Читать книгу Racing Toward Recovery - Lew Freedman - Страница 8

When I think back to early in my life I think of a lot of good times. One thing we did when it was break-up and the ice was melting was go swimming. It wasn’t in the river, but in these giant puddles. I remember playing with friends every day, going hunting and fishing. Sometimes we chopped wood for the Elders and just hung out.

John Egoak was one of my best friends. He was the oldest one and he knew more things. We were actually three best friends, me, John, and Willie Lake, but John showed us things. He showed how they made the log cabins and how they filled in the cracks with moss from the tundra. He also showed us how he built his strength. He was really strong. He teased us, I guess. He took some of the moss and rolled it up into a cigarette. Then he lit it up and smoked that moss and said, “This is the reason I am so strong. What I am smoking makes me strong. If you smoke this, you will become strong, too.” And we believed him. So we tried it and coughed like heck. It did not make us strong. We got very sick.

John has passed away. Willie works in Bethel. He’s an optician who has been doing that for over thirty years.

When I started elementary school in grades kindergarten through fourth grade, we had a teaching staff from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. It was a two-room school, one for those grades and one for fifth grade through eighth grade. We had another room for that. There was one teacher in each room for all of the grades. It was an interesting setup. I think there were about ten kids in my class all of the way from kindergarten through eighth grade. That was my group.

One boy, John Jasper, was born a day after I was, so we basically grew up together and I became really close with his parents. John grew up in a traditional Eskimo family where his parents did not speak any English and he grew up in a traditional way. I stopped by his house every day to walk to school with him. He was sort of a quiet guy, but he was very bright. John was not a very big person physically. He could think things through and he was very smart.

I always cherished his parents, especially his mother. She would tell us the rules for living and to have a strong faith in God. His dad was a quiet guy, Willie Jasper. He was always driving his dog team. He also taught us about how to set fish traps under the ice in November about four or five miles from Akiak. He was an expert and my brother Walter and I would hang around with him. He would hitch up his dogs and we would hitch up our dogs and we took off after him. The fish traps were three feet by three feet by ten feet in size. The real name of the fish we trapped is burbot, but we called them lush fish. I don’t know why.

I learned how to hunt by going out with my dad and brother Frankie. They were hunting for moose and took me along. They always got their moose. Mostly I was traveling with them. We had a canoe that we used on the lakes when we were trapping muskrat and hunting ducks at the same time.

From the beginning I was a good shot with a rifle. I had to be. You have to learn and you have to gain experience, but I was a good shot. Maybe it was because Frankie taught me. He was the best shot. When I was a young boy the best part of it all was being able to go out on a hunt with my father and older brother. It was a good feeling that they trusted me to come along. It meant a lot. They made me confident in myself. Doing those things built confidence. I learned how to set up camps and about survival. Once I knew how to hunt I knew I was going to be able to survive because I would have something to eat. It was a case of knowing that I could always go back home with something.

It was also a good feeling to understand that they were preparing me to survive on my own and teaching me how to provide for the family. My dad was with me more than anything on these trips, especially on fishing trips. He showed me how to fish, where to fish, and what the best times of day were to fish. It was the same with hunting. You had to get up really early when we went hunting, about four o’clock in the morning. Boy, it was hard to get up. A lot of kids don’t like that, but I always woke up. The smell of coffee was good and maybe we ate pound cakes.

I had learned about those lush fish traps with Willie Jasper. He showed us exactly how to do it, how to set it, how to make the trap. That was a big help to me and Walter. The Jasper family also came to the same spring camp as we did. We always seemed to be together in spring camp and fish camp. I spent a lot of time with Nelson Jasper, John’s oldest brother, who was a captain in the National Guard. He was an outgoing guy and he taught me a lot, too. He taught me how to fix small engines and we did some boatbuilding, as well. Nelson and my brother Frank were the best of friends. They did a lot of hunting together and hung out a lot. That was one family that I really appreciated the guidance from, as well as my own.

Those lessons I learned as a boy are still important to me now. I think they rooted me in being independent and not dependent on anything or anybody else. They were teaching me to be able to take care of myself and confident in whatever I did. I have confidence in what I need to do and it came from those times. They also taught me that you had to work for what you needed. They had discipline. There was a sense of responsibility in providing for yourself and the family.

I come back to discipline. My father and Frankie had a lot of discipline. Not just to be able to get up in the morning, but to carry out all of their tasks in the right way. They were adapting to the environment and they took care of the fish and the meat. They took care of everything in providing food for the family.

Part of what I learned was to be respectful of the animals. They were our food, but in a way moose were presenting themselves to us to eat. Also part of the entire experience learning to hunt and to fish was sharing what you got. I was taught to share what you had, what you gather, and what you catch with others who needed food. That’s what we did and that’s what we do now. If we hunt a moose we share the meat. If we catch fish in the nets on the Kuskokwim River, we share the fish. There are always people who need food and there are Elders who fished and hunted for a lifetime who are no longer strong enough to work to get their food. It is our responsibility to make sure they have enough to eat.

That has always been the way of our people going back in time. The majority of the people in Akiak come from people who grew up in the Kuskokwim Mountains or Kilibuck Mountains. Maybe some were from as far away as Denali. When they hunted they covered great distances. They spread through areas like Rohn and Rainy Pass—which are now checkpoints on the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. Going back, my grandfather and great-grandfather were long-distance travelers. They hunted as far away as Nikolai. They were traveling by dog team.

Our Native language is Yupiaq and we continue to speak it, in addition to English. We still speak Yupiaq at home a lot of the time. When I was six years old I started school at the Bureau of Indian Affairs school in Akiak. Our school was grades kindergarten through eighth grade, but we did not have a high school then. It was about 1958 when I started school and there were no high schools in small Alaska Bush villages at that time. If you wanted to continue your education you had to go somewhere else.

When I was fifteen I was shipped out to the Wrangell Institute. That was a Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school in Wrangell, Alaska, in the southeast section of the state. They prepared us to go to either Mount Edgecumbe in Sitka or the Chemewa Indian School in Salem, Oregon. That was one of the hardest things we had to go through, being separated from our families if we wanted a high school education.

Everything about going to Wrangell was different from being in Akiak. It was a boarding school in another part of Alaska hundreds of miles away. We didn’t hunt and fish. We lived with other Alaska Natives. Akiak was a cold, dry climate and Wrangell was a wet, milder climate. When I got there it felt like a prison. I had to go there. My parents had no other options for me other than to send me out. It was a trust obligation of the federal government to educate us and the goal was to assimilate Alaska Natives into the mainstream of United States life. It was about being acculturated. They wanted to do away with our culture and replace it with the everyday culture of the rest of the country. It was a necessary thing to do if you wanted an education. You were taken from your family and sent to this new place. That is why it was so important later to have schools built locally in rural Alaska. You could stay home and still get an education. You could still be with your family.

I was fifteen years old and I had spent my whole life in Akiak. I was in a close family with all of those brothers and sisters and I had to say good-bye to them. I had grown up hunting, fishing, and berry picking and gathering and then I was by myself in Wrangell. Not completely by myself, though, because there were other kids at the school from villages who were just like me, who were in the same situation.

When we got to Wrangell, though, right from the beginning our joke was that we had been sent to prison. This was all to thoroughly prepare us for high school somewhere else. It was the next level of our education. We had a good math teacher and a good language arts teacher. Something else they did at the Wrangell Institute was to show us how to use a telephone. In those days there weren’t any telephones in the Alaska Bush, never mind cell phones. We didn’t have landlines in the Bush. We didn’t really know what a telephone looked like when we first got there.

Learning things was the good part, but there was a lot about being sent to Wrangell that was not much fun. Right away they gave us haircuts and cut our hair short, too. Then they sent us to showers to clean up. In the beginning it was all very unpleasant and a shock to us. We had to march around like soldiers, like little soldiers, divided into age groups and grade groups. We were supposed to march everywhere we went.

The worst thing about being in Wrangell was that we were not with our families. It was a completely different world. You are taken from a loving family with your mother, father, brothers, and sisters, doing things you have always done, to a completely different situation. You lived in a dormitory setting with running water and ate different food that was prepared differently from the way it was at home. We had to stand in line. We had to get haircuts and keep our hair short. The haircut was a big deal. We hated getting our hair cut and I didn’t like the haircut the way it looked.

They also inspected us. You had to get up at a certain time of day and make your bed. There were all these details and orders that we had to follow and if they weren’t just right under the rules we got yelled at. We were yelled at all of the time. They would go, “You!” And it was do this, do that. Go to bed, be quiet. It was a completely different environment from Yup'ik home life. It was different and we didn’t like it. What kept us boys going was that we had each other. We could talk to one another in Yupiaq, so we had our own language. We had each other and that helped us to survive.

Really, from the time we first started school, the United States government, through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, worked to wipe out our culture. At home we spoke Yupiaq, but when I entered elementary school in the BIA school I started learning to speak in English. It was not a bad thing to learn English, but they would not allow us to speak our native language at all. When we were not in the classroom, though, we spoke Yupiaq with our friends. We just kept speaking it when no one was around to tell us not to do it.

The goal was to make us into good little American boys. They had an assimilation process and that’s what they stuck to doing. We had to learn about Dick and Jane and that nuclear family even if our lives were completely different from the lives that Dick and Jane led. They were always clean—they didn’t get dirty from working outside—and they had a nice car. We didn’t have cars in Akiak. The teachers presented this to us as the ideal, the way we should be and the way we should aspire to be.

The same thing continued at the Wrangell Institute for a year. We looked at pictures of Dick and Jane and we knew we didn’t look like that or act like that. I’ll never forget an instructor teaching us what a “curb” was. We didn’t have paved streets in Akiak, never mind sidewalks with a curb. It seemed like a long year. I didn’t really want to be there. It was not something I had expected to do. There was some value in the curriculum. The math skills and working on the English language, I got something out of those. They helped me. That was definitely preparation for secondary education.

But there were also long periods of homesickness. You cried. I was a teenager in 1968. My family didn’t have a telephone in Akiak so I couldn’t talk to them. We never spoke. We communicated by letter only. We were completely cut off except by letter. They were far away. Wrangell was a hard place to be for a lot of kids and we lost out on parenting. They deprived us of our loving parents and our way of life. I missed hunting and fishing. It was different to have to follow all of those rules and regulations in boarding school and having to march around.

There were also kids there that were much younger than us. They went to school there because their village did not have a school that went up to eighth grade. So you had some really small kids there, eight, nine years old, from villages. I think a lot of those kids could not handle it being away from their homes and they lost it afterwards. They were much younger than us and they had been removed from their homes.

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.