by James Raffan
He had been first chief of the band from 1980 to 1994; for part of that time, he had also been grand chief of the Alaska Gwich’in. In 1988, he’d co-founded the Council of Athabascan Tribal Governments, arguing—always—on behalf of his people, traditional values, making an honest living, and keeping connected to the land. But he had also been one of four co-founders of the Yukon River Inter-Tribal Watershed Council, an international organization uniting more than seventy First Nations up and down the length of the Yukon River in the protection and preservation of the watershed.
For his efforts he had won a US$20,000 Ecotrust Indigenous Leadership Award. And in 2011, the whole family—Ginny and their four children, with spouses and grandchildren—had gone to Washington to see Clarence receive the Presidential Citizens Medal, pinned on his suit by Barack Obama. Just because he lived in a five-by-five-metre cabin in the woods at the edge of town, walking the couple of kilometres into the village now and again only to have breakfast, that was no reason to think he wasn’t a man with a mission.
Next time he blew in from the cold into Ginny’s kitchen—Super Bowl Sunday, I believe—he showed me how he had lined the knees and shins of his snow pants with kangaroo fur that somebody had given him. “Great when you’re kneeling in the snow,” he said. After dismissing the manufacturer of the pants (Columbia), he showed me how he had replaced all the nylon zippers with heavy metal ones from the Alaska Commercial Company (“Serving Rural Alaska Since 1867”) and created moosehide tabs and buttons to reinforce the Velcro that was supposed to hold the leg flaps together. He had also created denim cuffs to go inside the bottom of the snow pants, to keep the snow from riding up his legs when he was snowshoeing in the bush. “Sewed all this myself,” he said in a deadpan voice. Far be it from Clarence to allow some snow pant designer in Zhejiang Province in China to decide what winter is like in FYU!
After he’d settled at the table, I plucked up courage and asked him about the land swap and why he felt it was a bad idea. He turned and paused, and those mischievous bespectacled eyes started to dance. I started to think about the journalist he’d yelled at. But then he began, and what he said—not that by this time I was surprised—came at the question from an unexpected starting point.
“I wish the hell we could do better with getting to a common language,” he said. By now, I knew that there was no better strategy for keeping the conversation going than to stay quiet.
“Subsistence,” he spat. “That’s a term folk in the lower forty-eight give to what we do. ‘Subsistence’ comes from ‘subsidy.’ Subsidy is what they pay farmers in the lower forty-eight not to farm. We piss those politicians and farmers off because we’re so rich. So they call what we do ‘subsistence.’ Subsistence hunting. It’s not subsistence. It’s not a goddamn subsidy. It’s more like self-reliance. It’s more like living off the land, with the land, on the land. Those guys from down south come up with all kinds of stupid terms for what we do.”
He launched into a diatribe about water rights and the creation of the Inter-Tribal Watershed Council. Mines need water, doesn’t matter if it’s placer mining or underground. Miners need water. Oil drillers need water. And the communities along the mighty Yukon need water, and they use the river to catch what they throw away. That was what Clarence had been doing, trying to get people to the table to talk about water.
But then he flipped to salmon. New topic. No: same topic. Different angle of approach. He told me that he’d noticed—others had too—that there were white specks in the meat of some salmon, particularly in the meat of female salmon. Down by the mouth of the Yukon, he said, where it flows out into the Bering Sea, they had some specks in their meat; the farther upriver you go, the more specks there were in the meat.
“And those clowns in Dawson are still dumping raw sewage into the river,” he scoffed. “Fairbanks allows raw sewage to be dumped in the Chena [a tributary of the Tanana River, which in turn flows into the Yukon River], and that’s why their salmon are disappearing. So I’ve been thinking about water. I’ve been thinking about salmon. I’ve been thinking about us, the people in the seventy communities up and down the river.”
He took a breath and continued, “I went down to Portland one time to talk about the Salmon Nation, about bringing together all of the people and communities up and down the west coast of North America and maybe into Russia and down into Japan and Korea too. I thought everybody who is in one way or another dependent on salmon should get together. Other people had that idea too. But somebody thought I should get that Ecotrust thing. It was twenty grand. Good money, but I gave it away.
“Nobody who knows what they’re doing eats salmon around here anymore, because the Yukon River water is not the same. Nowadays, you eat salmon, your hair goes white. You eat whitefish, your hair stays dark.”
Nodding at his ponytail and full head of mostly jet-black hair, I said, “I take it you eat only whitefish.” Again he paused, giving me reason to think I’d crossed the line. But then he continued.
“Only whitefish. That’s how you stay healthy. But to stay healthy, you have to have healthy food. And to have healthy food, you have to look after the river.
“I went to a Gwich’in Gathering in Old Crow a while back”—given that the 2010 biannual gathering was in FYU, I gathered this had to be 2008 or earlier. “I was sick in my tent for three days with some kind of weird chest infection, some kind of respiratory condition. There was a Chinese doctor there. He pinned me [acupuncture], told me to eat pears, and I’ve been breathing fine ever since. That’s four-thousand-year-old knowledge. There’s a lot that our modern medical people don’t know.”
I was beginning to wonder if he would ever get around to telling me why he opposed the land swap deal, as he launched into a related story about natural healing. He had an infection, “dysenteric disease,” he called it, ulcers in his stomach and intestines that he felt were caused by stress and too many people asking him to do things (or too many people asking him stupid questions). Food would turn to liquid in his guts, he said.
To try to get better, he went out to a camp near Shoo Taii (Happy Hill), also known as Alexander Village, about thirty kilometres north of FYU, where his family had lived for generations. He went for a month or six weeks and lived off the land, trying to cleanse his body and soul. He stayed until the snow came but still he wasn’t better, or as much better as he had hoped to be with clean water and nourishment from the land.
Around then—it might have been an accident, or it might have been providential in some way—Clarence happened to meet a 104-year-old Inupiaq man from Noatak, north of Kotzebue. He remembered him as a big man, like a walrus. Like the Chinese healer, the old Inupiaq man gave Clarence some advice, and he listened. What he needed to heal his insides, the old man said, was porcupine droppings!
“Ginny calls it porcupine shit,” he said with a smirk. “What she cooks is shit. What I’m talking about here is porcupine droppings.” So he found a pile of porcupine pellets. He took four, broke them up into a bowl, and added some broth from a rabbit he was stewing on the stove. He ate that and immediately got really dizzy. “I knew right away,” he said, “I took too much. But in three hours, it completely cleaned me out. The infection was gone! And about an hour after that, I got really, really hungry. So I ate and ate, as much rabbit stew as I could, and—I couldn’t believe it—it stayed with me. It didn’t go to liquid. And that treatment lasted more than a year. I didn’t try it again until a year later, but this time I only took a couple of drops.” He laughed. “And I got better again.
“So there it is, the most perfect machine made by nature. A medicine-making machine, a porcupine. What it needs from its food, it takes, and then it puts the rest, the toxins, in its droppings. But what a porcupine doesn’t need is medicine for a man.”
As casually as he would arrive at Ginny’s, Clarence would suit up and drift back out into the community. Through the kindness of Ginny and the band council, I was able to meet a number of elders in town as
well as a number of key officers in the band office who were only too happy to talk or to take me to places around the village where things were happening. People were cutting wood north of town, some of them accessing the sites by dog team. Friday, the elders were treated to a hot lunch at the band office. There was work to do on the town’s new water and sewer system. And there were a few people running in and out of town with traps and rifles, obviously involved in bringing country food back into the little community.
One day, when Clarence was nowhere to be found for breakfast, Ginny’s friend Hanne, the author, came for morning coffee. Both she and Ginny had raised kids in town, and they talked about the pros and cons of living in such a small community.
“When my kids were small,” Ginny said, with Hanne in full agreement, “we might have to entertain the kids at home for as much as two months in January and February and March, off and on, because when it was below minus fifty-five [minus forty-eight Celsius], there was no school. But last year, school was closed only one day. There’s an indication of global warming for you. And so far this year, we haven’t even come close, despite the fervent prayers of our grandchildren. And I just bought the first snow shovel since I left Idaho back in the dark ages! That means in my book Fort Yukon wins the Fickle Finger of Frigidity Award.”
I had connected, before arriving, with the principal at Fort Yukon School. Unlike her counterparts on the coast, who were not interested in my presentation—”Too many visitors get the kids off track and it’s hard to bring them back,” a couple of them said—she accepted my offer to come in and speak to some classes about my journey so far. I reported to the office on the appointed day, but she was running out as I went in. The secretary said simply that there’d been “an incident” and that I should come another day.
I went back the following day, and the principal was all smiles. She led me into the senior half of the school and to the end of the hall, where a large and unkempt white teacher named Bob was sitting at his desk, reading, while the kids in his grade nine physical education class were sitting on the desks and talking among themselves. They were quite interested when someone new walked into the room. Their teacher was not. He said a perfunctory hello when his boss introduced us. She left. He said, “Knock yourself out. The projector’s over there.” And he left the room. He was missing in action as well when I began a presentation with his grades seven and eight social studies class, who were studying Canada.
When my presentation was finished, the class—fifteen in all—insisted on signing my journal as a way of wishing me well, letting me know in no uncertain terms that they expected me to be showing their pictures to kids in other classrooms I might get into as my journey continued. Their teacher was in the hall when the period ended, looking bored. Packing up, I kept looking to see if he might catch my eye. Nothing. I slipped out without saying goodbye. An impromptu encounter with a grade five class in the elementary wing of the school, hastily arranged with another teacher by the principal, was marginally more welcoming, but I left the school feeling as if I needed a good gulp of fresh air.
“No Child Left Behind,” Ginny scoffed, as I decanted this underwhelming experience as a guest presenter. She was referring to the federal law on educational standards brought in under President George W. Bush, whose main premise was that high standards and explicitly stated measurable goals can improve individual outcomes in education, particularly for disadvantaged students. “All students across the U.S. are tested at certain grades, and all schools are rated on how well their students do on these standardized tests,” she explained. “In the last results that were published, Alaska came forty-eighth out of fifty, and Fort Yukon was the last of all the schools in Alaska. Things are so uninspired here we actually had no senior class last year. No senior class! Of the ten or twelve kids who started in kindergarten together, how is it that not one of them is in school in their final year?
“Now, they probably all didn’t drop out,” she said. “Some probably went to Fairbanks and went to school there, or wherever. A lot of people here have family in Fairbanks. But isn’t that a travesty to have no senior class? The school provides nearly half the employment in this town. What’s up with that? I lay part of the blame on the teachers: they rotate in and out of here like they do across the North. But I also blame the school board, which is nominally responsible for hiring and firing the teachers and for the overall quality of education. I ran for the school board when I had five children in the school but lost to a guy who had no kids in the system. He sent his kids out to school. And that’s who they voted in. What were they thinking?”
The next morning, Clarence’s take on the educational system was characteristically acerbic. “All my life in school I got Ds. All my life in life, I got As. What’s up with that? These evaluations for No Child Left Behind—No Child Left Behind, pffffft—these evaluations are being done with outside values and outside standards. How can our kids do so badly when they are so smart?” This, and comments from others in the community, echoed Evon Peter’s observations about the systemic effects of colonization and ongoing government policies of assimilation. Being a child growing up caught between worlds, with traditional northern values at home and traditional southern values in school, was difficult at many levels.
As it happened, Evon’s cousin Mike Peter (their grandmothers were sisters), past chief of Gwichyaa Zhee (2008 to 2011), had just returned to Fort Yukon with his wife and family from Fairbanks to assume the position of environmental coordinator in the community. Having been on the job just a couple of months, he was still getting used to the position. He was working on planning the annual spring cleanup, including the removal of derelict vehicles and old household appliances from the community by barge, and generally figuring out what to do about garbage and how to keep community members safe from fuel spills and environmental toxins. He invited me into his space in the band office. He was forty-seven, but, like so many northerners to whom I’d now spoken throughout the circumpolar world, he seemed old beyond his years, with the wisdom of a survivor.
For Mike Peter, the Fort Yukon School was not a good experience, but that was the least of his problems growing up. He had his first drink of alcohol as a young teen, and by sixteen, he told me, “I was right into drinking and right out of control.” Somehow Peter realized through the haze of that existence that something had to happen. Something told him that he had to break the cycle.
So, like many young people from FYU, he headed south to Fairbanks and signed up for the Job Corps, which took him to the Yakima First Nation in Washington State, where he was eventually adopted (in the manner of many First Peoples) by a woman called Florence Haggerty. She counselled him, loved him, and helped him get himself organized and back in control of his own affairs.
“What would have happened if you had stayed in town?” I asked.
“If I’d stayed here, I probably wouldn’t be alive. It’s as simple as that,” he replied.
He went back and forth between Alaska and Washington for some years. In 1982, in his late teens, his work with Florence Haggerty gave him the inclination to get more connected to the land, which led him back to his family and a couple of influential summers in a fish camp on the river with his grandfather. “That was a huge part of figuring out who I was, who I am, and what is important,” he said.
Even when he was chief, the constant travel between Fort Yukon and Fairbanks and the South continued, which seemed to work. “A lot of travel. Money for meetings but no salary. And it’s kind of a thankless job, really, but fulfilling in its own way.” For the last while, Peter had been working in Fairbanks, living with his university-educated wife and three children, two boys and a girl. I asked him what went into the decision to move back to FYU with the family.
“Things are better now. Environmental coordinator is a paid position. And I know what at least some of the problems are, and that I can be part of the solution. And we didn’t want to raise our kids in car seats.”
“What will life be like for them here?”
That, it turned out, was a much tougher question to answer, for once they got much beyond elementary school and immediate parental control and influence, there was no telling what could happen. The trade-off, of course, was that proximity to family and to opportunities to hunt and fish came with the challenges of isolation and the ongoing pathologies of conquest and assimilation.
The official FYU unemployment rate was 21 percent, which included people who were looking for work as well as those who were not, and finding meaningful work was difficult. The hard truth was that the number of jobs inside the community was much smaller than the number of employable people. Because of ANCSA, if you had Native status (the blood quantum had to be greater than 25 percent), said Mike Peter, and if you could get four walls of some kind raised out of logs or dimensional lumber, there would likely be some kind of program that would help with the doors, windows, roof, plumbing (if applicable), electrical work, and interior finishing. And there were other sources of money as well.
For any band member who chose to stay in town without work, there was general assistance to the tune of about a thousand dollars a month. Recipients of this benefit could be asked to work. People who refused to work could be refused the money, but that money was available. It certainly didn’t go very far for hunting on the land with gas at eight dollars a gallon, said Peter. Shells cost more than a dollar a shot, and the already high Alaska prices for food were amplified by the cost of barging or air freight.
There was the Quest Card, Peter told me, which provided a form of income supplement to offset the high cost of living for Native people. A single person might get $250 to $350, and a family of five might get something like $1,400 a month, he said. There was also a WIC (Women in Crisis) card, which was meant to ensure that children one to five years old received at least some eggs, dairy, fresh vegetables, brown rice, and non-sugared cereal. But food security was an issue. People here weren’t rich. But that was the trade-off for living here.