Circling the Midnight Sun

by James Raffan

  While I rested up, trying to shake the plague, I got an introduction to Evon Peter online. In a speech he gave to the Tanana Chiefs Conference in 2009, he talked about being the son of a Neets’aii Gwich’in mother and a Jewish father. He became chief of the community of Arctic Village—Vashraii K’oo—in 2000 at age twenty-four. Since that time, he had travelled all over the world. Although he was likely still the youngest of the forty-three chiefs in the room, he stood and spoke before his peers with the poise and confidence of a man twice or three times his age.

  “I have been seeing the challenges the world is facing, not just our own people. And I have learned a lot and I have shared a lot. And one thing that I learned is that the traditions, the culture, the traditional wisdom and knowledge that our people carry, the way and form of our leadership is direly needed all around the world, not only here. We are in a unique role as Alaskan Natives or as indigenous people, where people want to understand what it is that we understand, about what it takes to live in community for long periods of time with one another, what it is to live closely to the land in a sustainable way. That sort of knowledge is becoming more and more important.

  “I would go as far to say that, without us all doing the work of becoming healthier and stronger, wiser, more aware and conscious of becoming trained to garner skills for ourselves, the other political, economic, and social changes we make won’t succeed, because our people need to be able to fill those positions that Chief Jerry Isaac [president of the Tanana Chiefs Conference] is talking about, at the CEO levels, to be able to run the shows. To do that we have to have a lot of self-discipline, and carry ourselves and be responsible.

  “We define ourselves by respecting ourselves. When we respect our own spirit, our own actions, then it is hard for anyone to break us down because we become so strong and so grounded. We grow roots into the earth. We build that connection to our elders and our ancestors and then it is hard to shake us.”

  The audience stood in an ovation that went on and on, and I wondered if this deeply charismatic young man I was to meet the following day was the next Nelson Mandela. He was so grounded, so self-assured, so solid in his convictions, so magnetic, all without a trace of arrogance. Further digging turned up more information about how he had consciously turned away from political leadership and toward projects and activities that would make his people better and more whole, particularly the summer camps for youth throughout Alaska that many credit as turning points in their young lives.

  When I found him in his unassuming windowless office in the basement of a strip mall in Fairbanks, I asked him about that ovation. He said that this was an important speech because it was given after he’d been living for five years with the Navajo in the South, just after he had decided that he would take a much more traditional leadership role among his people.

  Big and strong, with clear eyes and a memorable handshake, he presented himself as a very serious guy, not inclined in the least to accept any kind of credit for what I had seen in his address to the Tanana chiefs. But he did explain why he had chosen not to re-enter conventional band politics as a chief or councillor: “On my return, I had decided that I didn’t want to move back into this Western structured leadership system, but I would fulfill that more traditional leadership role put on me by an older man, Chief Peter John. He was an elder who lived to be 102 years old. He was from the Minto tribe. And when he was 99, he invited me—this was before I was chief of Arctic Village—to this gathering called Inakanaga, a gathering of elders and youth and most of the chiefs.

  “He showed up about ten a.m. He was getting kind of old, not moving too fast. It was in a gym. He came in late, all bent over … and called for me. There were the chiefs sitting on the gym floor; the rest of us and other guests were in the bleachers. He asked if I was there and then he called for me to come down. There was a circle of chairs. So I stood up and went down, and he and I sat in the circle with the elders. He spoke in his language, which is different from mine. So an elder sat next to me to interpret,” Peter explained.

  “I had sat with him several times in my life so he was one of the traditional mentors for me, of understanding what it means to live life based on a set of values and understandings, which manifests as wisdom over time, as you experience life, when you’re going along that path and that trajectory of what it really means to be a traditional leader or chief.

  “He explained several things to me. He was even able to foretell the future. He said, ‘Only if you continue to live the path you have been leading so far in your life will your destiny be fulfilled.’ At that point he placed a chief’s necklace on my neck. That was when I began that path of taking on a role of a traditional leader among Athabascan people.”

  While in Nome, after my experience in Shishmaref, I’d clipped an article and editorial about suicide in the Arctic Sounder. Before I knew anything of Evon Peter, I’d read about the key leadership role that he was taking across Alaska and beyond, not on what might be considered the conventional paths through the state social and mental health systems, as laid out in a government document called the Alaska Suicide Prevention Plan, but from a much more synoptic and potent viewpoint.

  In the editorial, Carey Restino summed up her response to Peter this way: “This week … I met someone who made me embarrassed to have ever whined, even internally, about my work. I met someone whose job is so overwhelming that he ought to be hiding under his desk. Instead, this person is full of energy and enthusiasm for what he does…. Imagine that your job is trying to stop an epidemic that is killing young people throughout your region. It brings you nose-to-nose with every piece of community and culture that is broken—every heartbreak and sad story you can imagine. And your job, simply put, is to fix it all.”

  Sitting across from the man himself in the basement of a Fairbanks strip mall, I had to ask: “Is that what you’re trying to do, fix it all? Where do you begin? And how do these summer camps fit into the plan?”

  Over the next six or seven minutes, I sat listening, amazed at the clarity of his calm words and the evident fire in his belly. Chief Peter John was right about this remarkable young man’s potential.

  “These camps are focused on young people,” Peter began. “We aim at youth thirteen to eighteen years old. We try to give them a chance to meet other young people from around the region and to learn ways to be able to live life well and to have a healthy life, rooted in the cultural values of the people of the area. We talk about the rapid cultural change that our peoples are going through. Then you look at the grandparents, the great-grandparents of these people, pretty much living a traditional life on the land, all speaking their language, living off the land. No electricity. No running water. Living a real culturally, traditionally based lifestyle. You go from that to bringing in a lot of outside influences—my mother is an example of a person who was taken out to a boarding school at five years old, to California or some place, and told that her language is wrong, that our culture is wrong, that who we are as a people is wrong, or evil or backwards.”

  The dark eyes had an intensity that drew me in. He continued: “At the same time, they were facing a lot of physical, emotional, spiritual abuse through the process of being told those things. Some of the elders who spoke before me today talked about being hit because they were speaking their language in the schools. So you have that coupled with alcohol being introduced, sexual abuse that started coming into communities…. There’s a lot of hardships that have been passed down over a couple of generations now in some of the communities. The cultural values that were intact, that sustained our people for thousands of years were kind of fragmented and broken apart.

  “So a lot of our work with healing is mending or re-mending those bonds, those relationships, so that they can be healthy and strong and provide for our people again,” Peter went on. “But that has to begin with each individual deciding to live the values that our people embraced for so long. And to be able to walk a path that way. To build that st
rength with each other. And that’s what our work is about, not only with young people but in the communities and with the elders as well, encouraging people to take the steps and to break the cycles of violence or harm and to begin to have a solid foundation underneath their feet again.”

  He even looked balanced in his chair, with both forearms at rest on the desk in front of him. There was no tension in his body. He just talked: “So we do that. In supporting young people, I know that maybe some of the hardships they may have seen in their communities or their families or that people are facing isn’t the way that it has to be. And that if we choose to shift our own life path, then we can change that within our families and our communities. That’s basically the work that we do.”

  Since that day, I have followed the Gwich’in apostle Evon Peter online and in the press when I can, watching how peoples of the circumpolar North tried to bottle what he had to say and franchise his methods—creating a team that always worked with local elders and leaders wherever he went, unfailingly returning the credit and the thanks to them for making things happen—for finding a way to ignite the possibilities of pride and place in the hearts and minds of young northerners. Undaunted by the statistics and the often seeming hopelessness of it all, Evon Peter made putting fate control in the hands and hearts of northerners job one, his mission in life.

  18: BREAKFAST WITH CLARENCE

  Like a character out of a Robert Service poem, Clarence Alexander, seventy-two-year-old former grand chief of the Alaska Gwich’in, stepped out of the darkness and into the Snowdrift B&B in Gwichyaa Zhee. He stomped the loose snow off his moosehide moccasins and removed his glasses, which had fogged instantly in the warmth of a very familiar kitchen. He removed his muskrat hat, patched nylon parka, and slim-hipped snow pants, hung them on pegs behind the door, and then padded across the kitchen floor and dropped into a chair at the head of the table, set with a placemat and a new place setting.

  His ex-wife, Ginny, proprietress, cook, and philosopher-in-residence at the Snowdrift, whisked a full breakfast of sausages and pancakes out of the oven and plunked it down in front of him. She poured a steaming cup of coffee and only then said, “Clarence, this is James. He’s a writer from Canada travelling around the world at the Arctic Circle.”

  His oversized seventies-style specs had steamed again a little, but with his hands on his lap he turned and looked at me with clear, dark eyes that looked far younger than his slow and deliberate movements would suggest. After a pause, just long enough for me to feel uncomfortable, he reached out a weathered hand and took mine with a grip that, like his gaze, belied his years. “From Canada, eh? Is that why you’re so quiet?”

  As the son of a Yorkshireman who had a similarly arid sense of humour, I could spot an almost imperceptible smirk on that handsome Gwich’in face. By the look and by his tone, I knew I was going to like this guy.

  “Hmm, Canada,” he continued. “Maybe you can tell those people in Dawson City to stop dumping raw sewage in the river.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll be over that way at the end of the month.”

  “Good. Tell Mayor Jenkins I say hi. And then tell him to clean up his act.”

  Another pause, which I came to learn was just the natural cadence of his speech. Eventually, he said, “I don’t know if my husband ran off with another woman that I’d invite him back for breakfast when the other woman buggers off.”

  Ginny, who’d just poured herself another cup, sat back down at the table. “Who said you’re invited?” she said to Clarence. And then, turning back to me, she added, “I just couldn’t kick him out of the family home that he built.”

  This was going to be a different sort of breakfast.

  As I made my way from Anchorage to Nome, Shishmaref, Kotzebue, Fairbanks, and North Pole, people asked about my plans for travelling along the Arctic Circle in Alaska. My story would end with mention of going to Gwichyaa Zhee, or Fort Yukon. “You’re going to FYU? Why the hell would you want to do that? Nobody wants to go to Fort Yukon. They’re all busy going the other way to get patched up in hospital or to get liquored up in Fairbanks.”

  It was crystal clear to me, given the mandate of my project, why I might want to spend some time in Fort Yukon, a Gwich’in community of 589: it was just thirteen kilometres above the Arctic Circle. But it wasn’t exactly a tourist destination. Fortunately, an online notice about a 2010 gathering hosted by the Gwichyaa Zhee Gwich’in Tribal Government opened a small window to goings-on in the village, which allowed me to connect with the band and the school, which, in turn, connected me with Ginny Alexander and the Snowdrift B&B.

  I did wonder if I’d made the right choice when I was the only person on the Wright Air flight to FYU from Fairbanks. The only passenger instruction on that flight was, “We gotta lot of mail and fresh groceries in the back, so sit in the front row. Take your pick.” And standing alone in the dark on the ramp outside a locked terminal (at least, unlike Shishmaref, FYU had one), turning my back to the blast of prop wash as the plane departed, didn’t make me any more sure. Mercifully a guy in a pickup came for the last of the boxes on the ramp and offered me a lift to Ginny’s.

  By then it was late. Ginny was still up and expecting me. We had tea and agreed to talk more in the morning, but she said I might want to check out her friend Hanne Bergman’s book The North Star: My Sign of Peace, which was all about her life in Fort Yukon. “It’s on the night table,” she said, as she shut off the lights and headed for bed.

  Hanne’s first line amplified my uncertainty, but things improved after that. She wrote:

  All the bad things have been said already, and it seems we have a pretty bad reputation. But when all is said and done I don’t believe Fort Yukon is so different from the rest of the world. We have a lot of very smart people and we have some incredibly stupid people. We have child molesters, murderers, drunks and druggies just like the rest of the world, and just like the rest of the world we have all those good people who do the best they can. They go to work, they raise their kids, and sometimes even their grandkids and they don’t make waves so we don’t notice them much. The difference is that because we live in such a small community we see and hear everything, so we know who is who and that is a good thing…. I would not want to be anywhere else.

  In truth, what had intrigued me from what little I could find out about the local politics of the spectacular Yukon Flats area of the Alaskan interior was the fact that the people of Fort Yukon—half of whom were children—were counted among the 18,600 shareholders of ANCSA-created Doyon, Limited, the regional Alaska Native Corporation for Interior Alaska and the largest private landowner in Alaska. The locals had said no to a proposal to swap some of their land, with strong oil and gas potential, for an equivalent piece of public land, so that Doyon might get the test drilling under way. I’d been moved by published testimony by the Gwichyaa Zhee first chief, Dacho Alexander, Clarence and Ginny’s son.

  Speaking to a tribunal about the land exchange deal, the younger Alexander said he’d realized his dad had been telling him they lived in paradise. As a young man he couldn’t see that, so he left town, as so many youth did, and roamed for ten years. But he came home and saw the place with fresh eyes. And what he saw was a Native corporation that was betraying the very people it had been created to serve.

  “The transformation of Doyon is complete,” Dacho Alexander said. “They are no longer a Native corporation. And now they are willing to sell you out. They are selling you out. They put a price tag on everyone in here. This is how much you are worth to Doyon. Doyon has put a price on our land. Who here can do that? I think you have to be thirty-seven years removed from the village to be able to do that. And now that’s exactly what it is. We have been marginalized. A price tag has been put on everything that is in Doyon land, on Doyon land. That tree over there, it’s got a price tag. That blade of grass, that has a price tag now. That muskrat that’s swimming down the creek, that’s got a price tag. Every single thing within our area, our tr
aditional area here that Doyon owns has a price tag now. All you have to do is come up with the money to offer them.”

  Led by the Alexanders, FYU had turned down its Native corporation’s plan. Six days in FYU gave me a chance to explore that issue from a variety of perspectives but none richer or more entertaining than subsequent go-rounds at Ginny’s kitchen table, which included a couple of chats with Hanne and, of course, breakfasts with Clarence.

  Ginny warned me, “Beware. He hates when people repeat what he says. And, whatever you do, don’t say, ‘Really?’ because he didn’t take well to a journalist who was here who said that all the time. Clarence got mad and blasted him. He yelled, ‘Do you think that I am lying to you all the time? I’m not a goddamn liar.’ And that’s the last thing he said to that guy.”

  Ginny had told me that they were both concerned about possible untoward health outcomes that happen in association with oil and gas development. They were also aware of impact studies on the North Slope and elsewhere that showed the sociological outcomes of major petroleum development on local land and people. “But ask him yourself,” she said, knowing that her ex could just as easily dismiss the question with a wave of his hand or a diatribe on another subject.

  What I did learn from Ginny was that in his lifetime, Clarence had spent a lot of time on the land. He was sent to residential school in Wrangell after grade six and then to Mount Edgecumbe, a staterun boarding high school in Sitka, for one or two years. He had also done a whole variety of jobs—training for tool and die making in Chicago, odd jobs in California, a long stint in the National Guard.

  But at some point he ended up back in Chicago, binge drinking, running with the wrong crowd, and eventually being beaten senseless and ending up in the Cook County Hospital with no idea how he’d got there. That turned him back toward the North, toward home, and into twenty years of service with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. And after that, at almost every turn in his life, he had stepped into leadership roles.