Wisdom Keeper (19 page)

Finally, with the help of my partner, I brought the great halibut into the boat. The wondrous and mysterious fish surrendered without further resistance. My partner's eyes welled up in tears as we both realized the significance of this moment for the halibut and for each of us. The halibut's death is filled with meaning as he gives its life to us with dignity, power, and grace so that we may sustain ourselves physically, emotionally, culturally, and spiritually.

Honoring the halibut in the way taught for generations, we spent the day carefully and respectfully cutting up the halibut, making sure not to waste any part of it. We returned its skeleton back to the sea so that the halibut could choose to return to feed someone else. We drummed and gave a prayer of thanksgiving. We gave away some of the halibut to many in the village, and there was still plenty to meet our own needs for the rest of the year.

I am thankful for the many blessings and bounty given to me by the halibut and the Bering Sea. After decades of traditional fishing, the spirits of the halibut and the Bering Sea continue to teach me, their Unangan apprentice, my place in the great Circle of Life. After all is said and done,
this is the essential gift of wisdom from the halibut heart, given to all who have the courage to learn from, and master, the Unangan way of fishing for thousands of years.

In 1990, I received a sizable grant to support the meeting of Elders to discuss the Bering Sea and its people. I felt that we needed their guidance because we were facing great changes in the Bering Sea, the birds, and the animals. Seabirds and several species of marine mammals were declining at an unprecedented rate, first noticed by my people in 1977. Seabird chicks were falling off cliff ledges in larger numbers than ever in living memory, too weak to maintain their hold. Adult birds were obviously emaciated, with their breast bones sticking out and their chest muscles gone. Steller sea lions were eating seals in greater frequency than ever before, and fur seal pelts from the subsistence take were so thin that we could see through them when put up toward a light. We knew an ecosystem-wide phenomenon was occurring given that depth foragers, surface foragers, and near and distance foragers that bred on the Pribilofs were all precipitously declining. Many of these species are continuing their decline today. The birds, fish, and wildlife are key to the people of the Bering Sea, and so anything happening to them affects us directly. We depend on these animals for the nutrition, subsistence, spirituality, culture, health, and well-being of our communities.

I established the Bering Sea Council of Elders and sent invitations to all the Elders I could think of. Word spread about the Council. In all, we had twenty-seven of the most revered Elders from seven regions of Alaska attend four meetings a year, four days per meeting, for four years. The Yupik Elders spoke only their language, so an interpreter translated for us through translation equipment we managed to borrow from the Alaska Federation of Natives, an umbrella organization of all the Native groups in Alaska.

I acted as coordinator for the Council, decided how to conduct the
meetings, and arranged for the meetings to be audio-recorded for subsequent review and action by the staff and me if necessary. However, I knew that the Elders wanted to be free of any constraints of time or procedure, so I simply set the place and date for meetings and left the rest up to them. It was, and is, unprecedented to have such a gathering for as long as four years on an inter-regional basis.

I learned a lot about how to conduct meetings from these Elders and continue to use their methods in my work to this day. We would first start off in prayer, with a different Elder leading in his or her own language at each meeting. Then what I witnessed could be a template for deliberations anywhere: Anyone who wanted to say something could speak. When someone spoke, no one interrupted, and the individual would speak as long as he or she wanted. No one kept notes to speak from. Everyone spoke from their hearts.

Each speaker, before saying anything, would affirm the prior speaker, even if he or she did not know the person—for example, “I see that the prior speaker chooses her words carefully when speaking and speaks wisely. I will take her comments into my heart to consider her thoughts.” Then, the speaker might speak from a completely opposite point of view, without use of any words that would be considered violent. Words are considered violent if they can hurt someone. For example, the speakers never said such things as “I disagree with you,” or “I think that is wrong,” or “I disagree.” The speaker simply spoke his or her own truths without reference to another. But, if the speaker agreed with another person, he or she might say so.

When everyone had a chance to speak on the topic, the deliberations were complete, and consensus on a subject would be intuited. No vote was ever taken. If there was no consensus, everyone understood that discussions would continue until there was consensus. Every meeting was conducted in this way.

Later the Council elected an Elder to chair the meetings, Walter Austin, a Tlingit from Southeast Alaska. He was chosen for his wisdom and ability to teach young people. In earlier years he had made his mistakes that he regretted, but he had learned from them and now was
on a good path. The Council then took on a form I had not envisioned. People started to attend as observers, and some even brought issues for the Council's guidance and consideration. One time the great-great-grandson of Chief Sitting Bull spoke before the Council, dressed in his traditional regalia. He had made a staff out of wood and placed a real raven on the top. A wolf's tail was tied on the bottom. He presented this staff to the Council and asked them to receive it as a gift. The Council accepted it.

The Council of Elders had several messages they wanted to share throughout. They were very concerned about the younger people, who do not know how to survive through difficult times because they have learned the Western ways and ignore their own ways. We must stop trying to “save” the Bering Sea and instead concentrate of learning how to live as a real human being. They feel an urgency to prepare young people. They want to find ways to interact with the young people. The young people don't know their own language, and the Elders speak more in their own language, making it difficult. Another difficulty the Elders recognized is that the young people are chasing the Western ways with their technologies, such as the computer and mobile phones, and their fast pace of modern times. These ways take the young person away from learning their language and their culture. The Elders recognized that the young get a Western education and pursue that, but it is done at the expense of learning their traditional ways that should come first or at least concurrent with learning the Western ways. They recognized that the Bering Sea is changing quickly, and that these changes may cause great difficulties in the future for coming generations. The coming generations need to be ready, and the only way to be ready is for young people to learn their own language, their traditional ways, and to become a real human being. Only being present in the moment and in the heart will the coming generations know what to do. It cannot be solved by the mind. This is the way of the real human being.

There will be hard times according to the Elders. And many people may suffer. The only way to prepare for these times is to be a real human being because the real human being is guided spiritually first,
then physically and mentally. The heart will tell the real human being what he or she must do. Then, the mind figures out how to accomplish what the heart says to do. The heart never lies and guides us impeccably.

The real human being knows how to be present in the moment and in the heart. In the old days, everyone was a real human being, in harmony with all in Creation. There were no prisons, no male-dominated hierarchies, no violence. There was peace, love, understanding of Mother Earth, and harmony with oneself and everything in existence. The Elders said that to be a real human being we must get out of the head and into the heart so that we can hear what the heart is saying. They were concerned that the younger generations can't tell the difference between messages from the heart and from the mind because these generations were schooled at an early age to think and that thinking is the mainstream society's idea of human intelligence.

It was an honor and a privilege to listen to and learn from these Elders. They conducted themselves with dignity and grace that was taught to them by their Elders before them. I now use what I learned from that day forward—how to listen, how to conduct oneself in meetings, the wisdom of the talking circle principles, and how to achieve consensus and prevent conflict. Society needs this wisdom today.

At the time I was the coordinator of the Bering Sea Council of Elders, composed of some of the most revered Elders in seven regions of Alaska, a Mapuche messenger delivered a message to the Alaskan Elders. The message was delivered personally because that was the protocol, and because they had no means of communication. They were physically very poor. The Argentinian government had forcibly removed them from productive lands in the 1950s to the desert where they barely eke out a living. The Council deliberated on who should be sent to South America. They had decided, for whatever reason, that I should go, but the Mapuche messenger had already left, so there was no way to let them know of the Council's decision.

I arrived in Argentina and traveled to the place where I was to meet my guide, a young Mapuche chief. I was explaining why I came instead of the Elders when he put his hand up, saying that the explanation was unnecessary as he already knew.

I asked, “How do you know?”

“Because the Elders told us it would be you coming,” he said.

“How did the Elders know?” I asked.

“They talked with the Earth and the Sky,” he said nonchalantly. Then I knew these Elders were real human beings who talked the Language of One. This language allows the person to communicate with everything, and especially with Mother Earth and Father Sky through use of what I call the “inner net,” not the internet. It is a way all peoples communicated a long time ago. There are still some people left who understand this language, and the Mapuche Elders clearly kept this knowledge.

My interpreter and I received instructions on how to get to the
ceremonial grounds two days from any civilization. As we were leaving, the chief explained that “there was a delegation of Kechua/Ayamara spiritual leaders that will be there to greet me. They came by horseback and traveled for two weeks just to meet you,” he said. As we drove to the sacred ceremonial grounds, I wondered why they would travel by horseback for two weeks just to meet me.

When we got to the ceremonial grounds at a special sacred place, the spiritual leaders were there, just like the chief said. When we got out of the car we had rented, the delegation of seven spiritual leaders approached. Through two interpreters we were able to talk. “We heard of your traditional name. Could you please tell us how you got the name, how you pronounce it, and what it means?” the eldest of the leaders asked.

I responded, “The name is Kuuyux. It means an arm extended out from the body, like a messenger from the Aleut to the modern world, a bridge. I got the name when I was four years old by the last Kuuyux. He gave me his name, which is a name given to one person in each lifetime amongst my people,” I explained.

They were visibly excited. The Elder spiritual leader responded, “We have exactly the same name, given in exactly the same way, and it means exactly the same thing. This confirms our stories that we were go-betweens for your people and those in South America thousands of years ago,” he said. And that is how I found out that our people did indeed go to South America thousands of years ago as I had heard from my Kuuyux.

The ceremonial grounds were in the high desert, where the temperature got as high as 125 degrees Fahrenheit during the day and 25 below at night—a hundred-degree temperature difference in one day! It was quite an experience for an Alaskan. I also saw firsthand how the Mapuche were forced to live a life of bare subsistence. The Mapuche people were concerned for their Elders because it gets very cold in the winter time, and they live in small shacks with one wood stove for heat. The stoves barely keep the shacks warm.

The region had not had rain for at least nine years or more, so a lot
of Mapuche people were gathered to conduct ceremonies—at least a hundred. Each day of ceremonies would begin at 6:00 a.m., when the sun would rise, and end at 1:00 a.m. the next day, and this went on for four days. The ceremony was begun by someone who had to be the oldest person in the world at the time, 123, plus, years old. Her name was Rosa, a blind woman who could only speak the Native language. She changed the way I look at “being old” because not only would she lead the ceremony, but she also stayed the entire time, day and night for four days! My assigned role along with many others was to give energy to the dancers, who danced day and night for four days, by standing next to them, focusing my energy on them, and chanting.

At the end of the ceremonies, we saw some incredible things. Two snow eagles flew clockwise, spiraling upward at one end of the sacred grounds, and two condors were at the other end, flying counterclockwise. As the wondrous birds flew out of sight, it began to rain. The Mapuche were fulfilling their part of the eagle and condor prophecy that every Native nation in the western hemisphere knows about. The prophecy says that when the eagle and condor meet and shed tears, a great healing will take place on Turtle Island. The Mapuche Elders were very happy, and we celebrated the finish of the ceremonies with a feast. The people offered what they had; it was the first (and probably the last) time I had horse, the only thing they had that could feed so many people.

There have been many eagle and condor gatherings before and since the Mapuche ceremony. Unbeknownst to me, the Mapuche had been concerned that the ceremony would die because the young ones didn't see the value in what the Mapuche Elders practiced—until they came to the ceremony and witnessed my role in this event. They saw that someone from atop the world had come to be in their ceremony and that if someone from so far away saw value in the Mapuche ceremonies, then there must be something of value to learn. So they are participating in the ceremonies once again. Rosa died about six months later. I found out when an English-speaking Mapuche friend called from Argentina saying that she had left the world because she felt her work was done.

I had a chance to meet with their young people, who told me how
poorly they were treated in Argentina. One seventeen-year-old boy sobbed as he related his experiences in the city with racism. My heart went out to the boy, and I told him, “Be thankful that you can still cry. It is a gift that you should never let anyone take away from you even if it is crying about your treatment. If you don't cry, your heart will be hardened. If your heart gets hard, the racist people can declare victory because you will not be of use to yourself or anyone else.” That young boy and I became good friends, and he would go with me everywhere while I was in Argentina. I gave him the flute that I cherished. Later, when we said our “so longs,” he gave me a flute in return, made simply out of a branch from a tree.