Coming into the Country (53 page)

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Authors: John McPhee

BOOK: Coming into the Country
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Fifteen years ago, Harry was the chief. “Anyone interfere with our country, we got a right to pitch in and kick like hell about it. You white people butt in, take our traplines, our fishing. That's what we try to stop.”
“How do you feel about independence for Alaska, Harry?”
“That's the best way to look at it.”
Making a long loop through the burn, we came out eventually at the highest part of the bluff, directly opposite the Village: a panoptic aerial view, of such height and distance, taking in so much river and mountain land, that it emphasized the isolation and the elongate symmetry of the Village by the river and—what is not apparent up close—its beauty. For Harry, this was obviously the supreme moment in the country—the sight of his village from the air. He was born, he said, far down the Yukon River, at the mouth of the Kandik, in 1913. “They kept on moving in those days. They don't stay one place. They lived off the country. They lived in tents, ten by twelve, the biggest they ever had. They just keep on moving. They don't stay in town all the time, like we do.” Harry's father, Old David, died when Harry was six, and he was raised for a time by Chief Alec, at Fortymile, but when “the flu came up the river” Chief Alec died, and so did his wife, Mary Alec. Harry was returned to his mother, at Eagle, and lived with her until she died. In the same year, his stepfather drowned. Harry was by now a young man. He hauled wood for the riverboats, and he worked aboard them, too, until they stopped running, “when the Jap tried to take Alaska.” At Moosehide one time, near Dawson, he met Bessie. “She is what they call a Crow, I think. One day, I bought two bottles of Hudson Bay rum—a hundred and fifty proof—and a keg of beer, and I married her.” Looking across at their cabin, in miniature, in the third of a mile of cabins all touched with smoke, he said he had cut its logs by Eagle Creek and floated them down the Yukon River. For a time, he made his living as a trapper and in summer fished, with a wheel, on Goose Island. He pointed. “That is Goose Island, in the Yukon River—there.” He soon went to work, seasonally, for the gold-mining operations at Woodchopper, Coal Creek, and Chicken. “For many years, my work and unemployment just connected.” His and Bessie's
children were born in the cabin—Michael in 1951, “clever, too, just like Howard, quick.” Harry pointed toward the school, at the upstream end of the Village, and said Bessie taught Han there. Han is the language of the Hungwitchin. There are about thirty people in the world who speak it. A few are upriver, in the area of Dawson, but virtually all of them are in Eagle Indian Village. Han is one of the smallest subdivisions of the great Athapaskan language family, which reaches contiguously from Nulato and Koyukuk, in western Alaska, to southern Alberta and east to Hudson Bay—and makes a surprising jump, as well, across twelve hundred miles to the isolated Southwestern enclave of the Apache and the Navajo, which, among Athapaskans, are by far the most numerous. High on a pole outside the school we could see a small, dark movement—the flag of Alaska flying. The flag, as it happens, was designed by a native. It is lyrically simple, the most beautiful of all American flags. On its dark-blue field, gold stars form the constellation of the Great Bear. Above that is the North Star. Nothing else, as the designer explained, is needed to represent Alaska. It was the flag of the Territory for more than thirty years. Alaskans requested that it become the flag of the new state. The designer was a thirteen-year-old Aleut boy.
Michael went to high school in Tok, and he was “clever for anything,” his father said. “With no trouble, he got into the Army. One day, he said, ‘Dad, I'm going far to Anchorage with my friend.' He went far to Anchorage with his friend, and he got through the examination clean as a dollar. He went to California.” Michael spent almost all of his two service years at the Presidio of San Francisco, where it never snowed, and he missed the winter. He also missed Sophie Biederman. She was a tall, slim, beautiful girl in brightly beaded moccasins. She had an outreaching smile, black hair, a complexion light and clear, notwithstanding that she went around with a can of soda pop almost constantly in her hand, and—eating virtually never —seemed to live on Coca-Cola alone. Harry told her she
smoked too much marijuana. (Harry, for his part, does not even smoke tobacco.) Sophie's childhood had been roiled in her parents' troubles with alcohol. Nonetheless, she emerged with a joy in living, a fondness for excitement, a love of games. Her life and Michael's seemed to be spiralling upward through the summer of his return. Spilling Coke, she would dash into his arms. They planned a wedding, and he went to the North Slope to collect money to begin their married life. While he was there, she died of a gunshot wound, an apparent suicide. “Michael got broke down over her.”
 
 
 
Through the night, the rain becomes heavier—a long, unremitting spring rain—and in the morning it is a downpour. Michael and I and Minicup make no effort to get up—just lie half asleep under the big dripping spruce as if there were no today. In an important sense, there isn't, because Michael, coming up the river to fell trees for his new log cabin, discovered that while he brought a chain saw he forgot gasoline. The temperature is less than ten degrees above freezing. The brothers have only one sleeping bag and a lightweight blanket. Michael has spent the night in the blanket. Toward noon, the rain has somewhat diminished. Michael gets up and builds a fire. His first gesture of the day is to make a cup of Sanka and carry it to Minicup, who is awake but has remained in the sleeping bag. “Nights out in a wall tent at sixty below, you just get up in the morning, throw everything into the sled, and move,” Michael remarks. “In two hours, you might be warm. When I trap, I still use dog teams—not snow machines. You can't find a gas station out there. I trapped two years ago at Champion Creek with Jacob Malcolm. Wolves. Wolverines. Martens mostly. Lynx. Mink. We got seventy martens. We tan moose
and caribou hides. From the caribou hides we make babiche to make snowshoes.” Of all the whites who have come into the country, he prefers by far the young ones who live out on the river. “They believe more like an Indian believes,” he says. “They believe in living like an Indian. They have dog teams. They fish. They hunt. They live in the woods. They tan hides, make dog harnesses, trap, use animal furs. They get to know the forest. They make sleds of birch. They survive in the woods with nothing, hardly. They are a good thing, going back to Mother Earth—just as long as they don't build on Hungwitchin lands.”
With a cup of his own, he sits in the rain and makes an entry in a notebook. He tells me that he has been studying law, in a program offered by the Tanana Chiefs Land Claims College. A college education in earlier years was not possible for him, because he lacked the money, but now, as chief, he regards his present courses as imperative. “Other village corporations have gone bankrupt,” he explains. “I would hate to see that happen to ours. The study of law is hard for me. It is hard for an Indian to understand contracts and corporations.”
I ask if I may look at the notebook. He hands it to me, and I flip it open. “Judicial Department. Marbury v. Madison. Judges review, concept,” says the first note I see. “Supreme Court don't make law but change them, and protect us from the government.”
“The government wants to make a park down the river,” Michael says. “Some of the best hunting grounds are down that way. It puts our native-land selections in a tight squeeze. I don't care very much for parks. I like to go into lands and check them out, not to be told what to do. But there is another side. If the government does not keep the land, someone will take over. I am against development in this country. Without the pipeline—without the Native Claims Act—I'd feel freer. The Alaska population is bigger now, because of the pipeline.
I don't like a lot of people. I like the lands. If the land-claim settlement did not exist, you could go anywhere and build a cabin. If we strike oil in this country, we'll all be very rich, because it's on our land. But I don't want to see that. With a lot of money, people get into trouble. Where money is, more people will come. There will be a new pipeline, through here. I don't think I want to be rich.”
In the pre-white epoch, the Hungwitchin's Chief Charley led his people from the Charley River up the Yukon to Mission Creek, where they lived in houses of skin. In small increments thereafter, they moved their principal settlement on up the left bank of the Yukon. In the eighteen-eighties, they were about a mile from their present site, and lived in six log cabins with interdigitating roof poles that stuck up like sawbucks against the sky. Michael whimsically suggests that the Village should move once more. “Move it a few miles on up the river,” he says. “Into Canada. Nice people there. They are different—more mellow. They don't have no pipeline.”
From their log houses in the nineteenth century, the Hungwitchin went out for moose and mountain sheep, rabbits and caribou. Women sat on the bank and watched for salmon. When they saw the barely discernible ripples, they pointed them out to men by the water, who went after the fish in bark canoes. They had dip nets in their hands. They wrestled the big kings to land. They smoked them. They trapped wolverines for ruffs. They hunted game with bows and arrows. They used sheep-horn spoons, and made birch-bark pots, and cooked by dropping hot rocks into water-filled baskets woven of spruce roots. Family by family along the river, they had long-established fish camps, which were jealously defined, as were their hunting and trapping grounds. When people of another tribe happened into the country and killed game, they could eat the meat but they had to surrender the hide.
That was the general ambience that has since become encapsulated within the word “subsistence.” They subsisted in
the country, almost independent of the rest of the world. Even before the gold rushes, there were touches of the coming difference. They enjoyed the tea and the tobacco they got from white traders, the novelty of guns. When the miners came in great numbers, and the freight of white supplies, the dress and the diet of the Indians began to change. Subsistence from the country somewhat declined. It would decline more as a result of the job economy of the Second World War, and still more following the discovery of oil. Alaska's booms denature the natives. The Yukon River fish camps that were symbols of the working unity of Indian families have gradually been abandoned.
Meanwhile, to assist the natives in their adjustment to the new social order, federal programs administered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs have long provided support of various kinds, from food and clothing subsidies to social services—a tradition of plausible generosity that reached its supreme expression in the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, widely described as the most openhanded and enlightened piece of legislation that has ever dealt with aboriginal people. While giving them a tenth of Alaska and about seventeen thousand dollars for each man, woman, and child, the act created a dozen regional native corporations to hold and invest roughly half the money, and to distribute the rest, on established schedules, to individuals and to village corporations. Doyon, Ltd., is in area the largest of the regional corporations, covering the whole of the Athapaskan interior and including about nine thousand people in thirty-four native villages, among them the Hungwitchin, each of whom is a Doyon stockholder. Doyon's fine new headquarters in Fairbanks are spread out and spacious, and resemble the headquarters of almost any large Eastern company that has just moved to a meadow in Connecticut. It is Doyon that is drilling for oil in the upper-Yukon region—within a hundred miles of Eagle. Two wells have proved dry, at nine and eleven thousand feet, but Doyon is undissuaded.
The disposition of Native Claims Settlement land begins with the villages, which get acreages related to population, and village choices must start with the ground around them. Michael David is the land-selection agent for the Hungwitchin. Because there are certain absentee stockholders, who belong to the community but live elsewhere, Eagle Indian Village qualifies for 92, 160 acres. The selections will run from the Canadian border past Eagle and about thirty miles down the river, stopping at the edge of the large area the National Park Service hopes will become Yukon-Charley National Rivers (also as a result of the Native Claims Settlement Act). Eagle City, on its one square mile, and almost wholly white, has thus become an island in the Indian ocean. People in the city believe that the terms of the Settlement Act give Eagle the right to retain a two-mile “buffer zone” on all its sides. While the Indian Village is three miles upriver from the white community, it is less than two miles from the city line. Thus, the whites' buffer zone would overlap most of the Indian Village. This situation, while not the largest of the difficulties between the City and the Village, has touched off an example of what Michael David calls “modern-day Indian warfare.” The Village would like to own land right up to the city line and give the city compensating acreage somewhere else. The Department of the Interior has rejected this. The Hungwitchin Corporation, with the help of Doyon lawyers, has taken the matter to the Alaska Native Claims Appeal Board and may take it to court. Michael calls this “a pretty deep question,” and goes on to say, “Sometimes I wish the native land claims and the pipeline were not here. I could do a lot of things I want to do. I don't even know why they say ‘own' land. You use land. You can't own land.” As a result of the Native Claims Settlement Act, his sense of land —his people's sense of freedom of land—after ten thousand years is archaic and obsolete. Michael is a stockholder now, a landowner, a capitalist, a conscribed component of a distant
system. For all its overt benefits and generous presentations, the bluntest requirement of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act was that the natives turn white.

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