by Robert Coles
That is enough for the mother. She hits the stove with her spatula and tells the girl to go clean up. The girl does not often hear such a demand, and she knows to obey quickly. The mother is smiling at her, but the eyes above the smile are hard and glaring, and Betsy does not speak another word or prompt any further injunction. She moves directly toward her bed, an old iron military cot, and with her hand brushes crumbs from the sheetless mattress, arranges the blanket neatly, dusts off the small pillow, and then with her cupped palms gathers what has fallen on the floor and carries it to a basket near the stove. As the old crumbs, a couple of lollipop sticks, and an empty orange soda-pop bottle get thrown in, the mother remarks, in a soft voice, that the rich have learned to take good care of themselves, to be tidy and prompt. The girl now does a philosophical about-face; she says she hopes her parents never become rich and that she would give away her money if she had a lot. Then she has a second thought: “I’d buy everyone in the village a snowmobile, even the smallest baby. Then no one would have one while other people didn’t. It’s not bad to have a lot of money; but it’s bad to have it while other people don’t have it.”
Betsy has heard that point of view expressed many times by her grandfather, and by her mother and father, too. When the mother hears her daughter speak so, it is as if a threatening war had been replaced by a pact of friendship and mutual support. The child finishes her chores; the mother moves close to her, helps her straighten out the particular corner of the room that she has responsibility for, pats her lightly and with obvious tenderness on the back. Betsy had thought of going outside before, but now, acknowledging her own shift of mood, announces that she will stay in and try being of help, if she can, to her mother. As the girl helps cut up some fish, which will be fried in deep fat, the mother responds to questions about the history of the Eskimo people. Betsy wants to know how long they have been in the village, and how long they have had snowmobiles in the village, and how long they have been visited by airplanes once a week. The questions continue, are answered briefly, factually. They are both general and specific, have to do with matters of faith and conviction or with technology, both primitive and highly developed. Motorboats interest the girl, but so do rowboats and kayaks.
Eventually there is silence. Betsy decides to draw a landscape (Figure 35). She makes no effort to look outside and remind herself what there is to see, nor does she close her eyes first — a gesture some children make, as if to summon up for themselves what they want to represent. She simply sets to work, quickly and forthrightly. She makes the sky first, a light blue, lighter than the sky other American children make. She omits the sun altogether. She works on a river, setting it off with the thinnest of black lines. The ice is breaking, she observes. Consequently, blue water interrupts the snow. The white crayon is used most, and she worries that it fails to evoke the visual reality around her. So she abandons the picture when it is done for another attempt. She decides to let the white paper be her accomplished landscape, except for a few interventions with blue for the sake of the sky. That does not work either; she decides to abandon hope of picturing the tundra and nearby river. Instead Betsy turns her attention to a nearby hill, whose pine trees offer a limited relief from the endless white, flat land she had been trying to evoke. She is ever so delicate with the trees; they are each fragile, yet obviously strong and flexible: they survive the winter, as she remarks when she is done (Figure 36). She is told that she can use black paper, cover it with white — a visitor’s suggestion, a “technique” explained. She shakes her head. She will have no part of that idea.
Betsy’s mother smiles, admits she will never be an art connoisseur, but is appreciative of her child’s ability. The girl asks the mother if she has ever drawn a picture. No, she hasn’t. Has her grandfather? The mother says she is always reluctant to answer for him, but she is sure he hasn’t. The girl decides to try her hand at a snowmobile. She has just heard the noise of one, and she is sure it is going down toward the river. As she works, using a black crayon for the machine, her mother looks outside: some birds, no doubt just returned from their winter stay to the south. Betsy does not get up to catch a glimpse, but she does turn her attention away from the machine to the portrayal of a sky. Soon it is filled with birds, each one small but in their sum a virtual blanket. The snowmobile is eventually completed; it was going to be small, anyway, but now, in comparison to the birds, it seems quite insignificant (Figure 37). As a matter of fact, the mother remarks that the machine looks like a fallen bird. Yes, that is not such a bad idea, Betsy muses: “The snowmobile is like a bird that wants to fly, but can’t, so all it can do is make a lot of noise and try to go faster, faster, but it never takes off. Why don’t the white men who make planes give wings to their snowmobiles?” She pauses only briefly before she comes up with a reply to her own question: “A snowmobile isn’t a plane; they’re different.” As she looks at her picture, she decides to pursue, almost as in a reverie, the subject of differences. “An Eskimo is not a white man. The teacher told my brother that we’re all like animals; we were once animals. But then we became people. My grandfather said the white man comes from one place, and we come from another, even if now Alaska has a lot of white people. When my grandfather was a boy, he said he didn’t see too many white people; and his grandfather had told him there were no white people around most of his life — only at the end. The teacher told my brother that today girls are the same as boys. My father laughed, and my grandfather did. But my mother said she knew what the teacher was saying!”
Her mother at first says nothing in response; she is putting on her outdoor clothes to go get some more fish, kept frozen in a small cabin removed from the main house. As she leaves she tells her daughter that Eskimos have seen their whole world change in recent years, and there is, no doubt, more to come — more people, more machines, more alterations in customs, habits, beliefs. The birds somehow survive, despite the continuing turmoil beneath them; and the fish still are to be found, for all the motorboats that have made the river far from the quiet place it used to be in the summer; so, Eskimos will also manage to survive. The girl is unhappy with a certain fatalism she detects in her mother. She has heard the same attitude expressed by her grandfather: stand firm, and somehow we will stay around, and the generations will follow one another. Betsy has other ideas; she is convinced that the snowmobile and the motorboats, if given even further reign — if owned by more people — would make Eskimo life better, easier, more pleasant. The mother will hold her ears when one of the snowmobiles goes by; Betsy listens to the noise quite eagerly.
Not that she is infatuated with the machines or allows their presence to change her overall sense of perspective. While she draws, she thinks: the machine is no match for the natural world in all its threatening, awesome, and occasionally quite beckoning presence. The machine is a help, even as the dogs are. The dogs, those Arctic huskies that are almost taken for granted by her and the other children of the village, are still (as her grandfather has often reminded her) the mainstays of village life. For a machine even to be compared with the dog is, in itself, noteworthy. But the child knows enough not to get hypnotized and fooled by Western industrialism. More planes might mean faster mail, a more varied and plentiful diet — assuming the continued willingness of the state and federal government to provide a subsistence economy with welfare checks, food stamps, surplus commodities. More planes might mean a greater intimacy with the outside world, something intangible, yet quite real to an Eskimo child: “We would see a lot of white people; there’d be more movies brought in, and we’d hear more news.” But there is no likelihood, Betsy knows, that machines will overcome the long Arctic winter. She has seen dogs penetrate the coldest weather. She has seen machines rendered useless by weather she herself considers, at the very least, unsurprising. The dogs are utterly essential; without them life seems unimaginable. The motor-driven boats, the snowmobiles, and the airplanes belong to another world — one that has steadily encroached upon her exis
tence but not one she wants to see replace the essence of Eskimo life.
Is there still such an “essence” that a child like her can confidently and persistently know — even put into words? In her own way she both asks and answers that question: “I think I will paint a picture. It is better to use paint than crayons; I’ve decided that if you want to show how we look, especially in winter, then it’s best to use the paint set.” She ambitiously undertakes a study of the village in midwinter, well before the weather begins to moderate. She ignores the sky, even the snow and ice, at first; she uses black and a touch of green to indicate the houses of the village, some nearby trees, a store, and a school. Then she surrounds all she has done with white — flat stretches of it, hills of it, flakes of it. There is no sky. There is no sun or, for that matter, moon (Figure 38). When she is finished she recalls what her father once told his family: “He has a cousin who went to live in the city, a long way from here. Then he left Alaska; he went to the lower forty-eight. He was in the army, I think. They sent him to a school down there. When he came back he said he knew how other people live: they look at the sun, but we look at the ice and the clouds. My father wasn’t too happy with his cousin. He said we look for the sun, too. Now that the weather is getting warmer, we will see more and more of the sun. My father says that the Eskimos are like our dog: we know how to live here. The white man, he comes here and then he leaves.”
But Betsy knows that white men, too, have remained in various parts of Alaska. They may not, by and large, live in small villages, under the circumstances she takes for granted. They may come, dig in, dig the earth out (for gold, for other minerals, for oil), and then leave. They may retreat to southern cities as often as possible — to hotels and motels, to buildings that are large and made of brick or concrete. But for limited periods of time even some of those people have endured the Arctic at its most oppressive; and there are some white people, she knows, who have done so for years at a time. Her grandfather and her father have told her about one such family. She speaks of them as if she knows them, though she has never met them: “They came to our village. They asked our people if they could join us. We said yes. They get their mail here. They buy at our store. They come to our meetings. When the ice melts, we always look for their boat. My grandfather asked them once if they would like to live closer to the village, instead of upstream and away. No, they wouldn’t, they told him. He said he is sure that they have the spirit of our people living in them. He said maybe they are Eskimos who look white, just like there are some of our people who look like Eskimos, but they have the white man’s spirit in them.”
Betsy is halted by her own, vivid remark. She considers, silently, what she has said, resumes in a minute or so: “One of those Eskimos with a white man’s spirit came from our village. He was married to my grandfather’s sister. He took her, and they went to the big city: Fairbanks. He works for the government; he has something to do with the planes that bring us mail and food. He came back here two years ago; I don’t remember him, but my mother says he was not very nice. He kept on telling all of us how dirty we are, and how clean we should try to be. He didn’t even like our new school. He said we are not good at school; and it didn’t look neat, the way it should — and he told people he’d talk to the important people he knows in the city. My father told my grandfather not to be so unhappy with his sister and her husband. Finally, my grandfather could smile; he told my father that he woke up in the night, and he realized what was wrong: his sister had married a white man; she’d married a man who thought he was an Eskimo when he was a boy, but pretty soon, when he was older, he turned out to be white. Or maybe he’d been taken over by some white spirit.”
Young Leader
There is a twelve-year-old boy who also likes to talk to the pilot who comes to the village. John is a boy whom others of his age, even those a year or two older, regard as a leader. He talks to the minister like an equal. He challenges him on matters political, theological, philosophical. He asks him if God favors white people over Eskimos. He asks him if God likes the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the schools it sponsors. He asks him if God is on the side of the storekeeper, who makes the most money in the village, or on the side of the elderly people who have nothing to their name. The minister rallies to the defense of the poor, the weak, the vulnerable. But the boy is not easily persuaded to let up his scrutiny. What is the church like in the lower forty-eight? He wonders that aloud at one meeting, after a series of Kodachromes show the Eskimo children some stunning pictures of the California seacoast, as well as interesting, attractive San Francisco. The minister acknowledges openly that the Christian Church, in its various expressions, forms, structures, has betrayed Christ over the centuries. He tries hard to explain himself and his own purpose — to serve a number of villages in a particular section of Alaska.
Later, in his own home, John both defends the minister and continues his critical appraisal: “He’s a good person. We all like him. He wants the Eskimos to live better. He argues with our schoolteachers. I’ve heard them; it is fun to listen while white people argue! The teachers didn’t realize for a long time that my friend and I were listening; when they did, they stopped. I don’t blame them. When my mother gets angry at my father, she says nothing until they can be alone. She doesn’t want everyone to know how much pepper she can have on her tongue. Later I told the minister that I’d heard all he’d said, and I was on his side. He was glad I was. But I told him that he should go talk to other ministers, not to the schoolteachers in our village. He should tell the rich, white people that it’s wrong, the way the Eskimos are pushed around. We don’t have much to say about how we’re going to live — even the teachers admitted to him that he was right when he said that.”
John goes on; he repeats much of what he had heard the minister himself say. But the boy and the boy’s father and grandfather have said the same things many times. The minister is, however, a white man — and to hear such self-criticism from white people is not an everyday experience for Eskimos, the boy knows. He says that, too — indirectly but with unmistakable emphasis. For the boy, white people are powerful, hard to speak to, a source of confusion. They introduced, on the one hand, snowmobiles, airplanes, frozen foods, electricity, welfare checks; on the other hand, alcohol, drugs, jails, schools where children learn to look down on themselves, other schools located hundreds, even thousands, of miles away, to which children are arbitrarily sent. The particular village this boy belongs to has banned alcohol, but there is another, larger, village nearer the ocean where alcohol is plentiful — along with work during the summer season at a commercial fishery, where the river’s salmon are cleaned, cut, salted, and packed — to be sent “down there,” as the boy refers to the lower forty-eight.
The boy has heard his grandfather complain endlessly about white people and what their presence means; the boy both agrees with and takes issue with his grandfather: “The white people are everywhere, so I guess we can’t expect them to stay away from here. The minister showed us a map; all the places where America has air force bases were marked; they’re all over the world. Air force planes land down the river; they never come to our landing strip, though, because it’s too small. The big pipeline, carrying the oil, won’t come near us; but I have a cousin who lives near where it will run, and he’s waiting to watch the machines come in to dig. They’ve come to his village and talked to the people. I’m in favor of the pipeline, I think; the Eskimo people will get some money. My grandfather says that money is like liquor — you end up waiting for the checks, just like you end up drinking every day. My father doesn’t drink anymore. But he used to, and my grandfather doesn’t forget. He told my father that if he didn’t stop drinking, then he’d have a funeral to go to — his father’s! My grandfather was going to kill himself! That stopped my father, and then he went around the village, asking people to join him in getting rid of liquor. We have a vote; the people from the state government came — and we won: no liquor is sold here. Men g
o and buy it in other villages; they bring it home and we can hear them getting drunk. But at least you can’t just walk to the store and spend your money there on whiskey, instead of food. The store owner wanted to pay each person who voted five dollars so that they would say yes, we should have the whiskey here. And he is an Eskimo! I keep reminding my grandfather of that, and he turns away. My father said to stop reminding the old man. My mother said not to stop, because if I remind someone else I remind myself! A lot of Eskimos drink when they get to be fifteen or so, and there’s nothing to do.”
John stops talking. He looks at an empty whiskey bottle his father insists upon keeping on a table near his bed — a reminder to him of the bad times he used to have. His wife has repeatedly objected. She would have thrown the bottle out a long time ago. But the man has his reasons, and his son has heard them being turned into the basis of an argument: “My father took me once with him; we were going to catch salmon, then get them ready for drying. We started setting up the racks, then we got our nets ready. Before we went out on the boat, Father told me how glad he is to get up in the morning and be without a sore head and a sore stomach. He told me how he used to feel when he’d been drinking; he felt terrible. But he couldn’t stop. He’d try; each morning he’d try. But each morning he’d end up taking one drink, then another. He’d hold the bottle to his lips. He never used a glass. When my mother offered him a glass, he broke it. He said that if he could wait long enough to find a glass and pour the whiskey into it, he could keep himself from taking the whiskey. He either grabbed the bottle and drank from it., or he kept away from the bottle. But he stopped my mother from throwing the bottle out. When she did, he shouted and threw the dishes and pots around, and we were scared.