That was the first time I had ever been involved in student government and I didn’t know what I was getting into. Suddenly, I was into politics and I got interested in that. From there I dropped sports and focused on student government. During the summer after my junior year I went to a training program in the central part of Missouri at Westmont College to learn more about it.
I was given the opportunity to spend three weeks at this small, liberal arts college not far from St. Louis. There were kids there from all over the United States. It was an intensive program where I learned how to conduct meetings and understand Roberts Rules of Order, politics, and the issues of student governments. It was designed to help develop leadership and that’s where I think I got all of the leadership skills I needed to carry out my presidential duties my senior year.
So I gave up sports for politics for my senior year. I could have done both, but I decided to focus more on academics and student government.
I think my four years in Oregon really helped shape me as a person. I broadened my horizons. I got a chance to play on sports teams. I became president of the student body and learned about political issues. That was a whole new area for me then. The school did ask quite a bit from its students. I got an exposure to the western way of life in the United States, and by that I mean western as in American as opposed to Native. But Chemawa also made us learn practical skills. We did our own banking and by that I mean that we started a student bank my senior year. We started other programs. One was like a junior entrepreneurship and we started a business selling hamburgers. The business was for fund-raising for the student body.
We started another program built around alcohol education. We had all heard for years from white people and from movies that there was an image of “the drunken Indian” out there in society. We started a program when I was school president to try and focus on changing that image of the drunken Indian. It was basically a counseling program for people with substance abuse problems, both for students and staff who needed help. I was only twenty years old at the time, but I recognized that my people had problems with alcohol that needed to be fixed.
One thing we worked on was alcohol awareness in terms of the harm it could do. I worked with a guy named Steve Labuff. We also started a campus patrol program to help people who were drunk and to prevent crime problems. We wanted our campus to be safe and to make sure people got home all right.
Part of the idea was also to improve the image of Alaska Natives and Indians by promoting heroes. Ira Hayes was one of the six Marines that worked to raise the flag on Iwo Jima during World War II in the famous photograph. He helped to raise that flag.
My father saw the future pretty well. Although he was very involved in preserving Native traditions he also knew that things were going to change. He told his children that we should get a good education and get as much schooling as we could. I think getting that western education was important. I remember my dad saying, “I think you guys need to go get your education and try your best in school because you’re going to be dealing, negotiating for land. You’re going to be negotiating your rights. You’re going to be negotiating a lot of big issues that are going to come up.”
He really knew what he was talking about on this subject. He said we should try to go to the best schools that have the best education and provide the best opportunities. “Try to get as much education as you can so you can protect what we have,” he said. “We’re going to be challenged for our way of life.” His generation did not get a similar education and many could not read or write, nor could they understand these government policies that were popping up.
He was right. The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act was implemented in 1971. The act was signed into law by President Richard Nixon and formalized land dispersal in Alaska to twelve Native corporations and 200 village corporations. A few years later the Alaska Pipeline opened and began pumping oil from the North Slope of Alaska not far from Barrow. Congress passed the Endangered Species Act in 1973 and that affected Alaska Natives’ hunting and fishing prospects. The Molly Hootch Case resulted in a consent decree in 1976. That came from a lawsuit filed by Alaska teenagers that provided for more education in villages. New high schools were built all over. If that had become the policy a decade earlier I never would have had to go live in Wrangell or go to school in Oregon.
All of these huge issues affected rural Alaskans economically, in our subsistence lifestyle, and in the way we educated our children.
When I was a teenager going to Chemawa my father—and other Elders—said getting a white man’s education was important, regardless of whether we liked it or not. They understood they had been passed by and missed out on getting a high school or college education and they wanted things to be better for their children and grandchildren. Their thinking was: You guys have to go. Go and try to get your degree because you are going to be dealing with these tough issues. It was important to my dad and my mom and the Elders for people like me to get that western education. They were concerned about the future and they had every right to be.
Even though I liked Chemawa more than Wrangell and I had some good experiences there, I was still homesick a lot. When I came home during the summers I got jobs either working in the canneries in Dillingham fish processing, or working as a firefighter. Alaska always had forest fires in the summer when it gets dry and lightning strikes. Most of the fires start that way. I got to see my family, but I had to work for money during the summer for my expenses at school.
In Akiak we could live from hunting and fishing and berry picking, but I needed cash in Oregon. My entire four-year high school experience was a lot like going to college for four years. My schedule was structured the same way. Go to school in the fall, come home in the spring and visit with the family briefly, and then go make some money to have at school. I couldn’t really depend on my mom or my dad for money because they didn’t have any. My dad was a businessman by then, though, running a grocery store. The store was called the Tim Williams Store. My grandfather Peter Williams had his own store that was just down the road from where my dog yard is now.
My grandfather was a very good businessman. He traveled to Seattle, to San Francisco, to Japan as part of his business work. I don’t know how he did it with his limited education, but I believe he did very well as a businessman. After my grandfather Peter died, his brother Joe took over. He ended up selling it to a Native cooperative, so we didn’t have the store in the family anymore. Then my father started his store. I never worked in the store. My father pretty much took care of the store on his own. I wasn’t that interested in working there. I worked, but I did other things that interested me more.
When I became the president of the student body at Chemawa it opened a lot of doors to opportunities and experiences. That afforded me the chance to visit with the Yakima Indian nation and to travel to the Navaho nation. The goal was to visit tribes and learn how they operated. That was part of becoming a leader and I learned quite a bit. Looking over the tribes had a big influence on me. It was a good political education and taught me lessons about leadership.
By being elected president of the student body I got an entirely other kind of education at Chemawa. I learned a lot of politics and I learned about other Native tribes and cultures. My advisor, Clement Azure, was the one who suggested the training prior to my term as president. He was one of the best student advisors.
Up until then I didn’t know how to run a meeting or carry out the directions or rules that the student body made or the student council passed. I’d say the school benefitted from me attending that program in Missouri. I learned about much more than overseeing meetings. I learned how to do something. For me alcohol was already an issue to be looked at. When I traveled I heard that “drunken Indian” phrase a lot. I heard people say that if they just looked at the way Indians were portrayed in the media, they were all drunks. The portrayal in many places, certainly the movies, did show all Indians as drunks who didn’t know what they were doing. The image was that they are all killing themselves and that they’re always drunk.
At that time the activists Russell