by Robert Coles
He has heard from his grandfather stories of his ancestors, who used to live by the ocean and only recently (the generation of his grandfather’s father) moved inland. He has been told of expeditions through dangerous waters, of ice floes that shift, appear suddenly, disappear strangely, only to return so that lives are threatened or lost. He makes no pretense of concealing the excitement he feels when such accounts or stories are told: “My grandfather remembers being in his father’s boat; they were coming in after fishing, when suddenly the wind came upon them., and it brought the ice from different directions, and they were cut off, so they couldn’t land. They stopped rowing. They thought they’d be crushed to death, but there was a narrow channel still open, and my grandfather can remember his father saying that they should keep moving, and follow the channel. They could have been crushed to death at any moment. But they didn’t become scared; they used their arms and they talked to the ice, and the ice never cut them off all the way, so they got to shore. I don’t believe that the ice heard anything they said, but if they didn’t keep moving, they could have been killed.”
John is excited as well as impressed; they were skilled, able people, his ancestors, they faced natural elements more strenuously than he will probably ever have to. He and his friends have heard the stories, though, and have attempted in play to re-create the moments. They build walls of snow, the bigger the better, and imagine themselves navigators, with their lives at stake against the whims and excesses of ice floes. When their parents or grandparents have a moment, the children ask for new stories, or the repetition of familiar stories: struggles against the elements, including floating ice. And sometimes a picture makes a statement about the sea, about those floes, about Arctic life in all its savage or fragile beauty. The boy particularly treasures one painting he did at school (Figure 40). His teachers questioned him closely when he submitted it to them: had he seen ice floes that enormous, or was he making something up on the basis of hearsay? No, he was making up nothing; he had gone to a village near the sea, stayed with an old great-aunt, his grandfather’s sister, seen exactly what he had tried to represent. One teacher had told him that he made the ice floes seem like skyscrapers in a city like New York. He had looked at pictures of American cities, heard about the tall buildings in them, but he had never realized that they were really tall. He had estimated them to be, maybe, as tall as a water tower he’d seen in one seacoast town, or the tower on top of a small airline terminal building he’d seen at the edge of that town, but he had never thought any building could rise to the height reached by massive floes.
He paraphrases his grandfather’s memories as he looks at the painting he did for his teachers, took home and showed to his parents, and then put aside, against the advice of his teachers, who wanted him to hang up the picture at home — after he had refused to let them do so at school: “My grandfather remembers when he saw a picture in a church school of the ice in the harbor of the village where his father and his grandfather had been born. It was a photograph, I think. He went home and told his parents; they did not want to go and see the picture. They told him that as long as they had eyes, they would go look at the harbor. The white people would rather look at a picture than anything else. They go to movies, and they have television, and they have cameras. All the white people we see have cameras; and in school the teachers tell us about movies and television, and they get movies and programs flown in here to show us. My grandfather tells me to sit down and close my eyes, while he closes his. He sees the ice in the harbor, and he tells me what is happening — the wind is beginning to move the ice, and everyone is trying to take his boat back to the shore as fast as possible. I tell him what I see — the ice is moving in, but there is no one fishing and no boats are out, and he and I are standing and watching the ice. The sun makes some of the ice so bright I can’t look too long. So, I open my eyes — and I’m back in our house again!”
When John says that, he stops talking. He looks outside. He lifts his eyes upward, scans the sky: the poor, weak, short-lived sun. The boy has imagined himself to be an ice floe, the wind, the river, a salmon running it, but never the sun. He pities the sun, even the summer sun, that brings the tundra to life so poignantly: “The sun must get cold. The teacher told us that the sun is so hot it would melt anything, but it doesn’t look very hot. My mother used to tell us that she can feel the sun shivering, and the moon, too. The sun goes south, just like the birds. My sister sees the birds going, and she calls to them, and tells them not to forget the sun. When my friends and I told the teacher what we thought about the sun, she was very upset. She told us that we had to learn the truth, that the earth goes around the sun, and it doesn’t run away, and it’s always very hot, even when it doesn’t melt our snow and ice. They must be right. They told my older sister that we make up stories, but they tell the truth! I’d like to go see other places, where the sun is hot; then I’d know they’re right. In the summer it gets warm here, and it’s hard to believe that the winter will ever come back. But before long the birds are flying away; they know. I wish the teachers would invite our parents and grandparents to school, and explain to them what they know. My father says the teachers are right, but they wouldn’t be much help if they had to leave school and work with us. They would walk on top of a lot of eggs; they would plant flowers in the summer and hope to see them bloom in the winter.”
Such sarcasm, such episodes of bitterness and scorn, are relatively infrequent and, it seems, self-limiting. The boy likes to go to the village store sometimes; there to sit and say nothing at all, only watch intently and listen, as the teachers, among others, gather close to a wood-burning stove and talk, eat, drink, even doze in public. A father or grandfather offers stories about the past, information about the tundra, the nearby river, or the ocean, at once dangerous and inviting. The schoolteachers, or the visiting pilot and a passenger or two, offer stories about the outside world, the lower forty-eight. The white people are more relaxed in the store. The winters bring everyone in the village together. The teachers sing, drink, avoid self-important pronouncements. The children are endlessly fascinated by the difference — by what they hear in the store as opposed to what they hear in school.
A Modern Girl
Eskimo girls are not without their own moments of boredom, irritability, dissatisfaction with themselves and their life. One girl in a small Arctic village has just turned thirteen; Mary sympathizes with those who yearn for the old days and ways, but she is not about to turn her back on today’s “progress.” She is an expert on rock music, has a stereo set, wonders when she will get to a city, dance in a dance hall. She has finished school, does little to keep herself busy, resents the fact that her father is, by Eskimo standards, rather well-to-do — but can offer her only a limited version of the future she would like for herself. If some of the village’s more proper, conventional people find her self-centered, even insolent, she has some thoughts about them, among others: “My father worked with the white people; he helped them build the airstrip, and he was the one who showed them where to build the school. He can fix the generator, if anyone can. Other people are jealous of him; and they turn on my mother and me, just because we like to wear clothes that aren’t like their clothes. There are some old women in this village who are very mean. They spend all their time exchanging gossip; and when there isn’t any to tell, they make some up.
“On our radio I heard that in places like California, women are living different; they aren’t bowing before men, and taking orders all day from them. I’d like to go to California. Or maybe the gossiping women of this village, all of them, should go there! My father heard that my mother and I are ‘friends’ of the pilot — that he comes here on an extra trip every week, just to ‘visit’ us! Of course, everyone can see and hear that plane landing — so if he came in secret he’d have to be quite a pilot; he’d have to be like Superman in the comic books! When he does come he is greeted by the whole village, and he’s never out of everyone’s sight. But th
e women sit and sew and say that he’s my mother’s ‘special friend,’ and that when he gets tired of her, he turns to me! That shows what is going on here in this village: nothing! I wish the pilot would go ‘visit’ those old ladies and do something for them! They are worse than the minister and the priest put together! They are always calling me a ‘modern girl’ — and then they sneer!”
Mary cannot bear hypocrisy, and she is convinced that next to some of the gossipy village women, the most two-faced people in all of Alaska, maybe the entire world, are the pair of ministers who come to her village on weekly visits and who have long been objects of her derision. Often she wonders why in the world those men even want to visit the village. But she has figured out the reason and is most adamant when she comes forth with it: “They don’t like their own people, so they leave them and come up here to be with us. I heard one of the ministers say that white people are ‘plundering’ Alaska; but he’s up here, talking us into believing that he knows what’s best to believe in. And he’ll call you a bad person, and tell you about Hell. How does he know there’s such a place? My mother says he’s never been there, and no one has who’s alive, so it’s all up in his head, that there’s Hell and Heaven. The ministers both expect to be in Heaven one of these days; I’ll be glad to be in the other place, if that’s how God will divide people up.
“I don’t want to hear one sermon after another forever. Anyway, I’ll bet they did something wrong, before they ever decided to come up here. They keep talking about the Eskimos they haven’t converted, and how they want to convert them; but I think they ought to go back to the cities they come from and stay there, and stop telling us that it’s wrong to drink and wrong to swear and wrong to do anything, except go and pray in their churches. The older minister asked me last summer where I got the dress I was wearing. I told him I ordered it in the Sears catalogue; but he looked very unhappy with me, and I was almost in a fight with him. But I was younger then; I was a little scared. If he dared say something like that to me again, I might pick up a rifle and aim it at him and tell him to go radio Kotzebue for that pilot who flies him in here!”
Mary doesn’t really ever intend to talk like that to the minister or to any other grown-up; at least she can’t imagine herself doing so. She recognizes the difference, even in someone as relatively outspoken as herself, between a thought and the actuality of words uttered — meant to be heard, taken quite seriously. But she is not really joking, either; nor is she being fresh and sassy — without taking the risks of putting herself on the line, so to speak. She has dared tell her teachers what she thinks, knowing full well that she has accepted their invitation to say candidly what is on her mind, but at the same time risked offending them. They have wondered aloud why she is so adamantly interested in urban life, why she seems so anxious to join what one teacher quite explicitly called “the rock culture.”
She immediately challenged the teacher to describe that “culture,” and the description given prompted a rather strong response: “I told her she was not right about me. I decided to say what I was thinking. Most of the time I don’t. All the time the others in class don’t! I know I’m sounding conceited; that’s what my best friend said to me. She said I think so much of myself that I make the teachers feel uncomfortable — and her, too. We had a fight. I tried to explain to her why I say what I say. But she was too upset to listen; she said I shouldn’t talk to people like I do — especially to white visitors who come here to teach us. But that’s what I told the teachers; I said it’s not right for people like them to come here to this village and talk to us the way they do. They think they’re acting like Eskimos; they think they’re saying what our parents say, and what we’ll say to our children when we’re parents. But they’re wrong. Is it wrong for me to tell a teacher she’s wrong — or he’s wrong? My friend says yes; she says that you should stay quiet and smile and try to agree with what you’ve heard. I say that it’s wrong to pretend to agree when you don’t. But maybe my friend does agree! She says she agrees with the teacher when the teacher talks, and when I talk, she begins to agree with me! My friend says I should be a teacher!
“All I said was that I thought the teacher was trying to sound like an Eskimo; I mean she was talking like she thought an Eskimo talks, or like she thought we all should talk. Even my grandfather doesn’t talk like that. He likes the electricity the white people brought to our village; and he likes to listen to my stereo; and he likes to go on a ride in a snowmobile. He says that if he was only younger he’d learn how to ride a motorcycle himself! He wasn’t kidding me, either! The teachers are white and they come here from Chicago (one of them does) and New York (another one), and last year we had a teacher here from Portland, Oregon. They all say the same things to us; they tell us that we’re good, but the white people are ruining us, because they’re bringing in movies and radios and motorcycles and snowmobiles and potato chips and bubble gum, and we’re getting lazy, and we no longer have our own ‘culture.’
“Don’t ask me what that word means: culture. I asked the teacher, and she explained, and I still couldn’t figure out what she was telling us. So I asked again. That was my first mistake. My friend says I was being mean by asking, but I swear I didn’t understand the explanation. I asked my friend what she thought ‘culture’ means, and she said she wasn’t the teacher, and she couldn’t talk like the teacher! Oh, did I laugh at that answer! Then I told her she was conceited because she was so proud of what she’d said! All I’d wanted, anyway, was an explanation from the teacher that all of us in the room could understand, and take home to our parents and give to them. What’s so great about living in an igloo, and not having a store where you can get food in the middle of the winter, when it’s fifty below and the wind is getting ready to carry the whole village into the ocean? What’s so great about living here, when there’s no doctor or nurse who can be flown in, with the medicine they bring?
“My younger brother would have died if they hadn’t brought in a nurse, and she gave him penicillin, and he lived. I agree with the teachers about some things. The ministers don’t belong here, and they don’t really respect us. They ought to close down the church here and leave us alone. We don’t need their sermons. But my grandfather disagrees; he says there was a lot of fighting, a lot of bad trouble here in the village before the white man came, and it was the church people who tried to make us get along better here, and he thinks they succeeded. He remembers that the old minister, who lived here for a long time, would go and talk with one family, and then with another, and he’d turn enemies into friends! He was a kind man, my grandfather says, and he brought food to people all the time, even people who never wanted to listen to his sermons, or go near his little church.”
Mary is taken aback by her own capacity to emphasize ironies and inconsistencies. She laughs at herself, declares herself to be a touch mad. Her friend, in fact, has warned her that she will become the village eccentric if she doesn’t watch out. She wonders out loud why she doesn’t just go along, yield to her teachers, to the many neighbors and their children who retreat in embarrassment and dismay from her unashamed militancy, her willingness to speak out, on issues and dilemmas others are content to ignore or tolerate. She holds on tenaciously to a lively interest in the outside world, is determined to visit places most of her friends or classmates have no interest in seeing, can be self-deprecating as well as sardonic: “I heard one teacher call another one a busybody. I’m a busybody. I’m always watching what’s going on; if I lived in a city, I’d have to stop because there are so many people. But here I can keep my eye on everyone! There’s not much else to do here! A lot of my friends agree with me; they’d like to go live in the city for a while. They wish they had as many records as I do; they bring theirs over, and we play them and play them, until my mother says she can’t let us go on, because she feels like walking away from the house and never coming back.
“That’s what her uncle did; I guess he was her great-uncle. He was old, and he wa
s sick. One day he got up and he was in pain. My mother tried to help him. She made him tea, and she gave him some bread and jam. He turned away from her food. He said he wanted to go out; he was sure that the cold air would make him feel better. He got dressed and went out. He never came back. Later that day we all went looking for him, and we found him up the river. He’d found a small tree, and he’d sat down under it and died. When we brought him back everyone was sad because he had always been a good person. One of the teachers said we should have told her, so she could get a doctor here. But the old man would never have let a doctor look at him. He told my mother that the day would come when he’d go out and lie down and die, and he did. My mother told the teacher what her uncle had said and done; the teacher thought it was ‘beautiful.’ My mother admitted to me later that she felt like laughing at the teacher but didn’t. I would have laughed. It’s stupid to say our uncle did something ‘beautiful.’ He wasn’t painting a picture. He was dying, and he knew it. But maybe the teacher didn’t mean bad. I guess she likes Eskimos.”
The person she feels closest to is not her best friend, or either of her parents, but a younger brother, aged nine, who has severe near-sightedness, complicated by astigmatism, and who has relied upon her heavily in the past for vision — literal and figurative. The boy had no glasses for a long time. His parents accepted his near-blindness as something fated. His sister urged her parents repeatedly to go talk with the state officials when they came by, as they do often enough for one administrative reason or another. Finally she took the boy herself, telling their parents that they were simply going out to play. She stood with him at the airstrip, waited for the plane to appear and land, and went right up to the pilot, who stood watching and smoking while the mail and various supplies were being unloaded. Did he know when someone from Fairbanks, someone who could help her brother, would be flying in next? What was the boy’s problem? His eyes — he can’t see well. When he is five or six, the teachers will pick up the trouble and get it corrected, won’t they? But that is in the future, and there is so much the boy can’t do right now! Oh, all right! He told her to be standing exactly where she was, with her brother beside her, one week to the day, the hour.