by Robert Coles
The girl asks: “Will the sun burn them up?” She has in mind that adobe house, so solid looking, so comforting to its inhabitants, so much a part of the landscape. She also has in mind her horse, brown with white spots, but of a different color at certain moments of the late afternoon, after a rainstorm, and under a weakening, reflective sun: chestnut brown, an outsider might say, thinking of a yellow-red hue of low brilliance, but to the girl’s eye something else. She can’t quite find words for what she is thinking, or so she says. But in fact she can get across exactly what she believes to be the case: “The horse has been under the sun all day. She stands there dozing. I worry that she is hot, that she will get sick. But no, she doesn’t want the help of the shed. The flies are in the shed. The sun drives the flies away. The horse is happy. The horse likes the air; the horse’s feet like the ground; the horse’s coat is full of the day’s sun.”
Her father, an Indian who moves back and forth, back and forth, from an Albuquerque office building, which he helps keep clean, to a Pueblo reservation north of the city, where he lives, has spoken many times of the sun’s “spirit” and the earth’s “spirit.” The child sees one of those spirits in her horse’s coat, as it appears on a particular afternoon, and takes note in her own way of the influence exerted by a particular region’s weather and terrain on the everyday life of a people. In the girl’s words: “The horse may get tired in the middle of the day; the sun is too hot for her. But she waits, and soon the air is cooler, and she is ready to gallop for miles. That’s how we feel, too. I wait for the end of the afternoon; then I know I’ll feel better. My mother always tells us come inside and rest in the first part of the afternoon, and go outside later. She will thank the sun for warming us and later she will tell us that the air is cool and the ground is cooling off, and we can go play. We pick up rocks and throw them into the shade. They feel better after they have landed. They are glad to have the cool air on them.”
The air — warm or cool; for her it is something more than a condition of weather. There is a glow to the air, a promise. She is comforted by it, even as outsiders, unlike her in dozens of ways, find themselves immediately struck by something intangible yet recognizable — the extraordinary visual character of the air: thin, dry, clear. In our eastern cities, in California, or in the Midwest, even on a sunny, cloudless day, the air is not what it is in New Mexico. A layer of low-altitude air that is relatively heavy with humidity hangs over most of us; we have learned to live with a certain haze in the air, not to mention the additional and more blatant murkiness that environmental pollution prompts in the atmosphere. But in New Mexico one has moved high up; one is among mountains or on an elevated plateau. And one has come upon increasing dryness, too, apart from the altitude. The result is a crispness of vision, even on hot days, and even after a rainfall. The hazy, somewhat softened, even blurred vision of the coastal plains or the prairie gives way to a clear, bright, almost harsh, sometimes blinding field of view. Air that an outsider has come to regard as transparent suddenly becomes translucent — so sharp, so clean, so light that one feels in a new world or possessed of new eyes.
Scientists know why; the air has lost one-fourth of its weight, as compared, say, to the coastal flatlands of adjoining Texas. The air, too, is low in oxygen, in carbon dioxide, but higher in hydrogen. It is an air that has, to a degree, lost its capacity to refract or diffuse the light. It is an air that seems to bring objects almost too close; they assert themselves strongly, even harshly. But when one is on a hill and looking at the countryside many miles away, it is an air that lends itself to mystery, especially in the evening, when the stars and any speck of man-made light fairly glow before the observer, as if, against all laws of nature, hundreds, thousands, even millions, of miles have been deprived of their meaning, and one need only reach out and touch something in the sky, or nearer at hand, a town’s, a house’s, a car’s lights. Those lights are sharp, pointed, immediate, forceful; there is none of the soft glow one is grateful for when up a mountain or a tall building in other parts of the country. The “big sky” of New Mexico or Arizona is not only a matter of view; it is a striking freshness and immediacy of vision that seem almost God-given — the result, at the very least, of a complicated series of natural coincidences.
Nor is it only the eyes that have to accommodate themselves to a new physical, if not psychological and spiritual, reality. In the late afternoon the sun suddenly vanishes. Warm updrafts leave the earth, go higher and higher, produce clouds as if the sky were ground upon which a whole city was to be built. The result: thunderheads that dispatch bolts of lightning in all directions, followed by a rumble of noise and those brief, scattered, soft showers that settle dust, surprise and awake cactus plants, delight people who regard a full-fledged rain as an unusual event indeed. Indians laugh at the short-lived, noisy outbursts, call them “male rains” — full of pomp and circumstance but little substance. They rejoice at great length when they are visited by the longer, quieter, wonderfully sustained and soaking “female rains.” Then it is that a mother tells her child: “The sky spirits want us to have water; they want to feed us. They are mother-spirits. Usually it is men-spirits, quarreling or telling each other off.” So much, at least at this point, for the relationship between culture and sexual imagery, not to mention between a region and the psychological development of those who live in it — that is, have to make sense of its weather, its terrain, its physical and biological conditions.
It is an almost timeless environment — endless sky, strangely empty land, and everywhere volcanic spires, reminders of agitation and energy long since spent. It is a gentle, almost unnervingly arresting environment — views that bring life to contemporary clichés: vista, panorama. It is also a harsh, mean, forbidding, ungenerous environment — a violent one too: a summer’s flash flood tears through the land, sweeps across arroyos, spills itself wastefully, only to be hungrily absorbed by the land, evaporated by the sun’s beating warmth. A child can point to a moment’s mud and silt and say: “In just a second there will be dust, and the same old cracks on the soil.” It is as if life’s rhythms are brutally condensed — ashes to ashes before the comprehending eyes of a boy or a girl. Those children are sometimes casual with a physical world that may excite, surprise, delight a visitor; at other times they can turn quite serious, become preoccupied with the strange mixture of action and stillness they see and feel around them.
The great silence, the solemn loneliness, the provocative suggestion of a surreal and ghostlike world, are balanced by warm, lively winds, by the continuing side-by-side presence of the two oldest cultures in this nation, and by the earthy concreteness of adobe houses, which have themselves become (as they were meant to) part of the natural landscape rather than buildings thrust upon it. No wonder some Indian children talk about home and mean by it a field of cactus, or a tree on a particular hill, or an expanse of semiarid grassland, as much as a building or a street with a group of buildings on it. No wonder some Chicano migrants can pass through New Mexico, on their way from the Rio Grande Valley of Texas to the crops that need harvesting in the mountain states or those of the Pacific Northwest, and tell their children that not only Indians are nearby, but the Lord Himself — and the Devil. The Chicanos may sometimes mean, with respect to the latter, a state highway patrolman; but they also have in mind a God-given terrain — of a kind that strikes them as too much: ordinary proportion and symmetry have given way to a supernatural intervention. “It is just too much,” a mother dutifully says each year as she looks at the land north of Santa Fe. Her child remembers the description, oft-repeated, from last year’s trek and observes: “Sometimes I think my mother thinks everything is ‘too much’; she cries a lot. But she is right about this place. I asked the priest if there is some place where Jesus Christ comes and visits the earth every once in a while. The priest said that may happen; maybe He comes to the valley, in Texas. But I don’t think so. Why would He want to come there? Here, yes; I can understand why God would w
ant to visit New Mexico.”
Up in Alaska there are Eskimo children of his age, eleven, who regard the world similarly. They have been converted to Christianity, and they believe all too strongly and concretely in an immanent God. He is the God of ice and snow, of a whiteness that is unrelenting, all-encompassing, transcendent. When told by teachers or ministers that some children on this planet never have seen ice or snow, an Eskimo child smiles in disbelief. When asked whether he might want to live elsewhere, in a warm or tropical climate, the same child again smiles: “There is no such place.” Like everyone else, he has some utterly rock-bottom assumptions. One of them is that the earth is always covered by some snow, some ice; even in the summer the sun can achieve only a partial victory. And as if to point out that he has the evidence nearby, if not directly in hand, the boy points silently at a distant mountain, one of dozens that stand far away — a perpetual horizon of nameless, snow-covered peaks.
The boy’s ancestors came to Alaska, saw its land and presumably mountains, hundreds, maybe thousands, of years ago. Eskimos are light yellowish-brown in color. Their faces are broad, their cheek-bones high, their eyes black, their noses flat. They resemble in physical appearance the people of northern Asia: China, Mongolia, Siberia. Archaeological and ethnological research connects Eskimos to the Lake Baikal culture of Siberia. Radiocarbon dating indicates that several hundred years before Christ walked the earth, perhaps as much as a thousand years before His birth, Asian families arrived on Alaska’s shores and built settlements there. They were a stolid, enduring, patient, lively people. In the face of severe, limiting, sometimes crushing weather they somehow managed to persist. They built crude sod houses out of a frame of driftwood timber and for walls used packed ice: the igloo, now extinct, replaced by today’s small frame houses. In the summer they once constructed the tupek out of animal skins; now they use canvas tents manufactured in distant factories. They fished and hunted: the seal, the walrus, the sea lion, the whale. Those who ventured inland, following the course of rivers, encountered the caribou, an additional source of food. And there were berries and roots, in apparently endless proliferation during the short-lived but exuberant summers.
For transportation the men and women relied upon dogs, the legendary huskies who may well have come to North America with the first Eskimos. Sleds were fashioned. Kayaks were built, extraordinarily light and serviceable — an extension, in a way, of those who used them, who were (and are) a people of quick reflexes, sharp vision, and obvious manual dexterity. Decades ago they fashioned the umiak — an elaborately constructed large open boat made of skins and used for hunting and transport. The motorboat has replaced the umiak, but old Eskimos still remember it, not only with nostalgia but pride: a distinct engineering and aesthetic achievement. Ivory carving is another justly famous accomplishment — and, alas, mostly a source of nostalgia rather than everyday self-respect. Some Eskimos, as well as Aleuts and Indians, have also in the past done first-rate basketry. In this century, increasingly, commercial fisheries have commanded the time and dedication of Eskimo men and women and, not rarely, older children. Oil prospecting, and more recently, the building of the controversial trans-Alaska pipeline, as well as (during the 1940s and 1950s) military construction and maintenance, have also been a source of Eskimo employment.
Alaska’s modern, recorded history, and with it, a chronology of Eskimo life, goes back to the early eighteenth century. Russian explorers, traders, colonial expansionists had been pushing steadily eastward; eventually the rivers and valleys of Siberia ended: the Pacific. Peter the Great asked Vitus Jonassen Bering (after whom the Bering Sea is named) to find out if Siberia was linked to the continent of North America. Bering, Danish-born, a man of vision and enterprise, made two voyages; on the second one he explored Alaska’s southern coast extensively, not to mention a number of islands, including the one now called Bering Island, on which he died of hunger and scurvy in 1741. But some whom he commanded survived and brought back to Russia the pelts of the sea otter. The result: a new demand for fur, a new surge of exploration, hunting, trapping in Alaska.
Eskimo and Aleut settlers grew to fear the Russian trappers and traders, the first in a succession of outsiders who would arrive with all sorts of demands: food, shelter, goods and services, and, not least, the favors of all available women. In essence, the “natives” were exploited, killed outright, or enslaved. The Russians were followed by the Spanish, the English, the French, and finally, in 1788, the Americans — on the ship Columbia, under Captain Robert Gray, a citizen of the newly formed United States, and on another ship, the Lady Washington, under Captain John Kendrick. But Russia ruled Alaska in the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century — Russian America, it was called. A number of Russian governors encouraged an active shipbuilding industry, as well as various smaller industries and foundries, sawmills, machine shops. Church bells, for instance, were made in Alaska and sent south to the Spanish missions in California. Agriculture was attempted, but unsuccessfully; the growing season was too short in the southern part of Alaska and obviously nonexistent in the far north.
For a time the Russians contented themselves with intensive explorations of Alaskan territory, but in the early years of the nineteenth century they penetrated as far south as present-day San Francisco and even to the Hawaiian Islands. Yet Russia was only peripherally interested in its North American territory. Its czars and, through them, various governors did indeed issue various ukases, forbidding to other nations “the pursuit of commerce, whaling and fishery, and all other industry, within an area extending from Bering Strait south to 51° of north latitude on the American coast” (1821). Even so, American and British ships were everywhere, it seemed; and they would not be deterred by the wishes of the St. Petersburg court. With the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1854, Russia was even less able to enforce its will in North America. Soon the imperial government was entertaining thoughts of disposal; and in 1857 the Russian ambassador to the United States suggested as much to this country’s officials. The Civil War interrupted negotiations, which were begun in 1859. In 1867, however, William H. Seward, our secretary of state, put his signature to a bill of sale — his well known “Folly”: Alaska for the sum of $7,200,000.
The Russians left, American troops entered. Until 1877 the War Department ran the territory of Alaska. When Indian uprisings in the West became serious, prompting a need for all available troops, the soldiers left Alaska, and the Treasury Department, with its revenue collectors (whose boats were the precursors of the coast guard), maintained law and order. In 1880 gold was discovered in Juneau. From then on the Eskimos and all other “natives” became relentlessly, hopelessly entangled with one wave after another of settlers or mere visitors from the United States: gold prospectors and, later, miners come to work at the large copper deposits uncovered from 1898 onward; missionaries, who to this day try to convert heathens, educate children, provide medical services, and, sometimes, argue strongly on behalf of the rights of the economically poor and socially vulnerable; federal officials of one kind or another, including, of course, those from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, charged with providing for the “health, education and welfare” of “native” people; and a motley assortment of others — homesteaders, the owners of fishing boats, engineers and surveyors, bush pilots, dreamers in self-imposed exile from the ways (and pressures) of contemporary urban, industrial life, naturalists, and tourists. Many of those people have stayed, become Alaskans; indeed, Eskimos and their distant kin, the Aleuts and the Athapaskan Indians, are now decisively outnumbered by the rising tide of newcomers from “the lower forty-eight,” as the rest of the United States, apart from Hawaii, is often called by Alaskans, among them Eskimo children.
The word Alaska is derived from the Eskimo Alakshak, which refers to the mainland. Eskimo children, even those who live far up a river, hence a long journey inland by snowmobile or motorboat, are ever conscious of the ocean. Often they regard the ice and snow around them as, ult
imately, the ocean’s property, spread over the land by a prodigal (and fierce) nature. The “mainland” for them is the earth immediately under them; the ocean is everything else — as far-reaching and infinite, they believe, as the sky. For Eskimo children who live, say, on the Aleutian Islands, land seems an especially fragile and, for many months, a nonexistent element. Feet walk on ice or snow. Rain pours or snow falls all the time, it seems — over 250 days of the year, on average. Fog is an almost constant companion. The water is insistent, noisy, sometimes threatening and savage. Children wonder whether the sea will claim the islands — even the mainland. And children who live in the coastal settlements watch the ice floes move closer in the short-lived interval between summer and full-fledged winter, see the snow accumulate higher and higher around the houses, occasionally wonder whether the “mainland” won’t itself become absorbed into a giant ice floe and get carried deep into the Arctic Ocean.
The children actually know better; they are taught in school how enormous Alaska is — one-fifth the size of the entire United States of America: 986,400 square miles, or almost four hundred million acres, stretching over fifty-eight degrees of longitude and no fewer than four time zones. The children are also taught that there is a lifetime of exploration waiting for any of them who wants to stay in this largest of American states, a nation within (or more exactly, outside of) a nation. It is still a quiet, sparsely settled land — about three hundred thousand people, or only .51 person per square mile. In summer, when outsiders naturally find it easiest to visit, much of the state seems deceptively warm, approachable, hospitable. The surface of the permafrost begins to melt, though below the surface, silt and sand and gravel and rock remain as hard, as cold as ever. The tundra — a seemingly endless plain, bereft of large trees — suddenly is no longer brown and dead-looking. Flowers appear, the purple mountain saxifrage or the array of white flowers: Dryas integrifolia — or to Eskimo children, “summer snow flowers”; also the bright yellow glacier avens — “the little sun” to some Eskimo children — and the wind flowers (Anemone parviflora) with their touch of blue under the white petals. Grass is everywhere, and shrubs. A carpet of mosses and lichens covers land that just a week earlier seemed hopelessly inert.