Here is what I had noticed: Most Savoongans were walking around with their faces exposed in weather so cold we needed ski masks and goggles. Their skin is impervious, often frostbitten to insensitivity. To survive here, part of you must deaden.
In Savoonga at the start of the twenty-first century, a disheartening drama seems to be playing out as two generations of Eskimo people fitfully try to define their place in the world. Elders watch helplessly as their culture weakens, assaulted on every level by unstoppable forces—some of which are as simple, and as heartless, as nature. As the climate changes, the walrus, seal, and whale meat, upon which their culture has subsisted for so long, is becoming harder to find and harvest, requiring longer and more hazardous forays over the ice. Alternatives in cans and frozen TV dinners are available at the grocery.
Meanwhile, their children are beguiled by TV, and tormented by it. It is affecting the very tapestry of family life; long evening family conversations, an important part of Yupik culture and history, are being supplanted by the tube, which seems to interest only the young.
“TV,” Mike Kimber said, “is giving the young people a twisted idea of what life is, creating desires they can’t possibly realistically satisfy. They are cheated by false hopes. They’re frustrated.”
Yet, physical escape is difficult. People do leave Savoonga, sometimes through the military, sometimes through marriage, sometimes in other ways. But not all have the money, or will, to relocate. The last time a student made it out of the high school to an accredited college on the mainland, the assistant principal said, was twelve years ago. And she returned within two years. The culture shock was too intense. Moving out from a reservation in the Lower 48 is one thing—moving away from a society as insular as this is quite another.
The kids’ attendance in school is spotty, Mike said, their performance subpar, their home life, at times, utterly desperate. “Some children,” he said, “will live in a house with fifteen people. I had one who came to school exhausted. He said, ‘My uncle was up late, so he took my mattress.’ There were fifteen people in the house and five mattresses, and so the kid had missed his shift. When that happens, you can’t wake them in class. You can shake them, and they won’t wake up.”
And the adults? For many, their entire lives, their families’ histories, and their sense of self-worth are invested in a celebration of abilities and attributes that are less and less significant in a changing world.
“It used to be,” said Mike, “that a person here was judged by his skills. He was considered valuable if he could hunt, if he provided meat for the elders and meat for his family, if he could guide his people to a better hunting camp. But that’s less necessary now.”
To the older Savoongans, it seems, every move toward modernity is, by its nature, a repudiation of the past and of everything they are. A hunting and trading economy has been replaced by one that runs on cash. Money from state oil revenue, and other government subsidies that are intended to help—food stamps, housing and energy subsidies, and such—has the effect of keeping the community in a listless stasis: getting by in a threadbare fashion.
Government programs can backfire, too. The school used to offer half an hour a day instruction in Siberian Yupik, the native language. It no longer does. The rigorous course requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind policy, Mike explained, simply leave no more hours in the day to teach it. The school does what it can, sometimes in small but significant ways; photos of the town’s elders line the corridors, as a sort of cultural Hall of Fame. Elementary school essays, posted on the walls, retell the story of a walrus hunt.
Savoongans have enough to live on, barely, considering their expenses. And some of their expenses are costly in other ways as well. Cigarettes are $7 and $8 a pack, and practically everyone seems to be smoking. (Even some grade-schoolers have the habit, Mike said ruefully, and indulge in an alarming fashion. Some will furtively chew tobacco in class, and swallow the juice.)
Mike asked me if I knew what the going rate was, in Savoonga, for a smuggled fifth of booze. I did. Both Dean and Jason had told me: $300.
“That’s right,” he said. “And a joint is $30.”
The island is swimming in both kinds of contraband.
I asked: How can they possibly afford it?
“Priorities,” he said sadly.
SAVOONGA IN WINTER has a certain kind of desolate beauty, but Mike and others told us that it was a pity we couldn’t see it in the summer, when plants are in bloom, the sea is a spectacular vista, and the wildlife can be gorgeous. I’d looked at some Web sites, seen some pretty pictures, but only one fact registered, for its metaphorical horror. In summer, the island is teeming with one kind of rodent: lemmings.
One night, Michael the photographer and I were walking on the edge of the village, along the seashore. It was 50 below. We happened upon two dogs—small, spotted husky mixes—tethered to poles in the snow. Dogs in Savoonga stay outside, in all weather.
The first pooch was barking at us, tugging at its rope, asserting its territorial rights. But the other was collapsed on the ground, shivering in a tight ball, without the energy even to clear his face of snow. He had settled beside a flimsy shard of sealskin jutting up from the ground, because it was the only available shelter from the wind. It wasn’t working.
This fella didn’t move when I approached, and offered no resistance when I bent to pet him. He seemed about a year old, with soft, gentle eyes. He let my gloved hand smooth his fur and wipe his face a little.
Up close I could hear him whimpering. It was a shallow, forlorn bleat, only muzzle-deep, as though he hadn’t the breath for more.
“This dog is dying,” I shouted to Michael over the wind.
We looked around. There was a house nearby, with lights on and furnace roaring. Maybe they know all about the dog, Michael said. Maybe he’s sick and they’re letting him die.
We should do something, I said.
I looked at Michael. He looked at me. We both looked at the shivering animal, and then the house.
“Are you going to walk over there,” Michael said grimly, stowing his gear, “and tell some Eskimo he doesn’t know how to care for his dog?”
He started off, toward our lodge.
I stayed a second, and then followed him, not looking back.
BEFORE THIS TRIP, Michael and I had worried we would not be able to handle the weather, that it would break us. But we were handling the weather fine. That wasn’t what was breaking us.
At the moment we most needed to find warmth in Savoonga, we did.
As in most of the houses we’d seen, the floors in Floyd Kingeekuk’s home are linoleum, the furnishings modest, the decor a controlled riot of clutter (in a society that must bear with an irregular supply of provisions, not much gets thrown out). Also, the inside temperature is stifling, which seems to be the Savoongans’ nose-thumb to the elements.
But, the ambience! On the walls of the living room were a gargantuan American flag and a signed photo of two generations of presidents Bush, thanking Floyd for his support. Also, snapshots of Floyd’s kids and grandkids, pasted into seashells. Also, a talking Big Mouth Billy Bass. In Savoonga, fads, too, are somewhat past their expiration date.
Floyd is seventy-one, wiry and compact and aggressively hard of hearing. Across the room was his daughter, Adeline Pungowiyi, and her two-year-old niece, Lucy. Lucy was not only adorable but was being adored, as Adeline lovingly brushed her hair into a topknot. There aren’t enough houses for all the people, and many families are extended, often eccentrically.
Floyd is a carver; he and his wife, Amelia, make dolls. She had none to show us—they sell for thousands when she finishes them, which is not very often. But she has a scrapbook, and in looking through it you can forget you are looking at inanimate objects. The faces and hands are crafted from ivory, realistic down to the veins in the hands. The hair is made from the skin of unborn seals. The coat is walrus intestine. It is a pride of the Eskimos that every pa
rt of every slaughtered animal is used for something.
Floyd learned to carve from his father, who was also a fine artist. But his father would produce pieces on demand from the mainland, and much of it was utilitarian kitsch: napkin rings, pickle forks. When money is in short supply, the practical still trumps the artistic. Dean Kulowiyi had told us that he once produced a few silly, whimsical carvings of turtles eating mushrooms. Mainlanders liked them, so he gave them a name, and, for a while, one of the world’s foremost ivory artists was spending a lot of time carving “tundra turtles.”
When Floyd told us he still shoots some hoops down at the school gym, we envisioned a klatch of indomitable wrinklies playing a spirited game of H-O-R-S-E. So we were not prepared for what we found when we visited the gym the next night.
The school keeps it open at night, as a sort of free-for-all playground. The floor was filled with older kids. The Savoonga school is big on basketball, and the seventeen-and eighteen-year-olds were practicing for a regional tournament. And right with them was Floyd, seventy-one, huffing, puffing, sweating, running full court, draining the occasional fifteen-foot jumper. He plays a sneaky defense, too.
It was an exhilarating scene—no generational divide on that basketball court. But aside from Mike Kimber, Floyd was pretty much the only adult in the place. Kids of all ages were scrambling in the grandstands, unsupervised. Savoonga’s adults were elsewhere. We found them where some kids had sullenly predicted we’d find them—across town, at the firehouse.
The lights were on, and about two dozen snowmobiles were parked outside. Every few minutes, one or two more arrived and one or two departed. Michael tried to walk in but thought the better of it when a smiling-but-insistent patron warned him that if he brought that camera inside, he’d become “polar bear bait.” So I went in alone.
The firehouse resembled a firetrap. Dozens of people were sitting at tables jammed wall to wall. Some had impromptu card games going. Someone was calling numbers. It was Bingo Night.
But the real action seemed to be happening up front, where people were shuffling forward, passively queuing up to buy instant lottery tickets; some had $20 in their hands, some had $50. Some were going back more than once.
I bought a $2 ticket. It was dated “1989,” and it looked like a throwback technology, the sort of thing state lotteries offered before scratch-offs became popular. These cards are called “pull tabs.” You lift off cardboard tabs that cover three slot-machine payoff lines.
If you are an adult, and you are seeking entertainment on a winter night in Savoonga, apparently this is where you go. Pull tabs are one bad bet. The jackpot payoff for a $2 ticket is $200. A large barrel was provided to collect the losing tickets; it was nearly full.
Fresh on the icy wall beside the entrance, someone had traced a message with a warm finger. It said, “Boring.” Michael and I had come to refer to this ubiquitous, plaintive graffito as “the writing on the wall.”
Outside, a gap-toothed man approached Michael, pointed disparagingly at his hat, and offered to sell him a better one, made from sealskin, for $150. The guy said he was in a jam and needed the money for airfare to Nome, to serve a forty-five-day jail sentence.
For what, Michael asked.
He’d been convicted, he said, of trying to smuggle liquor into Savoonga. They agreed on $75 for the hat, and also that, under the circumstances, he would not be named in this story.
He and Michael walked to his house. Michael forked over the money; the guy produced the hat and immediately got on the phone to plan his trip.
The linoleum floors at the man’s house were eroded in places down to plywood. Seven children—some shirtless—sat around a TV set on grungy throw rugs, eating ice cream from a gallon container, watching a tape of Gilligan’s Island. The oldest was a sixteen-year-old girl, sitting to the side, impassively playing Game Boy. The babysitter. It was not clear who would watch the kids for forty-five days.
“I love Gilligan,” said a seven-year-old. “He always gets hit in the head with a coconut and goes to sleep.”
Mostly, the kids’ faces were frozen in the glow of the screen, silent against the sounds of the show.
The tale of the stranded castaways
Who are here for a long, long time
They’ll have to make the best of things
It’s an uphill climb…
Once he’d been paid, the man walked out with Michael, cash in hand. The last Michael saw of him, he was heading back toward Bingo Night.
AT THE GRANDSTANDS in the gym, I had met a friendly twenty-two-year-old named Collin Noongwook. In this place, you couldn’t miss Collin. He had an orange crew cut. Personable, squarely built, wearing a Pure Playaz shirt, walking with a modified hitch and roll, Collin wouldn’t look much out of place on the streets of D.C. Unlike most of the younger people we’d spoken to, Collin seemed not in the least personally dispirited. When I asked him what he wanted to do with his life, he outlined a plan. He wants to get out of Savoonga and live somewhere warm—California or Hawaii maybe—and he hopes to do it through the National Guard. He’s tried to interest his friends in joining him, he said, but he’s failed. They haven’t the will to leave.
If I really want to get a sense of what Savoonga is all about, Collin told me, I ought to talk to his dad.
That is how, the next day, I was sitting in Chester Noongwook’s home, at his kitchen table, perspiring in the heat. Chester is seventy-one, with a distinctively Eskimo face—flat, round, weathered, twinkly-eyed, resembling his father and grandfather, whose photos reverently adorn the walls, across from the big-screen TV, beside the socks hanging out to dry on a clothesline.
Chester immediately declared the impending end of the world. We were in the Christian end times, he thundered, and we’d better be ready for the Second Coming of Christ. The signs, he said, were everywhere: “Suicides, war, earthquakes, people asking too many questions…” His face remained impassive, and only after we burst out laughing, did he, too.
Like many of Savoonga’s elders, Chester speaks in heavily accented English. He used to work for the U.S. Postal Service, delivering the mail from Savoonga to Gambell, back when mail came once a month, there were no snowmobiles, and it took two days “by dog.” His last dogsled run was in 1963. He also was on the local team of fishermen that caught Savoonga’s first whale in 1972. Chester still hunts, but less often, and it bothers him. He used to live on what he could trap and hunt, and that suited him fine.
“When I was going on foot,” he said, “you might go out twenty miles to the Bering and back. A man used to walk sixty miles to get his family something to eat. Today we get something at a store, a New York steak for forty dollars.”
He barked out a list of expenses he found abusive—heating oil! rent! propane!—then quickly offered to trade his camera, a cheapo Instamatic, for Michael’s thousand-dollar Canon, as part of an important cultural exchange among new friends. There was a moment of stunned silence until Chester guffawed. He was having fun with the rubes from the South.
“When I was ten years old,” he said, “I didn’t even know what money was. We relied on ourselves and got our food from reindeer and fish and walrus.”
Chester produced a slate-gray object made from fossilized ivory. It resembled a small rudder, like a seal’s tail. “So much has changed,” he said, “so much has been forgotten. This is proof of how we used to catch the walruses.” He demonstrated how you would stick the object onto the wooden end of a harpoon, and then, with a quick, discuslike motion, whip the bone-pointed weapon across the surface of the ice. The rifled tail would act like a stabilizer, or the feathers of an arrow, to ensure the flight was true. It must have taken extraordinary skill, hunting walrus that way.
Nowadays, when Eskimos kill walrus, they use steel-tipped harpoons fired by shotgun. For whales, the tips are charged with explosives.
The whole Savoonga dilemma seemed to be playing out before us in that overheated kitchen, in an unscripted tirade responding to
a question that hadn’t been asked. Chester was delineating the Savoongans’ reluctant, grudging, almost tragic acceptance of a sterile, technology-driven cash economy that in ways subtle and dramatic was turning a fierce and proud culture into a docile, dependent one.
Collin entered the room. I asked Chester what he thought of his son’s hairstyle. He said he thought it was just fine. But across the room, Collin’s mother was smiling and vigorously shaking her head no. Sally Noongwook was wearing a True Value T-shirt and a look of exasperated devotion.
Collin plopped down next to her on the couch. She’s just jealous, he said, because she’s tried to dye her hair and failed. They started playfully shoving and tickling each other.
Here, in front of his dad, Collin lost a little of the swagger from the day before. When I asked Chester about Collin’s plans to leave, he said that whatever his son chose to do was fine with him. But Collin blurted how he would never lose respect for his family, how his intent is to follow his father’s footsteps in earning respect as a man. How, wherever he was, he would stay in touch with his family and honor them, and might one day build a walrus-skin boat to sail around the world.
Whatever despair was haunting the young people of this village, and dividing generations, it was not apparent in this home.
“I liked Savoonga better before,” Chester said—back before government handouts, the modern advantages, state-financed housing and whatnot. “People would do things together. They would build a frame house, together, one hand, one heart, one thought, one mind, one man, working together.”
I was just staring at the guy.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “I wish I could say things better, but my English is not that good.”
THAT NIGHT, MICHAEL and I took a detour, swinging back around the edge of the island, to find those two dogs. Or, with luck, one dog. My hope was that the sick one’s suffering had ended quickly.
The Fiddler in the Subway Page 12