Only it isn’t the end of the Earth. You can see that, right on the map. To get to the end of the Earth from Nome you would have to hop a small plane and head 130 miles out into the Bering Sea, where you would land on an island so remote that it is closer to Russia than to the U.S. mainland. To the people of Siberia, this island is the middle of nowhere. On it, according to the map, is a village named Savoonga.
Savoonga. Va-voom. Bunga-bunga. Funny, no?
I thought so, too, when I first saw it. It gave me an idea for a funny story. In the dead of winter, I would pack up and blindly head to Savoonga, unannounced and unprepared. No research at all, no planning beyond the booking of a room, if there was one to be had.
The whole thing was an inside joke, one with a swagger. It is a journalist’s conceit that a good reporter can find a great story anywhere—in any life, however humble, and in any place, however unwelcoming.
That is how photographer Michael Williamson and I came to be in a small commuter plane in late February, squinting out onto a landscape as forbidding, and as starkly beautiful, as anything we’d ever seen. Land was indistinguishable from sea—the white subarctic vista, lit to iridescence by a midafternoon sun, was flat and frozen straight to the horizon. The first clue that we were over an island was when the village materialized below us. It looked as negligible as a boot print in the snow, the grimy, nubby tread left by galoshes. The nubs were one-story buildings, a few dozen of them, and that was it.
I’m back now, trying to make sense of what we saw, trying to figure out how to tell it. It’s all still with me, except for the swagger.
LET’S PUT TO rest one cliché. You can sell refrigerators to Eskimos.
The people of Savoonga are Yupiks, the westernmost of the Eskimo tribes, closer to Siberians than American Eskimos in their appearance, and their customs, and their distinctive, liquidly sibilant native language. And, yes, they all have refrigerators. In the winter, food gets freezer burn if left out in the elements. Eskimos need refrigerators to keep their food warm.
I was still unpacking in the small lodge we had rented (two refrigerators!), wondering how to find a funny story line that somehow would capture the otherworldliness of where we were. At that moment, there was a knock on the door. An Eskimo named Larry walked in and produced from beneath his parka, swaddled in a towel, two treasures to sell. They were bones of formidable size, polished to an impressive shine. Each was roughly the dimensions of the handle of a lumberjack’s ax. I asked what they were.
“Walrus dicks,” he said.
So far, so good.
THERMOMETER READINGS MEAN little to Savoongans, because in this treeless island village, wind is a constant irritant; on that first day, we were informed, it was “30.” That meant minus-5, adjusted by wind chill to minus-30. In Savoonga, in winter, the “minus” is a given.
There is no real way to prepare, physically or mentally, for 30 below. You can dress as warmly as you think appropriate, with long johns and woolen socks and layers of fleece and a sturdy parka and a ski cap, and then you step out into it and you realize that, in the words of Roy Scheider in Jaws, you need a bigger boat. When we’d first landed, Michael and I left the plane for two minutes to photograph the unloading of cargo, then we scurried back aboard. With barely a word to each other, but exchanging stupefied glances, we slipped on full-face balaclavas and thick gloves and eye goggles and a second layer of hat.
And soon we were actually walking in it, heading out to explore the village. Thirty below is opportunistic. If you leave a slit between chin and Adam’s apple, 30 below works its way in and moves down and around in a darting shiver, like the icy hands of a pickpocket. To take photographs, Michael had to remove his goggles, freezing his eyebrows, as he put it, “in a permanent state of astonishment.” Your first lesson, then, is to expose nothing.
Savoonga is home to about 700 people. The inexpensive frame houses have no numbers, the few streets have no names. In the winter, the town rests on 5 feet or more of packed snow, and the only transportation is by snowmobiles, which roar about day and night.
Trudging through town, we found a grocery store, a K-12 school, a small City Hall, a small Christian chapel, a medical clinic, a firehouse, and finally a post office, at which we briefly stopped. Outside it, scratched into a wooden wall, was a welter of remarkably sedate graffiti. Even though this was obviously the handiwork of the young—pop lyrics and so forth—there was barely any profanity. Most writing was a simple assertion of self, followed by the same plaint, repeated in almost identical words, flat, mild, and disturbing.
Here’s one: “I was being bored here. 11/13/04. 7:41 a.m.”
Also: “I miss Nicholas.”
Also: “I miss Ernie.”
Also: “I miss Don.”
When we returned to our lodge, we had company. Visitors to Savoonga are an event, or, more specifically, an opportunity. A woman named Bessie, toting a baby, offered to sell us a whale tooth. A man had a small carving of a seal made out of walrus tusk. Would-be vendors arrived and departed serially, a minute or two apart. Polite and self-effacing, each person nodded placidly when we declined, then shuffled off; there was no hard sell, no hard-luck story, just resignation.
One visitor had no wares at all. We thought for a moment that he was looking for a handout, but it turned out he just wanted to talk. He appeared to be about sixty-five, a small, leather-skinned man with a stooped bearing, weary eyes, and an apologetic manner. His deeply fissured face bore a Fu Manchu mustache that framed a toothless mouth. The voice belied it all—it was soft, cultured, almost professorial.
He told us his name, which was Dean Kulowiyi, and his age, which was forty-two. If he saw our surprise, he didn’t show it.
Born here but educated on the mainland, Dean said he lives in Savoonga because he is stuck here without the means to leave. “I’m a poor man,” he said. Partially disabled from a construction accident, he said he survives mostly by hunting and fishing for his food. The Savoongans call this “subsistence living,” which in this village is not a lament but a matter of pride, at least to the elders. Still, Dean said, the old way of life is buckling under ferocious assault from modernity. Teens are questioning the ways of their forebears, he said, losing respect for their authority, staying mostly idle, and taking to drink and drugs.
Even the ancient Savoongan art of ivory carving, Dean said, is slowly being lost. He himself learned it at age seven, beside the bench of his grandfather. He seemed proud of this, so we told him we would love to take a look at any carvings he had. But he had none to show—not on his person, not in his home, nowhere on the island. Ivory carving is painstaking work, he said: A single, substantial piece can take months or even years. He must sell everything immediately to survive, he said. Life can be hand to mouth in Savoonga.
Dean brightened: We could see some of his work, he said, if we ventured to Washington, D.C., in the Lower 48, and found a place called the Smithsonian Institution. Had we heard of it?
DEAN KULOWIYI, IT would turn out, is one of the world’s elite ivory artists. His pieces have sold for thousands, and some have been marketed at Smithsonian gift shops. He inspires imitators, such as our next visitor, a handsome young man named Jason Iya.
Jason arrived as Dean was leaving. “We’re cousins on our mother’s side, and maybe a little on our father’s,” Jason said, and both laughed. There are only about twenty Eskimo surnames in Savoonga, as we would discover, and it is hard to find two island natives who are not in some way related.
Jason, twenty-two, is one of a few young, skilled carvers on the island. He showed us a foot-tall, long-necked cormorant he had made, lovely and delicate, sweeping up from a stone base. He was selling it for $200; we’d seen far more primitively rendered pieces in the Anchorage airport for four times the amount. In fact, Jason said, he’d been living near Anchorage, carving and selling his work until a half-year earlier, when he had to come home to help his family.
Help them with what? I asked.
Jason fiddled with his cormorant. He had a downy mustache and sad eyes, and he sat in an eloquent slouch.
“My brother died,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Everyone on Savoonga named Iya got together to make his casket and cross.”
“How did he die?”
Jason studied his boots.
“He got murdered.”
He began repacking his carving in bubble wrap.
“How?”
“He was stabbed.”
It was pulling teeth. We were both embarrassed. The first lesson in Savoonga: Expose nothing.
“Did they catch the murderer?”
“It was his wife that did it.”
A long silence.
“They were under the influence of alcohol.”
AT THE SMALL airport in Nome, we had seen posters warning that it is a serious crime to be caught smuggling alcoholic beverages of any kind to St. Lawrence Island, which is home to Savoonga and Gambell, its sister village forty miles away. The island is dry and has been for some time, part of a desperate effort to control a problem that has gotten painfully out of hand.
Savoongans are only a few generations removed from a near–Stone Age existence. Details from the distant past are murky, but in the late 1870s much of the population of the island was wiped out in a holocaust of complex origins thought to involve illness, climate changes, and behavioral factors. What is indisputable is that the commercial whalers of that era brought some modern ways to the island, along with disease and alcohol. Genetically, in both cases, the natives had no defenses.
Dean Kulowiyi had mentioned a scene he said is repeated all over Savoonga: two young people sharing a smuggled bottle, then getting into a fistfight over the last swallow. Jason Iya said the concept of social drinking is unknown; young people in particular simply drink to pass out.
Alcoholism and depression. It’s an old, sad story familiar to Native Americans, whether Eskimos in Alaska or Navajos in Arizona. In Savoonga, for reasons we would come to understand, the phenomenon seems to be intensified.
Jason told us he likes Savoonga, respects the tribal ways of his people, enjoys hunting for seal, whale, and walrus. (As indigenous people with a subsistence lifestyle, Eskimos who are Alaskan natives are permitted to take otherwise protected species.) Jason agreed with Dean, though, that too many of the young people seem spoiled, rootless, and without ambition, content to sponge off their parents. Despair, Jason said, is a constant companion. Bad things keep happening, such as not long ago, when one of his friends from high school, a young woman, fatally shot herself in the head with a .300 magnum. That sort of thing was unusual, though, he said.
Good, I said.
Girls, he explained, will more often hang themselves.
SUICIDE HAS REACHED epidemic proportions among the young people of Savoonga. They have been taking their lives in violent ways and in breathtaking, heartbreaking numbers for some time now, and there is little agreement in the village on precisely why, or precisely how to stop it.
Savoonga is run collegially by a loose, three-part government: a tribal council, a native corporation that owns the island—all Eskimo residents are shareholders—and a civil authority, headed by Mayor Jane Kava. I found the mayor at her desk in City Hall. A sturdy, pleasant woman, she has been here twenty-eight years and said she wouldn’t live anywhere else. When I asked her why, she said that it is wholesome: “You don’t have to worry about crime. You don’t have to worry about your kids.”
But, I asked, what about the suicides?
Yes, she acknowledged, that has been a serious problem for people under thirty.
How many have there been?
Lately? She counted in her head. Four in the past year. But those are just the ones that succeeded. Lately, she said, there have been as many as six unsuccessful attempts in a single month among people from ages thirteen to eighteen.
This is in a place with a total population of 700.
The village is dealing with the problem, Mayor Kava said. Two months earlier, Savoonga hosted a federally funded wellness conference for teenagers, with specialists flying in from the mainland. The mayor believes the main culprit is access to drugs.
“What’s really hurting,” she said, “is marijuana. It’s getting to younger and younger kids.”
All in all, though, the mayor said cheerfully, Savoonga is doing well. The people may be poor—unemployment is above 30 percent—but the government is working to make things better: There is satellite TV now. And in the past two or three years, she said, the village got running water and in-home sewage, so citizens are no longer dealing with smelly “honey buckets.”
The village store is a modern grocery, shelves stocked with goods at eye-popping prices. A Tombstone frozen pizza, $7 at a Washington Safeway, was $13.95. Bean dip in a cat-food-size can, $5. Many of the perishables were well past their expiration dates.
There we found Parson Noongwook, 41, wearing a “Native Pride” baseball cap. He told us he liked it in Savoonga just fine. He loves to hunt, is proud of being an Eskimo, has everything he wants. Michael asked him to pose for a picture. He said sure, if we would give him $50. We thought he was kidding. He was not. No picture.
This sort of scene would play out more than once. Later in the day, an older woman would berate us, whipping a scolding finger: “You earn a lot of money on this, you should give us some! I need false teeth, but I can’t afford to go to Nome for them!” This turned out to be Gloria Kulowiyi, Dean’s mother. She, too, is an expert carver as well as a seamstress; I would find her work for sale on an Alaskan native art Web site. A small Gloria Kulowiyi ivory hair barrette, sold online, costs $162.
There was something puzzling going on, involving money. The people of Savoonga were being mostly friendly—polite and accommodating, if reserved—except on this topic, where several seemed almost belligerent.
Back at our lodge, not far from the airport, we were bearing witness, day after day, to Savoonga’s dispiriting balance of trade. Incoming: boxes of tuna fish and soup and Spam and overly old dairy products at exploitive prices, along with the occasional smuggled poisonous bottle of booze. Outgoing: not much, except for the occasional piece of native culture—elegant art, painstakingly crafted from the wealth of the land, sold in desperation, whenever it is ready, for whatever they can get.
EVERY DAY, AT noon, a procession of old people assembles in the basement of City Hall, where volunteers feed them lunch; it is part of a government program for seniors, but it is administered with extraordinary dignity by a society that reveres its elders. The old men arranged themselves in a row, like the Last Supper, and ate mostly in silence; the women gathered more communally, facing one another and chatting. The teenage server remained quiet and deferential. The setting was banal, the cutlery was plastic, the stemware was Styrofoam, but the feel was almost holy.
From Harriet Penayah, an elder with a snow-white shock of hair, we heard what by now was becoming a familiar complaint: The kids are raising hell, she said, using drugs and alcohol, not respecting their parents, and losing their native language.
One of the cooks called me over. Adora Kingeekuk Noongwook did not want to challenge an elder. But she told me, quietly, that the problems are not the kids’ fault. The kids need skate parks, she said. Then she looked at me and stopped. I was not writing it down. I started writing it down.
“They need bowling alleys. Skate parks. Swimming pools. They need recreation. You tell that to Washington.”
I promised her I would. She was not smiling.
MIKE KIMBER IS the assistant principal of the Hogarth Kingeekuk School. He is one of twenty non-Eskimos in Savoonga. Almost all of them work at the school and live in an apartment compound on the school grounds.
At fifty-five, Mike remains enthusiastically dedicated to his job. You can find him working early in the morning, when the pupils arrive, and late at night, for after-school activities, and on his lunch hour, when he teaches basic
reading skills to cute little kids. He’s a downstater from Royal Oak, Michigan, who came to Savoonga ten years ago and has no intention of leaving anytime soon. He loves the children and he loves his work. In particular, he loves the land, for its archaeology—you can find woolly mammoth bones just a mile outside of town—and for its physical beauty, and even for the physical challenges it presents.
Mike swiveled to his computer and punched up pages of photos he took in the summer, when the mantle of snow is gone and the temperature sometimes reaches 60 above. The most compelling are of the graveyard, out near the airport; it is a surreal scene, either spooky or spectacular, depending on your point of view. Most coffins are only partially buried in the permafrost; that’s as deep as a spade can go. That means that many of the plywood caskets are exposed to the air. In time, they collapse in on themselves. You can see bones and skulls among the crosses.
Savoonga gives no quarter; it is merciless even to the dead.
Savoonga is so physically inhospitable it practically orders you to leave. Those who don’t are descendants of those who didn’t, and they are among the hardiest people in the world. Perversely, Mike said, that makes them vulnerable. Their stoicism, he said, is legendary, their pride intense. They don’t often complain. They don’t always seek help when they need it. Many resent offers of help. Take a people who bottle up emotion, he said, introduce them to excessive amounts of alcohol, and bad things can happen.
Jason Iya had said much the same thing. His brother—who had threatened suicide in the past, before his wife finished the job—had never discussed the nature of his personal problems at length, Jason said. Neither did Jason’s high school classmate, right up until the gunshot to her head. “People here don’t communicate,” Jason said. “They’re too shy or too scared.”
The Fiddler in the Subway Page 11