Alaska (149 page)

At this crucial point, the thoughtful military around Eisenhower and the conservatives from Seattle and the West somewhat overshot their hand; they convinced the President that Alaska, at least the ninety percent up north, should be kept in a territorial status under military control. One afternoon, persuaded by their arguments, he gave the Washington press an offhand judgment that while the populated southeast segment of Alaska Juneau, Sitka, Ketchikan, Wrangell, Petersburg might have enough people to warrant statehood some time in the distant future, the great empty areas to the north would probably never have enough.

This howling error enabled loyal Alaskans everywhere to rush into print with a startling correction: 'President Eisenhower may understand military affairs but he sure doesn't know much about Alaska. The preliminary census for 1960 shows that the southeast which he praises as being crowded with people... you take the fives towns down there, they have a total population of nineteen thousand, while the Railbelt, that's Fairbanks to Anchorage and down the Kenai Peninsula where our only railroad runs, it's going to show more than fifty-seven thousand. That's exactly three times as much. It's the Railbelt that's ready for statehood, not the general's favorite little burgs down in the forgotten corner.'

At this critical moment, when approval for statehood hung in the balance, one of those accidents erupted which sometimes help determine history. The governor of the territory was a gifted former medical student and journalist, Ernest Gruening from Harvard, who in 1928 had written the best book extant on the revolution in Mexico.

His perceptive analysis having caught the attention of President Roosevelt, he had been appointed Director of the Division of Territories and Island Possessions, in which capacity he came to know 904

Alaska and respect its potential for greatness. He spoke so often and so loudly in government circles about what Alaska might become that in 1939 he was appointed Territorial Governor, and was later elected to serve as make-believe senator to the United States Congress allowed on the floor, but not allowed to vote until such time as statehood was attained and real senators could be elected.

Having learned how much good the proper book at the proper time could achieve, Gruening, always the publicist, had approached a friend, the writer Edna Ferber, with a striking proposal: 'Come to Alaska and write a book about us. Do for us what you've just done for Texas.' Her immensely popular novel Giant

had catapulted the foibles and grandeur of the Lone Star State into national prominence, and he supposed that a similar book by the same writer could do the same for Alaska.

Miss Ferber, having weathered the storm of adverse criticism that was rained down upon her by Texas loyalists, rather relished the idea of tackling another contentious problem, so she came to Alaska briefly and hurriedly wrote Ice Palace, which gained enormous readership. The conse-905

NORTH WEST TERRITORIES

quences were precisely those that this clever man Gruening had anticipated. Of the book he would write later:

Ice Palace made a strong case, in fiction form, for statehood. Some of the literary critics felt it was not up to her best work, but one of them referred to it quite correctly as 'the

Uncle Tom's Cabin

for Alaskan statehood.' Thousands who would never have been interested in any of our pro-statehood non-fiction magazine articles, of which I had written several for Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly and The New York Times Magazine, did read novels.

In the closing weeks of our statehood drive scores of people asked me whether I had read Ice Palace.

It was ' called to the attention of many Congressmen. I have no doubt that it changed quite a few votes.

In 1958, when the debate heatened, an elderly gentleman of excellent reputation stepped regally into a Senate hearing room in Washington prepared to testify against statehood for

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Alaska. He was Thomas Venn, seventy-five years old, here to protect the commercial interests of Seattle. White-haired and puritanically erect in bearing, he created the impression of a man who did not tolerate fools or their foolish opinions, but he was by no means repellent, for he could smile affably when his friends nodded, and he knew that this impression of gentility was heightened by the presence of his wife, Lydia Ross Venn.

As they took their places at one end of the row reserved for testifiers, Mrs. Venn whispered discreetly in her husband's ear, and he looked to the opposite end: 'My God! How did she get here?'

It was Missy Peckham of Juneau, whose fiery determination had helped keep the struggle for statehood on the front pages of newspapers. She had a puckish smile and quick wit, and was not at all overawed by either the Senate hearing room or the dignitaries now filing in to conduct the session at which she would testify for the last time regarding the crusade to which she had dedicated her waning years. Now she saw Tom Venn staring at her, and with an innocent smile she nodded as if to welcome him to her party. Stiffly, the color still absent from his face, he bowed. Then he took his seat and listened as his long affiliation with Alaska and Ross & Raglan was explained to the audience. Then, never raising his voice or engaging in polemics, he stated the case of those who opposed statehood, now and in the foreseeable future: 'Gentlemen, no man in this room can speak of Alaska with greater affection than I do. I've known every corner of that vast territory since 1898 when I climbed the dreaded Chilkoot Pass, and throughout the decades that followed I have always acted to promote the welfare of Alaska. I assure you that in my reasoned judgment Alaska is not ready for statehood, that it would be gross error to give it statehood; and that its future can best be assured by continuing the same benevolent custodianship it has enjoyed in the past.

'The military know how to protect Alaska. The businessmen of the West Coast know how to serve its industrial and banking needs. The sympathetic experts in the Bureau of Indian Affairs know best how to help the native peoples. And the Department of the Interior has proved that it can be relied upon to conserve the national resources.

We have in place all the instruments required for a wise and protective system of government, one that has worked admirably in the past and 907

will continue to do so in the future. Like thousands of thoughtful men and women who consider only the welfare of this great territory, I beg you not to encumber Alaska with a form of government it is incapable of handling. I urge you to reject statehood.'

As Venn stepped away from the witness chair he had to pass Missy, who had, in a certain sense, reared him, served as his mother, encouraged him in his work, and imparted to him her wonderfully stable set of values. If he had been asked at that moment, he would have said without hesitation: 'Miss Peckham taught me most of what I know.'

As longtime friends they nodded and might even have embraced, for their debts, each to the other, were tremendous. But now she took his place at the table to refute everything he had said:

'Distinguished Senators. [Here she stopped and asked: 'Can this gismo be turned up?

Can you hear me now? Good!'] Let's settle the biggest problem first. The previous speaker, a distinguished friend of Alaska, has claimed that we do not have a population sufficient to justify statehood. Well, when the fury of the Civil War was about to destroy our nation, President Abraham Lincoln realized that he simply must have two more Senate votes to protect his strategies for winning the war. How did he finagle them? Ignoring every rule for the creation of new states, he wrote his own rules and invited Nevada to become a state. He then bullied her acceptance through the Congress, and by this headstrong act helped save the Union. What was the population of Nevada at that historic moment? It says here: ”Six thousand eight hundred fifty-seven.”

Right now Alaska has thirty-three times that number. And she is just as badly needed now as Nevada was then.

'Why do you need us? Because we will always be your gateway to Asia, we will always be your outpost on the Arctic. You need our expertise in living in and conquering the frozen north. The day will also come when you will need our natural resources: our vast supplies of wood pulp, our mineral deposits, our fish, and we may even have huge deposits of petroleum. My friend Johnny Kemper, who studied at the Colorado School of Mines, tells me we may have a large deposit way up on the Arctic Shelf.'

When she left the table she walked purposefully past her onetime charge, Tom Venn, who whispered: 'Thank you for

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not lambasting Ross & Raglan,' and she whispered back: 'We'll take care of you when we get statehood.' They smiled, nodded, and agreed to differ.

IN LATE JUNE 1958 IT BECAME APPARENT THAT ALASKA had a strong chance of slipping into statehood ahead of Hawaii, the racial mix in the latter territory militating against acceptance. The House had already approved Alaska by a vote of 210 to 172, with an amazing 51 abstentions by congressmen who could not accept the idea that almost-empty Alaska should have two Senate votes while populous New York was restricted to the same number. Also, some opposed allowing what someone had termed 'a mongrel population trapped in an icebox' to attain full voting citizenship.

Now only the Senate had to approve, and for a while it seemed doubtful that it would do so. Some senators tried to limit Alaska to commonwealth status only: defeated 50 to 29. Others argued persuasively that the military were best fitted to decide Alaska's future: defeated 53 to 31, while a vocal contingent led by Senator Thurmond supported President Eisenhower's accidental proposal that the entire northern portion be excluded from statehood, even if the lower districts did attain it: defeated 67

to 16. It seemed to Missy Peckham, as she listened to the debate, that her enemies could cite fifty arguments against statehood, while she had only one in support: the time had come for the Union to embrace without restraint a worthy new member.

On 30 June the deciding vote could no longer be postponed by obstructive amendments, and as the roll call proceeded, striking anomalies became evident. Stalwart Southern conservatives like Harry Byrd of Virginia, James Eastland and John Stennis of Mississippi, Alien Ellender of Louisiana, Herman Talmadge of Georgia and Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, having stated publicly that they were against statehood, now voted against it. But so did conspicuous liberals like Sam Ervin of North Carolina, William Fulbright and John McCIellan of Arkansas, and Mike Monroney of Oklahoma.

Two tormented pairs of senators handled their conflicting loyalties in contrasting ways. Warren Magnuson and Henry Jackson of Washington had been pressured heavily by their Seattle business constituents to come out against statehood on the grounds that the state of Washington would lose economic control of the territory. When the vote came, each man had to follow his conscience: 'Yes.' The two Texas senators, Lyndon Johnson and Ralph Yarborough, were un-909

questioned liberals who had frequently spoken in favor of statehood, but when the real crunch came they simply could not risk their political careers by voting to admit a huge new state which would relegate Texas to second place. On the day the vote was taken, each man reached the same decision: he dare not vote for Alaska, nor could he in good conscience vote against her; so both were recorded: 'Not voting.'

The final count: yeas 64, nays 20, 12 not voting. Alaska had become the forty-ninth state, 2.2 times as big as Texas with a total population about the same as Richmond, Virginia. When Tom Venn heard the final count he said: 'Alaska has doomed herself to mediocrity,' but Missy Peckham, celebrating with friends at an expensive Washington restaurant, rose unsteadily to her feet, raised her glass, and cried: 'Now we've got to show 'em!' and she spent the rest of that long night discussing the strange political and social innovations which would make Alaska unique among the states.

Her own proposals were startling; 'I want a school available to every child in Alaska, no matter what it costs. I want housing for every Eskimo, every Tlingit. We must have control of our salmon and our moose and caribou. We've got to have roads and factories and a dozen settlements like Matanuska.' On and on she went, projecting those dreams which she had first voiced during the terrible Panic of 1893 and to which she had devoted her later life.

She became so excited, at age eighty-three, by this vision of an arctic Utopia and by her unaccustomed intake of alcohol, that when her friends helped her to bed, she fell into a deep, contented sleep, from which she did not awaken. When her body was discovered, associates informed Thomas Venn, whom they knew to be her longtime friend, and he hurried to the modest hotel in which she had died, and for perhaps twenty minutes he stood beside her bed, remembering her as she had been in those far-off days when she had brought hope and food to a starving family. At last he bowed down and kissed her pallid forehead, then kissed her again for each of those men whose lives she had illuminated: Buchanan Venn, the betrayed husband in Chicago; Will Kirby, the lonely Canadian policeman; John Klope, the lost soul in the Klondike; Matt Murphy, the indefatigable Irishman.

'I know she would want to be buried in Alaska,' Venn said as he left. 'Send her to Juneau, and let me have the bill.'

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THE RIM OF FIRE

In 1969 the United States government began paying serious attention to the problem of how the ancient land rights of the Alaskan Natives could be honored and protected, and one honest principle motivated all decisions. It was best formulated by the senior senator from North Dakota, who said during debate: 'Regardless of how we approach this difficult problem of assuring justice to the various Alaskan Native tribes, we must do better than we've done with our Indians in the Lower Forty-eight. Whatever system we devise must avoid the reservation which is so destructive of Indian morale. It must assure the Native control over his ancestral lands. It must protect him against avaricious white men who would deprive him of those lands. And, if possible, it must enable him to preserve and practice his traditional patterns of life.'

In the private debates that followed, two contrasting terms predominated, reservation and mainstream,

the latter used as a verb: 'I say the sooner we mainstream the Indian the better.

Cut off all reservation support. Give him help where needed. But encourage him to enter the mainstream of our national life and find his own level.' In support of this recommend a—

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tion, proponents cited horrible statistics stemming from the historic reservation policy:

'An Indian reservation is a ghetto, and no pious wishes can gloss that over. It destroys initiative, encourages drunkenness, and inhibits the attaining of maturity. To keep our Indians on reservations is to keep them in jail. Of a hundred young Indians who go to college under the most beneficent conditions scholarships, guidance support, special classes only three remain to begin their junior year. And why do they fail?

Certainly not because they lack inborn intelligence. They fail because the horrible reservation system operates against their continuation, for when they return to it their peers scorn them and then-parents whine: ”Why go to college? You'll never get a good job even if you do graduate. The whites won't allow it.”

'The only solution I can see is to shut down every reservation, throw the Indians into the mainstream, and allow each to sink or swim according to his or her ability.

Granted, the first generation may encounter rough times. Those that follow will be ordinary Americans.'

Such draconian recommendations were quickly dismissed by those who felt, as congressmen had for the past century, that if only the reservations could be well managed, the present system would function:

'If you throw the Indian off his reservation, where a benign government endeavors to protect him, to preserve his ancient ways, and to enable him to live a decent life, where will he go? You've seen where he'll go. To the back alleys of Seattle, to the teeming warrens of Minneapolis and to the hopeless dregs of one small town after another. To throw him, as you phrase it, into the mainstream is to invite him to drown.'

The debate might have ended there, in the impasse which had persisted for the past century, had not two remarkable witnesses appeared to testify before the Senate.

The first was a youngish Jesuit priest who served as principal of a Catholic school on a reservation in Wyoming:

'It is a bitter joy to see our Native boys and girls in their early teens. America has no young people better than 912

these. The boys are manly, good at games, spirited and eager to learn. The girls?

No more beautiful creatures exist in this country. As you teach them, boys and girls alike, they brim with hope and the promise of becoming adults who can help lead this great nation and improve it as they do.

'That's how they are at age fourteen. At twenty-eight the young women are still hopeful and prepared to work for a decent life, but their husbands have begun to drink, to lie about, and to degenerate. Often they come home drunk and beat their wives, who begin to appear with their eyes blackened and their front teeth knocked out. Then they, too, start drinking and before long all hope is destroyed and they both become prisoners of the reservation.

'At thirty-six they're lost, men and women alike, and they spin out their lives with tangled thread, producing nothing. It breaks the heart to see this remorseless decline, and please allow me to specify exactly what I mean. Four days ago reservation officials came to my office in Wyoming to discuss what to do about the children of John and Mabel Harris. His Indian name was Gray Bird and in normal conditions he would become a chief of some importance in our community.

'But he and his wife have become so addicted to alcohol that they can scarcely function.

Their two children, a girl thirteen and a boy eleven, did what they could, with our help, to keep the family together, but it was becoming clear that they would fail, so with anguish I recommended that the children be taken from the Harrises and moved in with a more stable family. Everyone, including the children and the new family, agreed that this was the only solution, but I said: ”A church school can't accept responsibility for taking children away from their parents, even though I personally recommend it,” so the officials accepted the duty and took the children to their new home.

”That night John Harris, wildly drunk, went to the new family's house, shouting and ranting that he wanted his children. But the children themselves, not the foster parents, convinced him that they wanted to remain where they were. So off he stormed, staggered into the path of a reservation garbage truck that was sounding its horn wildly, and was killed.

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'His own children, hearing the commotion, ran from the house and reached his mangled body in time to hear the truck driver telling bystanders: ”He was dead drunk. He was always dead drunk.” And that night three nights ago today his wife shot herself.

Drunkenness and suicide are the heritage we have given the Indians as a consequence of our laws in contiguous America. Do not reproduce those laws in Alaska.'

Indians, too, came before the various committees, pleading with Congress to establish in Alaska some system better than the one operating in states like Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas: 'There must be a better way. It's your responsibility to find it.'

The second critical testifier was an Alaskan woman of forty-one who was about as far removed from a Jesuit priest as one could imagine. She was Melody Murphy, granddaughter of that famous Melissa Peckham who had come to the Klondike from Chicago in the 1890s and, via the wild gold fields of Nome at the turn of the century, to the capital at Juneau, where she had proved a thorn in the buttocks of any administration. Fighting always for the rights of the underdog, in 1936, Missy had turned up at the Matanuska settlement, where she had supported whites from Minnesota as vigorously as she had Aleuts from Kodiak. She had died in harness, fighting for statehood and enfranchisement for all Alaskans, and had bequeathed to her granddaughter not only her willingness to combat ignorance or injustice but also her indifference to marriage customs.

In fact, Missy Peckham had lived outside of wedlock with four different men, and by the time her longtime companion Matthew Murphy was finally free to marry her, neither she nor he saw much purpose in his doing so. Her granddaughter Melody, a handsome woman with four radically different strains in her background, had likewise avoided matrimony but not men, and by the time she was thirty she was known favorably as one of the great women of Juneau. Her mother, Melissa's daughter, had been more traditional and at an early age had married the son of a wild Siberian, Abraham Lincoln Arkikov, and his Eskimo wife. So Melody's four grandparents were the American woman Melissa, the Irishman Murphy, the Siberian Arkikov and the Eskimo woman Nellie, and there had not been a weakling in that quartet. And for reasons that she never explained, she early on took the last name of Murphy.

When she sailed into Washington at her own expense, 914

having benefited from the profits of Grandfather Arkikov's uncanny skill in buying up unwanted Juneau real estate on the gut feeling that 'someone's gonna want this later,' she spread before Congress her vision of a much different Alaska from the one they had been considering:

'The informal census last year showed that we now have a population of two hundred ninety-one thousand eight hundred, and I assure you, it will double before the next one conies round. And if we strike oil big, as some are predicting, it could quadruple.

We already have the most beautiful state in the Union and the one with the greatest potential for growth. I can see no end to what Alaska might become. But to get it started on the right path, we simply must get our land problems straightened out, and no part of that problem is more complicated than finding a way to assure our Native people their right to the lands they've always occupied.'

At this point a senator asked: 'Miss Murphy? It is Miss Murphy, isn't it?”and she replied: 'It sure is.'

'Tell us, Miss Murphy, are you a Native? Do you stand to gain if we allot land to the Natives?'

She laughed, the free and easy chuckle that might have come from any one of her Alaskan ancestors, and she was remarkably attractive as she leaned forward to help the senators: 'In the curious mixing way that operates in Alaska, I would be considered half Native.

One grandfather was an Irish prospector on the Yukon. He found nothing. The other was a crazy Siberian who sought gold in Nome. He found a beach full of it. One grandmother was of English derivation, the other was Eskimo. Me? I'm Alaskan, and because my Siberian grandfather did find that gold, I can afford to be disinterested where my personal land rights are concerned, but I'm vitally concerned about land rights for others.' At this point the chairman had to rebuke the spectators for cheering.

'Of our total population, thirteen percent can be classified as Native, and they're roughly divided into Indians, Eskimos and Aleuts. But in Alaskan Native life, nothing is ever simple, because the Indians, who should properly be called Athapascans, are divided into various groups, one of the most important being the Tlingits. The Eskimos are also divided, Inupiat and Yup'ik. And even the Aleuts fall into two classes, the original

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Aleuts from the islands, the self-styled Aleuts from the mainland.'

When one of the senators asked: 'And what are you?' she said: 'My Eskimo grandmother was certainly a Yup'ik. My Siberian grandfather? Now there we have a nice problem.

His ancestors way back must have been Athapascan stock. Later on they could have been progenitors of the Inupiat. And if you look far enough back into my English ancestors, God knows what you'll find. I like to think I'm part Pict.' Here the audience laughed quietly, but soon broke into guffaws as she concluded: 'Let's say I'm properly mixed. If I was a dog, you'd call me Rover and be damned pleased to have me.

'So Alaska has eight main Native groups four Indian, two Eskimo, two Aleut and we live together rather easily. By and large, any solution you come up with . must apply equitably to all, and I assure you that the various groups will be prepared to accommodate, even though some of the small particulars might go against their own peculiar traditions.

The basic problem? The Natives must have land. Next basic? They must be protected in their ownership until such time, maybe by some year in the next century like 2030, that they can make decisions about their land without these protections.'

At the end of her testimony one senator asked the question which perplexed them all: 'Miss Murphy, have you testified here today as a Native or as a non-Native?”and she replied: 'As I told you, gentlemen, I'm half and half. When I took my oath to tell you the truth I was mindful that Alaska is eighty-seven percent ordinary Caucasian just like you, thirteen percent Native like the pure Eskimos and Athapascans. Your job is to find a solution that will enable both groups to move ahead in security and hope.'

The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 (ANCSA) was one of the more intricate and unprecedented bits of legislation to emerge from the American Congress, and its bountiful provisions were due primarily to the fact that the American people suffered from a guilt complex because of the shabby way they had treated their Indians. They were now determined to do better with their Alaskan Natives. It was a collection of laws of which the American people could be proud ... as those laws were understood in

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1971. ANCSA was not a solution for the ages, but it was a generous step forward at that time.

Alaska contained 586,412 square miles an area 2.19 times larger than Texas for a total of 375,303,680 acres. Of these the Natives were to be given 44,000,00012 percent of all Alaska plus a cash settlement of $962,500,000. So far so good. But to accomplish some of the goals Melody Murphy had espoused, and particularly to prevent extravagant behavior during the euphoria when Natives gained their own land, the vast acreage would not be distributed to them individually but would be delivered into the hands of twelve huge Native corporations located regionally so as to apportion the entire state among them, plus a remarkable thirteenth corporation to include all Alaskan Natives living outside the state and therefore not attached to any specific area of land.

Every Alaskan Native born before 1971 and living anywhere in the world would thus be assigned membership in one of the thirteen huge corporations and receive papers entitling him or her to a proportionate ownership of that particular corporation.

For example, Melody Murphy, resident in Juneau, became a shareholder in the powerful Sealaska Corporation, one of the best managed and also favored in the quality of the land it received. Vladimir Afanasi up in remote Desolation Point became part owner of the vast Arctic Slope Regional Corporation with an acreage larger than many states. An interesting provision covered the corporation focusing on the heavily settled Anchorage area, for there most of the best lands had already passed into private ownership; the Native leaders here were allowed by Congress to select comparable government-owned lands in widely scattered parts of the United States, so that an Eskimo living in a village near Anchorage might find himself part owner of a federal building in Boston or an unused warehouse in Honolulu.