“I grew up hunting every day,” he says, looking out the window. “Now we’re a lazy people because we’ve got snow machines and four-wheelers. We used to pack ice from places by the mountain for drinking water, dragging big chunks on our sleds. There are only a few dog teams now. They are getting fewer and fewer. Subsistence hunting is expensive. How can it be subsistence if it costs money? It doesn’t make any sense.
“We’ve lost our language. The white people took it away from us, but we haven’t tried to get it back. That’s why our story is the way it is now. If you don’t know the words that describe the weather, ice, and animals, then you don’t know the life. That’s why some of these kids are lost. They don’t know their way around here. They don’t even think about the things that make up my whole world.”
FRIDAY. Pull-tab night. The wind howls. A villager named Gabriel comes into the multi and unlocks a door to a tiny room I thought was a broom closet. Instantly, it turns into a small shop. A counter folds down, and behind are shelves lined with boxes of “pull-tabs,” sodas, candy, and peanuts. I have to ask what pull-tabs are. Joe says they are the most passive form of gambling imaginable. “You pull the tab like opening a can of pop. Underneath is a printed number, the amount of money you win, if you win any. That’s the amount of money you are paid. Pull-tabs cost a buck apiece. Usually there’s a blank under the tab, so it’s almost impossible to make a profit.”
Gabriel switches on a small TV hidden in the corner and puts on the sci-fi channel. The blaze of the screen turns his brown face blue. A tall teenage boy comes in clutching a wad of dollar bills. Forty dollars in all, he tells us, throwing the bills down on the counter as if on the bar in a Western movie. Instead of whiskey, Gabriel doles out 40 bucks’ worth of pull-tabs. One by one the young man, sitting alone in the glare of the TV, opens them. Five are marked one dollar; the boy gets five dollars but loses thirty-five.
Clifford sticks his head in to see if anything is happening. He wears thick glasses and Carhartt overalls. “Friday nights are pretty dead,” he says. I ask what happens on Saturdays. Muffled laughter. “There used to be storytelling, but TV wiped that out. When I have a story to tell, I put it into a carving, but my sight is going. It’s almost creamy. They’re going to put a laser on it. In Anchorage. As soon as I get the money to go,” he says.
“A lot of things are changed since we were kids,” he tells Joe. “Like language. Remember how different each village dialect sounded? Barrow dialect was musical. Shishmaref was real slow.” He says he started hunting when he was five or six. “They put me in the center of the boat. Been watching the Earth conditions since I was little. Had to. No way else to survive. In a boat you do a lot of thinking. Winds and currents are not like they used to be. They go back and forth like they can’t decide. We have a lot of erosion here, but not as bad as Shishmaref. We could sell our mountain to them. They need some ground for the village. When we were kids the ice used to shift north, then come back. Now the ice stays up there, then it blows offshore and the current collides with it. It goes over to Diomede.
“I don’t hunt for a living. I’m a custodian at the school. I help keep the kids’ morale up. Unofficial counselor. I live alone, so I’m here for the kids. Hopefully we can pass down some traditions and they can learn to watch the weather on their own.”
Snow scratches at the windows. Wind shakes them. Then the quiet evening of pull-tabs with only one player comes to an end. Gabriel closes up shop and goes home. Alone in the big community hall again, Joe wonders if they ever have traditional dances here. “Might be more exciting than pull-tabs,” he says, looking out the window. All he sees is his reflection. No outside world at all. “Did I come here just to see myself?” he asks quietly. The sky has been dark since four.
On our last night in Kingetkin, Luther Komonaseak bursts into the multi. “I really wanted to talk to you before you left,” he says breathlessly. His baseball cap bears the name Tikigaq, the Inupiat name for Point Hope, the oldest continuously inhabited village in Alaska. People have been living there for at least 14,000 years.
“Up there,” he says, meaning in Point Hope, “the people are more traditional than we are here. I don’t know why,” he begins. Sharp nosed, fast talking, and passionate about life in Wales, Luther is a 52-year-old whaling captain who says he learned whaling from Winton’s father and from Ray.
He grew up learning from everyone because his dad didn’t have a boat. He was sent to Little Diomede when he was nine. “They had rock houses and half doors. You had to crawl through a tunnel and come up through a door into a sod house. They taught me to hunt the traditional way there,” he told me.
When he came back, he started his own crew. That was 1987. The ice was frozen all the way out, and the whales were coming back, but the ice blocked them. He didn’t get his first whale until 1994. That’s the kind of patience it takes to be a hunter.
“The day I got my first whale the water was boiling with bowheads. They’d stick their heads up and look around. They know when you’re scared and won’t come close to you anymore. So you can’t have fear and provide food for your village.
“After, I had a whale feast. Three boatloads came over from Diomede. They respect me now. It took a long time. I gave a lot of my first whale away. It comes back to you in other ways. It takes three days to harvest a whale. The role of the captain is to keep track of who gets what and to be fair to everyone. A square from under the chin goes to the harpooner. A big square of the stomach goes to everyone. From the bellybutton to the front and all the way around goes to the captain. Parts of the skin from the back go to the whaling crew, and the other goes to the crew that helps tow in the whale. Each community has a different way. I’m writing it all out so it will be remembered.”
He says he always knows if people are having food problems, and he brings meat to them. “Last year I brought Faye some seal and walrus meat. Boy, she was happy. We have two elders at every council meeting. They are Faye and Pete now.
“We try to take care of our future by using the past. That’s an unknown concept to most kids these days. We communicate with the young people who are not interested in going out hunting. We try to push them in the direction of tradition, because that’s what we have here. That’s all we have.
“Wales was a radical place when white men first came. Radical in the knowledge it took to survive. Wales was like a hub city before Columbus. Stories were told here, things were bartered. The Messenger Feast originated here when a whaling ship came to Port Clarence and a runner with a message on a big pole came to the ship saying that we were having a feast and they were invited.
“My grandson and son go out with me. At first the younger one said it was too cold; now he’s hooked on hunting. He was only four when I first took him.
“I went up to Point Hope and hunted there. They still use skin boats, no outboard motors. The pressure ridges are two and a half miles out, they’re really high. Bowhead whale hunting is much better there than here because the whales go around Point Hobson, then come by Point Hope, real close. Now everyone is having problems with the ice, and a lot of changes are happening. The Barrow people say they are seeing narwhal for the first time. That means the narwhal are making it all the way across the Northwest Passage from Greenland to Alaska.” (They are normally only on the coast of Greenland and in the waters of eastern Nunavut.)
“Summers are hotter too. Our water supply went down to nothing. Now we’re getting sick from the water. We have dragonflies. Never had those before. And robins, porpoise, sharks, and orca. Real strange. It’ll come a time when the migrations of eider ducks and walrus and whales get so mixed up that they’ll come at the wrong time and weather. The wind and the currents and the coming and going of ice will go against them.
“These days there’s either too much ice or not enough. You can hardly forecast weather the Inupiat way. The elders taught us signs about how to know the weather. Like a wind cap over the mountain at the southern end of the village
meant high winds coming. The clouds never lie.
“I’m on the International Whaling Commission,” Luther goes on. “We have to tell people that we aren’t commercial whalers. We’re just feeding ourselves like we’ve done for 10,000 years. The oil companies neglect the subsistence whalers. We tell them they can’t use big ships in the migration route. They’re supposed to stop during migration, but they don’t. In Kaktovik, at the top of Alaska, the whales are going further out because of the oil industry activity. A lot of things are going haywire.
“Fall time, the whales return later. Now it’s the end of November, beginning of December. Bowheads go south a bit; humpbacks go to Hawaii; grays to Baja. It’s not just right here that we are concerned with. What happens here with the ice affects everywhere, just like that,” Luther says and snaps his fingers. As he does so, all the lights in the village go out.
OUR PLANE LIFTS OFF in a snowstorm. We head east from Wales to Nome. The pilot is young but he knows the way. It’s minus 22 degrees with a light wind. To the south, down the nose of the Bering Strait, is King Island, a chunk of granite sticking up out of a tormented sea.
The King Islanders, the Aseuluk, were forced off their island by the government and had to move to Nome, 90 miles away. “So Wales people and King Island people were bunched together as two outsider groups,” Joe says, looking at the island in the distance. Its sides are so steep it’s hard to imagine anyone living there at all.
They say that King Island came into being when a giant fish was harpooned by a hunter who cut a hole through the fish’s snout to tow it back to shore behind his kayak. A storm came up and the hunter had to leave the fish behind. The fish turned into an upended stone and became the island of Ukiovak—King Island. The name means “a place for winter.” The island and the Arctic culture that arose on its vertiginous cliffs are deeply expressive of the interaction of humans and their environment—in this case a plug of rock sticking out of the ocean. Against all odds, humans thrived in this difficult and unlikely place.
At two and a half miles long and almost two thousand feet high, King Island has no harbor and no landing place but once had a hanging village of driftwood houses on stilts tied to the precipice with half-inch braided walrus-hide thongs. Each cantilevered platform held two separate houses, their frames overhung with walrus hides. “An Eskimo duplex,” Joes says, jokingly.
The houses were small, about ten feet by ten feet, with a storage shed in front for kayaks, paddles, skins, harpoons, and spears. The ceilings were insulated with dried moss and the walls were stuffed with grass. “Eskimo wallpaper,” as Joe called it, was sealskin. The roof was laid with split logs. Window and door coverings were made of walrus intestine that served to let in light and also functioned as lighthouses for homeward-bound hunters.
A deep cave near waterline with permafrost walls served as a cold storage for the islanders’ food. Walrus ropes were used to help climb up from the cave to the houses. Women carried huge loads of meat up and down the cliff in walrus-hide backpacks.
Before a hunt, the villagers climbed on top of the dance house roof at dawn, lit a small fire, and sang as the men went out. The men’s skin kayaks and umiat were often strapped together for safety. These were not ice hunters—they harpooned walruses in open water.
When meat was scarce, the men climbed bird cliffs wearing walrus-hide harnesses. “Straight up among screaming birds, they captured cormorants and stole murre eggs,” Joe tells me. The residents of King Island were not unlike birds themselves, as they lived perched on cliffs in houses that shook with the winter winds. The women tanned hides with their own urine, and men made tools with whatever materials were at hand. Baleen strips were used for fishing line, odd-shaped rocks were used as hooks, water was carried inside a pouch made of walrus intestine, snow goggles were carved from driftwood, shovels were fashioned from the shoulder blades of walruses, knives were flint or jade. The flat tops of the houses were used in good weather for open-air work spaces.
December was called the Month of Drumming. When the spirit of Sila was appeased, dance competitions were held, new songs were composed, and shamans went to work keeping whatever social problems had erupted under control. There was ritual, storytelling, and dancing. Even in this tiny, hanging village, there were four dance houses on the island. Families belonged to individually named dance houses, and friendly competitions were held among them. The long winter entranceway was cold and narrow. Like a mole, a person crawled along, then popped up through a hole in the floor and entered the dance house. Driftwood beams were supported by four poles, and benches lined the walls.
Winter could be a time of hunger if the stores of food from previous seasons ran out. Extra hides were always put aside: From them, nutritious broth could be made to get people through until spring. If hunger became extreme, villagers moved in with each other to share food and warmth. Nothing was hoarded, even if it meant that everyone died.
King Islanders were maritime travelers: By kayak and umiaq they went south to St. Michael Island, north to East Cape, Siberia, northeast to Point Hope, Kotzebue, and Wales. Their dogs were weather forecasters: They were trained to sit in the bow of the boat, sniffing the air and feeling the currents, barking if there were shifts in the ice. Moving ice could crush a boat or break off and carry away an umiaq and its crew.
Joe’s mentor in Nome, Paul Tiulana, was from King Island. Paul learned to listen for the haunting mating song of the bearded seal by sticking his paddle down into the water and holding it to his ear. He knew the sound of spirits as well. “If a spirit wanted to come into the house, there was a big bang on the roof. Then fog entered the room and the seal-oil lamp flickered. Medicine men and women in the village cured the sick, found lost objects, and danced for good weather. They knew when villagers were in danger out on the ice.”
He recalled a story from 1949, when three men drifted out from the island. One was his cousin, whose parents, upon hearing a loud crack under their house, knew he was dead. Another man on the ice was named Ayek. His mother knew that if the man’s extra pair of mukluks stopped moving back and forth during the night, he was dead. The mukluks kept swaying, and after drifting for 17 days in the Chukchi Sea, Ayek was found alive. Now, two generations later, his grandson Sylvester Ayek, an internationally recognized artist in his 50s, returns to King Island every summer to make his Calder-like sculptures.
When the prey was polar bear, there was a dance to honor the animal. Food, rawhide, and furs were given away. Both men and women composed their own songs. In any time of plenty, there were large dances to which people from such far-flung villages as Wales, 30 miles to the northeast, were invited. There were cross-dressing dances in which men dressed as women; bench dances when the entire dance was performed sitting down; and competition dances when each dance group competed with another for a prize—perhaps a dance fan made from the chin whiskers of caribou. Men and women changed mates in a dance called the Yugaisug. A man would throw a bearded-seal rope over his desired “exchange wife,” go off with her for sex, and return her by morning.
A contemporary King Islander referred to one ancient source of entertainment as Eskimo TV: A large wooden dish would be filled with seawater and a gut-skin parka draped around it, using the neck hole as a “lens” to look into the water. There, they could “see” if hunters who had gone out were safe. “But now, when looking into a bowl of water, all that is seen is a tiny sparkle of light, a very tiny one. Nothing else.”
WE APPROACH NOME in falling snow. No visibility until the runway lights show, the altimeter like a clock winding backward from heaven to earth, then forward again as if to reflect the jolting leaps between old and new in this ancient culture.
In the winter gloom there are Christmas tree lights, even though it’s January. One young man has been “replanting” discarded Christmas trees. They stand in a single line out on the sea ice with a sign: “NOME’S NATIONAL FOREST.”
In 1924, after having traveled for three and a half years by
dogsled across the Northwest Passage, the Danish explorer Knud Rasmussen and his Inuit lover, Anarulunguaq, arrived in Nome from Kotzebue on a mail schooner. He wrote: “Nome lies on a grassy plain with a fine range of fertile hills in the background.”
Thirty years before he arrived, the population of Nome was negligible. There were a few Inuit marine mammal hunters and their families. Then the 1900 gold rush swelled the population to 10,000 people. Rasmussen was astonished by the array of native peoples from northwestern Alaska in one place: “The entire population of King Island, the Ukiuvangmiut; the inland Eskimos from the Seward Peninsula, the Qavjasamiut; the Kingingmiut from Cape Prince of Wales; the Ungalardlermiut from Norton Sound and the mouth of the Yukon; the Siorarmiut from St. Lawrence Island; and the natives from Nunivak Island are here,” he wrote in his expedition notes. The newly arrived hunters and their families lived in tents flanking both ends of town and made carvings to sell to tourists and gold rushers.
It was here that Rasmussen encountered his first taste of American racism. When he and Anarulunguaq entered a restaurant together, they were refused service. Rasmussen was shocked. They went back to their hotel, changed out of their skins, and put on what he called “white man’s clothes.” Finally, they were let in to eat.
Rasmussen and Anarulunguaq had a child midway through their journey from Greenland to Alaska, born on King William Island in the Canadian Arctic. Knud was married to a bright, wealthy Danish woman who helped raise funds for his many expeditions. To bring his Inuit “wife” and their child home to Copenhagen was unthinkable. Same problem for Anarulunguaq, whose husband-to-be was waiting for her on Qerqertarsuaq, an island near present-day Qaanaaq, Greenland. What must have been a heartbreaking decision was made: They would give the child to a young Inuit couple in Nome who had no children of their own.
At the Polar Café, Joe introduces himself to an older man—an Inuk, a native Alaskan—sitting alone by a window that looks out on the frozen sea. His name is Miseq, also known as Roy Tobuk. “My name means ‘wet tundra,’” he tells us. Joe invites him to eat with us.
In the Empire of Ice Page 7