Racing Toward Recovery. Lew Freedman

CHAPTER 6

      When I got out of the service I was around twenty-two years old and I missed home. Ted arrived back in Akiak a day before I did after combat in Vietnam. He started having nightmares about his time in the war.

      Sometimes he kept his feelings inside and sometimes he talked about it. He mentioned how hard it was to adjust to Akiak after seeing all of that killing and what the army did to all of the villages and women and children there. It bothered him.

      It was good for me to be back and hunting and fishing again. But there were no jobs in Akiak and I had the disability discharge from the army. I did have the GI Bill to use for school. After a few months in Akiak I decided to look for a job in Bethel. Bethel has more than 4,000 people so the odds were better I might find something. Also, Kuskokwim Community College is in Bethel, so I could take college courses.

      I landed a job at the hospital doing kitchen duty and washing dishes. It paid pretty well and I enrolled at the college. I worked full-time and I took courses full-time. I got my own place and I was busy, busy, busy. I began studying behavioral health counseling. I wanted to be a mental health counselor.

      This fit in with my plan of wanting to help others and I began studying for that degree. After washing dishes I got a job as the recreation director for the city of Bethel. I was nearly at black belt status in tae kwon do, so I wanted to do something using sports or physical education. I also was involved in karate. I began teaching an hour-and-a-half course each evening in karate at the recreation center. Then I was asked to teach karate at the high school, too, an extended hour. I was doing everything all at once for a while. I don’t know how I fit everything into the day. I was taking sixteen hours, sixteen credits and doing all of that teaching, as well. I didn’t have time to do anything except work, teach karate, and study.

      It took me three years to complete that degree at the college. I spent a while washing dishes, but there was a psychiatrist in town named Verner Stillner and he took an interest in me. He was trying to get a mental health program started for kids through the Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corporation.

      He knew I was teaching karate to young people and he would see me in the kitchen. Sometimes he wanted to have lunch or dinner with me. I told him that I was studying to become a counselor and he was working at the mental health program in Bethel. He told me about the idea he had for the kids project. He wanted to help the Yup'ik people with their mental health issues and that there was a job opening on the outreach mental health staff for a counselor. Dr. Stillner was involved. Bridget Kline, a Yup'ik from Mountain Village, was involved. And so was a counselor by the name of Dana Kopunuk. He was an elderly guy that Dr. Stillner had recruited. He asked me to take the position. It was explained that I would have more educational opportunities to advance myself and that Mr. Kopunuk would be my mentor. So I took it. That fit in with my goals of being a basketball coach and helping young people. It’s not the same as becoming a physical education teacher and a coach, but it is still helping.

      It also offered more money than washing dishes. I had flexible time, too, not having to get up and start work in the kitchen at six o’clock in the morning.

      The mental health program was the first in rural Alaska. It was an effort to come to grips with the issues that were affecting people. When I accepted the position I continued taking courses and Dr. Stillner ended up being one of my professors. I also took solo courses from him and he and his wife, Marianne (she was a psychiatric nurse who worked for the school district focusing on kids that had brain damage or developmental disabilities), joined my karate class and became my students.

      When I took the mental health position it expanded my work with kids in the middle school. After a while Marianne Stillner asked me if I would be interested in using the karate instruction as a self-esteem and confidence builder for the kids that were brain damaged, had developmental disabilities, or didn’t have any role models. We took some of those kids, equipped them with karate uniforms, and I spent two hours of my work day teaching them karate. I also worked as a counselor working through the schools in building self-esteem within these kids. These were kids who weren’t doing well in the classroom and they had low selfesteem because of that or other reasons. After a year of doing that we found that these kids had improved their confidence and their grades. Everything improved for these kids.

      This started in 1975 or 1976 and at the same time we had about thirty dogs in the kennel. My brothers were taking care of them, mainly Walter. But back then we always had around thirty dogs in our family for transportation and racing. It was pretty tough for me to spend too much time with the dogs because of all the things I was doing in Bethel during that period. But I took turns with getting fish for the dog food, feeding the dogs, and handling their sleds and equipment. I would go to Akiak on the weekends and mush the dogs. I kept my hand in with the dogs.

      At about this time there was an explosion in suicide amongst young people in Alakanuk, which is a little bit more than 150 miles from Bethel. There seemed to be suicides happening every week. This was exactly the type of thing we were trying to prevent from happening in Bethel through our program. The Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corporation was working with more than fifty tribes. We were trying to provide counseling services for the villages and it seemed as if Alakanuk was an important place to go.

      It really did seem as if a teenager was killing himself, or herself, every week in Alakanuk. We wanted to help the community with its grieving. We wanted to find a way to be of assistance during this disaster. We wanted to examine the reasons why the kids were killing themselves. What the heck was going on? The suicides prompted us to consistently travel to that village. I went there and met with community leaders, individuals who were affected, and families. We were trying to salve the wounds. We really wanted to stop this epidemic of suicides and address the issue of “How do we prevent more wounds?” We went there trying to look for underlying causes.

      It seemed pretty clear to us that some of the underlying causes of this despair involved the loss of their language and the loss of the culture. And alcohol was playing a major part. Some kids were being abused. There was dysfunction in families as the result of dependency on alcohol. People were drinking because they weren’t adjusting to quick life changes from the days of the healthy Alaska Native. There was that pressure to assimilate. There were all of those new government rules. There was rapid change stemming from the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. Some people got rich. Some people were still on the outside. Families that for generations had been solidly relying on subsistence hunting and fishing were going on welfare, public assistance.

      All of these things add up to loss of identity and lack of identity—loss and lack. Those were the underlying issues and they still are outstanding issues in villages in rural Alaska. We still have to figure out what to do about those underlying causes. All of those things, language, land, religion, education, alcohol dependency, education, contribute to the loss of identity. It is not difficult to feel overwhelmed.