Somehow these memories are both the happiest and saddest of my entire childhood.
So I guess I wonder, where is the line separating me into this culture or that culture, saying I have less or more? I’m just me, and like most people, I’ve had my heart broken a few times, but for the most part I have been happy.
I don’t want you to misunderstand me, though. There are some important and hard questions to be asked of history in Alaska. Native children were abused for many years by missionaries and teachers at territorial government schools. How do those effects trickle down through generations? How do we help families get out of patterns of alcoholism and addiction and domestic violence? These are real problems. But then if we use terms like subjugation and loss and the desire to “preserve culture,” it devalues and limits people in a way that I don’t think is accurate.
You shouldn’t assume my opinions represent how everyone feels, though. Even within my own circle of friends and family, you’ll find twenty different opinions on one subject. Whenever anyone writes down one of the old stories, several people come forward to say “No, that’s not the way it goes. This is how it happened.” I think there’s this tendency to lump people together, to think that all people who look like this or come from this background must think the same.
Here’s example: a few years ago an environmental group approached the tribe to ask us to support some stance, assuming we’d all agree. But we had to say no, actually, some of our members earn a living working for the exploration companies, even as their relatives are protesting against the mines. Another example: I have a group of friends who formed a band and they use traditional Wolverine River language, music, and dance but interweave them with modern sounds and influences. They performed at the birthday party of one of our elders, who was turning 100, but even though they meant it to honor her, she was upset by it. She is devoted to her church and was raised to believe the old ways are backward and evil.
All of these opinions are packed into one small town, even one family. You can see how complicated it is, even if you just scratch the surface. It’s humanity. We’re complicated and messy and beautiful.
When I’m reading these diaries and letters, more than anything, I’m thrilled, both as a historian and as a member of the tribe. We know so little about the precolonial Wolverine River, and the Colonel’s diaries are rich in information. Every detail, about how people dressed and spoke and prepared their meals, is an exciting discovery. I love the idea that women could turn into geese at the edge of a marsh, that a young girl could marry an otter and then slay him for his hide when he was found to be unfaithful. The dead could go to the mountains to hunt woolly mammoths, and instead of drunken teenagers and a psychopathic serial killer, Kulgadzi Lake could be inhabited by a giant toothy monster. There’s this sense in these stories that we were wrestling with a vibrant and fully spirited land.
I wish I could find the tree where Moses Picea was born. It’s probably not far from my uncle’s old hunting camp, but the journal entries are too vague to be sure. For the Colonel, it was a repulsive and bizarre encounter. He didn’t know that spruce tree or that river valley; he never knew Moses Picea or all that he did for Alaska. And certainly he couldn’t have imagined that the baby might somehow be connected to him and the “Man Who Flies on Black Wings.”
I find it very interesting that once the Colonel and his party cross the Wolverine Mountains and arrive at the Yukon, which by 1885 was already the territory of the Army and missionaries, they never come across another goose woman or lake monster. And during the next few years, when the miners and trappers started pouring up the Wolverine River, not one of them described such occurrences. I’m not saying that other world is gone, because I’m not convinced it is. Maybe we just don’t have the eyes for it anymore. I know I’ve never been so fortunate as to witness it, beyond stories and imagination. As my professors were so fond of saying in college, the paradigm has shifted.