Coming into the Country (54 page)

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Authors: John McPhee

BOOK: Coming into the Country
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When the whites of Eagle talk about the Indians, almost nothing of what they say is flattering—and why would it be? For, as Michael puts it, “they are always knocking each other.” Within the flow of general disdain, about all that seems interesting is the recurrent implication that the troubles and shortcomings of the Indians are based on their not adequately thinking or acting white.
“They live day to day out there, whereas the white philosophy is ‘progress.'”
“Time means nothing to them. There is no future. Today is today is today.”
No one—at least, no one I have heard—brings forth the remark that there is much to be envied in such an approach to one's day. No doubt it accounts for the easygoing grace, the humor, the companionability of the Hungwitchin, not to mention the lilting, unbusinesslike way they speak—a primal outlook, so durable that, for all its beauty, it is perhaps unfortunate that it has survived while superficial facts have changed. The Hungwitchin may look upon a wristwatch as “the sun's heart,” but they know what time it is, and they work on the pipeline. They seem to hang suspended between a fast-fading then and a more than alien now. Meanwhile, their failures to adjust are much noted by the whites.
“They've been hitting the booze since the nineteen-thirties. They've pretty much hurt their heads. They don't care.”
“They all wish they were something else. They have come to hate the fact they're an Indian. They have adopted cowboy boots, of all things. They put cowboy boots on their kids.”
“They have difficulty coping with the regimented life style that the capitalist system imposes upon them.”
“Boys do not develop ambition. They don't want to get married.”
“The Indian man has been emasculated by the whites. Indian women want to marry whites.”
“The people are soft. They have no discipline. They have a job, and if it's difficult, they say, ‘It's too tough.'”
“The Village Council does not get things done.”
“Now that Michael is the chief, nothing ever will get done.”
“A settlement should be a settlement. They still get transportation, medical, dental, free snow machines, chain saws—anything they want. Handouts. If you make a settlement, that should be that. The Native Claims Act should have made the natives like everybody else.”
“The sums that have so far come down through Doyon and into individuals' pockets have amounted to less than eighty dollars a year. There are many resources elsewhere for the natives. They work as firefighters. They work on the pipeline. They come home and collect unemployment compensation—two hundred and more a month. They work on local road maintenance and do miscellaneous labor. They join the crews of exploration geologists. Moreover, the Native Claims Settlement Act has not put the Bureau of Indian Affairs out of business in Alaska, and a native can still turn to the B.I.A. for many kinds of grants and relief. With other Indians of the upper Tanana, they belong to the United Crow Band, which, under contract, distributes money for the B.I.A. for everything from fishing boots to Indian welfare checks to Indian relief checks. Welfare and relief money is available from the state as well. Three hundred to six hundred dollars a month is available in Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Nearly all health costs are paid by the Alaska Native Health Service. People over sixty-five not only draw Social Security but also receive an Alaska Longevity Bonus—a hundred and twenty-five dollars a month for anyone who has been in Alaska twenty-five years. No wonder all they do out there is visit.”
That anyone in the Indian community might regret the events of the past century is not an insight that floats about on
the surface of white conversation, but now and again it does rise.
“Michael David is a fine chap, slightly confused. He is a completely acculturated Indian, now trying to find his way back into the wigwam—a classic example of the ‘advances' made in educating the Indian. He has assessed the world around him. He is not enamored of technology. So he affects the long hair and the headband. Given a chance, Michael would be a real good Indian. He would be a hopeless failure as a white man. He is forthright. He does not speak out of both sides of his mouth. He is very honest.”
I ask Michael, “What do you do as Village chief?”
He grins widely, and says, “What do I do as chief? Ha! Ask them in Eagle what I do. When I was elected chief, Louise Waller said, ‘Now that Michael David is the chief, nothing is going to get done.' They are different people in Eagle. They don't understand us. We don't understand them. The town is Christians and bootleggers, and they fight between each other. They once had twenty preachers there. My people were happier before those people were ever here. The Indians did more things for themselves than they do now. I would like to have a post office in the Village, and a store of our own, run by Hungwitchin. I am working on the winterization program and improvements to the road around the Village. For Doyon, I am studying proposed easements to Doyon land. I am trying to get more jobs for Village people. Last year, the B.L.M. stationmanager job went to a white who had been here six months. No one in the Village was given a chance even to apply. Oliver Lyman, of the Village, was fired as janitor of the school, and Charlie Ostrander was hired instead of a Village person.”
“Who had the say?”
“I don't know who—but the town had the influence. Every year, it seems like the town's moving closer to the Village, and the town is half bootleggers. I hate the bootleggers. The constable makes twelve hundred dollars a month, and they bootleg
right under his nose. The most important thing I try to do something about is the drinking in the Village. We get some help from the Alaska Native Commission on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse. Drinking is a sickness. I'm glad the town is dry. At this next meeting of the Village Council, there will be a big decision about alcohol. That is why the meeting is so important to me.”
He speaks for a time of Tony Paul, who died recently of pneumonia complicated by cirrhosis of the liver. Admired for his intelligence, his energy, and his education, he was the brightest light of the Village. He was married and had a nineyear-old son, whom he often took camping. Tony was not yet thirty when he died. Larry Juneby, of Eagle, went out of a bar in Fairbanks and into the Chena River last week. Searchers are still dragging for the body. To drink, Michael says, Village people will sell their chain saws, their winter's wood—anything at all. On Easter, in bright sun by the white frozen river, they hold sawing contests, bag races, and tea races (make a fire from scratch, melt snow, and make tea), but such wholesome scenes are increasingly rare. Money was once collected for a Village well only to be spent on liquor. In various elections over the years, the white community has voted itself in and out of prohibition. It has been dry since 1967. Bootleggers get upward of two hundred dollars a case for blended whiskey—eighteen dollars a quart. “One of them did not like being wakened in the night,” Michael tells me. “So he told the people just when to come around. He did that, really. He's bootlegging, and he's got hours.”
I mention that I have asked Mayor Borg why the town did not stop the bootleg traffic, and Borg said, “Apathy. People don't want to become involved by signing a complaint. Reams of evidence would be needed before there could be an arrest. Meanwhile, the Village has been without any moral leadership for so long that there's very little sense of responsibility. It's each person for himself there, and alcoholism is widespread.
They give young children booze. No one is there to say they shouldn't. A strong Village Council would prevent that.”
Michael makes no comment. He says that in Venetie and Arctic Village, Athapaskan communities to the north, mailplane passengers and baggage and cargo are searched on arrival. Bottles are smashed. People actually drunk are returned to Fairbanks. “They get things done in those villages,” he goes on. “They tan hides. They make babiche.” By contrast, there are people of Eagle Indian Village who on arriving in Fairbanks are routinely detained and sent back to Eagle.
Last week, Michael went to see the most active bootlegger in the white community. He asked him to stop selling liquor to Village people, and mentioned that in his capacity as chief he might go to state authorities and seek their help in enforcing the local law. The bootlegger urged him not to do that but to put the matter before his own council instead. “If they vote that they want me to quit,” said the bootlegger to the chief, “I'll quit.”
 
 
 
Outside my cabin window, on First Avenue, Eagle City, the afternoon's entertainment is Horace (Junior) Biederman, who ambles up and down with a beer can in his hand, inviting Eagle to care. He is muttering. I can hear him through the open door. “I don't know if this here town wants to live in the past, or what it's trying to do. It's the right of the people to drink—to do anything. I don't mind packing it up or down the street —a beer in my hand. I don't give a damn who sees me.”
Horace (Sophie was his cousin) is three-quarters Indian and seems to hang suspended between the Village and the town. His father ran the store that his grandfather took over from the Northern Commercial Company, and Horace grew up in the white community, where he still lives. The whites regard him
as an Indian, the Indians regard him as white. “Junior Biederman has never been able to make up his mind which he would rather be,” says Jack Boone. “He is not faithful to either community. He lives in the town like an Indian, in squalor. He never has more than two days' wood supply. He never plans ahead. That is the Indian way.” Michael David's opinion is even lower than Boone's. He refers to Biederman as “a halfbreed who is stuck in the middle, a bootlegger, and a husband and father who provides no wood.” Biederman's wife, Sara, grew up a Juneby. Their marriage is a local dramatic series, one of Eagle's preoccupying events. He is said to be an effective hunter, knowledgeable in the ways of moose and caribou, but of Horace in Eagle about the highest praise one hears is “We sure did have a lot of hopes for Junior.”
Odd, then, that he has been elected and reëlected to the Common Council of the city of Eagle. Something deeper than gossip makes a vote. Officially a white oligarch, he is a heavyset, swarthy man with black curly hair. He may be called Junior, but there is nothing of the child in his appearance. He looks like a Mexican insurrectionist ten years after the coup. He stops by occasionally to share a bit of time, and he comes in now with his beer. His voice is a light one. It sounds like falling sand. “I don't think the people in this town have grasped what is happening,” he says.
“What is happening?”
“The native people are coming into their own.”
His mother, like Bessie David, was a Crow from Yukon Territory. His grandfather carried mail with dogs on the river —more than three hundred miles round trip to Circle—and lost toes to frostbite, even pieces of his feet. Horace is a Cat skinner. He has made $13.43 an hour when he has gone out to work on the pipeline or at the drilling sites of Doyon. During the king-salmon run when he was young, his family regularly occupied a fish camp, abandoned now.
“I'd like to see everyone acknowledge that it is one town,
and get along,” he remarks—an earnest, if lonely, wish. “I do care about my town.” When he says that, he—uniquely—means all of Eagle, Village and City, white and Indian. He has taken a course in municipal government. He has been a vice-president of the Tanana Chiefs Conference, which is concerned with social welfare in the Doyon region. Even so, he confesses that he feels that the people of the Village do not wholly trust him. (“When Junior goes to the Tanana Chiefs, he is just there for the per diem and the trip,” Michael has said to me.) “I'd like to see this Eagle become a stable town,” Junior continues. “Not a modern city, with paved streets, but a growing town. I'd like to be able to live here and support my family without leaving. With the two communities together, there'd be opportunities for a utility company. I'd like to have lights.”
“And running water.”
“I don't really care about that. But we need a community center, a gym. The pipeline isn't going to go on and on, and without it people will need work. The town has got to grow, so somebody can support somebody. Right now, the major source of employment is firefighting for the B.L.M., because no one has figured out how to stop lightning. It's a hell of a note when your major part of your working force in your town is waiting for your country to burn up. In 1905, Amundsen came here to send a message to the world. Now you can't even call Tok. Something went haywire.”

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