Wisdom Keeper (3 page)

I grew up hearing the sounds of tens of thousands of seals as I went to sleep every night and as I awoke every morning. I loved the sound of the seals. When I was a child, there were as many as 1.4 million fur seals on the Pribilof Islands. Eighty percent of the northern fur seals bred on the Pribilofs. The bull seals would arrive in May from the Bering Sea, where they stayed most of the year, to establish their territory and await the arrival of the females in June. They would never leave their territory, even for food, until they finished mating. When the females arrived, having spent the winter thousands of miles off the coast of southern California and Southeast Alaska, the bull seals would “grab” them, some as little as a fifth of the size of a bull, to be part of their harem, which during my childhood consisted of as many as one hundred females. Once a bull impregnated a female, the bull left its territory and went to sea to feed for the first time since its arrival.

Female seals have two uteruses, one to deliver a ten-pound pup and the other to become impregnated again about three days later. The pups congregate with other pups in the breeding rookery when their mothers venture out to forage. Upon return, the pup and female find each other among the thousands of fur seals through the sound each makes. The female is known to be out foraging for three to ten days, but in the Pribilofs the maximum was seven days before fur seals began declining in the 1970s.

Over time I learned a lot of the language of the northern fur seals. I knew the sounds of a bull seal mating, the warning roars as some bull seal's territory was encroached upon by another bull, bull seals fighting, a bull seal alerting others that he is moving without threat to other bull seals, a seal awakened by surprise, the bleating of pups calling for their
mothers, and a mother searching for her pup. All such sounds mixed into some kind of chaotic and rhythmic melody from every rookery day and night.

Growing up with the 1.4 million seals in the Pribilofs was magical and mysterious. I would watch the seals for hours either from the land, or when I was out with the men fishing for halibut. The seals are extremely agile, alert, and highly social animals, always in groups onshore or at sea. The prime breeding males had manes, just like lions or bears—in fact, they are known as “sea bears.” If you watch a seal run on land, its front and hind quarters move exactly as a bear would. Like a bear, the males are highly territorial and the females aggressively protect their young regardless of the source of danger. The prime males are as dangerous as any grizzly bear; no one messes with these males. They can move faster than any man over the rocks and within seconds can cause severe injury as they sink their canine teeth through flesh or fur with a viciously strong shaking action of their muscular necks. Fights between these males are frequent, intruding younger or older bulls are very likely to have large parts of their fur and skin ripped out by the prime males, and several bulls may attack an intruder together. Rarely, however, do such encounters end in the death of a territorial intruder.

At sea, the seals are a contrast to their lives onshore. Most of the time, the seals at sea are simply floating aimlessly or playing. They are not aggressive there except in the case of a bull seal chasing a reluctant female to mate in the water. They are unafraid of humans and can come up to the side of a boat, craning their necks high out of the water as they curiously stare at us. All seals move very quickly and gracefully in the water. I have always been amazed at the agility and flexibility of the seal's body, as it twists and turns rapidly in an underwater ballet that is as graceful as anything anyone would hope to see in their lifetime. No one can tell me that seals don't play. On certain types of stormy days, when the waves would break far from shore, the seals, young and old, would “catch a wave” and surf either on top of the wave or immediately inside the wave. I loved watching the silhouettes of seals inside the clear water of a steep wave. When the wave was expended or ready to break onshore,
the seal would turn around and catch another wave offshore. Sometimes, under the right conditions, the seals would play like this for a better part of an hour. In the fall, I would watch the seal pups, born in June and July, play for hours at sea, finding and playfully shaking seaweed picked off the sea bottom, surfing on small waves, or chasing after other seal pups.

The only threats to the seals, besides humans, are the orcas and Steller sea lions, the latter of which are not like the gentler California counterpart. They are larger and much fiercer—the female is larger than the male and is responsible for finding food so that her pup can survive on her milk. One fall day I watched as a male and female transient orca pair moved up to the rocks along the rookery where seal pups were gathered in pods. Astonishingly, the orcas started “playing” with the pups. The orcas would nuzzle below the pup and gently toss the pup into the air. The pups would twist, nose down, back into the water, like some kind of Olympic diving-board exhibition. The pups obviously loved this play and gathered around the orcas to get “their turn” to be thrown into the air. Suddenly, as if a signal passed between the orcas, they simultaneously attacked the pups when their defenses were down. What pups survived, the sea lions would then chase in open water and eat when caught. That day, I saw at least a dozen seal pups eaten in a matter of a couple of minutes, two and three at a time.

More frequently, orcas at sea would stalk and even steer seals toward other waiting orcas. We could always tell when this had happened as there was the inevitable large circle of blood on the water surrounded by four or five orcas. We would never purposely dare to come into the circle of orcas when a seal was taken—many times a female orca and her calf would be feeding on the seal while at least two large male relatives would maintain patrol in an invisible defense perimeter around the vulnerable pair. One time, we accidentally wandered into this invisible perimeter in a skiff and soon after spotted two huge dorsal fins speeding toward our boat. The boat operator quickly started up his seventy-horse power outboard and headed in a 180-degree direction at maximum speed. We ran for ten minutes before stopping, when we didn't see the flukes anymore in the direction we came from. We sighed in relief; however, the boat
operator then looked below the outboard and saw the two huge males looking up at him. They had followed us to make sure we didn't turn back. Once we were an adequate distance from the feeding area, they turned around and headed back to the female and her calf.

Today, sadly, there may be three to five females to the northern fur seal harem instead of a hundred, with many bulls, upon establishing territory, waiting in vain for a female. Northern fur seal numbers in the Pribilofs have declined over the past 30 years to about 450,000, probably due to climate changes affecting migration patterns, location of food, and availability of food sources; discarded plastics and rope wrapped around seals' necks causing them to slowly choke to death or die of infection; and the likely contribution of commercial fishing by factory trawlers that target food sources eaten by the seals, sea lions, and seabirds of the Bering Sea.

Gone are the times I remember the most, when I would go to a rookery and see the seals by the tens of thousands.

I was born into a community on Saint Paul that was subject to a form of slavery created by the U.S. government after the Treaty of Cession in 1867. I was seventeen years old when we finally gained our civil and human rights in 1966 by an act of Congress. The experiences of my childhood under U.S. government domination, the efforts of our freedom fighters, my Unangan legacy of two hundred years of servitude to first Russia then the United States, and the heroic struggles of my people have formed the basis of my life's trials, tribulations, and triumphs to this day.

My mother, Stefanida Zacharof, and my father, John Paul Merculieff, were born in the Pribilofs, and experienced both the beauty and the ugliness of the islands we call “Birthplace of the Winds” and “Galapagos of the North.” My mother was born out of wedlock on Saint George Island. Her mother had had an affair outside her marriage, and this was the source of great pain for my mother who was raised by her mother and stepfather. Her stepfather verbally and emotionally abused my mother for years in such a way that she rarely spoke of her childhood as an adult. I do know that when the family got together for meals, she had to sit alone. The only other stories, though scant, I heard from my mother began with World War II, where she was part of a U.S. government evacuation and subsequent internment of Pribilof Aleut people in abandoned canneries at Funter Bay in Southeast Alaska. It was at Funter Bay that my mother and father met as teenagers.

I investigated this period of internment in my people's history while in my early twenties. In 1942, the Japanese military had invaded the Aleutian Islands of Attu and Kiska and bombed Dutch Harbor on Unalaska Island. Attu Aleuts were taken to Hokkaido, Japan, as prisoners for the duration of the war. It had been the first time in contemporary
history that a foreign power had invaded and occupied U.S. shores and captured American prisoners. Consequently, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the U.S. War Department were concerned that the Japanese military would move on to the Pribilofs because of their source of rich and thick northern fur seal pelts. The coffers of the U.S. Treasury, long supplied forcibly by my people, were at risk.

The MV Delarof, a U.S.-commissioned vessel, arrived on Saint Paul Island in June 1942. The Unangan people were given a few hours' notice to prepare to abandon the village. Everyone was to bring no more than one suitcase and leave everything else in their homes. The government officials gave little information about where or why they were going, or even when they would be returned. They didn't even know that the U.S. military would occupy their homes when they left. These homes now belonged to the U.S. government.

The Delarof then picked up the Saint George Island people under the same circumstances and set sail for Funter Bay. The people were kept in the holds of the ship, and many got sick. When the ship arrived at its destination, the people were dropped off along with two large crates of dried bread, the only food the government provided. Apparently, the government believed that, since Unangan were an Indigenous people, they could live off wild foods that were abundant in the area. They didn't understand that none of them knew how to live in a rainforest, having lived in the Pribilofs since they were forcibly removed from Unalaska and Umnak by the Russian fur traders in 1767.

It wasn't until mid-life that I began asking my mother questions about her experiences during the war:

As I listened to my mother tell this story, a lot was not mentioned because either she didn't want to remember or, English being her second language, she didn't know all the words. I knew the facts already, though: The World War II Commission documented from firsthand accounts of survivors that ten percent of the interned Unangan, primarily the elderly and the infants, died from malnutrition, disease, and heat prostration in the two years they were imprisoned by the U.S. government in these
abandoned canneries. The government doctor resigned in protest of the squalid conditions and lack of medical supplies.

Several Unangan men escaped from these camps to Juneau to join the war effort. The U.S. government agent in charge of the Unangan, not wanting to lose the men skilled at killing seals, charged that the men were not U.S. citizens, but the War Department decided otherwise. It was during the time the men were in Juneau that they discovered that other people didn't live like the Unangan were forced to live. They were free to go and do as they pleased, and a government agent didn't dictate every aspect of their lives. It must have been a real shock to these Unangan to see what freedom really was. This realization led the Unangan men to the Alaska Native Brotherhood (ANB), organized and led primarily by the Tlingit people of Southeast Alaska. The ANB was at the forefront of the battle for Alaska Native human rights and had hired a brilliant lawyer, Felix Cohen, to represent their cause. The ANB instructed Mr. Cohen to help the Unangan as well, and this was to mark the beginning of the Unangan fight for freedom that would take twenty-one years after the interned Unangan were returned to the Pribilof Islands in the summer of 1945.

In 1943, the Unangan men left behind were forced to leave their families in Funter Bay to kill seals on Saint Paul and Saint George Islands in order to supply the oil to lubricate war machinery and weapons. The men did not want to leave as there was so much sickness in the camp. They were afraid that they would come back to find their loved ones gone. But, forced to go by the government agent, they returned to Funter Bay three months later to find many of their fears had been realized: scores of people had died that summer from pneumonia and other sicknesses.

Upon their return to the Pribilofs in 1945, the Unangan discovered that their homes had been trashed and valuables stolen by the U.S. military personnel when they were stationed on the Pribilofs. Everything considered valuable was taken, including most of the old Russian Orthodox religious objects in the homes and church.

Unangan from the Aleutian Islands of Akutan, Unalaska, Umnak,
and Atka had also been evacuated and interned in Southeast Alaska and suffered equally. When Unalaska Unangan were returned, they found that most of the land they had lived on had been sold by the U.S. military to private fish companies without Unangan knowledge or consent. And the Unangan taken from two Unalaska Island villages, Chernofski and Makushin, were returned to the village of Unalaska after the war without means to return to their communities. Many of the Unangan from Attu Island who had been taken as prisoners of war in northern Japan, subsisting only on rice, died before release. Those who survived were forcibly relocated to Atka in a U.S. government decision that determined it was too costly to rebuild the homes on Attu that had been destroyed by the Japanese military. Most of the survivors of this ordeal never talked about these times, not until the U.S. government commissioned an investigatory body headed by Hawaiian Senator Daniel Inouye in the 1970s. The World War II Commission was charged with documenting abuses of Japanese-Americans and Unangan during their internment and to recommend steps to redress the abuses.

The Unangan men who had seen and experienced what real freedom was like, and what it was like to be treated like a real person, set out in earnest to strategize how they would change the Unangan status as a captive labor force for the U.S. government. With the aid of ANB leaders and Mr. Cohen, they set out to establish the Unangan as a federally recognized tribe under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934—a law that recognized Native Americans as U.S. citizens and tribes as their vehicle for self-government.

Since the U.S. government had established rigid rules about Unangan gatherings—only gatherings for church services were allowed—Terenty Philemonof, Gabe Stepetin, Irish Stepetin, Alexander Melovidov, Elary Gromoff, Mamant Emanof Sr., and my uncle, Iliodor “Eddie” Merculieff, secretly devised a plan for covert meetings among themselves: Gabe Stepetin came up with the idea to propose to the government agent that the men be allowed to put on a play or performance for the white government employees on the island, and to do so required rehearsals. The government agent swallowed the story and allowed the men to gather.
The men actually produced a play during this time, but no one remembers what it was about.

As a result of these meetings in 1948 and 1949, a petition was smuggled off the island for recognition of the establishment of the Unangan Communities of Saint Paul and Saint George under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 as amended in 1936 (to include Alaska Native peoples). The men sought to gain the human rights that the Pribilof Unangan had been deprived of since first being enslaved by the Russian fur traders, who had brought them to the islands, and then by the U.S. government.

From the time the U.S. government gained control of the Pribilofs after the Treaty of Cession with Russia in 1867, Unangan had been a captive labor force, first for two private companies the government had contracted with, then for the U.S. government when it assumed direct administration of the Pribilofs in 1910. From 1910 until the early 1960s, Unangan were not allowed to leave the islands, own their own homes, or write letters to anyone on the outside unless such letters were first censored by the government agent. The government agent served as judge, jury, and law enforcer in a colonial dictatorship over the Unangan. Food, government housing, and clothing were rationed as pay for the back-breaking work of the Unangan men who worked seasonally up to seventeen hours a day for three months, killing seals and removing and processing their pelts. Men were debilitated by the time they reached the age of thirty-five.

The Pribilof Unangan men directed Mr. Cohen to draft an Indian Reorganization Act charter, which he formally submitted to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. When the charter was granted in 1951, as their first official act, with the aid of Cohen, the first organized Unangan tribal council launched a claim against the U.S. government for failure to deal with Pribilof Unangan fairly and honorably, and for violating the terms of the Treaty of Cession that required the U.S. government to treat Unangan as U.S. citizens with all the rights and privileges of citizenship. This lawsuit was filed with the Indian Claims Commission, which had jurisdiction over claims of Native Americans throughout the United States. The lawsuit was vigorously opposed by the U.S. government,
and so it took twenty-seven years to reach a judgment in favor of the Unangan. The government lawyers, however, appealed the decision to force the Unangan to settle out of court in 1978. By this time, most of the men who began this effort were dead.

From beginning to end, Pribilof Unangan were represented by five different attorneys, all of whom took the case pro bono. A former state supreme court justice, Roger Conner, was the first to take over the case from Cohen on behalf of the Unangan. After Justice Conner died, Anchorage attorney Lloyd Miller took over the case. After Lloyd Miller retired, Don Green and Stephen Truitt finally won the lawsuit. Through the efforts of these good men, the Unangan were able to prove that the U.S. government had rationed an equivalent of 1,700 calories per day for each working man to kill seals in extremely arduous labor over 8 to 17 hours daily during 3 months of every summer. In dramatic contrast, the attorneys demonstrated that German POWs received an average of 1,900 calories per day to do essentially nothing.

Meanwhile, the seals were the reason the U.S. government was on the Pribilofs in the first place. Seal pelts brought a considerable profit to the government every year on the backs of the captive Unangan labor force who were the only ones who knew how to kill the seals so efficiently. No one else would do such dirty work without just compensation and fair treatment, but the Unangan didn't know that they were the only labor force held captive by the U.S. government in the entire United States, and the only labor force in U.S. history that made a profit for the U.S. government. The Unangan thought everyone was treated this way by the government, having already had over a hundred years of slavery as their legacy before the U.S. government appeared on the scene.

The Pribilof Unangan finally achieved political independence after the first director of the Alaska Human Rights Commission, African-American Willard Bowman, led an investigation in the early 1960s. The Commission's report eventually reached Congress, and Senator Bob Bartlett led a congressional investigation in 1964 that led to the Unangan civil rights bill, ironically called the Fur Seal Act of 1966.
This act recognized Pribilof Unangan rights to vote in state and federal elections, own their own homes, and receive full civil service wages. Little did the Unangan know the challenge to the human spirt that lay ahead.