As an adult I understand what they were thinking. They were trying to provide some sort of education, but not in our own culture. I think they could have afforded us the same education in our communities and eventually that’s what happened. I believe the federal government had the responsibility to provide education in our communities and it did not do that. They just provided K through eight instead of K through twelve. They should have provided the whole thing without sending us to boarding schools. I think we’re still living with the damage done to some of those individuals. Later, when Alaska got oil money and there were lawsuits, schools were built in all of the villages to provide K through twelve as it should have been from the beginning.
That form of schooling out of town changed us from having a strong family unit to breaking us down. Then we had to adjust when we came back to villages. It was very difficult for us. Also, as adults that had children, they had a tough time raising them in the proper Yup'ik way, in the traditional way, as had been done in the past.
One thing I did like about being at Wrangell was the sports teams. That was good. I really enjoyed getting involved. I played basketball and I participated in track and field and long-distance running. For me, that was a relief from the rest of the routine.
When the school year ended in the spring I went home and it was so good to be back. My family was going to spring camp for hunting and I went almost directly from Wrangell to spring camp. That was so nice. It was a good homecoming. It was always good to be back with my brothers and sisters.
Looking back I can see that not everything was wrong at Wrangell. The curriculum, the schooling, was OK, was even good in some respects. But the marching around was silly and it was a loss not to be with our parents at a young age when you need your parents. We didn’t have that. We resented that somewhat and we would be angry at members of the staff that we felt treated us badly. I think I’ve gotten over it, but I still feel some resentment about the way it was all done. There were kids who went to school there and later hurt themselves, committing suicide, or drank themselves to death.
Sometimes I think a majority of those kids from Wrangell did not succeed in life. Or maybe they succeeded in a limited way. But I think damage was done. There was some healing. Going to Wrangell that year affected my life. My old friend Willie and I still talk about it sometimes. We say, “It’s get-up time. It’s detail time.” We make those sarcastic comments. We remember those days.
CHAPTER 3
That was a very good homecoming after Wrangell. I got back to doing what I had always been doing with my family. But after the summer passed I was in the same situation again. If I wanted to continue my education, go on and attend high school, there were not many choices. There was no high school in Akiak.
I ended up attending Chemawa Indian School in Oregon. The year in Wrangell was just preparation for four years of high school, starting with the ninth grade. Part of me still wanted to stay home, but I was also excited a bit by going outside of Alaska and seeing another state. This was another boarding school. Going to live out of state seemed different from going to another school in another part of Alaska. I flew into Seattle and then took a bus to Salem, Oregon.
Chemawa was a lot like Wrangell, but it was bigger. There were three dormitories there, Brewer Hall, McNary Hall, and Mitchell Hall. But they had the same kind of rules. It was the same thing as at Wrangell. We had to get up in the morning at a certain time, do this, do that. But the kids were more independent because we were older than we had been at Wrangell. I arrived for high school in the fall of 1969.
Sports had been a high point for me at Wrangell so I wanted to continue playing sports at Chemawa. One big difference was that they had a football team. That was one thing I wanted to try and I did. The mix of people at the school was interesting. There were people at Chemawa from all over Alaska, from Point Barrow, Southeast, the Interior, and also Indian tribes from the Northwest. There were kids there from the Navajo nation.
There were a whole bunch of tribal kids in the student body and we were all curious about football. Nobody had really played, but we had seen games on television and wanted to try it. There were Eskimos from everywhere who signed up. On the first day we were in the locker room and the coach came in and gave as all of the equipment to put on. He said to put it on and go out and play football. We had to figure out how to put the equipment on by ourselves.
Nobody told us how to do it. If you have ever seen all of the pads that go on under the uniform you will know it is not as easy as it sounds to figure out what goes where. We put the hip pads on and then we tried to figure where the piece that was the tail guard went. We wondered what it was for. Was it for our backsides? Or was it to protect our private parts? We didn’t know. We figured that it was to protect our private parts in case we got hit by a helmet on a play. So we agreed on how to put the pads on and ran out to practice. It was very uncomfortable. You had all of these Eskimo kids running around on the football field being very uncomfortable because we had the pads on backwards. Ouch.
We couldn’t move very well and we were grimacing and frowning. All of the coaches looked at us and they were smiling, then they were snickering and then they were laughing. We made the adjustments quickly.
At that time my body was built very differently than it is built now. I was about five-foot-seven inches tall and weighed around 150 pounds. I was also a pretty fast runner, so because of my speed they made me a running back. I was a sprinter back then. Mostly I played positions for a smaller, fast guy. I was a running back throughout my football career and I also returned punts and kickoffs. On defense I was a linebacker. Everybody played offense and defense both at the time. I loved playing football. I really loved it. Our team was the Chemawa Braves.
I was 150 pounds when I first went out for football, but I grew. I got to be 160 pounds and then 170 pounds. I am big-boned, so I had the body frame to handle more weight. I was a fast runner, but I also had some strength from the lifestyle I led in the outdoors at home in Akiak, hunting and fishing and chopping wood.
We didn’t have a lot of size on our team. I think our linemen averaged like 180 or 190 pounds. We played a lot against white schools that had guys that were six-foot-two hulks who weighed 250 pounds. I think our tallest guy was six-foot-one. We were smaller, but we were fast. Our teams weren’t bad.
Our team had a wonderful coach. His name is Kugie Louis. He was the football coach and the track coach. I got the best coaching. He built our stamina and toughness. He was always big on fundamentals. He stressed knowing the fundamentals of the game and always being prepared to play. He talked about us being prepared to run and being prepared to have your body withstand pain. He was the best coach I ever had.
In high school I played football, basketball, and competed on the track team. I was the captain of the freshman team in basketball in ninth grade. As a sophomore I played on the junior varsity and the varsity. My junior year I was cocaptain of the basketball team.
As a member of the track team I ran the 100-yard dash and the 220. I also did some low hurdles and high hurdles. My best event was probably the 100-yard dash. My best time was 10.5 seconds. My best 220 time was under 23 seconds. I wasn’t slow.
The Chemawa school was a lot like being at Wrangell in that I was living away from home again and a lot of the program was aimed at acculturation. They still wanted to strip away our culture, I think, but it was a little bit more liberal in that we were allowed traditional dances. The Navajos did some Indian dancing and the Northwest tribes did their dances. They were good dancers, too.
They did tell us that our goal should be to go to college. Academics were stressed and I think they had a pretty good academic program. I was a pretty good student