The Dead Go to Seattle

by Vivian Faith Prescott

  Now she had a vanload of happy tourists who’d spent a few hundred dollars on the cheap-economy-buster cruise deals currently being offered by the cruise lines—See Alaska: The Land of the Last Frontier.

  Tova started to say, “Welcome to Sitka. We’ve been here for ten thousand years—” She was going to tell them about her matrilineal culture, how the Tlingit are organized by two moieties—eagle and raven—when Loud-Man informed her that her people couldn’t have been around that long: He had never heard of them. Tova shook her head. She reached her hand up to her bottom lip to fiddle with her labret, but the labret wasn’t there. She and a handful of Lingít language learners had had labrets pierced beneath their lower lips as Tlingit women once did. She often touched the labret to remind herself of the power of her words, to watch what she said. She sighed to herself—this was going to be one of those days.

  Tova recalled her first tourist venture at ten years old, selling garnets to the tourists back home on Wrangell Island, a 120 miles from Sitka. She had to tolerate people who felt comfortable pinching her cheeks and calling her Eskimo. Tova wasn’t Eskimo, of course, she was Tlingit, among a few other nations. She was Sámi, too. But at that age she didn’t know what that meant. Eventually, she’d convince the tourists she wasn’t Eskimo but Tlingit, but they couldn’t pronounce it anyway. A kling-what, they’d say.

  Tova would complain to her mother, but her mother would tell her to get back out there and sell garnets or they wouldn’t be able to visit Disneyland that year. And her father would tell her to be a “Good Indian,” using his same line over and over. “You know, kiddo, there are only a few of us good Indians left.”

  Those days were as ancient as her ancestors who pulled spruce roots with their teeth for basket weaving. Her father had disowned her nearly ten years ago after she’d told him she liked girls better than boys. She remembered her own Grandma Berta accusing her mother, “You should have made Tova wear dresses when she was little—and more pink.”

  Sometimes Tova wondered if her life was being run by a trickster. After all, she was a gay Indian with freckles, green eyes, and lighter skin than her brother.

  Tova drove the van out of the parking lot to the small outer drive and then turned toward Lincoln Street, the street that went through town. She did her routine, pointing out shops, the hotel, the Russian Orthodox Church. “Here in the center of town is the Russian Orthodox Church, built in 1848 and burned down in 1966 and then rebuilt.” After they drove the couple blocks through town, she headed over O’Connell Bridge. Once they were on Japonski Island, she pointed out the harbor, the university, the US Coast Guard Boat Station, the large Native hospital, the airport, the Coast Guard Air Station. She turned the van around at the airport, which was technically the end of the road, and headed back to town.

  Tova drove the tour van back over the bridge to Totem Park, parking by the big white converted school buses the competitor used. She walked her tour group into the thick forest. The pine-needle path crunched beneath their feet, and the sun filtered in through the hemlock and spruce. She let the tourists touch the wood and taught them to identify the ovoid shapes and the faces carved into the pole. “Kootéeya,” she told them. “Totem pole.” In unison they said, koo-tea-yuh.

  Tilley-Hat-Chick stepped nearer to Tova. “I’d like to get a photo of us together by this totem pole, if that’s okay with you?”

  “Sure,” Tova said. She was used to this. She liked to say visitors to Alaska had been shooting at the Tlingit for two hundred years, but she didn’t say it out loud this time. Tova sidled near Tilley-Hat-Chick. LL-Bean-Woman held up Tilley-Hat-Chick’s camera. “Smile,” the woman said. Click.

  LL-Bean-Woman handed the camera back and Tilley-Hat-Chick said, “Everyone back home won’t believe this … a white Indian.”

  Tova kept on smiling. Karma. After all, she had given them unofficial Indian names in her head. Probably, when they got back home to their comfortable worlds, they’d call her the “White-Indian-Tour-Guide.” But people were more than color—they were shapes and landscapes like her Northwest Coast art: slants, squares, ovoids, circles, horizons, mountains, and valleys.

  Tova asked Tilley-Hat-Chick, “Where did you say you were from?”

  “Oh, Australia,” the Japanese Tilley-hat-wearing woman said, walking away with her camera in hand.

  What Tova hated most about this business, though, was she had to be charming in order to get the tips. For a job, the pay wasn’t much at all: the tips made the job worth it. Yet if the tourists didn’t like what she said, she wouldn’t get any tips. And besides, she had a potty-mouth, so it was hard to not let “fuck this” and “fuck that” slip out.

  And every now and then she wanted to do a rain dance, or play with a starfish on the beach, taboos that would incur the wrath of Raven and he’d pull down the clouds and let it pour. Sometimes, she needed a break. Once, her mother told her that in some indigenous cultures, gays were thought to be “two-spirited.” Sitka was like that: one spirit in the summer and one in the winter. But whenever it rained heavily, her tour numbers would be thin. She’d get half a van because the tourists would either be on the ship complaining about the rain, or they’d all be snuggled up in Centennial Hall watching the renowned Russian dancers. Those days were very nice … and quiet.

  Today, though, it was sunny. Today, everyone loved Sitka. Tova led the group along the park’s trails, stopping to photograph the totem poles. They circled around to the narrow wooden footbridge spanning the river. Her group followed her across to the center of the bridge. Tova leaned over the rail and pointed into Indian River at the salmon spawning below them. Furry-Folk-Woman plugged her nose, “Eeewww, can’t you do something about these fish, at least when the ships are in town? I mean, this detracts from the visitor experience, don’t you think?”

  Little-Greps made a loud sound, a tone somewhere between a fart and burp, then said, “Pee-ee-yoo.” Quiet-Woman bopped him on the head and whispered something to him. Little-Greps rolled his eyes.

  After they crossed the bridge and visited the Russian soldiers’ graves, they crossed back over the bridge again and walked back to the park’s cultural center near the parking lot. Tova took them inside the building where they saw a wood carver and a raven’s-tail weaver at work. Then, she herded them into the tiny gift shop where they grabbed postcards, books, T-shirts, and hats.

  Tova pulled several books from the shelves and turned to face the group. She cleared her throat. “Hmmm. These three books are the most reputable books about the Tlingit culture. Some of those tourist books are inaccurate.” She set two of the books down on the counter and opened up the third one. “This one, on page 127 … there’s a photo of my great-grandmother.”

  The LL Bean Couple and Tilley-Hat-Chick scrunched in beside Tova as she set the tip of her finger on a photo of her great-grandmother. LL-Bean-Woman nodded to the cashier. “It’s a good thing your ancestors intermarried. You are so pretty. You girls really are.” LL-Bean-Woman patted Tova’s cheek. Tova turned to the Yup’ik girl behind the counter and mouthed, Oh … My … God.

  Out in the parking lot, Tova loaded her group back into the van. She drove out the road toward Old Sitka, the first Russian settlement, which was at the end of the road, seven miles away. As she drove, she wanted to point out her own house, which was actually her cousin’s, but she didn’t. Stick to the tour, she heard Marvin say in her head.

  As they passed the 35 mph sign, Tova sped up the van and began her talk. “Next, is our grocery store where you can park and watch whales lobtailing from the parking lot and eat chicken and jo-jos. Our food gets shipped up here on a barge from Seattle.”

  Tova drove on past the grocery store and pulled into a narrow parking lot next to the beach. Everyone remained inside the van. “And of course, you’ve probably already noticed we have our own Mount Fuji, but we call it Mount Edgecumbe. It’s a dormant volcano. The last time it blew up was on April Fools’ Day, in the mid-70s, when one of our local tricks
ters, by helicopter, dropped a hundred rubber tires inside the crater and lit them on fire. Everyone woke up in the morning to a smoking volcano.”

  The tourists laughed and Tova pulled out of the parking area and drove slowly along the narrow highway curving with the shore. For the rest of the drive Tova gave them the rainforest talk, the bear talk, the raven talk, and the no-we-don’t-have-any-moose talk and the yes-we-have-a-post-office talk. Now and then Tova wondered what the hell she was doing here, the same job she’d had since she was a kid. She was thirty years old and she’d finished her master’s degree, but, by the time she came home from Fairbanks, the job she’d wanted at the Park Service was already taken. Sure, she could get minimum wage jobs, but she had a master’s degree in Indigenous Knowledge Systems, which meant she’d learned how indigenous people had survived invasions, survived HUD housing, survived Indian Health Service, Native Corporations, logging, environmentalists, public schools, and even college. What was she to do with a degree like that, except piss people off?

  What Tova really wanted to do was get paid to talk, which is why the tour guide business in some weird way still fit her. She’d rather recite her poetry, though, and travel around hob-knobbing with other poets. In college, she dreamed about life after school, like the kids from the smallest of villages. Driving this van wasn’t one of them. She was just being a “good Indian” like her father always told her to be.

  On their way back to town, someone looked for the igloos. Another wanted to see a reservation. Tova politely told them what they wanted to know. Saffron-Man asked Tova about Tlingit customs, if they still practiced them. Tova told them about the koo.eex’, the feast for the dead, which is held a year or two after a death. Tova said, “We still have forty-day parties after a death, use traditional medicines, eat traditional foods. Some of us still stomp our feet rather than clap our hands. Clapping hands is Western practice,” she said. “We still believe in the landotter man and certain taboos like not bragging, not saying out loud you’re going hunting.”

  Someone grumbled from the back seat. “Yes, any more questions?” she asked, turning down the lower road, heading toward the tribal house. Since most tourists asked to see their famous Russian dancers, Tova tried to steer tourists to the tribal house to see the Native dancers, a more authentic experience since there wasn’t a single ethnic Russian in the Russian dance troupe. There were probably more Russian/Tlingits in the Tlingit dance group.

  “This sucks,” Little-Greps said as Tova stopped near the tribal house. Quiet-Woman squeezed his shoulder. “Oww,” Little-Greps yelled.

  Loud-Man grumbled. “Yeah, I want my money’s worth.”

  Tova took another deep breath, “Well, Sir, I’ve taken you around town, did the tour you paid for. If you want your money’s worth you might not like what I have to say, what I have to show you.”

  “Try me,” he said.

  “Does anyone else want a real tour?” she asked.

  Quiet-Woman spoke up from the back seat, “I’d like a real tour.”

  “Sure, me too,” Tilley-Hat-Chick said.

  Saffron-Man and Bindi-Woman smiled. “Yes,” they said.

  Uncle-Aaron nodded. “You go ahead, young lady, we have plenty of time. Give us our money’s worth.”

  Tova raised her eyebrows. “Oh, all right.” She steered the van away from the sidewalk. She took the same route back through the narrow street, back up to the highway again. Along the highway she drove a few hundred yards and then turned the van up the hill to her cousin Roan’s house, where she had rented a room.

  “Pēśāba … wee,” the little girl said.

  First things first. Tova pulled into the driveway. Tova invited everyone in for a bathroom break and a drink of water. Afterward, the tourists packed themselves back into the van again, but Tova was still inside. After a few minutes, she walked outside. She had changed her clothing into her regalia: she wore her bright blue Fry Bread Power T-shirt, the one like Thomas Builds-the-Fire wore in the film Smoke Signals—a knock-off design from Superman with a bright yellow shield on a blue background. Also, Tova had slipped on her Carhartts, her favorite pants with holes worn in the ass. Beneath her canvas pants, though, she wore her thin, and equally threadbare, long underwear. She had put her silver labret back in her lower lip, and her long hair was now out of the hair tie, hanging loose down to her knees. She wore comfortable shoes that didn’t make her feet hurt, and around her neck was her bear claw necklace she wore whenever she wrote poetry.

  Tova opened the driver’s door, swung her hair in front of her and hopped in. She turned around to face them. “Ready?” she asked.

  “Ready,” the group said in unison.

  Tova stayed turned around in her seat:

  Ch’a aadéi yei xat naay.oo. Lingít x’éináx, Lugán Shaawát yoo xat duwasáakw. Dleit kaa x’éináx, Tova Agard. Yéil naax xat sitee. T’ax hit áyá xat. T’akdéintaan áyá xat. Sámi ka Hawaiian ka German ka Norweigan ka Irish. Suomalaiset yádi áyá xat. Karl Agard yoo duwasáakw ax éesh. Mina Laukonen yoo duwasáakw ax tláax’. Teikweidí dachxan áyá xat. Kachxaana.aakw dax as een.aa áyá. Sheet’ká Kwáan yei xat yatee. Gunalchéesh.

  In English Tova said,

  Please forgive me if my words offend you. My Tlingit name is Puffin-Woman. My white man name is Tova Agard. I’m a Raven from the Snail House, the T’akdéintaan clan. I’m Sámi and Hawaiian and German and Norwegian and Finnish and Irish. My father’s name is Karl Agard and my mother’s name is Mina Laukonen. I’m a grandchild of the Teikweidí, the Bear People. I was born in Wrangell, Alaska, and I live in Sitka. Thank you.

  After she spoke, the tourists were quiet. She turned the van out of the driveway. In front of them, the volcano came into view again, and Tova said, “See the volcano out front? There’s an old story about incest between a brother and sister and the shamed sister lives in the volcano. The volcano has a real name: L’ux, which means ‘Blinking Top.’”

  “L’ux,” Uncle-Aaron said, smiling at her.

  Tova smiled back. That word was hard to pronounce. “And we sometimes get earthquakes here in Sitka. Some of us still believe there’s an Old-Woman-Who-Lives-Underneath, and if she gets too hungry, if she isn’t fed enough fat, she’ll shake the fault line.”

  “What kind of fat?” Bindi-Woman asked.

  “How would you do that?” LL-Bean-Man added.

  “Good questions,” Tova said. “The fat is our stories. At least that’s what I’m told. We have to keep making them up, keep telling new stories, or she gets mad.”

  “Ah, I see,” Uncle-Aaron said. “You don’t want anyone to forget. That’s good … don’t forget.” Uncle-Aaron’s voice trailed off. He turned his head and looked out the side window. No one else said anything, their breaths falling into Uncle-Aaron’s silences.

  As Tova drove them around town through back-street—the Indian village—she pointed out houses: “That’s my cousin’s house, and my aunt’s house. And that one, the one with the rainbow flag, is my ex-girlfriend’s house. And that other one, the one with the blue trim, is my other ex-girlfriend’s house. And that’s my ex-father’s best friend’s house—he disowned me because my father disowned me because I’m gay. And that’s my uncle’s house and my other cousin’s house,” she said pointing here and there.

  Next, she drove them through the HUD housing and the other two housing projects. She said, “The Natives get the woods where we’re out of sight and the rich folks get beachfront, places where we used to smoke our fish. Do you think we can cross their fancy yards to have a bonfire on the beach?”

  Next, she drove them to the large bronze statue of Lord Baranof in the center of town. She pulled the van over. “And here we honor a tyrant, the beginning of our cultural genocide. And when the city erected it, before the unveiling, someone had chopped off the statue’s nose in the middle of the night. They had to postpone the ceremony and do repairs. For many of us, it’s like … it’s like having a Hitler statue in a Jewish neighborhood.”
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br />   Tova drove through the parking lot around the statue and then turned the corner toward the harbor. “And on the right is the harbor where my cousin shot himself in the stomach down on his boat.”

  Tova drove about a half mile. “And down the road a bit,” she said, pointing to a small trailer court on the beach side, “is where my cousin lives. Whooo! Hooo! We get to live on the beach. Cory lives in the little silver trailer.” She turned the van into the potholed trailer court. The van crept by a silver-sided trailer buckling under the weight of the mossy roof. “He has fetal alcohol syndrome. He works stocking shelves at the grocery store and repairs outboard motors.”

  Tova pulled out of the trailer court and turned left. Her passengers had been quiet for a while. Maybe she shouldn’t be giving them the “real” tour. Marvin was going to be mad, really mad. She drove the highway until she turned down another small road. She slowed the van down next to a shuttered gray house. “And a while ago, right in this house—see, no one lives there anymore—is where a white cop murdered one of our Seagull Women: Cousin Kirsti. The cop shot her and then killed himself. Kirsti, my cousin, was his ex-girlfriend, and I guess the cop was pissed because she broke up with him. So he waited and must have planned it because, months later, he killed her. They can’t sell the house. I don’t know if it’s because of the seagulls or the ghosts. I don’t know,” Tova said. “The seagulls still gather on the roof during every storm. The gulls, they’re our clan members. And I’m worried, ’cause it’s been raining a lot since Kirsti died.”