Those Elders, my parents, uncles, and people of those generations, grew up speaking Yupiaq. Some of them learned English, some of them did not. My generation, people now about sixty years old or more, was the first generation to focus on learning English. My generation made the shift. The older people were highly educated in Yup'ik ways and traditional teachings. Before contact with the whites they were very healthy people. They did not have problems with their teeth from eating sweets, diabetes, alcohol misuse, or any major regular health problems.
Our language and culture were intact. Our whole lives were complete then. But then contact came with gold miners, government workers, and missionaries starting in the late 1800s. They brought diseases that we had no immunity from, and they brought alcohol. It used to be that the Elders said if they heard about a death from a hundred miles away they cared about it and felt the same about that one death from far away as they did about one in their village. People had their own government, their own way of taking care of themselves, living off the land. They had a complete way of life that they enjoyed.
Obviously, things have changed. They changed with contact. The amount of deaths changed from smallpox, diphtheria, whooping cough, tuberculosis, and sexually transmitted diseases, too. Alcohol was brought in. People who had experienced their healthy way of life were subjected to trauma. At one time in Akiachak, which is only eleven miles from us, there was mass starvation because people couldn’t take care of themselves. They had to dig mass graves and some of our relatives were among them.
That was as the result of first contact. It was a little bit what our brothers and sisters in Indian tribes in the Lower 48 experienced with the Trail of Tears—all of that loss of their land, death, war, alcohol, and the killing of women and children.
This was not something I was really conscious about when I was a kid, but the Elders would talk about it. They talked about what they had seen and the starvation and about the ways of living that were going away. They talked to us about that. In their youths they had the language, ways of life, culture, hunting, and fishing all set. They all had rules that were followed. Then first contact hit us right between the eyes. It is hard to imagine how much grief and trauma occurred. So many families could not take care of themselves. Then the missionaries came. The Moravians established an orphanage. Parents and other adults were wiped out. The Moravian orphanages were established because children could not take care of themselves. The Bureau of Indian Affairs started its schools. The goal was to provide education, but only up to the point of eighth grade and only in English. It was good to learn English, but they didn’t have to ban the speaking of Native languages. Yupiaq was prohibited here.
If children spoke Yupiaq in school they were punished. Their mouths would be washed out with soap, or they would be hit for speaking their Native language. The teachers were instructed to assimilate the students with other American children. My mother told us stories about that. They were telling us that our way of life was not a good one and their way of life was better and we had to adapt.
Then Sheldon Jackson came around to establish missions and churches. He came to Alaska in 1877 and during his career it was said that he traveled more than a million miles and established more than one hundred missions and churches. Many of them were in Alaska and most of them were in the western part of the United States. He had it in his mind that he was going to save these lost Eskimo and Indian souls. His thinking was that these Yup'ik people are lost and our way of life is better. The feeling was that everyone had to learn English and that’s that.
They taught English. It was made clear to us that it was important and useful to learn English, though in my mind it didn’t have to be force-fed in such a harsh way. One missionary was a man named John Kilbuck, a Delaware Indian. He lived in Akiak and died here and he is the one who told people the importance of learning English. He said it was important to learn as much as we could about the ways of the white man because of what he had seen in the Lower 48. John Kilbuck had studied the history of Indians losing their lands, of being put on tribal reservations and before that the killing of women and children by the government. He was a witness to the Delaware Indians’ loss of their land. He emphasized the story of the settlers and the farmers moving west and taking the land everywhere. He was trying to prepare us for the day that settlers were going to come to Alaska and take the land, to take the resources and put us in a box.
We consider the fish in the Kuskokwim River to be a resource. Fish has been a stable resource. We have had salmon forever, freshwater fish, whitefish, sheefish, burbot, pike, and blackfish. Fishing has been a resource for us. Moose, caribou, bear, and small game have been a very important staple of our diet, and we have been gathering berries and preserving them for winter forever. These have been ongoing practices from way back. I think my parents’ generation was the first one to experience being punished for speaking the language, and attempts to change them to assimilate into the western way of life.
Alaska became a state in 1959, but the Indian Reorganization Act took effect in 1934. The federal government said that it had trust obligations in Alaska and to the Native tribes and tribal governments that were established. But there always seemed to be a lot of committees within governments somehow messing things up.
In my dad’s generation there were changes. The introduction of alcohol and the opening of a liquor store in Bethel was a big thing. Bethel is less than thirty miles from Akiak by the river and even closer by air. The introduction and availability of alcohol began to affect things in Akiak.
By the time I came along, when I was young, people were drinking in Akiak. My parents drank alcohol. My grandparents got into alcohol. I would see a certain amount of violence because of alcohol in Akiak, though not as much as there was later. I grew up around alcohol. One of my grandmothers was not a drinker. She never drank. People drank, but the majority of people in Akiak did not drink yet. It was available, but not as many people abused it yet. That was just the beginning of easy availability of liquor in Bethel.
My father did some drinking, but then he thought about it. When one of my brothers died, and then a second brother died, my father decided to go cold turkey and not to drink again. Instead, he started a prevention program. There were changes that affected our lifestyle because of alcohol and now he wanted to prevent people from drinking alcohol and return to the way things were with a traditional lifestyle. I must have inherited that outlook from him, even if I didn’t recognize it right away.
CHAPTER 5
I had picked out the Oregon College of Education to attend college and I was being awarded a small football scholarship, too, with plans to enroll in school in the fall of 1972. I was spending the summer fishing in Hydaburg in Southeast with some friends when the notice came to my home that I was being drafted into the United States Army.
In 1970, the government changed the draft to a lottery system based on your birthday. It was a random drawing that listed when you might be called to serve with numbers 1 through 365, for each day of the year. They did this for a few years and then dropped the lottery altogether. In 1972 I was one of the last draftees into the army.
I had to report in August. I had my physical done in Anchorage. I should have tried to get a deferment because of college, but I did not do that. I thought I would serve my time and then take advantage of the GI Bill to go to school. So I decided to follow through with the draft and report. They sent me to Fort Ord, California, for my basic training.
Fort Ord is near Monterey, California, a very pretty area. Up until that time, even though alcohol was becoming common in Akiak, I had never had a drink, never tasted beer. But at basic training we had weekends off to go to town sometimes and the guys would say, “Come with us. Come with us.” That was the first time I tasted beer, my first Coors. I was twenty years old.
Although I had other plans for college in Oregon I wasn’t opposed to going into the military. My dad was in the National Guard. I was familiar with the uniforms. He was in charge of the Akiak unit of the Alaska Army National Guard. He’d go to training periodically, so I had some idea about the military. And,