Читать книгу Racing Toward Recovery - Lew Freedman - Страница 10

What I learned during that year, after being student body president, after starting those programs, after the reading I did, and after hearing Russell Means and Dennis Banks, was that if I invested my time in good programs I could change attitudes. I wanted to change the idea that drunken Indians were no good. I wanted to overcome that image. We did a good job of it there at school, but I wanted to continue it.

To me it meant that if I am a drunken Indian I am a loser. I wanted us to feel good about who we were and who we were as Eskimos and Alaska Natives. That year was empowering.

I graduated from high school at Chemawa in 1972 and at that point I wanted to become a coach. I wanted to coach a football team, a basketball team, or become a physical education teacher. That was my goal. That was my thinking. I thought I could use my athletic background in a career and do good things for young people, as well. I wanted to work with young people and help others.

My plan was to attend Oregon College of Education in Monmouth, Oregon, which is now Western Oregon University. I wanted to earn a degree in education so I could teach and coach at the high school level. I thought I would be able to play football there, too, which I wanted to do. I wanted to get back to football. My junior year in high school I had made All-State. But I knew I could still play at that level.

Only one thing happened. I got drafted right after high school. By then my brother Ted was in the army. He had been drafted and sent to Vietnam. I was very close to Frank because he tutored me so much when I was a boy. He influenced me in everything, hunting, fishing, and everything else. He was a mentor. But Ted was, too.

Ted was another tough kid. He was the one who taught me how to box. We made boxing gloves out of socks and were hitting each other. We grew up boxing a lot. My mom got tired of us using the socks that way so we bought some boxing gloves from one of the catalogs.

We got pretty serious about the boxing and one time I punched Ted really hard and loosened his teeth. He fell backwards and was kind of knocked out for a while. Even if you are boxing with your brother you have to protect yourself at all times—that’s the first rule of boxing—and you’ve got to fight to the max or you’ll get it. You don’t back down on anybody. You fight. You don’t let them beat you. You beat them. That really helped me.

Only we were doing all of this fighting in the house. My mother was not thrilled about it at all. Later, Ted and I were in high school together. He was two grades ahead of me. He had some wonderful friends from Hydaburg in Southeast and we always had good friends from Akiak with us in high school. We stuck together and we stuck up for each other, so nobody bothered us. We defended ourselves if we had to and we kicked butt in high school.

So Ted got drafted and I got drafted and sent to South Korea. Ted went into combat, into the war, and I didn’t. When he got out of the army and returned to Akiak he had post-traumatic stress disorder. He had survived the bullets, but he couldn’t stand being back in Akiak. He had nightmares from all of the killings. He survived that, survived enemy bullets, but he couldn’t survive alcohol. We actually ended up coming back to Akiak at almost exactly the same time, except that he came from Vietnam and I came from South Korea.

Frank taught me a lot when I was younger, but I was close with all of my brothers. Walter was one of the top sprint mushers in the Bethel region. He was the best in the west, you might say. In 1983 he competed in the Iditarod and finished in thirty-first place. That year Rick Mackey won and the race was still slower. It took longer than twelve days to take first place. Walter finished in over fifteen days.

For a while after that I kept asking him if he wanted to keep running the Iditarod and he said he did not. He said, “No, Mike, you do it. I’ll just run the Kuskokwim 300.” And that’s what he did. He won all of the races around here for about ten years, the short ones and the middle- distance ones. For us, the Kusko 300 in Bethel, which everyone thinks of as the best and biggest middle-distance race, was even more important than the Iditarod.

Walter won all kinds of races in the area. All of our friends and family were there to watch him and he didn’t have to travel to Anchorage to the starting line. He never captured the title in the Kusko 300, but he finished fourth twice. Walter really specialized in the village sprint races. He won the best sprint race in Bethel three years in a row. We went to Dillingham and he won that.

When we were kids we all pretty much did the same chores. Some of those chores involved taking care of the dogs. We trained the dogs at a young age. We took care of their feeding. We took care of their health. My dad usually had trained dogs to use for transportation by the time the pups grew up. We made leaders out of them. We did all the chores that needed to be done around the dog yard and we also helped with the hunting and fishing. Walter was a top racer and my brother Gerald—he was one of my favorite brothers—always helped me learn how to do things in the dog yard. He was my handyman fixing things when they broke.

Once, when we were small, Gerald threw an open can at me and it landed here on my eye. I still have a mark. I don’t remember what he was mad about. I think it was a can of beef stew and the top cut me. It did some bleeding for a while. But Gerald was the one who helped me fish and we did a lot of fish tendering together for the local fish processor. We fished at the same time and that’s how we made our money. He was always there for me.

Timmy Jr. was the youngest and he did the same thing as all of us. He did some work in the house and he helped raise the puppies. In a sense we were all trainers of the dogs. Fred, too. All six of the boys worked with the dogs and ran dogs.

When we were young my family attended the Moravian Church. My mom and dad and everybody in the village went to church on Sundays. It was our religion, but it was also a social occasion to bring everyone together. We didn’t have TV and we didn’t have extracurricular activities in town, so everybody went to church on Sundays. We did it consistently and we did it year-round. That helped make for a strong community, I think.

There was a strong belief in God. My parents wanted us to respect the God who controls all of the universe and all that he made. That is what they told us and what they taught us. Every week we had Sunday school teachers. Sunday was a very respected day in my family. My mom and dad did not want us to do anything on Sunday except to rest. That’s what we did. It was a rest day. We didn’t go out hunting or fishing. That was a big influence on me. The Elders were consistent with my mother and father. All the Elders who came to our house taught me about their belief in the Creator.

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.