Two Old Women: An Alaska Legend of Betrayal, Courage and Survival (10 page)

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Authors: Velma Wallis

BOOK: Two Old Women: An Alaska Legend of Betrayal, Courage and Survival

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Sa’ stood with her arms around Shruh Zhuu, tearfully watching mother and daughter find the love they thought was lost forever. Then Ch’idzigyaak turned and walked into the tent, returning with a small bundle that she pressed into her daughter’s hands. Ozhii Nelii saw that it was babiche. She did not understand until Ch’idzigyaak leaned forward and whispered something into her daughter’s ear. Ozhii Nelii looked surprised a moment, then she, too, smiled. Again the women fell into one another’s arms and embraced.

After everyone had been reunited, the chief appointed the two women to honorary positions within the band. At first, people wanted to help the old ones in any way they could, but the women would not allow too much assistance, for they enjoyed their newly found independence. So The People showed their respect for the two women by listening to what they had to say.

More hard times were to follow, for in the cold land of the North it could be no other way,
but The People kept their promise. They never again abandoned any elder. They had learned a lesson taught by two whom they came to love and care for until each died a truly happy old woman.

ABOUT THE GWICH’IN PEOPLE

T
he people Velma Wallis has written about in
Two Old Women
are part of the Gwich’in band that roamed the area around what is now Fort Yukon and Chalkyitsik, one of eleven distinct Athabaskan groups in Alaska. The Gwich’in people are found in the western interior of the state along the Yukon, Porcupine and Tanana rivers.

While each group has its own dialect, many Alaskan Athabaskans not only are able to understand the language of other bands but also share language roots with the Navajo and Apache tribes. All are believed to have descended from Asians who crossed from eastern Siberia into Alaska during an early Ice Age.

The Athabaskans are distributed throughout interior Alaska, most of them living between the Brooks Range and the Alaska Range. Those living on the major river systems have relied on the annual salmon runs for subsistence, while tribes farther inland—such as the Gwich’in people—also depend heavily on large game such as moose and caribou and small animals such as rabbits and squirrels.

Historically, each of Alaska’s Athabaskan groups had a traditional territory. The hunters of each group were well familiar with their territory, in part because it was considered dangerous to travel through the territory of other groups. Each territory delineated the hunting and fishing domain of the group. Encroachment into another’s territory was rare, and when it did occur, it usually invited violence.

The mobility of the Athabaskans was naturally due to their lifestyle of following the resources. They could not afford to sit around and wait for the resources to come to them; such negligence invited hunger and starvation. So they moved around, establishing camps at places which predictably yielded good hunting or fishing according to the season.

Athabaskans sometimes faced times of starvation because the land was unable to produce enough for them. While not necessarily a daily threat to existence, the possibility of starvation was a well-known fact of life. People worked hard. The boreal forest was not an easy place to make a living. Life was comprised of many tasks and duties, which, if not performed, may have led to disaster.

By 1900, the Athabaskan people began to settle in more permanent camps or villages. This was a result of such factors as population declines brought on by disease, involvement in the fur trade, access to trading posts and later enforced school attendance. Even today, although many people work at wage labor and actively participate in the market economy, subsistence—living off the land—continues to be a vital component of life for most Alaskan Athabaskans.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

VELMA WALLIS
was born in 1960 in Fort Yukon, a remote village of about 650 people in interior Alaska. Growing up in a traditional Athabaskan family, Wallis was one of thirteen children. When she was thirteen, her father died and she left school to help her mother raise her younger siblings.

Wallis later moved to her father’s trapping cabin, a twelve-mile walk from the village. She lived alone there intermittently for a dozen years, learning traditional skills of hunting and trapping. An avid reader, she passed her high school equivalency exam and began her first literary project—writing down a legend her mother had told her about two abandoned old women and their struggle to survive.

That story became her first book,
Two Old Women
, published by Epicenter Press in 1993. She is also the author of
Bird Girl and the Man Who Followed the Sun and Raising Ourselves: A Gwich’in Coming of Age Story from the Yukon River
.

ABOUT JIM GRANT

An Athabaskan native born in 1946 in the village of Tanana, Alaska, J
AMES
L. G
RANT
S
R
. was adopted and raised James G. Schrock in Southern California. Drafted into the U.S. Army in 1967, he was stationed in Europe, where he studied the masters. Later he attended Chaffey Junior College in Alta Loma, California, then returned to Alaska to study the Native Arts at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Besides pen-and-ink drawings, his art includes sculpture, mask making, and oil painting. He lives in Fairbanks, Alaska.

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BACK AD

PRAISE FOR

TWO OLD WOMEN

1993 Western States Book Award Winner

1994 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award Winner

“A beautiful and moving book. [Wallis’s] writing is as lean and muscular, as full of unexpected bounties as the far north, and readers are sure to be delighted with
Two Old Women
.”

—
Washington Post Book World

“Wallis, who grew up hearing this tribal legend, retells it with disarming simplicity and grace.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“Wallis writes with simple elegance. . . . Powerful themes emerge from the story’s bleak premise: friendship, dignity and a ‘We will die trying’ grittiness—themes that still permeate the Alaskan way of life.”

—
Alaska

“
In Two Old Women
, Velma Wallis provides the reader with a lasting experience. Myth takes hold of us; we become old and abandoned, and we are a friend who says, ‘We will die trying.’ And the world hears this voice of confidence. Wherever we are—in the city, in the village, in the bush—we need this tale of isolation and the power to define a vision of human integrity.”

—Western States Book Award jurors

CREDITS

COVER DESIGN BY JARROD TAYLOR

COVER PHOTOGRAPH © CORNFORTH IMAGES/ALAMY

COPYRIGHT

This book was originally published in 1993 by Epicenter Press. It is here reprinted by arrangement with Epicenter Press.

T
WO OLD WOMEN
. Copyright © 1993 by Velma Wallis. Illustrations copyright © 1993 by James Grant. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Title page photograph © Cornforth Images/Alamy

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

ISBN 978-0-06-224498-7 (twentieth anniversary edition)

EPub Edition November 2013 ISBN 9780062244994

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

Australia

HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.

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Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia

http://www.harpercollins.com.au

Canada

HarperCollins Canada