My family has been in the area of Akiak for about 10,000 years. Always. We’ve been here from time immemorial. My father’s name was Timothy Williams. His father was Peter Williams. My father was a chief and Peter Williams was a chief of the tribes here, the Akiak Koliganek.
Koliganek, that’s where we were in the beginning. There is a story about the reason why Akiak became Akiak. A couple raised a brown bear from a little cub. The brown bear grew up in the village of Koliganek, but wanted the couple to move across the Kuskokwim River. The word Akiak means “across.”
The couple did not want to give up the bear so the couple moved across the river because the bear was getting too big and was dangerous to the community. So that’s how Akiak became Akiak. The bear grew up to be an adult and nobody would harm that bear. Eventually the bear left the village of Akiak and when people went out hunting they recognized that bear and would never shoot it because it was part of their community, part of the family of Akiak.
The Williams name came from a family in Akiak. My great-grandmother Lena got married to Waska Williams, who was from the Yukon. The village was a small place and sometimes cousins fell in love with one another. One grandmother, Elizabeth Kawagley, fell in love with her first cousin Peter Williams, but because they were too close in the same family the only way they could get married was to go out into the Gulf of Alaska. My mother’s name is Helena Lomack Williams. There are special rules if first cousins get married: they have to do it away from the community. They ended up going to Kodiak and from there they went out to the Gulf of Alaska and got married outside of the land and on the water. They were my grandparents.
I was actually born in a log cabin right next to the Kuskokwim River. It was our family home at that time that my dad built. He had some help, but he mostly built it himself. He got logs from upriver and hauled them to Akiak or he found other logs nearby. A lot of people did that in the 1950s and earlier. People built their own homes here. There was no housing authority and there were no houses around here like the modern kind you would see now. People just made them out of logs.
The house I was born in was about three hundred yards from where I live now. It is still there, I think, but it is underwater, because of soil erosion along the banks of the Kuskokwim River. The old house fell into the river. When I was born a woman named Edith Kawagley helped. She was a traditional midwife. She delivered the majority of the people in Akiak. She was a nurse and delivered all of the babies around here. I was born September 29, 1952, in Akiak, in that departed house.
The house was standing there until only a few years ago when it gave way into the river. It stood there for a long time really. Since then we have had more bank erosion. At one point we lost sixty feet and another time when there was flooding a couple of springs ago we lost thirty more feet through erosion. We had lots of flooding recently and that always takes some of the bank away.
I was one of eight children. There were six brothers and two sisters. Frank was the oldest. He was an avid hunter and fisherman, one of the best hunters and fishermen I have ever known and he, along with my dad, taught me most of the things that I know about hunting and fishing. I think Frank was the best hunter and fisherman in Akiak.
Frank was about ten years older than me and he also taught me about dogs and mushing. We always had dogs in my family, forever. Ted was the second oldest, then me, and Walter and Gerald, Timothy Williams Jr., and Fred. And those are the brothers. My two sisters are Cathy and Lena Sharon.
We grew up with a subsistence way of life, as our people had for thousands of years. We hunted and fished for our own food. It was always regulated by our Elders and our community by season. We didn’t grow up on junk food, just the fish and game the land provided. We hunted for moose and caribou in the fall. We also hunted for rabbits. Really, anything with four legs, we would hunt. We trapped beaver, too. There were also black bears and grizzly around and porcupines. They’re all here. The bears come through town. They raid our fish camps.
In the Kuskokwim River we fish for king salmon—Chinook—white fish, chum, sockeye, silver salmon, pike, sheefish, and in winter, pretty much starting in November, we fish through the ice for burbot and whitefish.
In the spring we pick greens from the ground, cook them, and put them away. Berry picking starts in the summer. There are salmon berries, blackberries, red berries, blueberries, and highbush red berries. I have been doing this since I was a child. All of it, hunting, fishing, trapping, and berry picking. We all did it—all of the boys—every year. Our lifestyle and our diet were dictated by the seasons. It is always all about what is available at what time. The land provides and the river provides. And we’re always gathering for winter. That’s been true my whole life.
For me I have always enjoyed most going out in the fall camping when we went moose hunting and caribou hunting. Moose and caribou hunting are the best. I started to go out on hunts when I was about seven years old and I started regularly hunting by the time I was ten. In the beginning I used a .22 rifle. The first species I ever hunted was migratory birds, ducks and geese. That’s what I started off with and as I got older I hunted moose, caribou, and bear.
Part of the excitement in the spring was going to fish camp with the family when the birds migrated. It took a lot of prep time to go to camp. I liked establishing the camp and getting settled in, just being there. You have your tent, your sleeping gear, your stove, your food like flour, sugar, coffee, tea, and the utensils like the cooking pot. Camp was about fifteen to twenty miles from home.
We would start to set up camp in March and there was plenty of snow on the ground so we went by dog team. Then, in early April we would set up the tent. In the spring we trapped for muskrat. That was our cash cow. It took thirty-two muskrat to make a coat and that’s what the fur buyers wanted. At the same time we hunted our migratory birds. We lived off the land in spring camp while we trapped.
Although we trapped furs and traded them for cash, essentially when I was growing up Akiak was a cashless society. We were basically living off the land. In the summer we could commercial fish closer to Bethel and turn in the fish for cash. Some people spent their summers working at canneries in Bristol Bay. And some guys would go to fight fires in the Interior for a summer job. They were smokejumpers.
But trapping was important. Some of it was muskrat, but in the fall we trapped for mink and other fur-bearing animals. Trapping beaver and turning in beaver pelts was good business. If you got cash you could use it for ammunition for your rifle and for supplies like flour, sugar, coffee, and other necessities.
Usually we bought things like that in Bethel, but we also had mail-order catalogs around the house like Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward. That was the American way, wasn’t it? Every year my mom ordered things for us before school started. We didn’t get our winter coats from a catalog. A lot of our protective clothing was handmade. We had mukluks for our feet that were made from sealskins or fur-bearing animals. My mom made us parkas. The coats came from fur-bearing animals.
Fall camp was set up in September. It was before it snowed. Camp could be anywhere from five miles to a hundred miles away from home. We went by boat along the Kuskokwim River for those camps. Somebody said that was pretty much like the lifestyle in the West in the United States in the 1800s. That’s probably true. I’m not sure how much people in the Lower 48 of the US know about our lifestyle now, whether they would believe it or not if they heard about it. I don’t know if they understand it. They live near big grocery stores that have everything. We provide our own food—most of it—still today. I think we need to educate them as much as we can about that way of life. It’s not a chosen lifestyle just for the heck of it, it is life. The lifestyle we adopted long ago was practiced from generation to generation and has been going on from time immemorial.
The place we live also dictates what we do. We live off the land, but the land is alongside the river. We do not live near a highway that can take you anywhere to go shopping. The lifestyle and the place come together. This is a big part of me. This is where I grew up. That’s how my dad and my grandparents lived and it goes way back. Each generation is taught the same