Wisdom Keeper

by Ilarion Merculieff

  The Unangan men who had seen and experienced what real freedom was like, and what it was like to be treated like a real person, set out in earnest to strategize how they would change the Unangan status as a captive labor force for the U.S. government. With the aid of ANB leaders and Mr. Cohen, they set out to establish the Unangan as a federally recognized tribe under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934—a law that recognized Native Americans as U.S. citizens and tribes as their vehicle for self-government.

  Since the U.S. government had established rigid rules about Unangan gatherings—only gatherings for church services were allowed—Terenty Philemonof, Gabe Stepetin, Irish Stepetin, Alexander Melovidov, Elary Gromoff, Mamant Emanof Sr., and my uncle, Iliodor “Eddie” Merculieff, secretly devised a plan for covert meetings among themselves: Gabe Stepetin came up with the idea to propose to the government agent that the men be allowed to put on a play or performance for the white government employees on the island, and to do so required rehearsals. The government agent swallowed the story and allowed the men to gather. The men actually produced a play during this time, but no one remembers what it was about.

  As a result of these meetings in 1948 and 1949, a petition was smuggled off the island for recognition of the establishment of the Unangan Communities of Saint Paul and Saint George under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 as amended in 1936 (to include Alaska Native peoples). The men sought to gain the human rights that the Pribilof Unangan had been deprived of since first being enslaved by the Russian fur traders, who had brought them to the islands, and then by the U.S. government.

  From the time the U.S. government gained control of the Pribilofs after the Treaty of Cession with Russia in 1867, Unangan had been a captive labor force, first for two private companies the government had contracted with, then for the U.S. government when it assumed direct administration of the Pribilofs in 1910. From 1910 until the early 1960s, Unangan were not allowed to leave the islands, own their own homes, or write letters to anyone on the outside unless such letters were first censored by the government agent. The government agent served as judge, jury, and law enforcer in a colonial dictatorship over the Unangan. Food, government housing, and clothing were rationed as pay for the back-breaking work of the Unangan men who worked seasonally up to seventeen hours a day for three months, killing seals and removing and processing their pelts. Men were debilitated by the time they reached the age of thirty-five.

  The Pribilof Unangan men directed Mr. Cohen to draft an Indian Reorganization Act charter, which he formally submitted to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. When the charter was granted in 1951, as their first official act, with the aid of Cohen, the first organized Unangan tribal council launched a claim against the U.S. government for failure to deal with Pribilof Unangan fairly and honorably, and for violating the terms of the Treaty of Cession that required the U.S. government to treat Unangan as U.S. citizens with all the rights and privileges of citizenship. This lawsuit was filed with the Indian Claims Commission, which had jurisdiction over claims of Native Americans throughout the United States. The lawsuit was vigorously opposed by the U.S. government, and so it took twenty-seven years to reach a judgment in favor of the Unangan. The government lawyers, however, appealed the decision to force the Unangan to settle out of court in 1978. By this time, most of the men who began this effort were dead.

  From beginning to end, Pribilof Unangan were represented by five different attorneys, all of whom took the case pro bono. A former state supreme court justice, Roger Conner, was the first to take over the case from Cohen on behalf of the Unangan. After Justice Conner died, Anchorage attorney Lloyd Miller took over the case. After Lloyd Miller retired, Don Green and Stephen Truitt finally won the lawsuit. Through the efforts of these good men, the Unangan were able to prove that the U.S. government had rationed an equivalent of 1,700 calories per day for each working man to kill seals in extremely arduous labor over 8 to 17 hours daily during 3 months of every summer. In dramatic contrast, the attorneys demonstrated that German POWs received an average of 1,900 calories per day to do essentially nothing.

  Meanwhile, the seals were the reason the U.S. government was on the Pribilofs in the first place. Seal pelts brought a considerable profit to the government every year on the backs of the captive Unangan labor force who were the only ones who knew how to kill the seals so efficiently. No one else would do such dirty work without just compensation and fair treatment, but the Unangan didn’t know that they were the only labor force held captive by the U.S. government in the entire United States, and the only labor force in U.S. history that made a profit for the U.S. government. The Unangan thought everyone was treated this way by the government, having already had over a hundred years of slavery as their legacy before the U.S. government appeared on the scene.

  The Pribilof Unangan finally achieved political independence after the first director of the Alaska Human Rights Commission, African-American Willard Bowman, led an investigation in the early 1960s. The Commission’s report eventually reached Congress, and Senator Bob Bartlett led a congressional investigation in 1964 that led to the Unangan civil rights bill, ironically called the Fur Seal Act of 1966. This act recognized Pribilof Unangan rights to vote in state and federal elections, own their own homes, and receive full civil service wages. Little did the Unangan know the challenge to the human spirt that lay ahead.

  Chapter 5

  My Legacy as an Unangan

  My generation was the last generation that had a fully intact traditional upbringing. The entire village raised me, literally. For example, at age four, I was placed with my grandfather, my Papa, Paul Merculieff, twenty-four hours a day for two years so we would get to know each other. I slept with him, I hunted with him, I prayed with him. That was the tradition at that time and was a significant thing. My grandfather, who had been the janitor for the government colonial agent’s house, was a physically strong and humble man who did his work with attention, discipline, and pride. When I was four years old, he took me with him to hunt murres at one end of the island during the early spring. Murres are fast-moving migratory seabirds that come to the Pribilof Islands to nest. They actually look like penguins; only, they fly above and below water. I was always fascinated to watch these birds swim under the clear Bering Sea waters in search of food. They use their wings to move, as if they are flying under water.

  That day I witnessed what an accomplished hunter my grandfather was. We were not seeing too many murres as most of them were flying a hundred yards or more off the spit where we sat waiting. The other hunters with us were commenting on how far offshore the birds were flying. Murres may fly some twenty miles an hour against moderate winds, or faster if they fly with the wind. Soon one murre appeared quite a distance from shore—flying with the wind. My grandfather raised his twelve-gauge shotgun and took aim as the bird came from our right side toward our left. He followed the bird for maybe thirty seconds. I could see that he wasn’t even aiming at the bird, but ahead of it—quite a way ahead of it. He fired, and about seven seconds later the bird plummeted out of the sky. The other hunters yelled in acclamation of my grandfather, and it was from their comments that I realized he had made a remarkable shot.

  On another day my grandfather and I walked a sand beach after praying near the shore of the Bering Sea at sunrise. It was an incredibly beautiful day in which the sun was up and there was no wind. We could hear the seagulls calling out and the seals bellowing in a distant rookery. The sea air smelled fresh and everything was alive and intense. Small waves crested in rapid succession along the beach. The sky and sea were expansive with a myriad of blue hues. I could see horizon for 180 degrees.

  “Oh, I love this day; it is really good!” I proclaimed out loud as we walked in a rhythmic, slow pace along the dark-colored sands of our volcanic island.

  “Anaan eestahnaan Laakaiyaax,” my grandfather said softly in Unangan Tunuu. “Tutuuthax.”

  I knew what he meant. In his characteristically gentle way, he sha
red what was likely the foundation for Unangan existence for millennia. He said not to say anything but to listen and experience without words. Words were not only superfluous but would diminish the fullness and understanding of any human experience. It is an age-old Unangan way that likely is central to how and why Unangan survived and thrived in the Bering Sea for over ten thousand years. I learned later, having experienced extreme conditions, the wisdom of refraining from defining everything, as is so pervasive in much of the rest of American society.

  At age five I had an “Aachaa” (pronounced “ah-chah”), a profound relationship that just develops unplanned, between an older person and a child, in which the connection between the two is more “energetic” and spiritual than anything else. When that feeling of special connection occurs between an older and a younger person, they become Aachaas. My Aachaa’s name was Nick Stepetin, a beautiful man who married my aunt, Sophie. It was with them that I escaped the weekend drunkenness in the village, spending all day hunting with my Aachaa. One aspect of an Aachaa relationship is mentoring—thus, my Aachaa took me under his wing from age five to thirteen and taught me much of what I know about being Unangan, being a man, hunting, Unangan ethics and values, reverence for all life, and my relationship to creation.

  Between the ages of five and seven, I began to be invited into many circles within the village. The Elders would take me camping with them and I would hear their stories. The women would take me out berry-picking and show me women’s ways, and the men, including my Aachaa, would take me out hunting and fishing. All that was expected of me at this time was to watch, listen, learn, and help. I was not given verbal instructions or explanations of any kind; I was simply expected to use my own intelligence. In his role as mentor, my Aachaa spoke, maybe, about two hundred words to me during the eight years of my formative childhood. We were together in silence the rest of the time. My Aachaa, as well as all the other adults in that community, never scolded me, never put me down, always affirmed who I was as a human being every day of my life as a child, and treated me with the same respect shown any adult. The only distinction is that the child has less experience with life. So the beauty of that kind of a system of learning is that it allowed me to reach my maximum potential, because what I learned depended totally on me. The adults neither presumed any limitation to my intelligence or ability to learn nor tried to tell me what it is I should learn. They simply provided learning opportunities.

  Many adults in modern society have a preconceived notion about children and what they should or should not know. They may treat a child in that fashion, perhaps at the expense of the child not learning as much as the child could learn, and certainly at the expense of the child’s creativity. Nothing was held back from me, however. Anything I wanted to do, learn, or know, I could—without concern about my age—and the only time adults would intervene was when I may be in danger.

  The Elders really challenged me to learn by gauging their response to me based on the nature of the question I would ask and how I conducted myself. Thus, to the rare question I may ask, the kind of answers I was given came from their assessment of how much I understood, as reflected in the question I was asking. For example, a common mistake of scientists and researchers when talking with Indigenous Elders is to focus on a single issue around what they are studying. Have you noticed a decline of the harbor seal in your area? Do you think more females than males are declining? Even though the Elder knows that the context of the information he or she provides is more important than the actual observation, the Elder sees that the researcher is only interested in the observation. The Elder, therefore, answers the question in a manner that is responsive to the question and leaves the substance out.

  In today’s mainstream society we are often expected to give the “right” answers, or at least try to. And these “right” answers are derived from instruction and learning by rote. The reverse is what I grew up with. None of the things I learned about being Unangan came from books, and there were no wrong answers, only better or different ones. I think this age-old wisdom, present in many Indigenous cultures, of the Unangan learning process helped me to think creatively and critically, something that has helped me immensely in my life and career.

  Unangan people understand that human intelligence is not simply in the mind or in the brain. The center of human intelligence is the entire body and spirit. So, for example, I used all of my senses—hearing, feeling, smelling, seeing, and tasting—as well as intuition, thinking, emotion, and body signals in learning. This intelligence synthesizes information from all the sensory and nonsensory inputs. That’s what Unangan consider to make up a real human being. Underneath all of this is heart and a profound relationship where we feel connected to all that is. In fact, thinking with the brain without first checking in with the heart interferes with the growth of one’s intelligence.

  One day, when I was seven years old, while visiting my Aachaa, he said to me, “Lakaiyux, aakaathaax” (“boy, come”). “Way, suuthaax!” (“here, take this”). It was a combination rifle and shotgun. I knew what this meant, and I beamed brightly. “Kaaxaasukux ungoonesh!” (“thank you very much”), I said loudly. I was being acknowledged as a hunter for the first time in my young life, something I will never forget for the rest of my life.

  I didn’t have to take a competency test or be asked any questions. My Aachaa knew I was ready because I had the qualities of a good hunter, the qualities I had learned by using my true human intelligence, using my senses, using my intuition, using my “gut feel,” listening to what my heart was saying, and using my sixth sense (inner knowing).

  At times I could feel a sea lion before I would see it. More consistently, I could feel a halibut before it hit my jig fishing line. I could tell how a halibut was hooked—by the lip, jaw, or torso; I could determine the size of the halibut; and frequently, I would be able to tell if the fish was male or female. Then, I could tell how it was going to fight on its way up. This information determined how I would bring the halibut up. If it was hooked by the lip, we brought it up gently; if it “swallowed” the hook, we had more freedom. That is the inner knowing that is inexplicable by any modern-day empirical standards. It also includes qualities I had learned that exemplified manhood to me and my people: patience, soft spokenness, gentleness, nonaggression, cooperation, presence in the moment, consideration of others, respect for all wildlife, and reverence for all life.

  When my Aachaa took me out hunting, we hunted Steller sea lions and eider ducks. Sea lions are to us like the bowhead whales are to the Inupiat in the North and bison are to the plains Indians. We only hunted sub-adult male sea lions. We never killed females. We understood that taking female sea lions would harm the population over time. We would go out to a reef jutting out from the island to hunt both ducks and sea lions in the late fall, winter, or early spring. We never hunted during the summer breeding season. Unangan strongly hold to the understanding that no animal should be disturbed when breeding.

  We would sit for hours waiting for a sea lion to “ride” by the reef. Sea lions rarely come ashore in the cold fall, winter, and spring seasons because exposure to wind makes it colder to be on land than at sea. Sometimes the sea lions would travel alone, or in small packs. Steller sea lions are not at all like the well-known California sea lions. Stellers are much larger and fiercer, and old adult males weigh as much as two thousand pounds and tout a huge dark gold–colored mane. They mature between the ages of eight and ten. Females are much smaller and sleeker, are slightly lighter-colored than the males, weigh up to seven hundred pounds, and mature around age five. A sea lion pup is considerably smaller and much darker-colored, weighing as much as 250 pounds between the ages of 2 and 9 months. I grew to love these magnificent, bold, strong, highly intelligent mammals.

  Sea lions swim very differently than the northern fur seals for which our islands are world-renowned. While sea lions plow through the water when traveling from place to place, fur seals porpoise, or jump, through the wa
ter. When the animals are spotted miles away and only a “dot” on the horizon, this is how we are able to tell the difference. Historically, we used every part of the sea lion, wasting nothing—sea lions provided skins for kayaks, sinews for ropes, intestines for waterproof gut parkas, throats for waterproof baskets, whiskers to decorate the classic hunting hats, bones for spear points and other implements, and food. A staple food source for Unangan people for over ten thousand years, sea lions are 98 percent lean meat. The fat is rendered for oil, and tissue inside its flipper is used for a kind of gel we call “stuudenux.” The heart and liver are delicacies, and the meat is cooked in the same kinds of ways we cook beef today.

  When I was a boy out hunting Steller sea lions, we were never boisterous; everyone was quiet inside and out, and we were always completely aware of everything going on around us. Conversation distracted hunters who could spot that sea lion out in the water five, sometimes ten, miles away. “Cowax ukaakox!” a hunter would proclaim, “a sea lion is coming!” The hunters would know uncannily that a sea lion was coming even before physically seeing it. It was important for a good hunter to have this awareness not only because it maximized the prospect that he would get the sea lion, but also because it kept him from inflicting undue suffering on the sea lion when it was killed. I later found out how they, and ultimately we, did it.

  Each individual sea lion has a different pattern to its swimming. Some swim faster, some slower; some are bound for a particular destination, others may be feeding. And each one has its own dive rhythm. So, for example, one sea lion may swim on the surface for two minutes, decide to dive, and then be under the surface for several minutes (sea lions take an extra-large breath immediately before diving). Knowing the pattern of the sea lion allows the hunter to accurately predict when the animal will fill its lungs full of air, allowing it to float instead of sink once killed; good hunters always hunt where the waves are moving shoreward, which bring in the body quickly (within minutes).