Wisdom Keeper (10 page)

Upon returning to Alaska after graduation, I first worked for the Alaska Native Foundation for which I secured a major grant from the Kellogg Foundation to link village corporations with the University of Alaska, then, at age twenty-three, as the youngest land director of a Regional Native Corporation. By that time the U.S. Congress had passed the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, which provided a billion dollars to Alaska Native peoples and titles to forty-four million acres of land they had historical ties to. Land was parceled out according to population within each village and region. Most villages and regions chose to form private for-profit corporations to receive the titles and money that were the centerpiece of the legislation. The Unangan people formed The Aleut Corporation (TAC) under this legislation in 1972, and its president Michael Swetzoff, hired me to lead the effort in training people from twelve villages on land identification and selection under this new law. I hired two people for my new department and set out to help the villagers select land in our region. We were the first Unangan, with a few exceptions, to get to see all the villages in their region and to fly over all two million plus acres of land available for selection.

After successfully training the people in the villages and making land selections for TAC, I was hired to be the first business manager for the village corporation in my hometown of Saint Paul in 1975 and subsequently asked to serve as its president. We engaged in the first businesses, other than coffee shops and a movie theater (the people had never had the wherewithal to develop other businesses during the government domination, and the government did not want us to have enough money to leave the islands), based in Saint Paul, which included a construction company, ownership and operation of the International
Inn (in Anchorage), and leasing of lands for small boat harbor operations.

In the ten years I served the village corporation, we made consistent profits from our ownership and operation of the International Inn. A hotel/restaurant and tourism operation on Saint Paul Island also made consistent profits, along with a fish processing operation and small boat demonstration project. We also put money into lobbying for a boat harbor on Saint Paul, which was built in the mid-1980s and has been a centerpiece of the Saint Paul economy ever since. The harbor, originally the dream of my uncle, Eddie, had been put aside when he died in the 1970s. After it was built from funds from the Army Corps of Engineers and State of Alaska, we had gone from a ten-thousand-dollar per capita income during the height of government-paid civil service wages,
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to thirty thousand dollars per capita in less than half a generation, re-tooled from a government-run company town to private enterprise.

In the small boat demonstration project, we hired an “old salt” retired halibut schooner skipper out of Seattle, Sig Jaeger, to teach us the basics. Sig had skippered a halibut schooner in the Bering Sea for over twenty years. He and I designed a twenty-one-foot boat that we could launch and retrieve off the beach and carry enough commercial halibut gear to make it worthwhile. We had two skiffs built and delivered to Saint Paul. Half the time the volunteer men were in class, and half the time at sea fishing. The first year we caught four thousand pounds of halibut and thought that was remarkable. But, it was nothing compared to the million pounds we delivered onshore four years later, when the traditional council agreed to back individual purchase of small boats.

I was one of four skippers who got the first commercial fishing boats, again co-designed by Sig and I. They were modified twenty-one-foot Oregon dories capable of being launched from the former government docks. I wanted these boats to be able to pay for themselves from the first year's catch of halibut, so they were designed to minimize expense while maximizing their ability to catch fish. We learned how to set gear and to retrieve them even in foggy weather, which frequented the island
during the summer months, by using LORAN. At the time, LORAN (which stands for Long Range Aid to Navigation) was the state-of-the-art technology for marine navigation, giving one's location in longitude and latitude at any moment through triangulation of LORAN signals from three stations in the Bering Sea. One of those stations was on Saint Paul, and the other two were in the Aleutian Islands. We all became proficient in navigating by LORAN, which brought us within fifty feet of our gear, even in fog. Later, local people bought larger boats and now use GPS and radar to navigate. Today there are over thirty small boats owned by Unangan people on Saint Paul, which, at the fishery's peak, brought in a million dollars a year to local pockets. Now, probably due to climate change and overfishing by factory trawlers from Seattle, the halibut stocks are plummeting, leaving the future of the Pribilof small boat fishery uncertain.

It was during the early 1980s that the U.S. government executed its plans to leave the Pribilof Islands without negotiation with the Pribilof Unangan people.

It was on Saint Paul that Phyllis and I decided to have children, as we had felt that there was no reason to raise children in a city and had waited until we were in the village. Our daughter Leatha was born in 1976 and Marissa in 1978. They both were beautiful children with distinctly different personalities. One thing they have always shared in common, however, was a love to be outside. I had a pickup truck, and whenever I drove with the family, both Leatha and Marissa wanted to ride in the bed of the truck, summer or winter. Phyllis and I loved the island, so we spent a lot of time outdoors as a family.

Marissa was always different from the other girls in town. One evening we were walking down the road at night when she was five years old. There were few street lights and no clouds in the sky, so the stars could be seen in all their brilliance. Marissa asked, “Dad, what are the stars?”

I thought for a while then gave a scientific explanation, “there are billions of stars, and they were created billions of years ago by the ‘Big Bang.'”

Marissa thought for a while, then said, “No, Dad, you are wrong. Stars are spirits of people.” Even at that age, Marissa always knew what she was going to do. “Dad, I know what I want to do. I want to get enough money to retire at age forty-five, and I want to be buried under the Great Pyramid of Giza.” To this day I wonder how she could have possibly known about the Great Pyramid at her age.

When Marissa finished high school, she enrolled at Arizona State University where she graduated and then entered law school there. She now has two law certificates, one in Indian law and the other in environmental law. I asked, “How did you choose Arizona State?” Her response was memorable, “I just looked at the pictures of the schools and chose
the first one that didn't have snow.”

Marissa's first job, just out of law school, was to work at retrieving the water rights for the Maori. In one year she and her associates did just that. She now lives on the East Coast with her two sons, Kanuux and Hamati. She is the chief lawyer for the tribe on Saint Paul, our hometown.

My oldest daughter, Leatha, is equally accomplished. She was a vice president of the Alaska Native Medical Center, which provides medical services to all Alaska Native villages in the state. She is now Vice President of Administration for the Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium (SEARHC), which provides medical services to communities in Southeast Alaska. Both daughters are beautiful, accomplished, and very intelligent. Yet as polished as they are, each retains a measure of the village girl from how they were raised, and both return to Saint Paul as often as they can. I feel blessed that they are both doing very well.

My son, Ian Alexander, born sixteen years after Leatha, during my marriage to Sumner MacLeish, was also given to remarkable statements at an early age. Returning from playing with his best friend, Ian said, “When I grow up, I am going to marry Alix, and we will live in a farmhouse with roses attached to the sky.” He was four years old at the time. Now, in his mid-twenties, Ian is working in the culinary arts here in Anchorage, but his heart and soul are drawn toward a different form of art. He is a talented writer and is working on a screenplay in between work and being a father to his one-year-old daughter, Leah.

In the early 1980s, the Unangan of the Bering Sea's remote Pribilof Islands survived a profound crisis that ultimately would prove to be a spiritual, cultural, and economic turning point in their lives. For two hundred years government commercial sealing had provided the sole economy for the people on Saint Paul and Saint George, and it ended abruptly in 1983. Pribilof Unangan history documents three murders, four suicides, and perhaps a hundred suicide attempts that fateful year. In contrast, no suicides and only one murder had been recorded in the previous one hundred years.

Although the fur seals had fared well under the conservation regime founded by the North Pacific Fur Seal Convention of 1911, the Pribilof Unangan did not. The treaty had been put in place to stop the taking of fur seals on the high seas, a practice that was bringing the animals to near extinction. In return for sharing the pelts taken from the Pribilofs, the other participants agreed to enforce the treaty on the high seas. This conservation regime increased the number of northern fur seals from two hundred thousand to nearly one and a half million within twenty years.

Of far less concern to the U.S. government than the fur seals, and treated as second-class citizens, the Unangan lived under the arbitrary, oppressive, and sometimes cruel control of the government agents who administered the Pribilof Program. These Unangan were subjected to many cultural indignities ranging from the forced restructuring of their customary work methods to the censorship of their communication with the outside world. Traditional Unangan methods of dealing with problems and conflict were ignored, and government agents assumed the role of police, judge, and jury. Protests by the Unangan were quickly
suppressed by the government's threat to deport troublemakers, or kick them out of their homes, limit their rations of food, clothing, or housing, or take away their jobs.

In the early 1960s, however, this all began to change. Alaska's only Native-owned newspaper, the
Tundra Times
, published letters, successfully smuggled off the islands, that detailed these atrocities and led to investigations by the Human Rights Commission and the U.S. Congress. Though legislation was passed in 1966 granting Pribilof Unangan the rights of other citizens of the United States, their economic base did not change; they continued to depend on the U.S. government to provide jobs in the federally managed fur seal harvesting program.

In 1969, the non-profit organization Friends of Animals initiated a campaign to stop the federal take of fur seals on the Pribilof Islands. Other animal rights groups, involved in the Canadian anti-sealing campaign, joined them in the late 1970s. These organizations launched well-funded media campaigns against the seal harvest, taking out full-page ads in national newspapers that characterized the Unangan as brutal, bloodthirsty, greedy killers of animals. Islanders received hate mail from all over the world. At the height of the anti-sealing campaign in 1980, the U.S. Congress received thousands of cards and letters from Americans protesting the U.S. government's role in the fur seal harvest. Under pressure from the public, the Humane Society of the United States, and other animal rights activists, the U.S. government announced its intention not only to stop the commercial seal harvesting but also to completely withdraw from the Pribilofs within a year.

With such a decision, the Unangan knew this meant elimination of their only economic base, eighty percent of the local jobs, and all government services that provided marine transportation, operation of the electric power plants, airport maintenance, and provision of home heating fuel and groceries. Predictably, the government's decision created community-wide anxiety and uncertainty, and left the Unangan feeling angry and powerless over their future. The resulting depression was profound and widespread; the tragic number of deaths in 1983 remains a testimony to the fear and futility the Unangan experienced at
the hands of an impersonal and distant bureaucracy. During this time, the Pribilof Unangan people also faced critical concerns about declining marine mammal and seabird populations around the islands. Time and again they expressed their concerns with detailed information; time and again they and their observations were marginalized in favor of reports from single species scientists who visited the island for only six to eight weeks a year.

The number of fur seals began to decline in the mid-1970s at a rate of six to seven percent a year. This fact was seized upon by the animal rights groups that claimed the government's commercial seal harvesting was causing the declines. The Pribilof Aleut leaders, however, argued that these declines were symptomatic of something seriously wrong in the Bering Sea ecosystem, and that it was probably related to the lack of customary food. In many forums the Unangan leaders noted their observations of unusual wildlife conditions and behavior. Chicks were falling off cliff ledges and dying in large numbers, Steller sea lions were eating fur seal pups in greater frequency than ever in living memory, and fur seal pelts were thinning.

Nevertheless, the Unangan voice was stifled. Scientists characterized these Indigenous observations as anecdotal and thus of little value to research and management. Despite this, in 1983 I proposed a conference of scientists and Alaska Natives to address the declines and focus on food stress as a causal problem. I worked with the Dean of the School of Fisheries at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau to host this conference in an effort to meet scientific protocols and standards. I even received ten thousand dollars from the World Wildlife Fund to help pay for the conference costs and was able to get the commitment of every bird and marine mammal scientist conducting research in the Bering Sea. Unfortunately, the “powers that be,” whoever they were in the federal government, put out the word that they did not want their scientists to participate, so they all pulled out. The conference was never held.

When the Unangan made their first observations about the declines in the Bering Sea ecosystem in 1977, they knew six wildlife species were in trouble. Thirteen years later, northern fur seals had been classified as
depleted under the Marine Mammal Protection Act; Steller sea lions had been classified as threatened under the Endangered Species Act; and a group of scientists from several disciplines called for an “Is It Food?” conference, saying that the declines were probably related to food stress. Uninvited, I attended that conference anyway. In fact, not one Alaska Native person was invited. Moreover, the scientists met in their respective groups and shared what they had learned with each other, but they did not allow scientists outside their field to compare information, contrary to what I had proposed for a conference in 1983.

In 1992, the spectacled eider was classified as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Four species of seabirds, which are made up of murres and kittiwakes, have declined in the Pribilofs by fifty to eighty percent since the mid-1970s. Kittiwakes are now classified under a Category II watch list by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service due to their declines in the Bering Sea. Today, more than eighty species may be in decline, and the reasons continue to baffle the scientists and resource managers. Meanwhile, the North Pacific Fur Seal Treaty was allowed to lapse, along with the treaty provisions that required an internationally coordinated research program. The Unangan leaders argued that the research provisions should remain in force as the fur seals were still declining in large numbers throughout their migratory range; without the research, the reasons could not be uncovered. However, there was no support for the Unangan' call to help the seals.

Having lost the battle to protect their livelihood and the research provisions of the international treaty, the Unangan leaders then focused on protecting their right to eat seals for food. Seal meat has been a staple in the Unangan diet for more than ten thousand years. Some animal rights groups argued against allowing the annual subsistence harvest of approximately 1,600 non-breeding male seals (from a population of almost a million seals), claiming that the Unangan could buy hamburger, fish, and chicken in the local grocery store. As such, several Congressional staffers wanted to know why Unangan people needed to eat seal meat anyway.

Though the Humane Society of the United States was unsuccessful
in its attempt to pressure the U.S. government into promulgating regulations that would specify which parts of the fur seal could be taken for food by the Unangan, rules and regulations were developed to strictly monitor the subsistence harvest: essentially, each seal was to be weighed by a government official to ensure no meat was wasted. Many Unangan Elders were angry, pointing out that no other American citizens had to have their food weighed by the U.S. government to ensure every edible piece of food was used. However, the Unangan arguments, again, were ignored. Most of these regulations remain in place today.

Meanwhile, the bulk of the fur seal pelts removed from seals during the subsistence harvest must be thrown away because of laws prohibiting the commercial sale of the pelts. Villagers are allowed to take the pelts for use in traditional arts and crafts, but, since 1867, due to the government's past restrictions, traditional technology and art skills have been lost. The irony of this situation is not lost on the Unangan people. Animal rights groups argue passionately against wasting seal meat, but they are content to have the useful pelts discarded. Today, however, the local people have regained their technologies to tan seal pelts and are working toward developing their other lost traditional skills.

In the year before the government pulled out of the Pribilofs, the Unangan leadership was under enormous pressure to come up with quick solutions for providing a new economic base for the people. At one point the situation was so desperate that plans were made to buy one-way airline tickets to the mainland for all villagers. Another time the young men of Saint Paul devised a plan to secede from the United States, declare war, and take over the local U.S. Coast Guard station by armed force. It took a potentially tragic suicide pact between two teenagers and a child to wake up villagers to the need to work together in an atmosphere of relative calm and collectedness.

The urgency of the situation prompted the Unangan leadership to take huge risks in their decision-making processes. They discarded conventional Western economic and community-planning approaches and devised their own. The first challenge came in throwing out the standard democratic, one-person, one-vote system to which they had become
accustomed. The leadership realized that unity among the islands' governing bodies could not be achieved with such a voting system because of the distrust that had developed over the years—each organization had their own ideas about what should be done and they had their own interests to protect. So, it was decided that unity and elimination of divisiveness required a focus on the process rather than the goal.

The people thus realized the wisdom of their ancestors who had always placed great importance on the process of reaching decisions. Western society has become almost exclusively goal-oriented because a process approach takes considerable time and patience. The Native American wisdom keepers, people who are tradition bearers and considered wise, understood that if the process is constructed with the right spirit and intent, the whole, or result, would always be greater than the sum of its parts and would exceed individual expectations. Thus, the Unangan leaders decided that unity and elimination of divisiveness could only be achieved by acknowledging and respecting each other as truly equal in the decision-making process.

They decided that every representative of the community, including not just the governing organizations but also Elders and the Unangan priest from the local parish, would sit at the decision-making table with total veto power over any major decision. At first, the Unangan leaders had strong reservations about granting such power to each individual representative. The historical distrust made the leaders wary of decisions being made out of self-interest instead of through a more altruistic concern about the future well-being of the community. So, they established rules: no personal attacks or criticisms within or outside the circle of decision-makers, no use of derogatory terms or nuances of behavior that signal something negative in any context, and total honesty. Simply put, the Unangan leaders were able to reestablish their traditional values of mutual respect and honor in the decision-making process—and it worked. Individual leaders were careful not to abuse their power, and no one spoke derogatorily of others because they understood it would hurt their ability to move their suggestions within the decision-making circle. Everyone felt they were heard and
listened to when they spoke within the circle. Egos were put aside as everyone was treated equally and with respect. Deliberations went as long as was necessary to achieve a consensus because people realized that without consensus no decision could be made. During this period, the Unangan leadership went to unprecedented lengths to keep the community informed of the daily process.

The wisdom keepers, whom the Unangan drew upon during this crisis, were absolutely right. Results far exceeded expectations as the focus shifted from goal to process. Ten years later, Saint Paul developed one of the most robust economies of any rural community in Alaska. However, it was not an easy road and required much effort and persistence.