by James Raffan
Disembarking from the Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 into the obscenely cold air in Kotzebue, I noticed the smiling, ruff-framed Inupiaq or Yupik man painted on the tail of the plane and made a mental note to see whose face had become a major company brand. Airline literature said simply, “Long known for its Alaskan roots, symbolized by the Eskimo on the tail of the aircraft, Alaska Airlines offers a friendly and relaxed style of service, one that we have come to appreciate as the ‘Alaskan Spirit.’” In keeping with the trend of incomers in the North, Alaska Airlines had either created a logo figure from scratch or, more likely, appropriated someone’s face without attribution or name.
A bit of digging led to a self-published book called Know the Happy Face: Biography of Oliver Amouak, by the man’s granddaughter, Brenda Ritchey. Later I ordered the book from a used-book store. It categorically showed, with an original black-and-white photo with acetate overlay of the Alaskan Airlines logo, that the Mr. Mona Lisa of Eskimos was, in fact, her grandfather. They had tweaked his smile but that was Oliver, no doubt about it.
Interestingly, instead of being churlish about it, Ritchey had gone to some pains to retell some of her grandfather’s stories and to teach her readers about where and how he had lived his life. With something of an ingenious design tweak of her own, the whole volume worked as a flip book, with little drawings of characters doing a dance that her granddad used to like very much. But there it was: Alaska Airlines had taken away the man’s name, given him a smile, and continued to present him, anonymously, as some essence of Alaskan hospitality.
My first stop in Kotzebue was a morning with Zach Stevenson, the geographic information systems (GIS) professional working for the Subsistence Mapping Project in the Northwest Arctic Borough. As a fellow geographer, I had followed his trail electronically and was eager to see the work the group was doing with hunters, trappers, fishers, and gatherers along the coast of Alaska. The borough’s goals, as set out in ANCSA, included maintaining Inupiaq culture, promoting traditional ways of life, and fostering local self-determination, and they seemed well served by the project being conducted by Stevenson and his team. Cultural and intellectual control of information about hunting and gathering of natural resources is surely at the core of local people taking local control over resources, even if the full measure of their knowledge of the place is often lost in translation. But the work was important and had helped not only to create all kinds of interviewing, clerical, administrative, recording, mapping, and analysis jobs in Kotzebue and beyond but also to provide a foundation of locally derived traditional knowledge that would be actively used alongside other types of science in determining the future of development projects in the region.
Between interviews, in cold like I had never felt, I tried something I had always wanted to do. Dark and early one morning, I took a cup of hot coffee into the minus-forty-eight air and fired the whole thing into the air. It was better than popular scientific legend had promised. The contents of the entire cup went poooof! with an audible pop and drifted as a puff of white vapour into the pool of light on the hotel porch. Very cool!
Martha Siikauraq Whiting, the Inupiaq mayor of the Northwest Arctic Borough, was up to her eyeballs in frozen water and sewer problems during this crazy cold snap but still found time to chat. With the unabashed smile of an optimist and expressive hands that could have sold diamond rings to royalty, she said, “Zach’s project is a good opportunity to take the lead, to take the ownership. It’s giving us more cards at the table, for policy-making and resource development. It’s also a tool for us to learn these new skills, to learn about the language, the culture, the river. It’s a chance for our community to perpetuate our culture. It is key that it is going to be written down. There’s going to be a schoolbook. We need to take advantage of absolutely every opportunity we can to keep our culture and language strong. We need to have our voices heard.”
“How is that going for you?” I asked.
“It’s a struggle,” she said quietly, as she straightened herself in her well-worn mayoral chair. She took a deep breath. “If I have a message for you to take away, it is that we—the indigenous peoples of Alaska—exist. We are here. I want people to know that we are unique and a national treasure. And we need to be part of the conversation when it comes to the Arctic. Even here in Alaska, we get a lot of people talking about the Arctic. It’s climate change. It’s offshore drilling. It’s resource development. It’s Arctic passage. As global warming is occurring, there’s going to be a lot more marine traffic. So there is a lot of conversation about the Arctic.”
She continued, “Too often we don’t even exist in those conversations. We have to be the first and foremost people involved in what happens in the Arctic. So any time the word comes out about policy or next steps, they’d better make sure that we are involved because it’s our backyard. It’s our home. We have lived here for generations. We’re going to stay here for generations to come. We’re going to have the best interests for what happens in our environment, because we’re going to be here forever.”
Conscious of having a limited amount of time with the mayor, I drove on with queries about how climate change fitted into the picture. “It’s like a phantom,” Whiting said. “I won’t say it’s an organization, a presence maybe—that is right in our face. You see it. But it’s kind of out there looming. So it’s very difficult to address. There are changes we see with plants and insects and birds and berries, that we see with the weather patterns. It’s so big but it’s hard to grasp and certainly not as pressing as loss of culture or language or any of the thousand other things we’re worrying about.
“And then there are other things we’re looking at for policy, like the opening Arctic corridor and the increase in ocean traffic. I need to make sure that if there is money to be made from that—and there are expenses as well for search and rescue and environmental cleanup—I need to make sure that we get a share of revenues of that. I don’t want to say that it’s priority one, two, or three, but on a day like today, when I’m worried about getting water to our clinics, climate or climate change—whatever you call it—falls down our list of priorities. I’m hoping that this cold spell will not be too long.”
But with grace and ease and by habit of mind, Whiting returned to where she began, cultural survival. She talked of her own daughter: as the offspring of a white father from Michigan and a mother who is three quarters Inupiaq, her Native blood quantum—the all-important measure of who receives government services for American aboriginal people—is only one quarter. If she, like her mother, had children with a non-Inupiaq father, her offspring would fall below the threshold. “We talk about that,” she said.
She stiffened: “We will not, we cannot become a people of the museum. We will not become a people of the past. The last time I checked, we are a people. We exist. Even if my daughter doesn’t know as much as I do or as my mother did, the important thing is that she knows who she is, that she knows her culture, she knows who she is as an Inupiaq person, and that she is proud as an Inupiaq person. She knows where she comes from. She knows who she is named after. She knows her internal spirituality as a people. And she is proud to carry that legacy for her own children. Cultural identity has changed in a generation. A lot of young people are asking, ‘Who am I?’”
I told the mayor of my experience earlier in Shishmaref. “There is no doubt that this questioning can lead to suicide and to alcoholism,” she responded. “We have to have a purpose. When we go to our fish camp, we have a purpose. We have to go hunt. We have to go fish. We have to prepare the camp for the winter. All kids have a role at the camp: bring the wood, take out garbage, dig a well to get water. Which is why kids like camp.
“We have the highest suicide rate in the state, and that’s not something that we’re proud of. A lot of it has to do with cultural identity. It gets tough. It gets really hard. At the same time you have to look at a lot of strength and resilience that we do have. We have a strong language. We have a stron
g culture. It’s my job as mayor to make sure that we provide people with hope.”
On the way back to the hotel, I picked up a newspaper that highlighted the importance of Whiting’s optimism, something of the essential power of her leadership in the face of dark realities that shade, it seems, all post-colonial northern life. A front-page story detailed the case of a fifty-three-year-old Kotzebue man who slashed his sister multiple times with an ulu, shot her, then shot himself but not fatally, leaving him able to present himself to the Norton Sound Hospital ER. His lawyer was requesting a change of venue because of fear that the man wouldn’t get a fair trial in his hometown.
As an effective counterpoint to the raw violence in the paper, and presenting an excellent sense of the substance underpinning Mayor Whiting’s optimism, I spent a morning at Nikaitchuat Ilisagviat, the tribal immersion school in Kotzebue. It was another dark mid-winter day with temperatures that turned diesel fuel to wax, but the welcome I received and the colour and the chortling of happy children in this one-room school warmed me from the inside out. The school operated outside of the formal Alaskan system, run as a private non-governmental institution, but the Northwest Arctic Borough and NANA Regional Corporation (one of thirteen for-profit Alaska Native Corporations set up as part of ANCSA) were supporting the place because of its role in strengthening Inupiaq pride and confidence in the community.
Children of various Native backgrounds, not just Inupiaq youngsters, were in a circle with the teachers on a bright blue carpet. Their parents had to pay $500 a month tuition for them to be there. It was clear that they were thoroughly enjoying games and exercises and stories in the Inupiaq language. The director, Mickey Nanouk, explained, “Nikaitchuat is based on the understanding that culture resides in language, and from that all else flows. If they can get a good start here, this gives the children an early childhood foundation in Inupiaq before attending regular school, where they might get twenty minutes a week in their native language.”
Clearly, whatever was happening here was generating pride both in the students, whom I watched going through their paces so willingly, and in the community, where a visit had been highly recommended to me. The tribal immersion school was also garnering interest from other northern jurisdictions. “Representatives from Statoil in Norway are coming here next week to see what we’re up to,” Nanouk said. “Our mission is simple to say, harder to enact. What we are trying to do here is instill the knowledge of Inupiaq identity, dignity, and respect, and to cultivate a love of lifelong learning.” I couldn’t help but wonder how life might have been different for Gilford had he experienced tribal immersion like this in his formative years.
Walking back across town in the forenoon, the sun just poking up over the horizon, I heard a clatter of sound from above. I stopped and turned to see what looked like forty or fifty ravens, all gathered in the pool of sunlight that was hitting the top of the insulated water tower, or perhaps the fuel tank. Like a romp of river otters on a frozen bank, the ravens were crowding together at the cusp of the curve where the gently sloping top of the tower arced down. In ones and twos, birds were sliding on their bellies until gravity cast them off into space, where they caught the air, did a barrel roll or two, and circled back to the pack on the top of the tank.
17: HO, HO, HO
The only figure of northern myth older and more persistent than the “Happy Eskimo” has got to be good old Santa Claus. After Rovaniemi, Finland, which may hold the title of the HQ of Santa Inc.—being right on the Arctic Circle—the next most enduring point in the Coke constellation is south of Fairbanks in a little place called—what else?—North Pole, Alaska.
On the off-ramp from Alaska Highway 2, in the shadow of a set of McDonald’s golden arches, was a large sign made of ice: “Welcome to North Pole where the spirit of Christmas lives year round.” It didn’t take long to find Santa Claus House at 101 St. Nicholas Drive in the village of North Pole, but I was a little surprised at how much it seemed like a roadside attraction set between two oil refineries on one axis and two military installations on another.
Sadly, although it is “Christmas every day of the year” in North Pole, it was mid-week in January when I arrived, and Santa was only at home on Saturdays and Sundays. So I had to settle for a walk around the exterior. It looks far more European and less Coke-like than Santa’s main office in Rovaniemi, but the fat man is still wearing red. The day was, as my musical idol Tom Waits liked to say, “colder than a well digger’s ass,” so I headed back to the car, noticing that the water vapour in the exhaust had created a sail-shaped icicle that was nearly dragging on the ground.
Over coffee and free Wi-Fi at the North Pole McDonald’s (which, ironically, is south of the Arctic Circle McDonald’s in Rovaniemi), I learned the cute story of how the Alaskan zip code 99705 has become the same as postal code H0H 0H0 in Canada, the address to which letters to Santa are sent and from which good boys and girls will receive a letter back, no charge. If you want the letter personalized or with customized text, or if you’d like an authentic deed for one square inch of North Pole property, or if you’d like to purchase any number of other cool things—a “Santa dollar,” a jumbo sticker proclaiming the bearer to be on “Santa’s Good List”—then that costs a bit extra. And in true northern gold-rush style, the backstory of Santa Claus House has a frontier family thread woven right in.
“When Con and Nellie Miller arrived in Fairbanks, Alaska, in 1949,” the story goes, “they had $1.40 in cash and two hungry kids. Determined to carve out a living in the new territory of Alaska, Con soon became a merchant and fur buyer in the surrounding villages. Donning an old red Santa suit each Christmas, Con earned celebrity status as Santa Claus in the eyes of the village children—the first St. Nick many had ever seen.”
One thing led to another, and the store became “Santa Claus House.” Nellie got the contract to run North Pole’s first post office, Con became the mayor, and Nellie became a state marriage commissioner and could officially marry the giddy couples who flocked to Santa’s lap to say their vows. They added a new wing and commissioned a three-dimensional thirteen-metre-tall plastic Santa (gone in January 2012, having been replaced by a much taller two-dimensional plywood one). Sixty years later Santa Claus House is one of the top attractions in Interior Alaska, having welcomed millions of visitors from all over the world in person and online.
From North Pole, I got back on Highway 2 and continued to Fairbanks. My original plan was to take a few days and drive down through the Kuskokwim Mountains, past Denali National Park and Mount McKinley to Wasilla, north of Anchorage—where, if Sarah Palin wasn’t available for lunch or tea, I was going to search for a lake named after a friend’s father who’d been seconded to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers during the Second World War. On my earlier flight to Nome from Anchorage, those majestic peaks and snow-filled valleys had been bathed in starlight, leaving an image that stirred the wilderness wanderer in me. To come here without taking at least a few steps on snowshoes would have been a travesty.
The first indicator that it was not to be came at the rental agency. The clerk asked what I was planning to do with her bottom-of-the-line super-sub-compact, and I told her about the planned expedition down to Anchorage. She blurted, “Are you nuts?” After composing herself, she flatly refused to rent me that car.
“Do you have any idea how cold it has been, how snowy it will be in the mountains, how lonely that road is in the winter, how long you would last if you broke down, and how stupid you would be to go down that way this week by yourself? I can’t rent you that little car. At the very least, you must take an all-wheel-drive and promise me that you will put a survival kit together and tell somebody when you’re leaving and where you expect to be at what time along the way. Is this your first time in the Arctic?”
“Well, no. But I get your point. I’ll take the all-wheel drive, and the chains.”
I ventured out onto the four-lane George Parks Highway, heading south from Fairbanks, at ten
the next morning, in darkness. The first thing I noticed was that there were no trucks on the road—I thought there would be freight running up and down the highway, but I’d neglected to consider that in this part of the world, everything goes by train between Anchorage and Fairbanks. After half an hour of driving at speed, the heater still hadn’t heated the cab sufficiently for me to remove my mitts and balaclava.
The shivering was all the worse because somewhere along the way, I’d contracted some kind of flu, just as I had in Siberia. I couldn’t hold anything down. I had a temperature of 39.7 degrees and had awoken in my Fairbanks hotel room wrapped in wet sheets. So much for the glamour of round-the-world travel. I was beginning to think it might be better to rest my jet-lagged, travel-ravaged carcass for a day or so in a Hotwire hotel than it would be to die of flu-induced carbon monoxide poisoning, in a flapjack of my own frozen sweat, in a candlelit Ford sarcophagus in a Denali ditch at seventy below.
The final and by far most compelling reason to turn around was that after an hour plugged into the cigarette lighter in the car, my mobile came back to life with news that the Gwich’in holy man Evon Peter had returned my call, placed a few days before after I’d heard about his remarkable work in Kotzebue. He was indeed interested in sitting down with me to talk about his work with the youth camps and other projects he directed through his work with the Northern Alaska Wellness Initiative.
I had learned about Peter’s work with youth in both Shishmaref and Kotzebue, where he had convened some of those all-important cultural summer camps, helping young people find themselves in the land-based subsistence harvesting activities of their ancestors. He was married to a Navajo woman and spent at least part of his year in the American Southwest. But everyone who recommended that I talk to him said that if he wasn’t speaking somewhere, or running a community wellness workshop, he would be at home in Fairbanks. And suddenly there was a message on my phone saying that a meeting was possible. Sarah Palin and Bruce Lake would have to wait.