“They’ll take us in, right?” Sarah asked. “I used to know the health aide at the clinic. And my aunt lived there for a few years. She married a guy from there. But she moved to Juneau.”
Tova licked the rain off her lips. “It’s Southeast. I have relatives here.”
Tova slowed the skiff, her eyes scouring the shoreline. She was right. Not all of Kupreanof Island was submerged. The small colorful square houses and the harbor were all gone. Most of the seashore of the island had sloughed off in the initial flood. A few boats tucked inside the trees.
As they neared the village, two small boats motored out from the treeline and headed in their direction. Johan waved. No one waved back.
The boats intercepted them. Tova slowed the skiff then shut the engine off as the boats sidled alongside, one on either side. There were two men in one boat, and one woman and one man in the other.
“Who are you?” the woman asked, holding a rifle.
She recognized her. “Nan, it’s me. Yak’éi yee xwasteení.” She nodded to the others in the boats. “Wáa sá iyaatee?”
The woman smiled, “Aaa, tlél wáa sá xat utí.”
The woman turned to the man in her boat, “This is Tova Agard. She’s cool. I know her from college. We were in the same Tlingit language classes.”
The man pointed his gun at the others. “And them?”
“I can vouch for them,” Tova said. “They’re friends.”
“You came at a bad time,” Nan said. “We’re on the watch for a navy ship they say is headed this way. The Dewey. It’s armed.”
“So are you,” Johan said, nodding to their weapons. “And, besides, what have you done, anyway?”
“We’ve resisted,” one of the men said flatly.
“That’s my brother, Thomas,” Nan said.
“Thomas,” Johan said, nodding to him.
Fern held out her hand, palm up. “Resisted what?” she asked.
“They’re going around taking all our at.óow for safekeeping,” Thomas replied. “That’s what the radio says. Safekeeping. They want the totem, our carved masks, any helmets, headdresses, anything we might have. Everything we have.”
“Wow,” Johan whistled.
“And worse,” Nan said, “they’re taking us.”
Tova put a hand to her chest. “Us? You?” What was she talking about? Wasn’t the government supposed to save them? At least, help them? She didn’t believe that, but she’d at least hoped for a rescue or help even.
“Yeah, you, me, them. They’re taking Natives to camps,” Nan said through her gritted teeth. “There are two or three around Southeast. They say we’ll starve if we don’t, and we have to have our kids in school and have access to hospitals and housing. We’re going to die if they don’t help us.”
“What?” They weren’t starving. Sure, they’d have to work to get food. They’d get hungry. But if they worked together, they’d be okay. This news didn’t sound good. Not good at all.
Thomas held up a pair of binoculars searching the horizon. “Don’t see them yet,” he said. “First the camps were voluntary and, when no one volunteered to go, it became mandatory. Now they’re rounding us up.”
Nan nodded her chin upward. “Girl, you could pass for white. Or Japanese. Sure you want to hole up with us? They’ve already been here once a couple months ago. Said they’d be back. Said we’d better have the totems down and ready to go. Gave us some free plastic totes, and they said to gather up the at.óow.”
Thomas lit up a cigarette and inhaled. “They want our world’s largest totem. We saved it from the flood and somehow they figured we did. We floated it to the fort and dragged it back behind it. We’re going to raise it when we rebuild. Like hell we’re giving it to them.”
“That’s bullshit,” Johan said.
Tova looked at Sarah, Johan, and Fern and shrugged as if to say, Well, do you want to stay? Of course, she wanted to stay. There’d be a good fire and maybe a bed. And there’d be stories. Kake folks were good storytellers. These were her grandmother’s people.
Fern and Sarah both nodded.
“Yeah,” Tova said. “We’ll stay. I’m a good fisherman. And Johan weaves and he’s a nurse too. He’s good. He can suture, stuff like that. Fern’s good with traditional medicines.”
In the woods beyond the treeline, the villagers had built a small fort. Large spruce trees were cut for the perimeter. Inside, there were five or six small buildings and a large one that held two hundred people or more. Tova smiled when she first saw it. There was even a basketball court set up and several kids were playing ball. Men and women were skinning deer and a half dozen smokehouses puffed smoke from out the cracks in the doors.
That night, the village held a big dinner. There were speeches in both Tlingit and English. The dancers had come out to dance when Thomas came into the large room, looking worried. The dancing stopped abruptly.
“Two of our guys spotted the Dewey by Portage Bay,” Thomas said. “She stopped in Petersburg overnight.”
A low rumble of voices moved through the room. Uh-oh, Tova thought, but didn’t say it out loud. She’d been quiet all night, listening to the language she didn’t get to hear as often as she’d like.
“Good news is,” Thomas said, “they don’t have a full crew. They didn’t even have a full crew to begin with: about twenty. They stopped in Petersburg and saw a bunch of bonfires on the hills. The harbor and the canneries are gone. But we gotta thank those Vikings. Quite a few sailors got drunk with the locals and the commander hasn’t been able to find the rest of his crew. The Dewey’s down to fourteen sailors—so I’m told.”
Laughter.
Johan stood up from the floor and raised his hand. “I have an idea.”
She looked at him and frowned. What kind of an idea? Johan was outspoken. Not a trait that would be respected here. But as he spoke, first introducing himself in Tlingit, people must have realized he had a future as a good orator, a good attribute to have.
Later, men and women sat around in a circle exchanging ideas. Several were experienced Iraq war veterans, some Vietnam vets, some worked for the tribal hospital. They talked about plans and strategies.
The eldest, Joseph Williams, was a WWII vet and led the discussion. They talked of diplomacy and the importance of talking things over with the government.
“I like Johan’s idea,” Williams said. “It’s possible this might work since it’s been done before.”
Williams nodded to Johan.
Johan stood and motioned for Tova to stand, too. Oh, boy. She was used to talking to outsiders, tourists, but these were her elders. That was a different story. How could she explain it to the elders, how she really did know what was going to happen if they tried diplomacy. Didn’t they remember the First Contact story? La Pérouse gave her people, her clan, the first taste of “civilization.” The old men and the young ones were going to paddle their canoes out to the navy ship. The sailors will give the Tlingits rice and laugh because the elders will think they’re eating maggots.
After that, the sailors will give them sugar, which the Tlingits will assume is white sand. But the “white sand” will turn into another type of death. In future generations, they’ll hobble on severed legs and their bellies will sting with insulin shots. And worse, the sailors will give the young men a bottle of brandy, and the men will spin in circles, laughing on deck, spinning through her family for a long time to come.
And the commander, after taking all their at.óow, will inquire as to the locations of all the villages and ask if there are riches: sea otter pelts, copper and gold, and, of course, Natives themselves. After this first contact, the Tlingits will head back to shore with their gifts and the sailors will claim in their diaries they were the first to greet the savages. And if the diplomacy didn’t work, she knew they’d bomb the village like they did Angoon, Kake, and Wrangell a long time ago.
Tova shook her head. She said to the grandfather, “Yeah, I speak their language. How about I go
in your place?”
“You speak their language?” Mr. Williams questioned.
“Ah, yeah, I can speak their language—fluently. I can say, ‘You better speak English only, you savages, because you’re lucky you get to believe in our god and our schools but if you carve totem poles and eat seal grease you can’t go to our schools and when you finally challenge us to go to our schools, our kids will beat up your kids for generations right into the twenty-first century when kids will spray paint around town “Kill All Natives” reminding you of the good American life: two halibut a day, free healthcare, a new HUD house, shares-or-no-shares in corporations not tribes, a laminated card, a degree for driving tour buses and working at the cold storage and canneries, where we will process your salmon up in cans, ship them out to our storehouses, and then, out of the goodness of our hearts, ship the salmon back to you when you receive our commodities.”
After she finished speaking, there was silence, but only for about a minute. To someone from the Western culture, that might have seemed like a long time. To her it was time enough to close her eyes and see herself beneath a glacier, enclosed within its womb. She rode a small raft from beneath the ice, coming out at the mouth of the Stikine River. She saw herself beneath a volcano, shaking the tectonic plates, spewing ash into the air. She saw herself whipping a blanket in Lituya Bay, sending a tidal wave crashing against the mountains. She saw herself lying on her back in a trance, an oval drum beside her, the way she had once traveled, through time and stories, and cultures. Maybe she was still traveling.
She saw herself walking along a beach. There was a dead girl walking to Seattle. Kirsti. Her dress was tattered and her dishwater-blonde hair stuck this way and that.
She approached her. Kirsti looked up at Tova. “It’s okay, Kirsti. I’m here. You can breathe now. Inhale.”
Kirsti inhaled, taking a deep breath.
Tova touched her shoulder. Kirsti felt as solid as beach rock. Real. “You have to stay here. You’re not dead. You’re alive like me. You forgot, like me. Sit down on the beach.”
Kirsti nodded but said nothing.
She helped Kirsti onto the beach to the sitting position. She leaned down and whispered, “Let the clouds caress your skin, the waxing moon sigh through your cells, the curl of wave rush over your thighs.” She straightened then stepped back from Kirsti. “Now, stick your legs out straight in front of you.”
Kirsti stuck her legs out.
“Now,” Tova instructed, “move them up to your chest and hold your arms around them.” Just like that the sea moved toward them. She turned around to look at Kirsti, who now had a big grin on her face.
Inside the fort’s house, surrounded by flood survivors, Tova opened her eyes, the image in her mind fading like melting ice. Everyone in the room stared at her.
The elder, Mr. Williams, spoke first. “Ah, I see. You are fluent, granddaughter. Maybe you should go out to meet them first, ask them what they want.”
“That’s right,” Johan said. Johan then told the story of the Naanyaa.aayí and the S’iknakadi coming down the Stikine and how the men dressed like women and fooled their attackers.
Johan grinned. “It’ll be like a Pride Week Parade. Instead of dykes on bikes and cruising for the rainbow, we’ll be aunt fancys skiffing with filet knives. We’ll be looking for the aggies on board the ship, make them help us.”
“We’ll need your best warriors, no Abigails,” Johan added. “Bring me your angel with a dirty face and only half dozen or so androgynes. Two boats and our skiff. Some can hide under tarps, under the bow. Take a boat with a space under the bow.”
“I see,” Thomas said, laughing. “We don’t want them to think we’re ganging up on them.”
“Right,” Johan said. “If you have women who are fighters, that’s great. We’re going in drag. Keeps ’em thinking we’re old ladies.”
Mr. Williams cleared his throat then said, “Knives and small weapons.”
On the shore, Tova and Fern and Sarah and Johan got into the Lund. Thomas and Nan and a half dozen others got into their boats. Some hid in the bow, others under tarps. Tova smiled at Johan, at his blue flowered scarf tied under his chin. He did look good in it.
Mr. Williams raised his walking stick up in the air. “Be careful, grandchildren,” he said.
Tova shoved the Lund off with her oar. She started the engine and turned the skiff parallel to the beach. She put her hand into the pocket of her hoodie and pulled a sleek metal blade from its hiding place. She raised it slightly. The young men and women on the beach nodded, raising their own knives. “I gu.aa yáx xwán—be strong—be brave,” they cried in unison.
She turned the skiff toward the ship with their signal flags flapping in the wind. Oh, I speak their language, all right, she thought. She’d been speaking with the slice of steel every summer at the cannery since she was fifteen years old: cut-slice-scrape, cut-slice-scrape. She knew how it felt to stick her knife in the anus, move it up through the belly, how to spread open the abdomen, rip out the entrails, scrape the backbone, and hack off the head.
This had better work. Everything depended on it, depended on them, their story; how they came down through generations, how they came down through the floodwaters, how they paddled here in the canoe, how they survived. This was their chance. Tell it again. Be the story shaking the sea. Be the story pounding on the taught skin of a drum. Be the story carved in stone.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Vivian Faith Prescott is a fifth generation Alaskan born and raised on the small island of Wrangell in Southeastern Alaska. She’s a founding member of Blue Canoe Writers in Sitka and Flying Island Writers and Artists in Wrangell, Alaska with an emphasis on mentoring Indigenous writers. Vivian lives at Mickey’s Fishcamp, her family’s fishcamp in Wrangell. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Alaska and a PhD in Cross Cultural Studies from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Her stories and poems have appeared in a variety of literary journals and anthologies including Cold Flashes: Literary Snapshots of Alaska, Cirque: A Literary Journal for Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, and Building Fires in the Snow: A Collection of Alaskan LGBTQ Short Fiction and Poetry. She is the recipient of a Rasmuson Fellowship and the Jason Wenger Award for Literary Excellence from the University of Alaska.
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