by Robert Coles
The tundra gives way to the sea, which is also stirring — cracks in the ice, currents and eddies that are encouraging to those who want to see the ocean set free again, but dangerous to navigate. The icebergs melt gradually — mountains to hills to mounds to an underwater existence; some icebergs, of course, never yield to any sun, as if the Arctic Ocean will only go so far in acknowledging summer. The tundra also gives way to higher country, and to forests: hemlock, spruce, cedar, mixed occasionally with birch and even balsam poplar. There are, too, stretches of less imposing willows, and even they fall off, at points, to shrubs. Berries of various kinds are available, and the grass can be lush, rank, deep green, and triumphant. The combination of heavy rains and long-lived sun, the arrival of swarms of mosquitoes and flies, the constant sound of birds, whistling, crying, croaking, chirping — it all goes to suggest a miraculous, definitive transformation: from a freezing, white death to a tropical jungle’s brimming exotic life.
And the animal life confirms the impression. While the steady passage of geese, ducks, and shore birds masks the suddenly open sky, bear, moose, and elk stir, run, seek yet another summer’s assertive activity. Great herds of caribou range the Arctic slope, go south, penetrate the woods. And less obvious and awesome, the smaller ones go about their business: fox, sable, ermine, wolverine, mink, land otter, beaver, muskrat — animals whose names evoke visions of fur coats in millions of city people thousands of miles away, people for whom Alaska is also a suggestive name — of igloos that don’t exist anymore, of Eskimos who fight long and not always successful battles with giant polar bears or whales. There are polar bears, of course, though it is more often the white man from far away who wants to hunt them and has to be carefully kept in bounds. There are also whales, and they are indeed caught, if less commonly than salmon and halibut.
Mostly, these days, there are village stores with frozen foods, no less, as well as candy galore, soft drinks, and canned goods. And snowmobiles and motorboats; their noise competes with the gentler call of the geese to one another, as flocks of them work their way in stately regiment across the sky. Not that birds don’t, under some circumstances, make their own urgent, shrill, even frantic sounds. Near open water, near hundreds of Alaska’s ponds, inlets, lakes, male and female phalaropes, for instance, skirt, plunge, jump, flutter, and all the while create a frenzy of sound and motion as they seek one another out, make their claims, adjustments, rebuffs, assaults — the prelude to a new generation. “Do airplanes have babies?” an Eskimo child of four once asked — so accustomed was she to the shrill but important noise of other flying objects, nature’s, and to her mother’s explanations: mating, then offspring. Why not those planes, too — those larger, even noisier, birds? And even more precisely: why not a link of propeller to propeller — and later, the emergence of a smaller plane out of the belly of one of the planes, whence at other times come mail, packages, and those who carry them?
Soon enough the endless days give way to the dominant and then utterly victorious night. The sky is no longer light blue, has turned black-blue. The stars offer all the hope there is. The birds scurry away, or leave well in advance, an orderly, proud, at times mocking retreat: let man stay where he is; we will have no part of these long, grim, devastating winters. Sometimes the dancing, sparkling, streaming lights of aurora borealis, the northern lights, appear — wild and strange electricity showing a huddled, snowbound people that all is not lost, that there is action, movement, dazzle even, at the least promising and most fearful time of the year. And the silence, the firm, solemn, eerie silence; young Eskimo children pay homage to it, ask their parents, with a touch of desperation to their curiosity, why the snow is so noiseless as it falls. The parents have no explanation, only the reassurance that below and above the ground there is indeed life; and if one is careful to listen, some sounds as proof.
The fox is as agile and evasive as ever through the winter. The snowy owl watches, glides or swoops magnificently, finds its rodents. And fish do not flee heavy snows, thick ice, treacherous glacial movements of a sea, a slope, a whole world of frozen restlessness. Nor, it has to be added, do the Eskimos, who for generations have gone down to the ocean, to the rivers and streams, the wide expanse of a delta, or the marshes and swamps, all so tightly covered by winter, to match wits with the Arctic, with “life,” with the fish running underneath and, not least, with themselves, because when the temperature is some fifty degrees below zero, the winds cut across the tundra, and the snow seems to have become not part of a fall, but an expression of a permanent condition, then even Eskimos, with all the strength of a heritage, can experience a moment of doubt, of apprehension.
It is, as Eskimo children are often taught in school, the frontier that they are part of, and must in various ways learn to live with and, to a degree, master. Even with airplanes and snowmobiles and motor-boats, there are days on end of danger, uncertainty, isolation. In New Mexico, too, or in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, where the weather is so different, the frontier is still either right there or not so far off: the edge of things; the spaces that seem to know no limit; the aloneness that is not the result of self-judgment or worse, self-punishment, but nature’s quite natural resistance to any creature’s easy domination. Miles of the Rio Grande’s loam separate people and towns; miles of New Mexico’s hill country keep one Pueblo reservation from another; miles of the tundra, and storm upon storm, make one Eskimo settlement utterly removed from others, even in this age of planes and wireless. “Once it was the frontier here,” an Indian child in northern New Mexico says; then he adds, sure of himself in spite of contemporary technology, “it is still the frontier.”
So it still is — where he lives, where Eskimo children live, where Chicano children live in various parts of the Southwest; not the old frontier, not the frontier of savage battles, new railroad tracks, smoke-producing trains, daily shoot-outs, anarchic gold prospecting — and anarchic drinking, fighting, stealing; not the frontier of frequent homestead rushes, though in Alaska they do occur occasionally; and not the frontier of boastful ignorance or dark, even murderous escape from God knows what, God knows where; but as the child says, still a frontier where it once was one — comparatively and substantively. The land has yet to be fully conquered or fully settled. The immense sky is still available, not blocked or shut off by man’s various constructions. The woods or rivers or desert or mountains are often untamed, or if brought under control, under surveillance, only somewhat frequented. There are fewer people than are to be found in the settled regions of America; and among those men and women who do live “out there,” closer to the earth, farther than all others from our cities and suburbs, there is a responsiveness to that fact, that state of affairs, that state of being, that mixture of physical fact, social circumstance, tradition, memory, and mood: the badlands (once); the hinterlands; the Far Northwest, Southwest, or West still the frontier — and homeland for hundreds of thousands of Eskimo, Indian, Chicano children.
Eskimo Children
Custodian of a Spirit
Wind, strong and uninterrupted, hits the old man, pushes the girl of five backward. She holds her grandfather’s hand tighter. He wants to reassure her; he points to the river, as if to say: it is only a matter of yards, so let us keep going. They reach their destination in a few moments, stand silently at the water’s edge. They seem oblivious to the mud that moves quickly to cover their boots. The wind, which had fought them so hard, now seems to let up a little. As the old man has told his granddaughter several times, they have reached one of the sources of wind, the river. The girl looks closely at the ice. She points with her right hand, smiles, says quietly: “Many cracks.” The old man smiles back and nods his head. The girl does not say a word more, nor does the man move, for about ten minutes. Then he squeezes the child’s hand, pulls his feet out of the mud, turns around. She follows suit, and soon they are on their way back, hurried along just a bit by the wind that now is a friend.
They continue their silence. Th
e man looks straight ahead. The girl tends to look downward, except when she suddenly lifts her head all the way up — to catch a glimpse of her grandfather’s face. He quickly responds each time she does so — he seems to sense her glance toward him rather than see it; he smiles at her, lifts his chin noticeably, using it to point ahead: we will soon be under cover. When they have reached the top of a gentle incline, they both turn around and look again at the river; it is April, the ice is beginning to break, they are excited and pleased to have taken this particular walk. The old man at last begins to talk with the child; he tells her that the wind is coming in from the ocean, sweeps up the river, leaves it for the banks on either side, takes a lurch upward to get on top of the slope, even as they have done so, rushes through the village and out across the tundra. The wind is not an enemy, though; the wind is part of life, he tells the girl, who is listening carefully to his every word. She moves her head emphatically up and down as he talks, not necessarily following a particular thought but indicating a sort of general acceptance of his authority and good judgment. When he has finished his mixture of description and explanation, she stops indicating her assent and says one word: “Home?”
Soon they are there, slowly unburdening themselves of their coats, hats, gloves, boots. The man watches the child as he takes his outdoor clothes off but makes no move to help her. She is agile, fast; she is done before he is. He is quite pleased, pats her back, smiles, goes back to his boots, which he makes no effort to clean, simply pulls off — a bit of a struggle — and puts them down beside the door on an old, torn brown bag. The two of them are cold, but they make no effort to warm themselves near the stove. They sit down on chairs that face one another and for the first time since they prepared to leave the house about an hour earlier, look at each other intently and with a certain persistence: a full minute. The silence is broken by the grandfather; he tells the girl that she is a good companion, a sturdy walker, and that she has taken her grandmother’s place in a ritual he has performed for years and years, since he was a young boy himself, having learned to do so by walking with his grandfather: the walk to the river to catch a glimpse of the ice beginning to break.
The girl had, of course, walked to the river many times that winter; she had gone with her father, with her older brothers, with her grandfather — to fish, to watch the snowmobiles move on the ice, or simply to meet other children and play. But this was a special walk, and she had been honored to be asked. Her grandmother had died the year the girl was born. At the age of five she knew a lot about her family; most especially she knew that her grandparents had been quite close and that her birth, coming as it did three months after her grandmother died, had meant a lot to her grandfather. In fact, he once told her — she was maybe three or three and a half — that her grandmother’s spirit may well have moved into her. He had no proof; he simply had a feeling, and he wanted the little girl to know. Not that he made too much of such a conviction; he avoided seeming portentous when he made his announcement (the girl’s mother tells me), and he has since then avoided going out of his way to mention it. Still, upon occasion he has reminded his granddaughter that she resembles her mother’s mother and that when one of them left, the other arrived. And so doing, he has given the child a special sense of herself. She watches him more carefully, with more regard, than his other grandchildren do. She asks her mother about her mother more often than her brothers and her older sister do. She asks, too, about “the time before” — her way of referring to her grandmother’s span of life. She knows that when her grandmother was five or six, snowmobiles were not in existence, nor were airplanes commonplace in Alaska. Now they cross the sky every few days and land weekly on the ground near her village. She knows there was no electricity a few decades ago. She also remembers that her mother and her grandfather both have remarked that her grandmother died glad she had lived when she had and had not been born much later — in the girl’s words, “these days.”
The girl is glad to be alive now. Her name is Betty, but she had decided she likes Betsy better. She has been called that by a schoolteacher, a white man who lives in the village and has come to know her rather well, even though she is not yet six, hence not old enough for school. The teacher has told Betsy’s parents that they have a smart and likable daughter — all very pleasant to hear. The parents say thank you over and over again, sometimes reminding the teacher of his observation with respect to their daughter so that they can, once more, express their appreciation. The parents also remind Betsy of the judgment that has been made about her, and she delights in hearing the outsider’s prophecy. She connects his analysis with her grandfather’s attitude toward her: if she is indeed a continuation, so to speak, of her grandmother, then she naturally would possess some of the old woman’s intelligence, wit, and common sense, all of which she was reputed to have in abundance. She has heard about the old lady: “She was tired a long time before she went away from us. My mother said one day she woke up, and her mother was calling her. My mother went to her, and her mother told her that before the sun set, she would be gone from us. My mother believed her mother; and she did go away just as she said she would. It was early spring, so the sun set a few hours later. Everyone said that our village would be in trouble, because no one was smarter than my grandmother, and no one knew how to fix things and settle arguments better than she did. But my grandfather disagreed with people; he said that he knew that his wife would stay with us and people would remember her; and then he decided that she passed me as she was going away: I was coming here, and she smiled at me — that’s what he says he’s sure happened.”
There is just a touch of uncertainty, maybe confusion, in Betsy’s voice as she makes that assertion. She has tried to learn exactly what her grandfather believes happened when his wife died and his granddaughter was born. But the man waves off her questions, not brusquely or angrily, but with a gentle vagueness she finds it impossible to get beyond. If not he, then his daughter, the girl’s mother: what does she know, and, just as important, what does she believe? But the mother is even less helpful; she tells Betsy that she knows nothing — that it is the grandfather who must be asked. If he has no more to tell, then that is that. But the girl has herself to turn to; she has a lively, imaginative, speculative mind, and she calls upon it to answer questions others shirk altogether or respond to, it seems, unsatisfactorily: “I think I know how I got to meet my grandmother. She was being carried away by the wind, and suddenly the wind stopped. Everything was still. Then I was born, and she had a chance to breathe her breath into me, and then the wind came up again, and she was gone. I saw my uncle lean over his son, and he kept breathing into him, but my cousin died anyway. My father said that sometimes it helps, when you see someone who isn’t breathing, to breathe for him. A teacher at the school, who used to be a nurse, taught us all to do that kind of breathing.”
Someday, Betsy thinks, she might become a teacher. She looks forward to school; she will join her older sisters and brother. They are not all that enthusiastic about the time they put in as pupils, but that is a mistake on their part, she knows. Her grandmother had told her mother to encourage all her children to go to school. The Americans from “the states” would be coming in increasing numbers to Alaska during the next few years, and the Eskimos had best be ready for the influx. The mother repeats to all the children what she was told, but Betsy listens most attentively. Her older sister, aged nine, reprimands her, tells her that she needn’t be a slave to their dead grandmother’s every word. Betsy denies being a slave to anyone or anything. Besides, who or what is a slave? The older girl talks about black people and their fate as Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Betsy is neither interested nor impressed: “I’m not a slave. I don’t want to go to school because my grandmother wanted me to go. I want to go because I want to go. I’m only a slave to myself! Don’t tell me any more about slaves.”
She turns away abruptly. She goes to the window; how are the dogs? She looks at them
, decides out loud that they don’t need food at that moment, but keeps looking at them. Meanwhile, the sound of a snowmobile can be heard, and she listens carefully. Betsy turns to her mother, who is frying cut-up potatoes, with Spam to follow, and asks whether (and if so, when) they will get one of those snowmobiles. The mother says no. She says they are expensive, and only the rich people in the village can afford them. But there are a lot of rich people, the child retorts, with a mixture of annoyance, envy, and incredulity. Not so, the mother insists. Anyway, the machines make so much noise that a handful of them dominates everyone’s hearing and, maybe, thinking. They are an exaggerated presence. The girl is not persuaded. She mentions four children she knows whose parents own snowmobiles. The mother casually mentions ten or twelve whose parents don’t and then, both teasing the child and making a sensible, generous suggestion, tells her to go ask her various friends for a ride; surely their parents will oblige. Betsy is both grateful and quite stubbornly aware of her mother’s ironic, if not sardonic, proposal. She does not underestimate the hospitality of others, but she wants something for herself. She conveys her feelings by apparently changing the subject, by asking a question rather than making any further comment, and by shifting the discussion to a different level of abstraction, arguably a more pointed one: “How do you get rich in the village?” She seems ready to wait patiently for hours after that request for information, but when her mother does not immediately respond, and indeed appears lost in thought — will the potatoes burn, or will she ever be able to tell the child how a few prosper while others are lucky to get through the winter alive? — another effort, this one more personally directed, is made: “Will we ever be rich?”