I am a proud Aleut elder of the Native Village of Kanatak. I lived in the village of Kanatak in the 1950’s. My Dad, who was Aleut-Russian, was born there and practiced his culture. He used to tell me stories of how his people buried fish heads in the ground to ferment. How they hung their summer catch of salmon on fish racks to dry for winter food. He hunted, trapped and fished, carrying on the tradition taught to him by his elders. He raised our family there, as he was raised. I love hearing and recounting the stories now, of the days we used to live in Kanatak and other village communities.
I am also proud to be an American. I would never trade my citizenship for that of any other country. But I can appreciate that, although our Government for many years has determined they know what is best for our people, we have become the most recent victims of governmental bureaucracy. Our forebears were taken from their homes and move to depleted broken down shacks during the war, children ripped from our souls to be sent to boarding schools, their native identities removed. Our lives have been rearranged. Assistance has been given, then taken back, (sort of like the term “Indian giver”) and its connotation, only it was not the Indians giving and taking away this time.
Some of us have now have been labeled “phantom”. Guess you could say we are “phantoms of the lost tribes”. How can anyone tell a person that they do not exist because they were forced to relocate from one village to another local? How can anyone make a person’s culture, ethnicity, lineage and personal identity be erased and asked to disappear, simply because where they once lived has been taken from them? Does a person become a phantom because they cannot return to their ancestral home?
I may be a figment of my own imagination, an ethereal being floating around this world, not knowing that I exist. You can see me, you can hear me, but in the minds of some people, I do not exist because I do not live on that piece of land that was once my village. I have always felt proud of being an Aleut, a minority. Even the word minority, used to describe our people, has a negative ring to it today. Doesn’t that mean secondary and less than? Minority has come to mean someone who is not Caucasian. Who decides when a person is a minority or not. Does that make those not considered minority, the “Majority”?
Does anyone recall the years when so many Alaska Native children of school age had to be sent away from their parents, families, and their total ethnic existence, to attend Government schools? The native way was all they knew. My Dad was one of those students. My Mom was one of those students. I was one of those students. They never spoke of their days in the Eklutna Government boarding school, but I can imagine it could not have been so different from mine, attending first Wrangell Institute, then Mt. Edgecumbe, in Sitka.
I cried so many tears in those first days, my eyes burned from the salt, my very being burning with longing for the things that were familiar to me. I craved the foods we ate, and the very nature of how we lived; the hunting and the fishing. All I wanted was to run away and go back home. I had to live in a small room in a boarding school that had several bunk beds in it, and I, at the age of 13, had to become a Mother figure to the three little 6 and 7 year-olds who were placed in that room with me.
They could not speak English. They had never been out of their village or away from their parents.
Can those of you who were never forced into that situation, imagine how it would be to send your 6 and 7-year-old children or grandchildren hundreds of miles away, to be tended by a 13 year old? Telephones did not exist in villages then. The mail took months to get there and back. Correspondence was almost non-existent. Now we are ostracized for having to be sent away, not by choice, but force.
We had to leave our families at a young age to attend schools in far away places to learn a strange culture, language, and way of life. If we chose not to return to our ancestral homes when we completed your teachings, were we not still Native, yearning for a way of life lost to us forever? I am not saying it was bad to get an education. I am not crying over spilled milk. What I am saying is, maybe it could have been done differently. Maybe, just maybe, it could have been done in a way that would cause my people and our culture less pain. Maybe it would have been less expensive to build one school in each village for many children instead of sending many children to a few boarding schools. Maybe not, but I ask that we not be punished now for something we had no control over.
It was the Government who divided our former tribal village land of Kanatak and gave it to one native tribe (Konaig) while our tribal members were assigned to a separate group in a different area (Bristol Bay). I like the one we were assigned to (BBNA). When most of the residents had to leave Kanatak after the volcanic eruption of Katmai and the flu epidemic, they moved to the area that accepted them and they had close family ties to (Bristol Bay). Their summer homes were in Bristol Bay, where they would fish the summer season to buy supplies to take back to Kanatak for the winter.
I would not want to have to change to a group other than Bristol Bay. No one from Konaig lives on the piece of land that was once our village site. Kanatak was decimated by the volcanic eruption of Katmai in 1912, the flu epidemic, the loss of the village school, post office and store, after the oil companies pulled out in the early 1950’s. The members of our tribe have tried for years to negotiate to buy or get back a small piece of our village land.
The following are the cultural memories that live on in my mind, from when I lived in Kanatak. Those cannot be erased from my mind by anyone. Nearly every one of our elders has passed on, and I am now one of the elders. I can recall only those things that a 6-year-old will remember. There are so many stories, but I will relate only those few listed below in the hopes that anyone who reads this, will try to place themselves in my position of defending myself as a real human and not as a phantom.
I can remember when my brother was born in 1956 and the Coast Guard came too late to assist in the birth, so my dad delivered him. I recall the sick horses that the oil company abandoned without any food and we did not know what to feed them. My Mom decided we would take care of them. She helped us bring them back to good health by feeding them seaweed and old soft potatoes that had been buried in the sand (for preservation) from the year before. Everyday we tended those poor sick horses. When they were well again, Dad taught us to ride them bareback. Mine was Snake Eye, and my younger brother and sister had Blue Boy and Silveretta. Dad trained those horses to walk around and around our large house. One even liked to open the door and come into the windbreak. Then someone from the oil company returned to the village and wanted to take the horses away.
Sometimes I close my eyes and let my mind drift to the beauty of the interior of the small Russian Orthodox Church, the icons later stolen and burned. We played in the old, red school building, finding chalk pieces to write with on the large, worn out blackboard as we pretended to be in school. Mom took us on picnics to the beach, crossed the small river to pick berries on the mountain, taught us how to catch salmon and hang them to dry.
One of my Mom’s most exciting accomplishments was shooting and killing a large Kodiak grizzly bear that had been stealing our dry fish off the rack.
On one particularly hard winter, we did not have any left from what was then called a “Winter Grubstake,” for an Easter dinner, except for a little flour, some lard, salt and rice.
My dad went hunting to see if he could get some ptarmigan or a caribou for our Easter dinner. While he was gone, Mom mixed some flour with water and lard and had we kids roll it very thin. She cut it into rounds and poked holes in it, which she sprinkled with salt, then baked in our wood stove oven. She told us those were called “crackers,” and I have never eaten better since. All that day, Mom taught me the Lord’s Prayer by making me repeat it over and over. Very late in the evening, dad came home with one skinny ptarmigan. Mom was so happy and everything was wonderful. Mom plucked, cleaned and chopped that tiny, little bird into littlest pieces and made curried ptarmigan with lots of gravy. This was served with our special crackers and boiled rice. And I was beaming with pride to recite the Lord’s Prayer for Dad at dinner.
To this day, I try to have ptarmigan for dinner every Thanksgiving and Easter. It is now a tradition for my family to go hunting for ptarmigan every Thanksgiving. This might not mean much to anyone else, but those ptarmigan have a way of preserving my culture and reminding me that I belong to a group of people who once were with us. Today we are known as a “Lost Tribe”, but some of us who actually lived in Kanatak still exist, no matter how lost others might consider us to be. I am thankful and blessed to have been born an Aleut woman, raised in Alaska and to be an American.
