he was just sleeping.

On another occasion, during the Christmas holidays, I was walking on one of the village streets, headed to a friend’s house to play with his new toys. I heard loud shouting coming from a home. There was some kind of terrible fight going on between a man and his wife. The door to the outside of their home flew open, and this man dragged his wife outside with full force by her hair. The woman screamed in terror. As an eight-year-old child, I wanted to help, but I knew it would be useless. The man’s intensely reddened face and neck clearly showed he was in a mad rage. His powerful jerking actions pulled a large part of his wife’s hair off her skull. There was blood everywhere, and the woman fainted. I thought she was dead. The man then seemed to have come to his senses and dropped to his knees, letting out an agonizing wail.

I was terrified and ran home sobbing uncontrollably. When I arrived, no one was there. I piled into my Army issue bed and pulled my Army issue blanket over my head, as if to block out the world. I just tried to get the image of what I had seen out of my head but went into a deep and nightmare-filled sleep that night.

I could readily imagine what it must have been like during the childhood of the man who was now before me in my office. At least I had two parents who fed, clothed, and took care of me the best they knew how. This man had never had even partially functional parents. His parents were complete alcoholics who drank almost every day that I could remember. The children of their home were always sleeping in other people’s homes, always hungry, and poorly clothed. The man in my office had been an alcoholic since his teenage years and had experimented with alcohol when he was younger than that. I could see the years of pain and suffering on his bloated face as he walked into my office. His eyes were looking downward, and his body was slumped, as if he were physically carrying a heavy packsack. I welcomed him in.

“Good to see you, Bucky Boy!” Bucky Boy was the nickname he grew up with. “Sit down and tell me how I can help you.”

I knew this was something very important because Bucky Boy never had asked for a meeting with any of his employers in his entire life. Bucky Boy had very low self-esteem and so would never take it upon himself to ask for any kind of meeting, let alone do it face-to-face with the “big boss.”

Bucky Boy fidgeted in his seat as he stared at the floor, never looking me in the eyes.

“I need your help, Larry,” he said in a barely audible voice. “I want to go to alcohol detox.”

Because I had known this man for almost my entire life, I knew he meant what he was saying. I knew it took a lot for him to be in my office that day. I also knew what he wanted. There were no detox centers in the village. The nearest one was eight hundred miles away, on the mainland, in Anchorage. It would cost a dollar a mile for an airline ticket. I also knew that there were only three detox centers in Anchorage, and they cost thousands of dollars. This man had earned minimum wage for most of his life, and so I knew he was asking the city to sponsor him. However, the city had nothing in its budget or policies that allowed for such a thing.

“I believe you, Bucky,” I said. “I will help. Will you be ready to leave as soon as I can set it up?”

“Yeah, I’m ready,” Bucky replied.

“I’m glad you’re doing this, Bucky. Anyone who is willing to stop drinking will always have my support,” I said gently. “You won’t regret it, but it won’t be easy.”

“I know. Thank you,” he said with obvious tears in his eyes.

I knew that my commitment to expend thousands of dollars of city funds for something never authorized by the city council would likely spell political trouble with certain members of the city staff and council. But, I also knew enough about alcoholism that moments of opportunity had to be seized upon whenever they occurred. This was such a moment, and I wasn’t going to waste it, regardless of the cost.

“Larry, you can’t do this. It isn’t authorized!” A city employee protested as she approached me upon hearing what I had instructed the accounting staff to do. “And besides that, it sets a bad precedent. A lot of the city employees have alcohol problems. Are you going to pay for all of them if they ask to be put into a treatment center?” she exclaimed loudly. “And besides, this could cost you your job!”

I knew Darcy was well-meaning, and that she had a good heart, so I never questioned her motives in telling me what she did. “Darcy, I have made up my mind, and this is going to be done. I can’t value the life of another human being in dollars! If it saves one person’s life, it’s worth it! And that’s my final word on the subject!”

Bucky Boy followed through with his commitment when I made the arrangements with the treatment center and airline. It was to be a month of detox in which he would not be allowed outside contact. I knew it would be hell for him at first, having seen people go through detox after a three-month daily drinking binge—delirious and babbling incoherently, incontinent and even some in diapers to avoid urinating or defecating themselves. One had to be physically strapped to the bed because he constantly ripped out the tubes bringing vitamins, minerals, and fluids into his badly dehydrated body. It was heart-wrenching to watch adults acting like rabid animals. Yes, Bucky Boy was in for it.

Two weeks later, I got a surprising pronouncement from my secretary. “Larry, Bucky Boy is on the line and he wants to talk with you.”

“Bucky Boy, good to hear you, my friend. How is it that you are able to call me?” I was surprised because I knew that detox clients were simply not allowed to communicate with anyone on the outside until their final day of the one-month program.

Bucky Boy’s voice was clear and serious. “Larry, I need to tell you something. I got a physical check-up, and they told me I have cancer, and that I have maybe a few months to live,” he said, so matter-of-factly.

Oh, shit! I thought to myself.

“I don’t want you to tell my wife. She has enough problems to worry about without worrying about that,” Bucky Boy stated firmly. “I’m going to finish up my detox treatment so I can come home clear and be with her, because I love her. But I wanted you to know since you have stuck with me when I asked for help.”

“Oh, Bucky, I am so sorry to hear this! My heart goes out to you. Is there anything I can do to make it any easier for you?”

“No, nothing except would you help my wife if she needs any help?”

My god, I thought to myself. He just got news that he has a few months to live and his only thought is of his wife and not himself! “Sure, you got it, Bucky. Anything!”

“Well, that’s all for now. I’ll see you when I get back.”

“Okay, see you, Bucky. I will keep you in my prayers.” Two days later, Bucky Boy’s wife asked to meet with me. “Hi, Louise, come in, sit down. You want some coffee?”

“No, thank you,” she replied with the same kind of low voice of her husband.

As soon as I closed my door for privacy, she began crying. I thought that somehow she must have found out about her husband’s terminal cancer. This woman had known me since I was first born, and I remember many times we had fun together when I was five, six, and seven years old. She was eight years my senior, but as a child I always thought of her as part of my extended family. We had grown apart as we became adults. I knew she came from a similar troubling background as her husband, and somehow they found each other later in their adult lives at a drinking party.

“I was raped last night!” Louise said, choking out the words.

“Oh, my god!” I exclaimed, feeling as if I just been hit by a ton of bricks. “Who did it? We’ll have him arrested and put in jail right now! How are you doing? Did he do anything else to hurt you?” I blurted out in rapid succession, not giving her time to respond.

“No, no, I’m okay, don’t worry, I’m okay!” she said, looking directly at me. “I’m not going to tell you his name, and I am not going to press charges because I don’t want my husband to know. He has enough to deal with right now!”

I was once again astounded and awed at finding this incredible beauty and courage where I least expected to find it—in two very troubled people who had lived most of their lives as alcoholics. Their love was so deep that even in experiencing their own personal tragedies and pain-filled dramas, they thought not of themselves but of the well-being of each other.

“I want to go out to detox too, so I can be sober and help my husband be sober after he gets out of treatment. That’s why I’m here,” she said in a strained voice. “But I don’t have the money to. Can the city pay for me to go?”

I stared at her, not knowing what to say in the moment. But I knew I had to support her just as I had pledged to her husband I would. But she wasn’t even a city employee. Oh, boy, my political detractors are really going to have it with me now, I thought. This is really going to stretch the rules. “Okay, sure. The city will pay for it, and we will help you set it up right away if possible. Are you sure you won’t reconsider telling me who this S.O.B. is so we can put him away?”

“Please, please don’t,” she said in a voice that indicated her final decision.

And so, I arranged for Louise to leave that week to enter the same detox center that her husband was in. I didn’t know if that would help, but I knew if I were in the same situation, I would want to be with my spouse, regardless of the circumstances. Surprisingly, no one in the city challenged my decision. Perhaps they felt it was useless once I had made up my mind. Whatever the case, I was relieved not to have to deal with that too.

Louise and Bucky Boy both completed their detox programs. Bucky Boy stayed in Anchorage until Louise was finished so they could come home together. It was only later that I found out that Louise had also been diagnosed with terminal cancer and had a few months to live. I watched them walking hand-in-hand, sober and happy, almost every day for the next two months until Bucky Boy died. Two months after Bucky Boy’s death, Louise died.

I will always remember their profound love for each other, their courage, and their inner beauty that outshined the ugliness they experienced in their lives. They taught me another powerful lesson about “not judging the book by its cover” and the deep beauty of my people that I will carry with me for the rest of my life.

Chapter 28

A Yupik Election

The Alaska Native Elders—be they Tlingit, Haida, Athabascan, Unangan, Tsimpshian, Inupiat, Yupik, Eyak, or Supiaiq—call mainstream society the “reverse society” or the “inside-out society” because we used to teach how to live; now we teach how to make a living. We used to contemplate the mystery of death; now we contemplate the mystery of life. Our heart used to tell the mind what to do; now our mind tells the heart what to do. We used to honor the Elders who were visible at every gathering—we listened to them; now we put them in “pioneer” or “senior” homes where they are not to be seen or heard. Women and the feminine were considered sacred; now we defile the sacredness of all things feminine, such as Mother Earth, Mother Earth–based cultures, and women.

I marvel at the wisdom contained in all the Alaska Native cultures whose Elders still teach the “way of the real human being.” Our own cultural names for ourselves mean the “human being,” the “real human being,” or “the people.” Real human beings, in the understanding of the Elders, are experts in resolving conflict, a necessary life skill and wisdom because Alaska Native people used to live in small nomadic bands. Today they live in small villages with populations ranging from thirty to eight hundred. Conflict in such an intimate setting can create incredible disharmony, even violence.

One morning I received a phone call from an intermediary, at the request of some Yupik Elders in Southwest Alaska.[10] The Elders were inviting me to witness the election of a prime chief for several villages in the region. I immediately agreed to come, knowing that, when the Elders asked me to be somewhere, it was to learn something. When I arrived at the regional hub, I was met by another intermediary, again on behalf of the Elders, who would take me to the school gymnasium where the people had gathered to listen to and vote for their favorite candidate.

My guide filled me in on the situation. “The election for prime chief was splitting up the communities in our area because of two men who have been spouting bad stuff about each other,” he said. “These two men are the main candidates. One of them will probably be the prime chief. People have been taking sides, and now friends who chose different sides are not talking with each other. Even family members and whole communities are doing this!” exclaimed my guide, incredulously. “It’s gotten so that it is disturbing good relations between people and villages, so the Elders have declared that they are taking over the election process. Now, you should understand that the Elders rarely interfere with anything political going on, but they are doing so now for the good of the people and our villages,” my guide explained. “The Elders have a lot of power, but they rarely use it. They are using it now. So, the Elders told everyone to come to this meeting place where we are going to hear the candidates speak. Other than that, I don’t know what the Elders have up their sleeves,” my guide said with a laugh. “But, whatever it is, it’s bound to be a doozy!” I laughed, too.

On our drive to the gymnasium we passed a few four-wheelers—small one- or two-person all-terrain vehicles, like a motorcycle with four wheels—on the bumpy gravel road. There were also more taxicabs than I had ever seen at one time, except in New York City and Washington, DC. The cabs seemed incongruent with the landscape—flat green, subalpine tundra for miles on one side and the Bering Sea on the other. Homes and businesses, mostly single-story, framed out of weathered wood, were sprinkled helter-skelter. Skiffs, outboards, and four-wheelers—the means to getting wild foods—sat in almost every backyard.

Alaska Native peoples depend more on wild foods than any other Indigenous group in the United States, consuming between three hundred and a thousand pounds per capita per year. As in most rural Alaskan communities, the people of the regional hub I was visiting depend heavily on bearded seal, walrus, salmon, halibut, wild berries, and migratory birds—their staples for thousands of years. Alaska Natives’ rights to have preference and access to these food sources are being challenged—by sport hunters, sport fishers, and the conservative state legislature.

The last major challenge to the subsistence use of fish came in 2001, when the state was considering an appeal of the so-called Katie John decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Federal Court of Appeals had sided with an Athabascan Elder named Katie John in her right to take fish from a river she and her ancestors had used for thousands of years. I was cochair of the We the People March, which included five thousand Alaskans of all colors. Through this march we succeeded in getting the governor not to appeal.

Then, in 2004, after a five-year battle that I led, Alaska Native peoples won recognition of their right to take halibut for subsistence purposes. This was accomplished through changes in the international treaty between Canada and the United States, which governs regulation of commercial halibut fishing, and through regulations promulgated by the North Pacific Fishery Management Council (NPFMC).[11] Alaska Native leaders had accurately estimated that all the subsistence users of halibut combined took about one percent of the total halibut catch. The remaining 99 percent was taken by commercial and sport fishing boats. Even given the miniscule amount taken by Alaska Native peoples, gaining the legal recognition of their right to take and use halibut as they had done for thousands of years had been an uphill struggle. Sports and commercial fishing interests in Alaska are a powerful lobby and were concerned with the shrinking of their share of the pie to accommodate this one percent take. A member of the NPFMC expressed concern about what would happen if the Alaska Native population doubled in fifty years and thus needed two percent. One member of the NPFMC, appointed to represent sport fishing interests, asked the Alaska Native leaders where they thought the additional one percent would come from because it certainly wasn’t going to come from the sport fishermen he represented.

Alaska Native peoples are very concerned about the increasing competition between people who depend on fish and wildlife—for sustenance, nutrition, culture, spirituality, and community wellness—and the rapidly growing groups of sport hunters, sport fishers, and lodge owners coming from the big cities in Alaska and the lower 48 who know nothing about the Alaska Native ways of life that have persisted over hundreds of generations into modern times. Alaska Native peoples, led by their Elders, are very concerned about the noise and pollution caused by thousands of hunters and fishers coming into pristine areas in their planes and boats, and the stark insensitivity of the catch-and-release salmon fishery. The Alaska Native Elders are unreserved about characterizing the latter as “playing with your food, just for money or selfish pleasure.” The Elders have pointed out for years that the fish feel a great deal of pain when hooked by the lip or gullet—that this suffering is unnecessary and likely affects their health and ability to reproduce. It was only in the early 2000s that scientists affirmed this traditional knowledge in scientific reports, but, as is typical of such reports, made no mention of Alaska Native observations.

For decades, tribal leaders have fought for their peoples’ right to live as their ancestors had lived for thousands of years—in hearings, in the state and federal halls of government, in Congress, in the state legislature, and in the courts. The tribal chiefs are expected by their people to protect their ways of life. At stake is the ability for families to have food to eat throughout the year, the right to practice traditional ways of connection to, and harmony with, the Earth, and even the ability to sustain the language, which is rooted in traditional practices and the land. Loss of Indigenous rights and access to traditional foods would spell economic, nutritional, cultural, and spiritual catastrophe for Alaska Native peoples.[12]

Tribal chiefs are at the forefront of the battles to protect the Alaska Native ways of life. As such, whoever is elected and under what circumstances is of paramount importance, which is why the Elders chose to intervene in this election, for the good of the whole. They are not concerned about who gets elected, but how they are elected.

As we reached the school gymnasium, I calculated that some three hundred people had gathered to sit in the bleachers. At the center of the gym floor was a single microphone. Everyone was relaxed, laughing and joking with each other or greeting familiar faces, waving to friends and family. This is a familiar scene at any Alaska Native gathering, which has the feel of being “people-centered.” The gatherings are times to renew acquaintances and friendships, or simply to acknowledge each other by saying hello in a shared language, or teasing, or telling jokes. There is not a single Indigenous peoples’ gathering I have been to, in or out of Alaska, in which I didn’t feel that everyone was making genuine connection with everyone else. People are important in Indigenous cultures, and no one can be ignored. Everyone is made to feel acknowledged and welcomed. I love these gatherings, wherever I travel. This time was no exception.

An Elder stepped up to the microphone with a younger person who turned out to be an interpreter. The Elder had a dark brown, etched face and all-white hair. I love such Elders, always beaming youthfulness even though they may be in their seventies or even their eighties. Their eyes show a childlike innocence with the wisdom of someone who has lived and seen many things. “Camai,” (pronounced cha-my) the Elder greeted everyone and continued in the Yupik language, with the interpreter’s assistance for those who did not speak Yupik. “He says that they [the Elders] have taken over these elections because it has become too disruptive of the communities and community well-being. Here are the rules of this election as he has outlined them: Every candidate for prime chief will get a chance to talk before the crowd, but each candidate will not speak of themselves. Each candidate will speak about their opposing candidates. The speaker who can find the most things good and true about the other candidates will be the winner of this election.”

I could hear the large audience murmuring. “Now we are getting to the real stuff,” someone behind me said. “Good!” another, a Yupik woman, said. “This is the traditional way!”

“He says that they will pick the candidates who would speak about each other,” the interpreter said. The names were called out, and the two main candidates for prime chief were selected. These two candidates had said some harsh words about each other during their campaigns. It was these harsh words and the resulting hard or hurt feelings they stirred up that had divided the families and communities of the region.

All candidates also understood that, if they spoke of another candidate’s quality that was not true, the Elders would know it. And, therefore, the candidate who spoke ill would not only be likely to lose the election but, far worse, would be shamed in the eyes of his or her people. Such things are rarely forgotten, and it could take years to restore credibility in the eyes of the people. Each candidate, as a result, was very careful in choosing the words to describe the other.

I listened and watched, fascinated, as Charlie (one of the main candidates) got up to speak. “I know William. He is a good father and provider for his family. I see him pay attention to his children and teach them the traditional ways. He is very knowledgeable about our culture and shares his knowledge freely for anyone who asks. I know William to be a very good hunter and fisherman. He knows the lands and waters like our ancestors did. I see William attend tribal council meetings because I know he is concerned about our people and our way of life. William speaks the Yupik and English language very well, and so I know he can communicate to us and to the outsiders. I know William to be a man who can understand difficult things of the modern times.” Charlie paused for quite a while, then his voiced choked up with emotion. “I know William is a good man and he really does care about everyone, just like all of us who are running for the position of prime chief!” Tears started to well up in Charlie’s eyes as he struggled to talk on. “I have said some bad things about this man, and I am sorry I did. It was selfish of me, and I hope William will find room in his heart to forgive me.” Charlie sat down. The silence in the room was palpable. Then—suddenly—boisterous applause.

It was William’s turn to speak. “Thank you for such good words, Charlie. You are a good man and show courage in what you say. I accept your apology, and I feel I need to apologize too because what I’ve said about you was not good either. I regret this now, very much. You are a good man. We all know you are a good man. You are one of the best hunters in this area, and you conduct yourself good, so you are a good role model for our young men. I have seen you take care of and respect the animals that you hunt. You make sure the animal is killed quickly and so does not suffer. You do not waste anything of the animal and make sure all the other hunters get their fair share. You are a very fair man. And when you return to the village, you generously share what you got with the Elders, widows, and your extended family. You are a generous man. I see you always willing to help other hunters when they need to launch or retrieve their skiff in the water. I see you help other hunters cut up the seals and walrus, never complaining. Just like our fathers and ancestors have taught us. Charlie, you have learned our ways well and you are a good teacher, husband, and father. I feel you have the qualities necessary to be a good leader for our people. I ask for your forgiveness for the bad things I said about you. Please forgive me.” At this point, William teared up and walked toward Charlie. Charlie stood up and both men, tears in their eyes, embraced each other.

Everyone in the room stood up, applauding. Many people were moved to tears; one Elder woman sobbed with joy at having witnessed such a great healing, not just of the two men but of everyone in the room and, indeed, of all the affected villages. The conflicts in the villages dissolved, and harmony was restored. The work of the Elders was complete.

It is such wisdom that has allowed the Yupik people, and all Alaska Native cultures, to survive and thrive. I felt privileged to have been invited to witness this living wisdom unfold. It is in stark contrast to what we normally see in our state and national elections, in which our leaders bash each other and talk openly about killing enemies. As the Elders teach, such words create nothing but divisiveness and strife. When an entire national citizenship and its leaders verbally fight each other, speaking openly of killing, I often wonder what messages are sent to our young people. I worry about what our young are taking in and how this will affect us in the future when it is their turn.

Chapter 29

The Heart of the Halibut: A Rite of Passage of an Unangan Boy

I knew the halibut on my hand-line was very large and must have weighed over 180 pounds. It is undoubtedly a female, I thought to myself as I carefully maintained a steady pressure on the cotton line, using every part of my body to hoist her to the surface. I could feel that she was hooked by the lip and likely to come off the line if I did not remain present in the moment, with its energy and every movement however subtle. Unangan people do not use gender to distinguish male from female halibut, but we would know.

Halibut are one of the strongest fish in the Bering Sea, known to fight so fiercely that inexperienced people could get hurt once the fish is on board the small fourteen-to-twenty-two-foot craft we Unangan typically use around Saint Paul Island. Inexperienced fishers usually let the halibut fight before subduing it onboard. “Respect the sea and the halibut,” we would always hear as children. “Otherwise, you can hurt yourself.” Self-responsibility, -awareness, and -respect were only a few of the many life lessons taught to us by the halibut and the Bering Sea. If you got hurt, it was not the fault of the halibut, the sea, or the weather—it was your own doing.

I took my time as I hoisted the large halibut up from 150 feet off the rocky sea bottom, one-quarter-mile offshore and eleven miles from the village. If she wants to fight, go with her energy, don’t fight back. Honor its life force and the halibut will know to give itself to you. The wisdom and lessons given to me by my Elders were guiding me now. I knew that if the large halibut turned its head downward, it would have more physical power through momentum than either I or the cotton line could manage, so I had to maintain a steady pressure on the line. Any hesitation in my efforts and the halibut would know it instantly, causing it to swiftly turn downward, perhaps ripping the hook out of its mouth or breaking the fishing line. I could feel its energy. This was a powerful, wise, and old halibut. It knew to conserve its energy until an opportunity to escape presented itself, or until the last death struggle. It did not fight on its way up, its way of acknowledging my skill. As the halibut came into view, my partner, on her very first halibut fishing trip, gasped in astonishment at the size of the fish. I knew I would need another person besides myself to gaff the halibut, so I instructed her while I continued to slowly bring the halibut to the surface. When we gaff the halibut, we use a three-foot-long piece of shaped wood where the lower part fits the hand, with a bent sharpened metal piece fixed to the top end of the shaped wood to grab the halibut when it surfaces next to the skiff. The gaff is also used to stun the halibut when it surfaces so it won’t flop around when in the skiff.

Do not let the nose of the halibut hit the air before you are ready to gaff; otherwise, it will start fighting, my inner voice of generations stated. I had caught this fish adjacent to a riptide area filled with large rocks, so I had to watch the speed and direction of our drift while bringing up the halibut. The riptide zones can cause a boat to drift a half-mile in ten minutes, and the direction of drift can reverse in the same amount of time. I had to be aware in the moment regardless of what else was going on.

Finally, the halibut rose to the surface. I could see that it was about a five-and-a-half-foot female, as I had felt when it first struck the line, and it was hooked only by the lip. One misdirected gaff movement and it would rip the hook out of its mouth and be gone. Before I could gaff the large halibut, the boat rocked to the swells caused by the riptides, causing the halibut’s nose to lift into the air. It immediately arched its muscular back and powerfully thrashed its tail in the air, heading back down to the bottom. I let the line go but kept a slight pressure on it. I had to be completely one with the halibut if I was not to lose it. I had to know its intentions before it acted on them. Too much pressure on the line and the halibut would be gone. Too little pressure on the line and it would be gone. It had to be precise, and I had to know exactly when the halibut was about to reach the bottom in order to turn it back upward with its own momentum. To bring the halibut back under my own muscle would ensure that the halibut would be lost. Today people might call this Zen fishing, but for me, it has always been the way of the Unangan.

I felt the halibut beginning to turn, and I gently increased the pressure on my line, bringing its head back up and continuing to haul again. There was no struggle, only weight. The fish was conserving her energy for when we would face each other again.

I was going through a ritual my Unangan ancestors had undoubtedly experienced over the ten thousand years of our intimate relationship with the Bering Sea. Taking a halibut in the proper way and mastering it is a rite of passage into adolescence and, ultimately, into manhood. It was part of an experience that connected me directly with my ancestors: they had felt the energy of the halibut just as I did; they had loved the Bering Sea just as I did; their emotions had no doubt been the same as what I was experiencing with a halibut on the hand-line. (Prior to the invention of the cotton line, my ancestors used strong lengths of kelp.) The smell, taste, and feel of this wondrous place in the middle of the Bering Sea were the same as what my ancestors experienced. This sea is my experiential history book and a personal link to my ancestors.

Historically, our seafaring technology had been the most sophisticated of any North American culture when the Russian fur traders found and enslaved us. Our people had traveled in high-seas kayaks to places as distant as southern California, the Pacific Islands, and the coast of Japan. Our craft were known to be the best open-water kayaks in the world. Having built a traditional Unangan kayak, I learned that its sophistication is based on the superior ability of the kayak to move with every nuance of the sea, from the most overt to the most subtle. To construct such craft required a profound understanding of the Bering Sea, an understanding that has remained relatively intact to this day, despite the genocide and severe cultural disruption Unangan experienced for more than two hundred years. It was this very same kind of understanding I was using to connect with the halibut on my line. Like the kayak to the sea, I had to intimately connect with the halibut in order to feel its every nuance and intention, in order to succeed in bringing it on board. This connection is the foundation for what is often termed by Native peoples as our traditional knowledge and wisdom.

At five years of age, I was introduced to the seafaring ways of my ancestors. This rite of passage began with a group of children clustered around a man, known in the village as “Old Man,” cutting halibut on the emerald green grass next to his home. He had just come back from a fishing excursion with a load of halibut caught from a fourteen-foot New England–style double-ended dory powered by a ten-horse outboard motor. The halibut would be used to feed the Elders, widows, and disabled first, then his extended family, and finally his own immediate family.

I was part of the group of children who watched with fascination and wonder as Old Man skillfully and carefully cut the halibut into special parts for specific kinds of meals—soup bone cuts, steak cuts, fish pie cuts. Even more fascinating for me was to see what was in the halibut’s stomach—sand lance, octopus, and small king, tanner, and horsehair crab.

Suddenly, Old Man, bronzed from windburn that resulted from the day’s outing, cut the halibut’s heart out and held it out to us, moving around inside the circle of children. “Whoever will eat this halibut heart raw will always catch as much halibut as you will ever need whenever you go fishing,” he proclaimed.

We all stepped back, startled by this gesture. Then, without thinking, I said, “I’ll eat it!”

Unbeknownst to me at the time, this old Unangan tradition determined who was ready to go to sea to fish for halibut. Unangan wisdom taught that whoever would have enough courage to eat a raw halibut heart would make a good student. This ritual also determined which child was a risk taker and willing to experience the unknown to learn new things. The entire community reinforced these ways by actively offering learning opportunities to children who demonstrated this kind of curiosity. From the time I ate the halibut heart, my extended family and men in the village would take me out fishing whenever there was an opportunity.

A month after I ate the halibut heart, my first halibut gave itself to me on a hand-line at age five on an outing with my dad. As is the Unangan custom with the first halibut, I was required to eat its heart to become “one with the halibut.” The spirit of the halibut entered me the moment I swallowed its heart. For hours, as we continued fishing, I gazed at the halibut that chose me. For the first time I experienced a deep and special connection with that which gave my people sustenance for millennia. In my open child mind and heart, I felt that the halibut and I were part of the same fabric that makes up all things, and my respect and reverence for the halibut took on a new meaning.

My first halibut went to the Elders and my extended family, and one piece was kept for me to eat. Catching the halibut was exhilarating, but there was nothing like seeing the delight and gratefulness in the faces of the people to whom I gave the halibut. “Give away your first halibut, and halibut will always come to you,” the adults would say.

In the traditional way, I did not ask a lot of questions; instead, I was encouraged to simply observe what the men were doing and to mimic them. It was an experiential school that taught more by actions than I could ever have learned from words alone. The total number of words the men used in all the years of learning how to fish was less than the number of words I am using in this chapter. But, whenever there were words, they were filled with lessons. I would listen to my dad and the other men speak in Unangan with reverence about the halibut and the sea. They would comment on when the tide was turning or whether or not the “bottom was coming up” while fishing in areas where the sea bottom consisted of basalt rocks typical of volcanically created islands. As we drifted, the elevation of the sea bottom would change. Learning to be aware of the subtlest of sea bottom changes increases the chances of catching halibut. Most halibut feed within three feet off the sea bottom, although many times we caught halibut sixty feet off the bottom when it followed the bait on our hooks as we hauled the lines up. I also learned that, depending on age, halibut forage in distinctly different sea bottom terrain.

The Bering Sea is the Unangan version of the modern-day supermarket. Three-foot halibut were found in one area, four-foot in another, and five-foot in another. Through experience, and without the use of compass or map, I learned the sea bottom topography of the entire six-mile radius around Saint Paul, as well as the three adjacent islands that make up the Pribilofs. I witnessed how the men would take in information through the use of all their senses: from the clouds and their formations, the color of the water, the direction of drift, the speed of drift, the timing between tides, the movement of wind, the type of sea bottom, and the shape and movement of the sea in the areas we were in. I began to understand the value of self-awareness and the necessity of remaining connected to the sea, the air, and the land for success in catching halibut and for safety. I was learning an ancient language of communication with the Bering Sea, Mother Earth, and Father Sky, one that allowed our people to survive and thrive in one of the most challenging of environments for hundreds of generations.

I went through my next rite of passage at age eleven when my father gave me permission to use his boat and motor to go halibut fishing. I did not have to pass any competency test to earn this privilege because my father knew I was ready. My skills would match those of much older men who did not have the benefit of the Unangan way of knowing. I could navigate safely without a compass in the fog that predominated the summer months when the halibut were back from their southern migrations. I could feel, smell, and read the texture of the sea and air to know when it would be time to return to land to avoid impending storms. I knew how to “ride the skiff or dory” when caught in large swells or breaking sea. I knew what part of the day the halibut preferred to feed, and where and when they go to give birth. I knew the sea bottom like the back of my hand.

Although I was confident of my abilities and skills at this young age, I also knew to have humility and respect for the halibut and the Bering Sea. The price of arrogance in the face of the Great Mystery—all there is to know about the universe and all that exists—could be death. There was always more to learn from the halibut and the sea, even for the most accomplished seafaring person.

My thoughts came back to the halibut on my hand-line. The way of the hand-line allows me to feel the halibut directly and is our mode of direct communication. Through the hand-line, I can feel when the halibut is near the hook before it strikes, and this knowledge allows me to prepare for the lightning-fast bite on the hook. Otherwise, the halibut will take the bait before I can set the hook. I can tell if the bait is being sucked in, but not taken by the halibut, and I can tell if the halibut is simply moving its body across the bait to determine if it is going to take it. I can tell how the halibut is hooked once it is on the line—by the lip, jaw, gullet, or snagged on the body. This knowledge tells me how to bring the halibut up—quickly or slowly, gently or vigorously. I can tell the size of the halibut once it is hooked, and I can tell how much it will fight before hoisting my line. The ability to secure such information determines the degree of success of the fisher. Commercial long-line fishing techniques are devoid of this dimension of connection with the halibut. Younger Unangan men who chose the way of commercial fishing, without learning the traditional Unangan way, lose much in their understanding of the halibut and the ancient ways to communicate with all of nature.

Finally, with the help of my partner, I brought the great halibut into the boat. The wondrous and mysterious fish surrendered without further resistance. My partner’s eyes welled up in tears as we both realized the significance of this moment for the halibut and for each of us. The halibut’s death is filled with meaning as he gives its life to us with dignity, power, and grace so that we may sustain ourselves physically, emotionally, culturally, and spiritually.

Honoring the halibut in the way taught for generations, we spent the day carefully and respectfully cutting up the halibut, making sure not to waste any part of it. We returned its skeleton back to the sea so that the halibut could choose to return to feed someone else. We drummed and gave a prayer of thanksgiving. We gave away some of the halibut to many in the village, and there was still plenty to meet our own needs for the rest of the year.

I am thankful for the many blessings and bounty given to me by the halibut and the Bering Sea. After decades of traditional fishing, the spirits of the halibut and the Bering Sea continue to teach me, their Unangan apprentice, my place in the great Circle of Life. After all is said and done, this is the essential gift of wisdom from the halibut heart, given to all who have the courage to learn from, and master, the Unangan way of fishing for thousands of years.

Chapter 30

The Bering Sea Council of Elders

In 1990, I received a sizable grant to support the meeting of Elders to discuss the Bering Sea and its people. I felt that we needed their guidance because we were facing great changes in the Bering Sea, the birds, and the animals. Seabirds and several species of marine mammals were declining at an unprecedented rate, first noticed by my people in 1977. Seabird chicks were falling off cliff ledges in larger numbers than ever in living memory, too weak to maintain their hold. Adult birds were obviously emaciated, with their breast bones sticking out and their chest muscles gone. Steller sea lions were eating seals in greater frequency than ever before, and fur seal pelts from the subsistence take were so thin that we could see through them when put up toward a light. We knew an ecosystem-wide phenomenon was occurring given that depth foragers, surface foragers, and near and distance foragers that bred on the Pribilofs were all precipitously declining. Many of these species are continuing their decline today. The birds, fish, and wildlife are key to the people of the Bering Sea, and so anything happening to them affects us directly. We depend on these animals for the nutrition, subsistence, spirituality, culture, health, and well-being of our communities.

I established the Bering Sea Council of Elders and sent invitations to all the Elders I could think of. Word spread about the Council. In all, we had twenty-seven of the most revered Elders from seven regions of Alaska attend four meetings a year, four days per meeting, for four years. The Yupik Elders spoke only their language, so an interpreter translated for us through translation equipment we managed to borrow from the Alaska Federation of Natives, an umbrella organization of all the Native groups in Alaska.

I acted as coordinator for the Council, decided how to conduct the meetings, and arranged for the meetings to be audio-recorded for subsequent review and action by the staff and me if necessary. However, I knew that the Elders wanted to be free of any constraints of time or procedure, so I simply set the place and date for meetings and left the rest up to them. It was, and is, unprecedented to have such a gathering for as long as four years on an inter-regional basis.

I learned a lot about how to conduct meetings from these Elders and continue to use their methods in my work to this day. We would first start off in prayer, with a different Elder leading in his or her own language at each meeting. Then what I witnessed could be a template for deliberations anywhere: Anyone who wanted to say something could speak. When someone spoke, no one interrupted, and the individual would speak as long as he or she wanted. No one kept notes to speak from. Everyone spoke from their hearts.

Each speaker, before saying anything, would affirm the prior speaker, even if he or she did not know the person—for example, “I see that the prior speaker chooses her words carefully when speaking and speaks wisely. I will take her comments into my heart to consider her thoughts.” Then, the speaker might speak from a completely opposite point of view, without use of any words that would be considered violent. Words are considered violent if they can hurt someone. For example, the speakers never said such things as “I disagree with you,” or “I think that is wrong,” or “I disagree.” The speaker simply spoke his or her own truths without reference to another. But, if the speaker agreed with another person, he or she might say so.

When everyone had a chance to speak on the topic, the deliberations were complete, and consensus on a subject would be intuited. No vote was ever taken. If there was no consensus, everyone understood that discussions would continue until there was consensus. Every meeting was conducted in this way.

Later the Council elected an Elder to chair the meetings, Walter Austin, a Tlingit from Southeast Alaska. He was chosen for his wisdom and ability to teach young people. In earlier years he had made his mistakes that he regretted, but he had learned from them and now was on a good path. The Council then took on a form I had not envisioned. People started to attend as observers, and some even brought issues for the Council’s guidance and consideration. One time the great-great-grandson of Chief Sitting Bull spoke before the Council, dressed in his traditional regalia. He had made a staff out of wood and placed a real raven on the top. A wolf’s tail was tied on the bottom. He presented this staff to the Council and asked them to receive it as a gift. The Council accepted it.

The Council of Elders had several messages they wanted to share throughout. They were very concerned about the younger people, who do not know how to survive through difficult times because they have learned the Western ways and ignore their own ways. We must stop trying to “save” the Bering Sea and instead concentrate of learning how to live as a real human being. They feel an urgency to prepare young people. They want to find ways to interact with the young people. The young people don’t know their own language, and the Elders speak more in their own language, making it difficult. Another difficulty the Elders recognized is that the young people are chasing the Western ways with their technologies, such as the computer and mobile phones, and their fast pace of modern times. These ways take the young person away from learning their language and their culture. The Elders recognized that the young get a Western education and pursue that, but it is done at the expense of learning their traditional ways that should come first or at least concurrent with learning the Western ways. They recognized that the Bering Sea is changing quickly, and that these changes may cause great difficulties in the future for coming generations. The coming generations need to be ready, and the only way to be ready is for young people to learn their own language, their traditional ways, and to become a real human being. Only being present in the moment and in the heart will the coming generations know what to do. It cannot be solved by the mind. This is the way of the real human being.

There will be hard times according to the Elders. And many people may suffer. The only way to prepare for these times is to be a real human being because the real human being is guided spiritually first, then physically and mentally. The heart will tell the real human being what he or she must do. Then, the mind figures out how to accomplish what the heart says to do. The heart never lies and guides us impeccably.

The real human being knows how to be present in the moment and in the heart. In the old days, everyone was a real human being, in harmony with all in Creation. There were no prisons, no male-dominated hierarchies, no violence. There was peace, love, understanding of Mother Earth, and harmony with oneself and everything in existence. The Elders said that to be a real human being we must get out of the head and into the heart so that we can hear what the heart is saying. They were concerned that the younger generations can’t tell the difference between messages from the heart and from the mind because these generations were schooled at an early age to think and that thinking is the mainstream society’s idea of human intelligence.

It was an honor and a privilege to listen to and learn from these Elders. They conducted themselves with dignity and grace that was taught to them by their Elders before them. I now use what I learned from that day forward—how to listen, how to conduct oneself in meetings, the wisdom of the talking circle principles, and how to achieve consensus and prevent conflict. Society needs this wisdom today.

Chapter 31

The Mapuche of Southern Argentina

At the time I was the coordinator of the Bering Sea Council of Elders, composed of some of the most revered Elders in seven regions of Alaska, a Mapuche messenger delivered a message to the Alaskan Elders. The message was delivered personally because that was the protocol, and because they had no means of communication. They were physically very poor. The Argentinian government had forcibly removed them from productive lands in the 1950s to the desert where they barely eke out a living. The Council deliberated on who should be sent to South America. They had decided, for whatever reason, that I should go, but the Mapuche messenger had already left, so there was no way to let them know of the Council’s decision.

I arrived in Argentina and traveled to the place where I was to meet my guide, a young Mapuche chief. I was explaining why I came instead of the Elders when he put his hand up, saying that the explanation was unnecessary as he already knew.

I asked, “How do you know?”

“Because the Elders told us it would be you coming,” he said.

“How did the Elders know?” I asked.

“They talked with the Earth and the Sky,” he said nonchalantly. Then I knew these Elders were real human beings who talked the Language of One. This language allows the person to communicate with everything, and especially with Mother Earth and Father Sky through use of what I call the “inner net,” not the internet. It is a way all peoples communicated a long time ago. There are still some people left who understand this language, and the Mapuche Elders clearly kept this knowledge.

My interpreter and I received instructions on how to get to the ceremonial grounds two days from any civilization. As we were leaving, the chief explained that “there was a delegation of Kechua/Ayamara spiritual leaders that will be there to greet me. They came by horseback and traveled for two weeks just to meet you,” he said. As we drove to the sacred ceremonial grounds, I wondered why they would travel by horseback for two weeks just to meet me.

When we got to the ceremonial grounds at a special sacred place, the spiritual leaders were there, just like the chief said. When we got out of the car we had rented, the delegation of seven spiritual leaders approached. Through two interpreters we were able to talk. “We heard of your traditional name. Could you please tell us how you got the name, how you pronounce it, and what it means?” the eldest of the leaders asked.

I responded, “The name is Kuuyux. It means an arm extended out from the body, like a messenger from the Aleut to the modern world, a bridge. I got the name when I was four years old by the last Kuuyux. He gave me his name, which is a name given to one person in each lifetime amongst my people,” I explained.

They were visibly excited. The Elder spiritual leader responded, “We have exactly the same name, given in exactly the same way, and it means exactly the same thing. This confirms our stories that we were go-betweens for your people and those in South America thousands of years ago,” he said. And that is how I found out that our people did indeed go to South America thousands of years ago as I had heard from my Kuuyux.

The ceremonial grounds were in the high desert, where the temperature got as high as 125 degrees Fahrenheit during the day and 25 below at night—a hundred-degree temperature difference in one day! It was quite an experience for an Alaskan. I also saw firsthand how the Mapuche were forced to live a life of bare subsistence. The Mapuche people were concerned for their Elders because it gets very cold in the winter time, and they live in small shacks with one wood stove for heat. The stoves barely keep the shacks warm.

The region had not had rain for at least nine years or more, so a lot of Mapuche people were gathered to conduct ceremonies—at least a hundred. Each day of ceremonies would begin at 6:00 a.m., when the sun would rise, and end at 1:00 a.m. the next day, and this went on for four days. The ceremony was begun by someone who had to be the oldest person in the world at the time, 123, plus, years old. Her name was Rosa, a blind woman who could only speak the Native language. She changed the way I look at “being old” because not only would she lead the ceremony, but she also stayed the entire time, day and night for four days! My assigned role along with many others was to give energy to the dancers, who danced day and night for four days, by standing next to them, focusing my energy on them, and chanting.

At the end of the ceremonies, we saw some incredible things. Two snow eagles flew clockwise, spiraling upward at one end of the sacred grounds, and two condors were at the other end, flying counterclockwise. As the wondrous birds flew out of sight, it began to rain. The Mapuche were fulfilling their part of the eagle and condor prophecy that every Native nation in the western hemisphere knows about. The prophecy says that when the eagle and condor meet and shed tears, a great healing will take place on Turtle Island. The Mapuche Elders were very happy, and we celebrated the finish of the ceremonies with a feast. The people offered what they had; it was the first (and probably the last) time I had horse, the only thing they had that could feed so many people.

There have been many eagle and condor gatherings before and since the Mapuche ceremony. Unbeknownst to me, the Mapuche had been concerned that the ceremony would die because the young ones didn’t see the value in what the Mapuche Elders practiced—until they came to the ceremony and witnessed my role in this event. They saw that someone from atop the world had come to be in their ceremony and that if someone from so far away saw value in the Mapuche ceremonies, then there must be something of value to learn. So they are participating in the ceremonies once again. Rosa died about six months later. I found out when an English-speaking Mapuche friend called from Argentina saying that she had left the world because she felt her work was done.

I had a chance to meet with their young people, who told me how poorly they were treated in Argentina. One seventeen-year-old boy sobbed as he related his experiences in the city with racism. My heart went out to the boy, and I told him, “Be thankful that you can still cry. It is a gift that you should never let anyone take away from you even if it is crying about your treatment. If you don’t cry, your heart will be hardened. If your heart gets hard, the racist people can declare victory because you will not be of use to yourself or anyone else.” That young boy and I became good friends, and he would go with me everywhere while I was in Argentina. I gave him the flute that I cherished. Later, when we said our “so longs,” he gave me a flute in return, made simply out of a branch from a tree.

Chapter 32

What the Elders Say

Over the years, I have been blessed and honored to know and hear many Elders from many traditions. I have learned a great deal from them about what it takes to be a real human being. My only regret is that I cannot place individual names to all of the following wisdoms; suffice it to say that their communities include Unangan, Yupik, Inupiat, Tlingit, Athabascan, Maori, Hopi, Sioux, Cree, Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), Maya, Tarahumara, Mapuche, Inca, Metis, Zulu, Hawaiian, and Inca.

“Nothing is created outside until it is created inside first.” We are angry at others because we are angry at ourselves. We criticize others because we are critical of ourselves. We are separate from others because we have separated from our hearts. We may hate others because we hate ourselves. We trash the environment on the outside because we trash the environment inside. We judge others on the outside because we are judgmental of ourselves first. This statement probably had more effect on me than any other wisdom. When I took those words to heart, I began my healing journey in earnest. Now I remind myself of this simple but profound wisdom. The Elders knew that “the most unselfish thing we can do is to focus on healing ourselves first. We can’t offer the world that which we do not have.” If I want peace, I must practice, think, feel, and know peace within, then I can offer it to the world. If I want to eliminate “separation” in the world manifested in such things as wars, violence in all its forms, racism, destruction of the environment, and all such ills, I must first heal the separation within myself.

Healing separation within myself requires recognition of what it means. The Elders say that “we must look to the root causes of anything before we can heal.” The root cause of separation is separation from the heart. A wise Yupik, Harold Napolean, recognized this in himself. When he was a young leader with a wife and children, the pressures were too much for him and he took to drinking himself into a stupor. One day while he was drunk, his little boy died under his watch. As a result, he lost his job and his marriage. While in prison, he looked deep within himself. What was the root cause of his drinking? It wasn’t that it was an addiction or that many of his friends drank. He realized that this drinking was killing his people and himself. His people had suffered much, beginning with the Russian fur traders’ arrivals to his land, and then the U.S. government. He coined the words “Great Death” to refer to his people’s suffering, which included diseases brought in from the outside that wiped out as much as eighty percent of a village.

What was causing the drinking, suicides, drug abuse, domestic violence, and depression in his community? He then came across the story of Vietnam vets who returned home by the tens of thousands taking to drug abuse, addictions of all kinds, and depression. Many took literally to the hills not wanting any human contact, and many committed suicide. The doctors finally put a name to the condition—post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He realized that his people were suffering from PTSD. His people, like the vets, did not want to remember the days of horror, when as many as eight out of ten people in the villages died in a matter of months. The survivors did not want to smell, hear, dream, or experience anything that would remind them of the horror. Vietnam vets did not want to remember, think, feel, smell, or hear of anything that would remind them of the horrors they experienced either, and so they worked at not feeling, which meant disconnecting from the heart and taking to addictions that altered the mind. One definition of an addiction is a “strategy to escape the present moment.” The present moment, however, is when one can listen to the heart without any mental interference.

Harold realized that he was carrying a legacy of spiritual sickness that his ancestors, survivors of times of horror, had to have had. The survivors had developed behaviors, attitudes, and feelings borne of those dark days and passed them along to the next generation, until it is here with them today. Harold put his realizations in a book called Yuuyaraq: The Way of the Human Being. We need only to think of the wars and events of horror around the world that occurred in the past and are occurring today to realize that we all suffer from this spiritual sickness. Clearly, a majority of the world’s population has had or is experiencing traumas that affect them mentally, physically, and spiritually.

Yupik Elders say that this is the reverse society, or inside-out society, where we have reversed the laws for living. “Before, we used to teach how to live, now we teach how to make a living; we used to honor the Elders, now we honor being young; before we used to contemplate death in order to fully live and now we contemplate life; before we used to honor times of darkness and now we are afraid of it; before we used to teach how to be present in the heart, now we are in the mind; before the heart used to tell the mind what to do and now the mind tells the heart what to do.”

We contemplate the mystery of life in many ways, because we no longer contemplate the mystery of death—perhaps because of our subconscious fear of death. Death is the unknown, it may mean darkness, and it is mysterious. Perhaps we put our seniors in pioneer homes or assisted-care facilities, out of sight, out of mind, because we do not want the reminder that getting older means being nearer to death. Perhaps we light up our cities so much that we can no longer see the stars because the darkness is unknown and mysterious, reminding us of death. Perhaps we honor youth because being older means being closer to death.

The mind now tells the heart what to do. We are schooled from infancy through adulthood to think. It is a belief that human intelligence rests in the brain. When we attend school, we are taught what to think about, how to think, and what the correct answer is to a problem, all geared toward preparing a student to be productive in the economy. We are taught to give away our “authority” to the one in control, in this case, the teacher. One must obey the teacher and must receive the teachings from the teacher. This system is linear, from kindergarten through post-doctorate, and everything less than post-doctorate is considered “inferior” in some way. It is a way that has circumscribed out intelligence, where we are not allowed to think what we think but to obey those who tell us how we must think. And this way takes us out of the present moment into the past or the future. Wise people throughout the ages say that “the point of power is in the present moment.” Thich Nhat Hanh said, “Every breath we take, every step we make, can be filled with peace, joy, and serenity. We need only to be awake, alive in the present moment,” and to be alive in the present moment is a place of no thought.[13] What takes us into the past or future and away from the present, according to the Elders, is hate, shame, guilt, remorse, anger, rage, jealousy, pride, and others, which take us into the past, and fear, which is only a projection into the future of something that has not happened yet. It is, according to the Elders, when time began. These are products of the mind.

We are so trapped in our minds that we do not consider how this has colored our world. There seems to be no other way to be, and this way has created the social, political, economic, and physical realities in the world. Einstein said something like “we can’t solve the problems with the same consciousness that created the problems,” and in the thinking of the Elders, this consciousness is the mind telling the heart what to do. Consider, for example, our thoughts about solutions to climate change: let’s convert our cars and trucks to hybrids. It will lessen the amount of CO_2 we put into the air, right? So, we convert farmlands to growing corn for ethanol, exacerbating food shortages around the world and making foods more expensive because there are less food-producing farmlands. We do not consider what we are going to do with the batteries in electric cars when we are finished with them. The batteries are filled with exotic minerals that are toxic. If we do with them what we have done with our computers when thrown away, we might ship them to Thailand, or some other developing-world location, as garbage. The poor people of those countries, needing money for food, mine these modern-day marvels for parts that they can sell, poisoning themselves and the Earth.

And the military of any nation? It is easier to train individuals who are in the mind to kill because the individuals have separated from their hearts. Our national leaders talk openly about killing the enemy. What message does this send to our young ones? Remember, the Elders say that nothing is created outside until it is created inside first. When we separate from the heart, we separate from ourselves. It is easier, then, to separate from others. The mind only thinks about itself, and is about “me” and “mine,” so we compete in school, in athletics, in the economy and everywhere individualism is paramount. There are few opportunities to emphasize working for the good of the people through teamwork and cooperation.

Because we are separated from ourselves, we create things that are separated. Western science, called Cartesian-based science, is founded on the principle that we must have separation of the observed and the observer. This science is based on specialization, composed, for example, of the marine mammal, fish, land, water, and atmospheric disciplines. The systems encourage the specializations to the point that data cannot be correlated with other disciplines that may be connected. Most sciences are struggling to develop collaborations with other disciplines now that we know “everything is connected.” Interdisciplinary efforts are only in their fetal stages of development, and a long way from trans-disciplinary science, which will bring us closer to understanding how nature works. We don’t see that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts in nature, because the parts act synergistically. Every discipline that we deal with in our society, be it social, political, economic, and biological is based on specialization. We can’t solve the problems with the same consciousness that created the problems.

The Elders ask, “What are we choosing to focus on? Are we choosing to focus on the ‘problem,’ or are we choosing to focus on the vision and dream we want to create in the world?” The Elders understand that what we choose to focus on becomes our reality. More organizations and people today are trying to create a more just and fair world and improving how we interact with nature than any time in human history, yet it seems the conditions are far worse than when they began. The same goes for efforts to stop suicides, murders, domestic violence, substance abuse, illnesses, and anything else that we feel is not good for humankind. Why? The answer, according to the Elders, is in the answer to their question.

We are choosing to focus on the problems. This may be difficult for people to understand, but we are focused on trying to stop something and are emotionally tied up in this focus rather than following a vision or a dream we may have. The Elders understand that a focus on the negative, no matter how well intended the person is, only compounds the problems. So, for example, a person or organization invests so much energy to stop the timber industry from cutting the trees to protect the spotted owl in the Pacific Northwest, they “win” the battle, take their credit, and move on to the next battle. The timber industry takes their licks and decides to move to Canada and clear-cut more trees than they ever had in the past. The challenge lies with the attitude that “we are in a battle” against this or that. The battle becomes the focus emotionally, and it is reactionary and not proactive. What we must do, according to these Elders, is emotionally detach from the issue, stop thinking it is a battle, then act. The action must not have an emotional edge. Doing it because you feel it is in harmony with the Earth, and without judgment of those who do otherwise, is not the main focus for action. The main focus must be on the vision, the dream of what we want the world to be. What are we choosing to focus on?

And then there are those who choose not to focus, because they feel powerless to affect real change they know is needed. Why do they feel powerless to do anything? According to the Elders, it is because we are all schooled in accepting someone else’s authority from the time we are born until we die. It discourages thinking on your own, outside the box. And, we are so immersed in hearing negative things that we have to shut it all out because it is too much—global climate change, destruction of the forests, extinction of animals, violence, pollution, injustice, the list goes on and on. We know them well. We may say, “Someone else is taking care of this” or “It is too big for me to make a dent in anything that matters,” or both. We say the first because we are indoctrinated into giving away our personal authority to others. We say the second because we forgot how to listen to our hearts. Our hearts will tell us what to do in any circumstance that matters to us, including what really matters. It never lies to us, but our minds lie and deceive us all the time. We must be able to distinguish what is only of the mind and what is of the heart. We are so used to having the mind tell us what to do that many of us cannot distinguish between the two. When we are “confused,” we know the mind is speaking to us, not the heart. The heart does not equivocate. When we are sure beyond a shadow of a doubt, we are likely listening to our hearts if we are present in the moment. The heart speaks to us when we are present. The messages become muted when the mind interferes.

Rita Blumenstein, a revered Yupik Elder, says that “we must unburden our hearts in order to think clearly.” She is speaking of listening to an unburdened heart to see the truths. And when we heal from the things taught by this reverse society, we can have a real discourse with others about issues of concern. And this discourse does not use the violence of attacking or putting someone on the defensive. It recognizes that everyone has his or her own truth, and that truth is equally valid as one’s own. After everyone has spoken in a council or meeting, a consensus about what needs to be done is reached. This way, they demonstrate being present and speaking their truth from the heart. It is a civilized way of the real human being. If we are to deal with any issue personally or otherwise, we would do well to emulate the Elders. To do otherwise means that we are stuck in the matrix that speaks only from the mind. And we all know where that has gotten us today. Rita Blumenstein also says, “We don’t do the world any favors by thinking small.” When we recover our “real human being–ness,” we will find our center to connect with all that is. When we do, we will know what to do personally and collectively.

And finally, the Hopi Elders say, “Seek not to fight evil, let goodness take its place.” This is profound wisdom in simplicity. Far too often we seek to “fight” evil, but as the Elders know, when we fight, we add to the atmosphere of negativity surrounding the evil. We may have temporary victories, which are satisfying to the ego, but we lose in the long run because the actions we take to solve something are based on fighting, ensuring the coming generations have the same battle in a different form. When we let “goodness take its place,” we are focused on the dream or vision. It is not in reaction to something, but proactive and positive. We do not acquiesce to the dictates of our egos, which like short-term victories that keep us in illusion. We fail to look at the multi-generational consequences of our actions and words when we do not look at what we have wrought by winning at any cost.

We are all capable of applying the lessons from the Elders. It only takes going into the heart and following what it says. Yes, it takes courage, but unless we do this, we cannot build, let alone live in, peace and harmony with self and with the rest of Creation.

Chapter 33

Contemplating and Questioning Everything

As the Jews survived their holocaust, my people, the Unangan people, survived the near decimation of their population and of their culture. Like the Japanese-Americans, the Unangan people experienced the dislocation, isolation, and cruel restrictions of living in an internment camp. And, like the African-Americans, the Unangan people endured the atrocities of slavery. Yet Unangan people still live along the Aleutian Chain and the Pribilof Islands. Ours is a remarkable and colorful history filled with joy, pain, confusion, courage, doubt, agony, grief, and persistence. There is no doubt in my mind that the wisdom of the people is what made them resilient against all odds. I was blessed to have much of this wisdom imparted to me. My people and ancestors were my original teachers. They taught me, above all else, to retain my personal authority, the innocence of the child, and the wisdom of the Elders. Their teachings live in my heart, and for that I will be eternally grateful. Elders from many different traditions shared their insights and wisdom with me to build upon this wisdom that I inherited. It is this collective wisdom that the world needs now as we experience challenges to human survival on Mother Earth.

It is not a question of whether or not Mother Earth will survive. She will. After all, she has been in existence for billions of years. It is a question of whether or not we will survive. If we continue to use paradigms for living that are borne of a masculine imbalance and destroy or minimize all the sacred feminine—including Mother Earth–based cultures, women healers, goddess cultures, women in general, and Mother Earth herself—we will all perish. I am convinced of this and you should be too. I learned to question everything I have taken for granted because of the wisdom of the ages.

Now I have time to reflect and do some soul searching. There are many questions, and some answers about Unangan people and northern fur seals. For example, why did the animal rights groups focus on saving the seals and not give any thought to the Unangan people? Why did the American public respond so strongly to their message? Why didn’t anyone understand our need to eat seal for food? Why didn’t anyone listen when we flagged the growing ecosystem problems in the Bering Sea? Why do the scientists and resource managers still not know what is causing the wildlife declines in the Bering Sea? Why did we, as a community, allow chaos and despair to reach such tragic proportions before we acted? Why did we succeed in our goals beyond our expectations?

There are answers to some of these questions, and I have learned that the spiritual healing of each individual is central to the healing of the whole community and the elimination of conflict.

The Hopi and Maori wisdom keepers say we are entering the World of the Fifth Hoop, which is a time of reconnection among the four sacred colors—red, black, white, and yellow—and that this reconnection is necessary to reestablish balance on Mother Earth. It requires healing.

The healing the wisdom keepers talk about is the process of reconnecting to the sacred within each of us. They understand that the underlying cause for personal and external conflict, violence, greed, thirst for power, fear, depression, and addictive behaviors is our disconnection from what is sacred within ourselves and thus sacred in all things. The fundamental cause of this disconnection stems from experiences of violence or abuse that wounded our souls.

Consider what we are doing today. Our cities are sanitized to eliminate our fear of the natural world. We put lights everywhere—even in small rural Alaskan villages—and we can no longer see the stars for our fear of the dark. We send our deceased loved ones to funeral homes and our pets to euthanasia centers out of our fear of death. Our children walk around detached from the present moment with headsets, listening to harshly loud music, or immerse themselves in video games—anything to disconnect from the present moment. We watch TV not for entertainment, but to escape from whatever troubles us at the moment. Our organizations are structured to control human behavior because we so greatly fear losing control. We create borders around our homes and our land out of fear of others. We create distinctions between races, cultures, religions, and beliefs because we are afraid of those things we do not understand. We think only of ourselves today and not future generations, in total selfishness. No one is untouched by this legacy of spiritual sickness.

The Unangan people of the Pribilof Islands have experienced anxiety, depression, fear, suicide, murder, and other violence because we are the offspring of our holocaust survivors who left us this legacy of spiritual sickness. Animal rights groups fought for the seals without regard to future consequences, thinking only of today, because they too are children of survivors. The people in Congress were only able to listen to their constituents because they were afraid; they too are suffering from this legacy.

The foundation for all conflict lies in our disconnection with the sacred within ourselves. It causes us to feel separate from others and all Creation. The key to dealing with conflict, personal or otherwise, is to focus on process rather than goal, loving who we are as imperfect beings, loving those or that which we may hate. That is the reason these Elders have all said, “We must seek not to fight evil, let goodness take its place.” Modern techniques for conflict resolution provide only a short-term and quick fix because they do not address the underlying causes of conflict. Remember the question of the Elders: What are we choosing to focus on? Are we choosing to focus on the “problem or issue,” or are we choosing to focus on our vision and dreams? Because that which we are choosing to focus on, no matter how good the intention, becomes our reality.

The lesson of the Pribilofs is to listen to the wisdom of the Elders. And to reconnect within.

Notes

1 Doing things without thought may be a difficult concept for Western-trained minds to understand since the mind is perceived as the center of intelligence, whereas Indigenous people know that true intelligence comes as a result of suspending thought.

2 The U.S. government needed seal oil for use in the war effort.

3 Alexander Galanin from Saint George Island and Arteme Hapoff of Saint Paul received Bronze Stars for valor in the Aleutian campaign.

4 In my youth, the federal government allowed Unangan to take seal meat for food from the “killing fields” during the government-sponsored slaughter of seals from June through August each year. The penalty for killing a seal outside the government-supervised take is a ten thousand-dollar fine, ten years in jail, or both. The law still exists.

5 Nine-thousand-year-old midden sites (refuse deposits that indicate human settlement) along the Aleutian Chain and on the Pribilof Islands contain large amounts of fur seal bones, indicating that, for millennia, our people depended heavily on the fur seal.

6 Civil service was instituted on the Pribilofs in the 1950s, but it was modified to pay fifty cents per hour, far below the standard rate, until the early 1960s.

7 The recounting of this story is by my own recollection. Various details may be different in small degrees. Except for those I acknowledge, this writer has applied fictitious names to some individuals involved so as not to offend anyone living today.

8 The names Merculieff and Merculief are designations of where we were born. It is the Unangan zip code forced on the Unangan people of the Pribilofs because there were so many identical names between Saint Paul and Saint George populations. As a result, catalogue orders were misdelivered by the government vessel. To eliminate the confusion, the government proclaimed that all born on Saint George would have one “f” in their name.

9 Turtle Island is a term used by Indigenous peoples to refer to the western hemisphere.

10 Intermediaries are usually involved in providing guidance about the community and culture and are usually people from the region and/or community.

11 The North Pacific Fishery Management Council is the domestic federal agency responsible for ensuring compliance with the international treaty and regulates fisheries in federal waters in the North Pacific.

12 The link between the experienced, older hunters and the young men would be severed if the ability to hunt and fish for traditional foods is lost. The link between the older women and the younger would also be severed if the ability to gather wild foods is lost. It is in the “subsistence camp” that the younger have extended contact with the older to learn their language, in the actual context of real-life experience from which the language was born, and the ethics and values of being a real human being, such as how to cooperate as a group, how to share foods with others, how to respect and have reverence for fish and wildlife, and how to demonstrate respect for Elders, the lands, fish and wildlife, and the waters. These ways of living are far more important than most non-Natives realize, and they are constantly being challenged by uniformed federal and state administrators and by segments of the public that do not see why these ways should be protected.

13 “Thich Nhat Hanh,” Famous Quote From, www.famousquotefrom.com/thich-nhat-hanh/.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ILARION MERCULIEFF had a traditional upbringing and a Western education, earning a BA from the University of Washington. He has served as chair of the indigenous knowledge sessions of the Global Summit of Indigenous Peoples on Climate Change, as cofounder of the Indigenous Peoples’ Council for Marine Mammals, the Alaska Forum for the Environment, the International Bering Sea Forum, and the Alaska Oceans Network. He is currently the president of the Global Center for Indigenous Leadership and Lifeways.

Ilarion Merculieff is available for readings and lectures. To inquire about a possible appearance, please contact the author at lmerculieff@gmail.com or visit his website www.gcill.com

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Acknowledgments

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

About the Author