by James Raffan
One of the provisions of ANCSA that went along with the transfer of land and cash and the establishment of regional and local corporations was the designation of an expanse of land for the purposes of wildlife conservation and for the conservation of traditional lifestyles—or to at least make that possible. Fort Yukon is more or less in the middle of the massive Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge. Upstream on the Yukon River is the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve. To the north is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, summer home of the Porcupine Caribou Herd. And all around, of course, is oil, gas, coal, and untold mineral potential.
And yet the people of Gwichyaa Zhee, knowing there would be revenue from a land swap that might see the oil and gas potential south of them being realized, had voted not to get more involved. As I listened to many takes on this decision, I thought of the people in Jokkmokk who wrote with such passion and elegance about slow food and the importance of food sovereignty, meaning the care and keeping of the habitats in which their food species thrive.
For FYU, the land in question was their piece of the revered Han Gwachoh, the mighty Yukon River. For a southerner or anyone with a more instrumental view of land as a commodity, the deep rootedness of these connections, and why these might take precedence over what seemed to some like a reasonable land swap, could be hard to fathom. The two perspectives were as different as a realtor’s rulebook might be from an award-winning novel called Two Old Women, by Velma Wallis of Gwichyaa Zhee. Wallis’s story was based on an Athabascan legend that took readers into the Yukon Flats at the confluence of the Porcupine and Yukon Rivers, where for generations, for millennia, her people had hunted moose and caribou and wolf and trapped everything from fox to marten and beaver. But in order to fully appreciate the significance of the story, both the storyteller and the reader had to enter Ch’idzigyaak’s world unfettered by conventional notions of linear time and physical distance. These understandings of how space became place had something essential to do with a real fear on the part of the Gwich’in of Fort Yukon that quick cash from development might compromise their very essence.
I finally asked Clarence about that during our last time together at the breakfast table in the Snowdrift B&B. As ever, he answered from an unexpected place. First, he said, “I see you were walking on the ice out by the barge landing. I think those were your footprints in the snow.”
“How did you know they were mine?”
“Two reasons: I like those mukluks you’re wearing with the rubberized soles. And secondly, no one around here would be stupid enough to walk on such unsafe ice at the corner in the river.”
On he went with a story about Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, who, “just to piss off George Bush,” had conspired to donate a hundred gallons (about 375 litres) of stove oil each to “poor” Americans living in the North.
“Yeah,” he said with his trademark smirk, “he chartered a 737 to take a bunch of us from Anchorage to New York City. Why me? Because I am considered ‘more honest’—you can put that in quotation marks—than most. Apparently I can turn the heads of the federal government with them sitting right in front of me. Anyway, Chávez put forty of us up in the finest hotels, and we eventually met with the man. He was all riled up, saying that America is the richest country in the world, with billions and billions of dollars in coal and oil flowing out of Alaska, and yet the indigenous people of this state are among the poorest in the country because of how the system is treating us. I think that lasted about four years. Who were we to refuse?” I didn’t have the nerve to ask whether the relationship between the indigenous people in Venezuela and the Chávez administration was something that the Alaskans took into consideration before accepting the dictator’s kind offer.
Eventually, the topic of the expansion of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge came around. In the months leading up to my visit to Alaska, this had been a hot topic of discussion in Washington, with much backtalk from the environmental lobby and Native communities as well, including voices from Fort Yukon. It turned out that, with many other accomplishments, the man with the kangaroo fur in his snow pants, the man President Obama called “the grandfather of tribal government in Alaska,” had been on the Alaskan Steering Committee advising the government on this decision. Not that, by now, that surprised me; at this point, I would have believed that Clarence had advised the pope on matters of northern decorum and Native spirituality.
“What was your perspective on this?” I asked. Without the characteristic pause, he growled, “I said they’d have to shoot me to make that swap happen.” And then came the blast.
“They ask what happened to all the passive Indians. The nice ones. I didn’t say yes, yes, yes, yes, like a passive Indian should. I say FUCK YOU! I don’t know what passive means. And they say, Clarence, you shouldn’t talk to our leaders like that. I say again, FUCK YOU! Why are you robbing me of more land?”
Clarence was nowhere to be found on my last morning at the Snowdrift B&B. I packed my things, said my goodbyes and thank yous, and readied my gear for an afternoon departure. I hadn’t actually visited—or been invited to—Clarence’s cabin in the woods at the edge of town, but on the basis of things he’d said and places I’d seen him walking in town, I reckoned he was in the woods back behind the barge landing dock where he’d seen my footprints in the snow.
Standing at the counter in the Alaska Commercial Company store, I debated whether to get him some tobacco to say thank you, or something else. Tobacco might make him think that I was trying to be an Indian. And then, if I gave him something else—but what?—he might think I was patronizing. In the end, I bought two large chocolate bars and put them in my pocket for the half-hour walk to the end of the road.
It was a dandy Arctic morning. The temperature had moderated a bit, but my mukluks still squeaked on a skiff of new-fallen snow. For the first time in a while, although I was all trussed up in snow pants and parka with multiple layers underneath, I didn’t feel the need to have a scarf or neoprene mask blocking the raw cold from my face. And the sun—even though it was only February and sunrise was at about ten thirty—felt strong, as if spring might be crawling north. Buntings and crossbills were out and about and busy picking at the last of the freeze-dried alder catkins along the side of the road.
I walked past Nyharn 17, Hanne and Grafton Bergman’s place (named after their boat, which was named after a street in the red-light district of Copenhagen), past the south end of the runway and the old jail, and on down the frozen tracks of wood sleds and snogos that had made their way in and out of town for firewood.
At the Indian Graveyard, which was separate from the graveyard outside the first trading post, I stopped and just soaked up the sun filtering through the rime-laden branches of poplars and conifers that poked through the snow among the mostly wooden grave markers. A guttural croak to my immediate left, almost a greeting, came from a raven sitting on one of the gravestones. Another big black bird in a tree swooped down, as if to join the conversation.
From there to Clarence’s place, which I found at the end of a fresh trail of his footprints leading into the woods from the barge landing, these two birds appeared to follow along, perching in the trees on the side of the road and then flying ahead, feathers glistening with every colour of the rainbow in the brilliance of the morning sun. They headed down to the pile of backhaul vehicles down by the frozen wharf when I turned onto what I thought had to be the trail to Clarence’s.
“I came to say thanks and goodbye,” I said, standing in the warmth of his tiny cabin.
“Thanks for what?”
“Thanks for the chats. I enjoyed them.”
Then, as he just looked at me with an awkward silence, I listened as my mouth said, “Nice stove” to fill the dead air.
“Made it myself out of parts I scavenged from cabins all around here.”
“Cool. Brought you some chocolate.”
“What time’s your flight?”
“Two thirty.”
“
Good luck with your book.”
“And to you, with Doyon, or whatever.”
“Don’t forget to tell those fuckers in Dawson to stop putting their shit in our river.”
“Right.”
“Till next time.”
“Yeah.”
19: LANDSCAPE AND MEMORY
As I made my way over the border from Alaska to Yukon and the Northwest Territories in the winter of 2012, the details of some memories of earlier trips to this corner of the Arctic seemed a bit faded with time, but the impact of the conversation I’d had in 1978 with an octogenarian Gwich’in elder, Andrew Kunezi, on the worn wooden steps of the Northern Store in Fort McPherson, N.W.T., was probably stronger than it was back then.
I met Andrew when I had just crossed the Peel River on a onevehicle barge tied to a wooden skiff built and owned by Eight-Mile Joe Vittrekwa, having driven north on the nearly completed Dempster Highway, the only all-weather road in Canada that crossed the Arctic Circle. The summer before, sick and tired of petri dishes, the mathematics of ecology, and other biological minutiae, I’d tucked away my new science degree and flown to Inuvik, N.W.T., where I secured a job building metal buildings for Esso. It was grunt work but I loved it, putting in sixteen-hour days by the light of the midnight sun. It had been so wonderful that I’d gone back for another summer, this time by road, pulled by the inexorable draw of the North and by wages sufficient to cover exotic Arctic canoe trips before heading back to graduate school.
Looking back, those two hours on the steps with Andrew Kunezi—while people in wellies clumped up and down past us, going in and out of the one store in town—were a turning point in my life and maybe even the moment in which a dawning fascination with the human stories of the North eclipsed my early inclination toward natural science as a career choice.
His new-moon eyes were wolf grey and shaded with the brim of a cap much faded by the sun. His face was burnished like hand-rubbed harness leather and surprisingly unlined for a man of his advanced years. Crinkles in his brow and crow’s feet, in white circles around his eyes where sunglasses protected his skin, appeared only when he smiled. He wore a hunter’s padded vest, stained green on the outside and patched red on the inside, and a blue plaid shirt that had clearly spent a lot of time on the old man’s back, judging from the way the colours inside his cuffs were so much darker than the fabric on the outside.
He talked about Corporal Dempster, after whom the new highway had been named. Whatever Dempster had done as a police operative, he had truly made a name for himself by discovering the fate of the infamous Lost Patrol led by Inspector F.J. Fitzgerald. En route from Fort McPherson to Dawson City, Yukon, over Christmas and the New Year in 1910–11, Fitzgerald and three others had perished like characters in an instructive Jack London tale. Three had succumbed to starvation and cold, and the fourth, seeing no way out, had died at his own frozen hand, which delivered a final single carbine shot to the face.
What followed was a glimpse into Andrew’s remarkable mental map, as he recounted the trail taken by the Lost Patrol. “From McPherson, you go south on the Peel,” he said, “about seventy miles [110 kilometres] to the Trail River. And then, to cut off the big bend in the Peel, you head upriver and across open ground at the foot of the Richardson Mountains, which roll away to the north, until you pick up Mountain Creek and follow that back down to the Peel.” It was a route that he had travelled with his father and grandfather many times.
Then up the Peel for maybe fifteen kilometres. The water was fast underneath but the ice was good there, Andrew said. Then left, heading southwest up the Wind River, maybe eighty kilometres, taking the fork at the Little Wind to head more west than south. It was as if he were giving directions in a city and these river confluences were the Times Square of the Yukon wilderness. “Follow your dogs,” he said. “They’ll remember the trail if they have been on it before.”
Depending on conditions, you’d go for one day, maybe two, up the Little Wind. You had to watch for Forrest Creek, which took you up and over the divide into Waugh Creek and down north to the Hart River. This was where Fitzgerald went wrong, said Andrew.
That corner on the Little Wind could change when the river froze when the water was high. There were certain rocks and certain crooks in tree branches that you had to learn, to make sure that you didn’t miss this right-hand turn. Fitzgerald had passed by the turnoff and ended up following the Little Wind until it petered out into a little brook in a tundra meadow in the Blackstone Range, and they knew they were in trouble.
“If they had watched their lead dog, they would have known when to turn, even if they didn’t know exactly what it looked like. It was their mistake to have Carter”—Special Constable Sam Carter—”and not a local guide with them. That’s why they died,” he explained.
As Andrew talked, I had my Yukon road map on my lap. He pointed at it from time to time to help me get my bearings, but it was pretty clear that the map he was following was in his head. His map, I was sure, painted in multiple dimensions and in many layers, was what my map tried to convey on a piece of paper.
The heat of the northern sun was beating down on us that July day. As I returned to the Mackenzie more than thirty years later, I thought again of how this man, who was born around the time of the Yukon gold rush, had shared personal experiences that encompassed every single change—good, bad, and indifferent—that had occurred in the lives of northerners in his lifetime. The richness of his memories and how they tied the man to the land amazed me still.
Since 1978, the changes that had occurred in this northwest corner of the Canadian North had been dramatic. But the promise of the Dempster Highway as the key to unlocking the resource riches of the Mackenzie Delta had not, as yet, been realized. The pipeline it was to support was never built. Justice Thomas Berger had led an inquiry into the feasibility of creating an energy corridor and, after listening to indigenous voices up and down the Mackenzie River valley, had written a pivotal report called Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland, released in 1977. It recommended a ten-year moratorium on any pipeline development.
That, in the short term, was probably a good thing for the people of Fort McPherson and the Mackenzie Delta. The Tetlit Gwich’in of Fort McPherson had signed Treaty 11 back in 1921, but all that had really done was connect Andrew and his people to the Canadian government’s policies of assimilation. Berger and the members of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry knew that more needed to happen in order for the indigenous people of the Mackenzie River valley to participate as equals in development. Only then could a more equitable arrangement be struck with the Crown.
Indeed, in January 1987, almost ten years after the Berger Report was published, the Inuvialut of the Mackenzie Delta signed a first Comprehensive Land Claim Agreement. That was followed by the Yukon Umbrella Final Agreement in 1990 and the Gwich’in Comprehensive Land Claim Agreement in 1992. Each of the fourteen Yukon First Nations settled with the Crown one by one after that.
These agreements accomplished exactly what the Sami and the indigenous peoples of Russia hungered for as they continued to suffer the lingering consequences of conquest and assimilation. The deals all included provision for cash and land transfer, resource royalty sharing, and a host of other benefits that allowed these indigenous communities to move back toward independence and self-government. Like ANCSA, each of these agreements in its own way acknowledged and honoured wrongs that had been committed along the way.
Interestingly, these documents also built on the Alaskan example of how beneficiaries were established. “Who counts” in the agreements was generally based on a blood quantum of 25 percent. But, as if responding to the concerns of Mayor Martha Whiting in Kotzebue, the Canadian settlements added a variety of measures that allowed tribal affiliation, community acceptance, living an Aboriginal lifestyle, and personal family lineage to be added to the mix. Who was in and who was out of the Canadian land claim agreements was broader, more flexible, and more in the hands of the
First Nations themselves, but the quantum was still a matter of contention in many quarters.
What it had taken to build or rebuild these relationships between First Nations and government after a century or more of discord had been courageous acts on both sides of the northern culture divide. Perhaps the most inspirational document for Aboriginal negotiators was a letter from Chief Jim Boss, of the Ta’an Kwäch’än (living in the area of Whitehorse and Lake Laberge). He wrote to the Canadian government in 1902 to express his displeasure with the land grabs and damage wrought on his homeland by the gold rush of 1898.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, Chief Boss’s letter was more or less ignored by the government for decades. But with the signing of ANCSA in 1971, which precipitated the building of the Dalton Highway and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline to bring oil south from Prudhoe Bay on the Alaskan North Slope, Chief Elijah Smith, first president of the Yukon Native Brotherhood, dug out Jim Boss’s letter. Inspired by Boss’s courage and clarity, Chief Smith collaborated with other Yukon First Nations to write Together Today for Our Children Tomorrow: A Statement of Grievances and an Approach to Settlement by the Yukon Indian People. This remarkable document, published in January 1973, became the basis and inspiration for the Yukon Umbrella Final Agreement, signed in 1990.
Like Clarence Alexander, Chief Smith spoke the truth—but in slightly more diplomatic language.
Many people say all we want to do is go back to the bush. This is NOT true for all of us, but it IS true for some. We are talking about going back to a set of Indian Values which will help our young people understand who they are. At the same time, many of our older people would rather move back to the bush where they would be free, independent and comfortable with a way of life that they know and understand.