After the Christmas program the adults would drink while the kids would open up presents from their parents. My first Christmas present from my parents was a wooden gun carved by my dad that shot rubber bands. I loved it. At the time, I still believed in Santa Claus, but that ended when I saw “Santa” drunk. The man had come to our house to “party,” but my dad intercepted him at the outside door, saying that he shouldn’t enter in his condition because the kids would see him.
Of course, all holidays were times when the community would gather to celebrate. After seven weeks of lent, the entire village would attend the Russian Orthodox church for Easter service. Afterward, children would go to their godmother’s house to receive some delicacy then have an Easter feast back at their own houses. The feast usually involved halibut fish pie and “moss” berry pie, delicacies reserved for special occasions. To this day I still love these dishes. Easter and lent were the only times during the year the adults wouldn’t drink. However, it all resumed the day after Easter services.
There were things that happened that no child should ever see or hear or experience. And although the sober days were happy days at home, the stark weekend contrast was, at best, confusing to the children. At worst, it created a cycle of fear, terror, and violence that these children never escaped.
Later in life I better understood the legacy of spiritual sickness and internalized oppression that my people developed first when the Russian fur traders arrived and 80 percent of the Unangan died from disease, malnutrition, and genocide over a fifty-year period. This misery continued for another hundred years under the U.S. government enslavement of the Unangan.
Chapter 8
Sealing
I vividly remember my father, John Merculieff, coming home beyond exhaustion five days a week. He was one of the “higher-ranking” sealers because he was a clubber, or “stunner.” To become a stunner, one had to work through the ranks over a period of years. It was the highest-rewarded position in the killing fields because it required skill to use a five-foot hickory club to kill a fast-moving seal with one blow to the head and do this over and over again. Six or seven men kill up to four thousand seals each day.
When I was allowed to go out “sealing” at age five, I saw firsthand how hard the men worked. As a child, it was a special event to be allowed to go out with the sealers. Sealing always began in June and ended by mid-August of each year. We had to be ready by 3:00 a.m. to go to the government breakfast hall if we wanted to get some food. Breakfasts were the same every day: small pancakes, powdered eggs, bacon, and coffee.
The government always wanted to herd seals before the day’s temperatures rose into the lower to mid-fifty-degree range because, any later than that, the seals would overheat and die, becoming what it called “road skins” when the pelts lost their high quality thus bringing in a lower price. Road skins were very hard to remove from the seal carcass and were frequently torn. So, by 4:00 a.m., we loaded up in government dump trucks used to haul seal carcasses and pelts from the field. The older men and clubbers would ride in the only covered truck, what we called the water truck because it contained fresh water for the sealers. It was always chilly in these moist pre-dawn days as temperatures usually were in the lower forties. I would crouch down below the cab to avoid the bone-chilling wind created by the moving truck.
We were part of a caravan of about ten government trucks and would head out to one of the seven fur seal rookeries where “bachelor” seals, non-breeding sub-adult males, congregated by the tens of thousands. We were headed toward the Northeast Point rookery, the largest rookery on the island. When the trucks arrived at the location, drivers would park the vehicles in a straight line on the tundra. I could tell where the seals were usually killed because the grass in the killing fields was always much greener than any surrounding grass, made fertile from the blood of hundreds of thousands of seals killed over the past 150 years. I thought about how my ancestors had to labor when trucks didn’t exist, rowing a fifty-foot, one-ton traditional craft, called a baidar (or nixalax), to and from the killing fields and the village.
Arriving at the killing fields, men would congregate around the trucks, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, talking in Unangan about the day. The conversations would typically be about the number of seals they probably would kill that day, whether or not the weather was good enough to go halibut fishing after sealing, and how people and their families were doing.
“Looks like a big kill day.”
“Yeah, this rookery always has lots of seals.”
“Hope we finish fast. Looks like a good fishing day. My family could use halibut.”
“Better watch out for the boss man. He looks grouchy today.”
“Yeah, last week the boss man was grouchy, and he sent five guys home without pay just because he thought they were too slow.”
“My back sure hurts from yesterday. They told me we killed 2,500 seals yesterday, and I sure feel it. Hope it doesn’t slow me down today. It could make it harder on everybody.”
Unangan sealers were the personification of teamwork because a central aspect of Unangan culture is cooperation and service to others without thought for oneself. The teamwork would begin when the sealer foreman signaled everyone to go. The thirty or so men would first walk toward the bachelor rookery, then run collectively as they approached the rocks near the shoreline where the seals rested and slept, coming between the seals and the shoreline and cutting off their only escape route.
I could hear the raucous roar of the tens of thousands of seals covering every inch of the rookeries where basalt boulders stretched for miles near the shoreline. There were breeding rookeries composed of prime males and mature females, idle bull rookeries where bulls past their prime rested, and non-breeding seal rookeries of sub-adult males. We never entered into breeding or idle bull rookeries.
I chose to run with the men, knowing that boys were allowed to participate in the “seal drive.” Everyone had to be alert. The black-colored seals matched the color of the rocks, even in daylight, and this was morning twilight. A threatened seal can be as fierce as a wild African lion, moving faster than a person can run in the rookery of large slippery rocks. The seals have large, very sharp canine teeth, and sometimes, although rarely, a seal would rip into a man’s thigh or leg, requiring multiple stitches. I had vivid visions of what the torn leg of a man must look like, and that certainly made me hyper aware as I ran through hundreds of snarling seals with the men. Although most of the seals were sub-adult males, ages two through four, there were some fierce bull seals in the groups, weighing as much as six hundred pounds. The men would move toward the shoreline, preventing the seals from escaping, and herd the seals inland. The men and boys would whistle and carry sticks that made sounds to keep the seals moving. I was reminded of movies where men were herding cattle. The sounds were very similar, to me.
The men made sure there weren’t any road skins by allowing the seals to rest frequently on their way to the gruesome killing fields. Fur seals have no sweat glands and let off heat through panting that then releases clouds of heat hanging over them. A seal that would die from heat exhaustion would be no good to eat, and its pelt would be hard to clean.
Frequently, bull seals and females would get mixed in among the sub-adult males and were let go on the way to the fields. I would see the bull seals and females run a few yards from the herded animals and stop to rest. The rest of the herded seals seemed terrified and confused. When they arrived at the killing fields, the men would take a break while the herd of seals tried to collect themselves. The seals would be guarded by three or four men and boys to make sure they did not run off. The men would know how long of a day it would be by the size of the herd that was collected. Most of the time over two thousand seals were collected from various parts of the rookeries (seven of which had non-breeding sub-adult male seals). That would mean about an eight-hour day killing seals.
When the sealer foreman gave the word, someone would cut ou
t a pod of six or seven seals by making a loud noise with a large metal coffee can on a club. The “pod cutter” would then drive the small band of seals separated from the rest toward the stunners who used six-foot hickory clubs to stun the seal in the head, frequently killing it with the blow. These men were handpicked for their accuracy in stunning a seal. It was brutalizing work. I wondered what effect this job had on the men, especially my dad.
Within seconds the dead or stunned seals would be dragged away and lined up in rows of five. Then a “sticker” would cut the main artery of each seal to make sure it was dead and cut around the flippers and head. A crew of three or four men, called “rippers,” would attach a large pincer-type tool to the fur that was cut around the head and pull the skin off the seal. Once the skins were removed, they were placed in another line for collection. Either in the middle or at the end of the seal kill, the pelts were loaded onto the truck using pitch forks. When the truck was full of pelts, it would continue to the fur seal pelt-processing facility where the pelts would be soaked, “blubbered,” and put into fifty-gallon wooden barrels for shipment to further processing into fine furs by the Fouke Fur Company. The “blubbering” process was another grueling job in which the men would use large-curved cutting instruments to remove the fat layer from the flesh. The remaining seal carcasses were taken to another location where they would be processed for mink feed. But, before that happened, local people were allowed to take what seal parts they wanted for food. They would take hearts, livers, tongues, shoulders, and ribs, and it was the only time the federal government allowed our people to take seals for themselves.
It was no wonder that the men became debilitated by age thirty-five. The brutal labor took its physical and spiritual toll.
Chapter 9
Death of a Six-Year-Old
For a Pribilof Unangan, sickness was always serious business in a remote community in the Bering Sea. The only clinic is far from the nearest fully equipped medical center in Anchorage, eight hundred air miles away. When I was a child, our parents had to cope by themselves with the myriad of diseases we contracted in the village, as most formal health care was reserved for white people. Impetigo, an infectious skin disease, was one of the worst experiences I recall. My sister Rinna and I, and most of the children in the village, suffered from unbearably itchy sores covering most of our arms, legs, torso, and faces. The treatment involved bathing in a tub of salt water, but, with open wounds from constant scratching, the bath was excruciatingly painful. We also suffered from mumps, measles, body and head lice, flu, polio, smallpox, and otitis media or inner ear infections from too much exposure to the incessant winter winds. The government-run clinic took in only life-threatening cases among our people. One day I was such a case.
I remember my mother, father, grandfather, and sister sitting down to the lunch-time family meal, the biggest meal of the day when the men weren’t slaughtering seals. Instead of joining them I walked into the living room. I wasn’t feeling quite right. My mother always kept this room immaculate. The living room was home to the Russian Orthodox icons, and it was where the priest and local choir would come to say prayers and sing when they went from house to house during the Christmas and Easter holidays. My left arm was hurting so fiercely that I began to cry. My mother came into the room and asked what was wrong with me. I told her how bad my arm hurt and that I was getting dizzy. She felt my forehead and cheeks. I was burning up.
She told me to put my jacket on because she was taking me to see the government doctor. I did as instructed, and we began the short half-mile walk to the clinic. As we walked, everything began to spin wildly. I had severe vertigo. My mother grabbed my hand and pulled me along as I cried, terrified. She was young, and had been a mother only for the six years of my life, given that I was her firstborn. She had never had to deal with something like this before as a mother and she was scared.
No one liked to go the clinic because only really sick people went there, and villagers associated it with death. It was an austere place and smelled of ether and rubbing alcohol. The local practical nurse took my temperature: 106 degrees. Another degree and my brains would have begun to fry. “Doctor, you better look at this boy; he’s really sick!” the nurse said, somewhat insistently.
The doctor, a white man, was a federal employee brought to the island from the lower 48. Most of these imported employees wouldn’t associate with Unangan outside of their assigned responsibilities; those who did were then strongly discouraged from doing so by the other government employees or agents. All the government doctors I had encountered before had seemed cold and distant to me, and this one was no exception.
The doctor looked at the thermometer, a frown appearing on his face. He shook it down and placed it back in my mouth. Then he put a cold stethoscope underneath my shirt and listened front and back. “His lungs and bronchial tubes are congested,” he said to no one in particular. Ignoring my mother, worry etched all over her face, he told the nurse to prepare a bed for me because I probably had pneumonia, and both my lungs were engaged. “Put him in a tub with cold water first, to lower his temperature” the doctor ordered. He then turned to my mother and informed her that my condition was very serious and that I might die. Hearing this, I became terrified.
“Don’t leave me, Mama! Don’t leave me!” I pleaded.
The doctor looked at me sternly. “You have to stay here and your mother can’t; it’s against the rules!”
Crying, nauseated, dizzy, confused, and terrified, I went with the nurse to what was to be my bed for the next six tortuous weeks. “Take all your clothes off and put this on,” she said as she handed me a white gown. “I am going to set up your bath and come back to get you.”
When she left, I struggled to get my clothes off. I was feeling so sick that even the simple task of bending down to take my socks off was difficult. Bending down seemed to make me dizzier and more nauseated. By the time the nurse came back I was too weak to get out of the bed. It was all happening so fast. That morning I had felt perfectly fine. Now, a few hours later, I was immersed in cold sweat and barely able to move.
The nurse carried me from the bed to a large tub, though barely large enough for me to fit in. She set me into shockingly cold water. I cried even more as I gasped for air at the shock of the coldness. Huge goosebumps rose on every inch of my body. At that point, everything started to go dark as I began to lose my vision. I couldn’t understand what was happening and no one bothered to explain it to me, but the doctor’s words that “I might die” were stuck in my head. I was beyond terrified, but I could not give voice to the terror anymore. Then everything went black. I remained mostly unconscious for the next two weeks.
My first recollection of brief consciousness during that period is that of waking up alone in the darkness. I looked around and could only make out strange and sinister outlines of the only ward on the second floor of the clinic. I was the only person in the entire building, and to a little boy, the room I was in felt huge and ominous. The nurse’s station was located somewhere downstairs.
I still felt horribly sick and nauseated and leaned over to vomit on the floor as I went unconscious again. Actually, this was the moment I began to choose unconsciousness as, in my child mind, I told myself I didn’t want to be there. “I’m going back,” I said to myself. The place I would go to was comforting. It is difficult to describe this place I went to; it was something like an infinite void, where there was a peace beyond anything I ever experienced. I felt like I was connected to everything in existence and yet maintained my own sense of being. There were no physical or energetic boundaries of any kind. I could connect with anything past, present, or future and go anywhere on Earth or outer space with just my intention. It was a glorious experience and a place I far preferred over my current physical reality. As a child, I had no sense that this place was unusual, just familiar and welcoming. Later in life, the vivid memory of this “no-place” or void would haunt me.
I had no sense of time w
henever I gained consciousness intermittently, except that I knew it was night when it was dark and day when it was light. I do remember sometimes waking up in the dark and wondering if I had gone blind again as I had the day I arrived at the clinic. I knew what it meant to be blind from movies I had seen and comic books I had read.
I recall the consistent sense of terror that I was going to die and die alone. I wanted my mother, my father, my uncles, my sisters, anyone, to be there with me. Where were they? Unbeknownst to me, the government doctor, possibly worried that Unangan people would steal things from the clinic if they were unsupervised, prohibited visitors in the clinic. Not knowing this, I could not understand how my parents, siblings, and relatives could all leave me there alone. I felt completely abandoned in a state of abject terror and did not understand what was happening to me.
One day I awoke startled by a pinching pain in my rear. The doctor was administering a penicillin shot with a long needle. I turned so abruptly as I awoke that the needle broke inside of me. The doctor looked irritated. “You have to stay still while I give you this shot; it will help you get better!” he said brusquely. He asked the practical nurse to get a pair of pliers. I tried to read his face to get some idea of whether or not he was worried about my condition. His face was stoic. The nurse returned, and the doctor proceeded to remove the broken needle with the pliers. “Now I have to do this again, so you have to be still, understand?” he asserted. I nodded, braced myself and bit down on my lower lip as he proceeded to stick the five-inch needle into me. It hurt a lot. It hurt more when the needle hit bone.
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