In the Empire of Ice (5 page)

At 78 Faye is bent but vigorous. She has an impish smile and scuttles around her cramped kitchen cutting up piles of reindeer meat and fermented walrus with her
ulu:
“I still get ice from the lagoon and driftwood from out on the beach with my sled,” she says, dropping the curved blade to shove a few more sticks into the ancient woodstove.

“I was born in a sod house. It was only about five feet high. It was nice and quiet, no sound of wind. Warm, too. Grandma and the other grandma, Mom and Dad, a blind aunt, and all us kids, 13 of us, lived there. We used to sleep on the floor with reindeer mattresses. In the summer we’d take them to camp and beat the hides with sticks, and those bugs just fell out! In the summer I’d go picking berries, and still do. Everyplace around here is good. Yes, it’s nice here.”

The stove ticks in time to no music as the room warms slowly. We are silent, all sitting together at a blood-encrusted table crowded with carving tools and a wad of whale sinew for sewing.

Faye serves platefuls of boiled reindeer meat and fermented bearded seal on pieces of cardboard. Meltwater brought from a thaw pond is scooped into plastic cups. “Before we had glass nursing bottles, we used bearded-seal intestines and squeezed the milk out of one end,” Faye remembers.

The reindeer is chewy. She sprinkles soy sauce on it. “When we’re not eating reindeer, there’s some good flounder at this time of year. I make a small igloo to keep the wind off my back and lie with my head at a lead [an open lane of water] in the ice and spear them. All the year, though, we are eating walrus, seal, and polar bear. I boil the bear claws. They’re good. But if you eat the bear’s liver, your hair will fall out!” she says, laughing, touching her thinning hair.

Out one window there’s a view of the shoreline. Out the other is a big snowdrift that flanks the tiny house. Faye shakes her head dismissively. “In the old days there was so much more snow, drifts so big the windows were covered all winter, and snow tunnels led outside to the door.

“In April we’d clear the snow away from the windows to let the sun through,” she says, eyeing the curving drift that embraces the house. “This last summer the wind was one day south and the next day north. Changing every day. And the clouds changed color too. I noticed it. They used to be real white all year.”

She jumps up, stirs the fire, and brings more meat. We chew in silence. She points to a photograph of a man and a woman, Joe’s parents. “I remember your father, Willy,” she says. “We missed you when you pulled out of here. Your father was a good man. The rest of us didn’t go to much school. Our school was ice, walrus, polar bear, ugruk, and reindeer. Reindeer were brought here by Mr. Lopp, the missionary who lived up on the hill. But to get those animals, you had to get religion too.

“When we had reindeer, we had wolves. They were bad. They ate only the tongue. Must not have been very hungry. We had so much food here.”

What Faye saw of the world was what passed by on the Bering Sea. She remembers an umiaq full of “ladies” from Little Diomede Island. “They were smoking big pipes. They came ashore and made doughnuts for us fried in seal oil.”

She says her father always took one teaspoon of seal oil every night before he went to bed because there were no doctors or medicines then. “But it didn’t do no good, because he died when I was a teenager in the 1943 flu epidemic. He got sick on January 2nd, and the next day he was dead.”

Faye takes a fading photograph from the wall. In it are 50 or 60 children lined up in three rows. “These were the orphans of Wales,” she says. “That’s all the people left after the flu came through.”

Joe lifts his heavy spectacles to inspect the faces: “My grandparents died of the flu too, leaving my mother behind,” he says as he scrutinizes the photograph. “That’s her,” he says, pointing to one of the thin figures. He stands back, closing his eyes for a second: “My mother was only a baby then. When a neighbor found her, she was sucking the breast milk of a dead woman.”

He sits heavily on a three-legged stool and leans forward on his elbows: “There weren’t many people here to begin with, and we needed everyone we had. The whites brought religion and sickness and not much else. We had good lives. We had ice and lots of food. We didn’t need anything from the outside world.”

Epidemics came to the people of Arctic Alaska with the explorers, whalers, traders, and missionaries who sailed by or came to stay. In the mid to late 1860s, an epidemic of “red sickness”—once thought to be measles but now known to be scarlet fever—struck Point Hope, Kotzebue, the upper Noatak, and Wales.

One group of coastal hunters and their families, the Pittagmiut, who numbered between 392 and 472, disappeared completely. They lived in 16- to 20-family groups on a ten-mile stretch of coast between the point of Cape Espenberg and the mouth of the Espenberg River. In the spring they hunted seals at the cape; summers, they fished for salmon on the Immachuk River and laid out long sealskin nets at Cape Deceit to catch beluga whales. In the fall, they forced caribou into a lake, then hunted them with spears from kayaks. Winter houses were dug 12 feet into the ground, lined with driftwood timbers, with a bearded seal-gut skylight cut into the peat moss roof. Precontact, the Pittagmiut thrived. They had lived on Kotzebue Sound for 13,000 years.

Waves of illness and famine kept coming. These were people who knew about death from starvation, accidents on the ice, childbirth, and more but had never heard of measles, smallpox, influenza, TB, or pneumonia, and they were defenseless against them. They couldn’t know that the ships that began passing by in the 1800s were ships of death. Besides infectious diseases, the whalers also brought tobacco, firearms, and alcohol. There were stories of famine resulting from indolence caused by drunkenness, and famine caused by people too sick to hunt.

In the year 1900 a whaling ship anchored off Barrow, Alaska, brought influenza to the village. Two hundred people died within the first week. Two years later, more than a hundred residents in Barrow died of measles. The advent of the worldwide influenza pandemic began in 1918. Fifty million people died around the world, and of those, the indigenous populations were hardest hit.

“The big sickness” arrived in Wales via dogsled. The once-a-month mail run from Nome stopped at Teller, Wales, and Shishmaref, then returned via the same route. The day the mail arrived in Wales, more than mail was being carried. On the sled was the body of a Wales hunter who had died of the flu and was being brought home for burial. The man’s relatives took the corpse from the sled and buried him. Those who came near were sick by nightfall and dead by the next evening.

“I remember stories my parents and aunt and uncle told me about that time. Being young when I heard those stories, I just never understood the full impact and horror, the death they saw. I just remember them telling about people getting sick and dying. It was hard to picture all the dead people my grandparents saw,” says Winton Weyapuk. He’s the town environmental specialist, a shy bachelor with a shiny forehead and aviator glasses who also writes poetry. He says he is looking for a girlfriend willing to live in Wales.

Winton’s grandfather was just a boy standing outside his family’s sod house when the village men came to get his parents. They had died and had frozen in place after the blubber lamp went out because his mother had grown too weak to keep the moss wick lit. The boy watched the men pull her, then his father through the
iqaliq
—the skylight. He had not eaten for days because there was no one to hunt and provide food for the family.

The boy saw piles of dead bodies with hungry dogs tearing at them. There were bodies everywhere. Some were half naked. One was twisted, with an arm half raised from the pain of sickness and fever. As more adults died, there was less and less hunting. Soon, there was almost no one left to provide food for humans and dogs. Those who did not die of influenza died of starvation. It was getting to be the cold time, and every day, more and more houses went dark. He remembered a day of huge blasts. The villagers had dynamited two gaping holes in the permafrost to be used as the final resting place for the dead.

The boy and his siblings were taken to an aunt’s house. Then both the aunt and uncle died too. Now orphans, the children continued living alone in the house, begging for scraps of food from neighbors. More than 200 adults had died. There were more children than adults alive in the village of Wales.

Someone finally moved the orphaned children to the schoolhouse, where the adults who were still alive made sure everyone was fed and had a place to sleep. But the infection spread quickly. More than a third of Wales’s 600 to 700 residents died the first week.

The cause of the illness was unknown. It was thought that a bad spirit had come across from Siberia to kill them. In villages to the south, epidemics were said to come from the moon. An eclipse meant an epidemic was on the way, and shamans worked hard to appease the angered spirits that had caused the illness. The length of the eclipse foretold the severity of the epidemic.

After the flu ravaged Wales, help from the outside did not come for three months. The arriving missionaries forced what was left of Wales’s adults to find partners and have Christian weddings so they could “legally” adopt the remaining orphans—this, in an Arctic culture whose social structure was based on collaborative living, where both marriage and adoption were informal arrangements, where children in need were always cared for.

Joe recalls, “My father was separated from his two brothers as a result of these forced adoptions. They were given to three different sets of foster parents. Then the missionaries who entered their names entered only their personal names and left out the family name altogether. In one stroke, my father’s family disintegrated. But that’s how it’s been. The Europeans regarded us as savages who didn’t need names. They isolated us so they could take our land. They Christianized us to make us more pliable. They introduced a value system that regarded profit as the highest good, one in which the human-animal-nature matrix came last. They befouled us with tobacco and alcohol, and the resulting ills were used as an excuse for the missionaries to scold us for being bad.”

JANUARY 20, 10 A.M., minus 2°F, wind, 50 mph. “This is a story about ethnocide,” I say to Joe, then apologize for saying the obvious. Joe smiles. His eyebrows are raised, his mouth downturned, his salt-and-pepper hair sticking straight up. He cocks an ear as I continue: “I mean the dire harm humans keep doing to humans. Last peoples to First Peoples, and the dire harm we are doing to this planet.”

Joe points with a sly grin to the T-shirt he’s wearing. Pictured on the front is a row of Indians and the words “Terrorism. We’ve been fighting it since 1492.” He smiles, but the bitterness goes deep. “Today our life can be described as one of existence within the restricted framework of an alien civilization. The aliens who came among us have taken and taken and still it does not end. Alaska today is like a walrus sitting on the visible part of an iceberg, grunting slogans of provincial patriotism, refusing to recognize the massive three-quarters of submerged and moving ice,” Joe says. In other words, the part of the iceberg that represents traditional culture.

The midmorning darkness is pixilated by horizontal grains of white. Part of the problem is that Joe and I haven’t really “seen” the village yet. The whiteout is all. We’re advised to stay put. Without a snowmobile or a dogsled it’s hard to move around without getting lost. From this new part of town built since Joe was last here, there appears to be no dwelling, no human, no animal, no village at all. “But the ghosts are around here, somewhere,” Joe says. He makes another pot of kuupiaq in his Italian stovetop espresso pot and “nukes” instant oatmeal.

Soon word gets out that Joe Senungetuk is here and people begin dropping by to visit. The
pular
—people visiting each other—is an old village custom. Food and warmth is always offered, and an ear for stories.

Ray Seetook is one of the first to come. He wears coveralls and a baseball cap. Perhaps Joe sees in Ray what he might have become if he had stayed in Wales. A village elder at age 67, Ray is one of four whaling captains. He immediately begins talking about the odd weather. “We didn’t even get snow until January. Usually snow comes in December, and the shore ice just formed last month, in the third week of December. Unusual weather. Ever since last spring the winds have changed quite a bit and our shore ice has already started to rot. It’s been blowing 50 miles an hour and I’ve been staying inside like a squirrel for the last two days!

“Last month,” he continues, “we saw small birds around. Maybe 10 or 20 of them. They were dark, grayish, smaller than snowbirds [snow buntings]. They were by the pond. Then we saw a couple of hawks. Never saw birds here in wintertime.”

He tells us that in spring the seagulls come just when the bowhead whales arrive. Last year his was the only whaling boat to go out. He harpooned a whale, but it went under the ice. His sons were able to find it because the ice was so thin. “One used an auger and the other son had a
tuuk,
an iron bar, and we finally got it out. Oh, we were happy. It’d been lost for three days,” he says. He recalls the biggest whale he got at 47 feet long. “I dedicated that one to Mom. It was so big, for a bowhead, it almost tipped us over.”

I refill his coffee cup and bring out some dried fruit. Ray adjusts his glasses, leans closer, and speaks very slowly: “I can feel it, when a whale or a polar bear is out there. I’ll be working somewhere, doing something, and suddenly I’ll just feel it and I tell my crew, ‘Hurry up, we have to go out now.’” He sits up straight and stirs his coffee.

“We’ve always had plenty of food. But so many young people these days, all they do is this.” He makes a gesture of typing. “What’s that word? Oh yes, typing. They go to their computers.” He shakes his head, not understanding why they wouldn’t rather be outdoors where they could wear sealskin pants and mukluks, carry driftwood harpoons with ivory handles, and put out seal nets. “No one has these things anymore. But I teach my sons everything I know.”