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CHAPTER 1

How Did We Get Here?

An Overview of the First Century

So finally they said “Let’s all live in one place and vote to have one leader, and we will see what happens.” So from around Arctic Village we went down to where the trail meets from Fort Yukon. That’s where we stayed. They say that so they can tell anyone coming along either trail about their plan. So that’s what they did.

— Maggie Gilbert, quoted in Craig Mishler (1995)

A Background Geography and History of the Nets’aii Gwich’in of Arctic Village, Alaska

The story of the Nets’aii Gwich’in’s settlement at Arctic Village has been told and retold over the years by a variety of interested outside observers (see, for example, Caulfield 1983; Hadleigh-West 1963; Lonner and Beard 1982; Mishler 1995). Still, in order to provide context, it is necessary to repeat some of this information here.

In short, the Nets’aii Gwich’in were a nomadic hunting and gathering tribe living in the region now known as northeast Alaska and northwest Yukon, Canada, for several millennia (see Map 1.1). As elder Moses Cruikshank explains in Mackenzie’s biography of Johnny Fredson (1985: 5–6):

The Netsi Kutchin [also “Natsit Gwich’in” as it appears in Osgood 1936 or “Natsitkutchin” in Mason 1924: 12, meaning “strong people”] of the Chandalar region were Athabascan Indians who had hunted the muskeg and scrubby forests of the Yukon Flats northward toward the snowcapped Brooks Range, and traveled northeastward toward the Yukon Territory for trade with the coastal Eskimos [i.e., the Inupiat] for more than a thousand years. They didn’t own much, only what they could carry on the hunt—a knife, some baskets, snowshoes, warm skin clothing, and until white traders came, only bows, arrows and spears to hunt with … The skins of caribou and moose provided almost everything else they needed.

The environment made the Nets’aii Gwich’in people who they were in ways large and small. In turn, the Gwich’in made and remade their environment over the millennia, shaping it to conform to their needs while also responding to its strength that would ultimately, along with other social forces determine their fates.

The region that the Alaskan Gwich’in call “home” is comprised of nearly 37,000 square miles of land (Andrews 1977:103) located in the interior region of northeast Alaska known as the Northern Plateaus Province (Wahrhaftig 1965: 22). The area has historically experienced extreme temperatures—90 degrees Fahrenheit is possible in summer and –50 degrees or lower in winter. Summers are typically more moderate, however, usually in the 60s and brief in duration. Sunlight is plentiful (Illustrations 1.1 and 1.2), as are a variety of species of voracious mosquitoes. Winter lasts from mid-September, when the first snows fall, until breakup in mid-June. In reality, it can snow virtually any day of the year. Much of the winter is also enshrouded in a blue haze, not so much dark as lacking in actual direct sunlight (see Illustrations 8.1 and 8.2). The region varies from marshy lowland valleys to flats that stretch for miles beyond the Yukon River’s banks to foothills of the Brooks Range. These hills generally reach summits no higher than 1,500 to 2,500 feet. Boreal forest covers the land (Slobodin 1981: 514) comprised of permafrost. Flora is limited to lichens, conifers, and the like; fauna includes bear, moose, caribou, and small furbearers (Wahrhaftig 1965: 23).

Historically, the Nets’aii Gwich’in (also referred to in the literature as “Chandalar Kutchin”; see Slobodin 1981) were seminomadic hunters, gatherers, and fishers, structured in small groups and bands known as “restricted wanderers” (Hosley 1966: 52) whose community pattern “adapted to scattered or seasonably available food resources” (VanStone 1974: 38). Thus, the region’s severe geography dictated the lifestyle and behavior of the people. While larger mammals served as the primary food source, smaller mammals (beaver, ground squirrel, Arctic hare) were used for clothing and trade (Slobodin 1981: 515).

It is uncertain exactly when the Nets’aii Gwich’in of northeast Alaska were first contacted by Europeans. While some argue that first contact occurred in 1847, with the establishment of Hudson’s Bay Company at Fort Yukon (Hadleigh-West 1963: 21; Nelson 1986: 13; Slobodin 1981: 529), others indicate a later period, the 1860s (Caulfield 1983: 88), when the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England began sending missionaries to the region (see chapter 2). Either way, interaction occurred with those of both French and English origin beginning in the latter part of the nineteenth century. As will be seen in greater detail (chapters 2 and 3), the colonization process was rapid and thorough, and would ultimately have a long-lasting impact on the Nets’aii Gwich’in with permanent outcomes and ramifications.

Map 1.1 Arctic Village and neighboring Gwich’in villages in the Yukon Flats.

The village was founded in 1908 (Caulfield 1983; Hadleigh-West 1963) or 1909 (Lonner and Beard 1982) and named Vashr’aii K’oo, meaning “Creek with Steep Bank” (Mishler 1995: 434). The origins of the name “Arctic Village” are unknown (Hadleigh-West 1963:17). Chief Christian (1878–1947) was, in effect, the founder of the village when he built the first cabin for him and his wife, Rachel (Peter 1966; Nickelson 1969b; I. Tritt 1987a). The building of a cabin was itself an innovation; only with the introduction of the axe was log cabin construction a possibility, and the poor ventilation of the buildings, heated by wood stoves, often led to various health difficulties. Thus, more than a decade later, a few skin houses still existed in the community alongside the small log cabins (Mason 1924: 27).

Although some have reported that settlement was fostered in part by the purported murder of a White man by unknown Nets’aii Gwich’in assailants (see Stern 2005: 34), little evidence exists to substantiate this conspiratorial claim. Rather, as the more commonly known story goes, the Nets’aii Gwich’in people came to settle at the confluence of the Vashr’aii K’oo Creek and the East Fork of the Chandalar River for very rational reasons related to the access of wild food resources. The village is ideally located in the direct migration path of the Porcupine caribou herd, which is central to the tribe’s social and economic survival. Similarly, there is a wealth of fish in the area, though numerous creeks similar to the Vashr’aii K’oo that also teem with fish intersect the Chandalar. As one elder related to Mishler (1995: 457) some years ago:

There was no village [yet] but they used to gather there [at the creek] during spring break-up. So they all gathered there until break-up and also for fish. So that’s what they did. We were living there, fishing. Chief Christian was there. We really depended on him. He was not having hard times and had no children. He helped people a lot.

It was at this point that the community determined to settle in one place and to follow a single leader who would run the political and economic affairs of the community:

So that’s what they did. They told everybody what they had planned. They all thought that was a good idea. So everybody got together. In those days there was hardly any money. Our main thing was getting food to eat. So they elected Chief Christian for their leader at Arctic Village. People all helped one another. They helped one another with wood, food, and other things. They all worked hard to do this.

So that’s how Arctic Village became a village. The kids used to pack water for each household. And they did the same with wood. There used to be wood piled up in front of the houses. Those were happy times. (459)

While this version of events is certainly compelling, settlement not only hinged upon food availability, which presumably had always been a concern from time immemorial, but was also further incentivized by two social institutions imposed by the outside, namely the church and the school. The missionaries had come to the area beginning in the 1860s (Caulfield 1983: 88). Formal education was introduced thereafter, designed to teach the Nets’aii Gwich’in Western cultural values (Hosley 1966: 231) and how to follow Christian social mores (VanStone 1974: 87). As I have noted previously, “the creation of schools and the requirement that all children attend them played a direct role in the settlement process of the community” (Dinero 2003b: 143).

Integration into the regional economy via the fur trade also helped in fostering permanent settlement at Arctic Village (Hosley 1966: 153). In the early days, furs were traded at the local store for basic provisions, but in time cash became an increasing part of the village economy as villagers made the 17-to-23-day round-trip journey to Fort Yukon to acquire more specialized commodities such as ammunition and tea (Peter 1966). Since the early 1840s, during the Russian-American era, Gwich’in trappers had traveled regularly to the fort to conduct commerce, especially with coastal Alaska Natives (Inupiat) and other local peoples (Bockstoce 2009: 212–16). The cyclical dynamic of introducing fur trapping to the Nets’aii Gwich’in subsistence culture, selling furs for cash, and subsequently using cash in commercial establishments to purchase non-Native food, clothing, and other fabricated goods including firearms (Bockstoce 2009: 212; Mason 1924: 25) was a major social and economic development that would permanently alter the course of Nets’aii Gwich’in society.

The village was slow to grow to a significant size of permanent settlers. Those who settled at Arctic Village then—or even now—should be recognized as the most committed and determined of Native villagers. It is, in effect, one of Alaska’s furthermost outposts, far from other Gwich’in settlements and White communities. As Clara Childs Mackenzie suggests, in its early years especially, Arctic Village was the most distant and remote of Gwich’in villages, making it all the more challenging to get there (1985: 112).

Thus, when researcher and anthropologist Robert McKennan traveled to the village in 1933, for example, only nine people were present upon his arrival, and the village was comprised of about a dozen cabins (Mishler and Simeone 2006: 168–69). Katherine Peter notes that throughout this period into the late 1930s, there was still constant movement between Arctic Village and neighboring Gwich’in settlements including Fort Yukon, Chalkyitsik, and Venetie. For the most part, the Gwich’in remained largely nomadic to this point, having little if any interaction with the outside world short of the ongoing trading activities at Fort Yukon. Increasingly, this began to change, as the men went out to hunt more frequently on their own while the women stayed at the village to care for their children, who began to attend school more consistently (Peter 1992: 91).

Indeed, the population of Arctic Village fluctuated considerably throughout the early years as seminomadism persisted, dropping to negligible numbers around World War I before beginning to climb steadily after World War II and the creation of the Venetie Reservation in which Arctic Village and the Village of Venetie are situated (see Dinero 2003b: 145). The reservation, created in 1943 to promote social and economic development in the Native sector via “a fixed, limited, and protected land base” (Hosley 1966: 206), fostered internal stability and also drew external pressures that encouraged further settlement. Between 1950 and 1960, the permanent village population more than doubled. With settlement, temporary tentlike shelters were replaced by log cabins (Hadleigh-West 1963: 311). Yet, as “traditional” nomadism declined, the community maintained a significant degree of residential mobility.

Illustration 1.1 Main Street, Arctic Village, Alaska (July 2011).

That said, settlement at the village cannot be viewed as entirely “voluntary” or in any way as a benign or benevolent process. Isaac Tritt Sr. noted that, due to a lack of reliable food supplies, life in Arctic Village was typically much more challenging and the population often smaller than in other communities—Venetie or Fort Yukon, for example—with easier access to these resources (1987a). Therefore, to fully understand the Nets’aii Gwich’in of Arctic Village in the early twenty-first century, it is important to realize that settlement in the early twentieth century occurred largely due to external economic and social forces acting on the community from outside of their control and, to a degree, of their full appreciation or comprehension.

As elder Sarah James put it in one of my earlier interviews with her (8 August 1999):

We were forced to settle here. The White people came with disease and change. They wanted to put Western education here. We were forced to settle in one place so there would be enough kids for a school. If we didn’t settle they would take our kids away, adopt them, send them to mission schools.

So we settled here. We have fish here year-round, so we can always have fish. This is a place where caribou are likely to pass, so that’s why we settled.

We supported the school getting started, but I still was sent to boarding school [because] half the time the school [in the village] was barely operating.

By being near the timberline, this is also a good trapping area. So they [i.e., the White men] also introduced us to trapping.

The Church was also a big part [of settlement]. They bring in used clothes. We had a bishop, Gordon. He flew a plane, and would bring in oranges. It was the only time we got [things like that] …

Before the White people, it was a time of plenty … [Now] there were a lot of people on the land, and it was harder to find food … Then they brought in the game warden. They put in regulations on game. If they get caught killing out of season, the head of the household, the husband, was arrested. Without a man who will provide for them? The game warden would look at the bones the dogs were chewing on; we had to hide the meat. We used piles of willows to hide it if the airplane came. As I was growing up, it made me feel like—well, what would you feel if you had to sneak around and your parents were a part of it?

To be sure, the coming of White settlers had mixed outcomes. White men brought alcohol and disease, but they also brought doctors and cures. Medicine and religion went hand and hand. The traditional shaman was not powerful enough to fight the new diseases the Nets’aii Gwich’in encountered, which, in time, would further strengthen the power of the Christian church (Mackenzie 1985: 8).

The creation of the Venetie Reservation did not fully resolve all land claims issues and struggles between the Nets’aii Gwich’in and the White settlers, who were slowly but surely coming to Alaska throughout the postwar period. Politicization of Alaskan Gwich’in interests also increased in the 1950s as the community struggled with the United States federal government to protect and maintain its traditional lands. The Nets’aii Gwich’in sought to increase the amount of land beyond that initially allotted to the reservation in 1943.

In 1950 and again in 1957, Arctic Village petitioned the US Department of the Interior to enlarge the Venetie reserve west and north (Lonner and Beard 1982: 101), but to no avail. Rather than surrendering land, the US government adopted a different approach to dealing with Indigenous Americans. By the early 1960s, the Johnson Administration had implemented its Great Society initiative, which extended into Native Alaska. On the one hand, the Nets’aii Gwich’in of Arctic Village benefited from the War on Poverty plan, insofar as new housing and buildings were constructed to help improve the communal standard of living (at least, from a Western perspective). At the same time, however, the programs also fostered increased dependence on the government and greater participation in the cash, wage-labor economy (131–32).

Illustration 1.2 The village context—the Vashr’aii K’oo Creek as it drains into the East Fork of the Chandalar River (July 2011).

Soon thereafter, in 1971, the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) was developed and implemented, a major outcome of which was the creation of 13 Native regional corporations and 203 village corporations (Arnold 1976: 146). The regional corporations were to serve as for-profit companies, as holders of traditional Native lands and the resources therein that invested their by-products in order to “promote the economic and social well-being of [their] shareholders and to assist in promoting and preserving the cultural heritage and land base” (Doyon 2015). The village corporations were governed separately from the regional corporations and did not “replace village councils or the governing bodies of municipal governments” (Arnold 1976: 160).

Thirty-seven villages were included in the Doyon Native Regional Corporation, established in Alaska’s interior region. Arctic Village and Venetie determined they would take title of their own reserve rather than participate in the land claims settlement. In so doing, the Nets’aii Gwich’in opted to take fee simple title of the 1.8 million acre Venetie Reservation from the federal government, furthering Nets’aii Gwich’in control of natural resources in the region (Stern 2005: 47). Bureau of Land Management studies at the time indicated that the area in and around Arctic Village potentially held gold, iron, zinc, tin, lead, tungsten, silver, chromium, and other minerals, and that oil and natural gas might also be found locally (DCRA 1991).

Thus, the 1.8 million acres were patented to the Venetie and Nets’aii corporations. As “tenants in common,” the two villages shared the land, dividing on a percentage basis, with 303 total residents and others with land claims in Venetie and Arctic Village combined. Venetie was given 156 out of 303, or 51.5 percent interest of the land, and Arctic was given 147 out of 303, or 48.5 percent interest of the land, as a temporary first step. The ultimate goal was to control the land and its resources, and to go through the necessary legal processes that would lead to that end. “Subsequent to acquiring the patented lands, the two corporations transferred title of the land in trust to the Native Village of Venetie Tribal Government [NVVTG] for the purpose of managing the land and its resources. Following this transfer the two corporations dissolved” (DCRA 1991).

As a result of working out these various legalisms, the NVVTG (which, as noted, includes both Venetie and Arctic Village) would be independent of the Doyon Native Regional Corporation, and Doyon would have no obligation to the government (Arnold 1976: 200). In the words of Alaskan Gwich’in community leaders (Arctic Village Council 1991):

Our system of self-regulation and self-determination is based largely upon self-respect and self-esteem, which allows us to then work for the common good of our village … Our leaders believed ANCSA was a trick to “ripoff” the land from Native people. We feel we were right in our decision to stay with the way we know best, our Indian way (38).

While “rip off” may not necessarily be the right term to describe the ANCSA settlement, it is true that the settlement was not fully resolved at this juncture. Years later, the United States Supreme Court, in a unanimous February 1998 ruling (not 1988, as reported in Stern 2005: 48), determined that while the Nets’aii Gwich’in did hold the land in perpetuity, the reservation lands were not completely under Nets’aii Gwich’in jurisdiction when it came to certain conditions (i.e., the reserve is not “Indian country”). The tribe cannot, for example, levy taxes on non-Native outside interests such as private contractors operating on tribal lands.

Moreover, throughout the early 1970s and thereafter, following the building of the oil pipeline out of Prudhoe Bay, it also became increasingly common to suggest that the “traditional” Alaska Native was now on the verge of “extinction,” about to be replaced by the business-savvy, “oil age,” materially oriented capitalist (Jorgenson 1990; for an alternative perspective, see Haycox 2002: 283). This sentiment has been suggested in such popular literature as John McPhee’s Coming into the Country (1977). The image of the “Brooks Brothers” Native (see Kollin 2001: 168–69) has also been reinforced by academics who suggest that capitalism began taking hold in Alaska Native communities with the creation of ANCSA, if not before, fostering an achievement orientation that supplants an ascriptive culture and facilitating the development of a new class structure that includes the creation of an “Alaska native bourgeoisie” (A. Mason 2002).

By the late 1970s, Arctic Village, if not the Nets’aii Gwich’in in general, had changed a great deal when compared to only twenty years earlier, despite efforts to opt out of ANCSA and to maintain control of the land and its resources. New oil-related job opportunities on the North Slope, as well as new “income” provided by the permanent fund annual payments, which had also been created by the oil industry, all served to bring new wealth to the community and with it, new spending behaviors (Nickelson 2013). New buildings, such as a communal laundry (see chapter 4), were added to the existing log housing, church, and school

Caulfield (1983) cites several of these changes, including “the availability of limited wage employment opportunities and government transfer payments, changes in resource distribution, the use of new technology such as high-powered rifles, outboard motors, and snow machines, changing demographic patterns, and resource competition” (101). The preponderance of all-terrain vehicles (ATVs) on village roads occurred during this period as well, lending to greater geographic dispersion of village residences away from the old village center, especially in the direction of the airport (now known as the Airport Road) and the mountain (now known as the Mountain Road). A large peeledlog Community Hall, perhaps the most notable building in the village, would not be added until 1988.

Concurrently, the Nets’aii Gwich’in leadership increased its efforts to exercise greater power, particularly in relation to the federal and state governments. In large part, this was due to an increasing perception among residents that outside interference and control (seen most clearly, perhaps, in the proposal developed at this time to conduct exploratory oil and gas drilling in the ANWR, the traditional calving ground of the Porcupine caribou herd) were directly endangering their subsistence lifestyle and culture. Indeed, the Nets’aii Gwich’in began to see themselves as a “state within a state” in the early 1980s (Lonner and Beard 1982: 107) as they sought control over outsider access to the community, its lands, and its resources.

The Nets’aii Gwich’in leadership sought greater centralized control of village resident behaviors as well during this time. The Arctic Village Council—elected annually and comprised of a First and Second Chief, six members, and an alternate (“Village Focus” 1991)—took on the increasing role of providing moral, as well as legal, guidance. Historically, the chief acted as a representative, chosen by the group for his knowledge and courage in hunting and conflict with neighboring tribes (Osgood 1936: 129). In this regard, the new leadership model was not unlike the Nets’aii Gwich’in’s traditional model, in which large groupings of bands (of ten to fifty unrelated families temporarily organized for major functions such as hunting, warfare, or trading) were led by administrator-style leaders, who “directed rather than participated in all major tasks” (Slobodin 1981: 522).

In essence, then, two trends began to emerge during the post-1970 period. First, Western elements of “modernity” arrived in Arctic Village, in the form of new technologies, values, and lifestyles. Second, political activity heightened in the village and broader community, as the Nets’aii Gwich’in struggled to fend off outside political control of their lives, while exercising social control within the community itself. While the Alaskan Gwich’in community underwent great change since European contact and especially since World War II, the Nets’aii Gwich’in of Arctic Village clearly remained just that—strong and proud members of the Gwich’in people. This sense of Gwich’in identity and purpose stemmed from the internal strength of the people and their rich history and culture, as well as from their ability to socially and politically mold newly imposed Western-style values and systems to further their own purposes. Perhaps this is best revealed by the voluntary adoption of a Western innovation—community planning—as a vehicle through which to perpetuate traditional Nets’aii Gwich’in values and ideals.

By the late 1980s, the community had changed in innumerable ways, and the village was, to a great degree, unrecognizable when compared to conditions just two or three decades earlier. Yet, one may still question whether, and to what extent, the village itself was by this point functioning as a single entity with one voice, one identity, one direction. This issue will be taken up in detail in chapter 4, but before doing so, I digress in the pages that follow by addressing how two primary institutions, the Church and the school, played a central role in the ongoing social and economic evolution and development of the Nets’aii Gwich’in community. As will be quite evident, these two institutions together both reflected and formulated the early years of growth and expansion in Arctic Village. Without a doubt, the impact of their role can be felt to the present day.