Wisdom Keeper (9 page)

My first job was something probably only a handful of people in the United States have ever done. I was fifteen years old and preparing to go to the University of Washington. I needed to make money as my parents were financially poor like the rest of the community. My friend Craig Euneau, son of the island manager at the time, suggested that I work alongside him for Lee Paola. At the time, Lee offered the only non-government employment in the village and that appealed to me, although his business was not entirely unconnected to the government. Lee operated the fur seal rendering plant through a federal contract to grind up fur seal meat carcasses, not taken by local people for food, to be used in a second-generation fur business: feed for mink farms.

Lee was a friendly but tough man and an extremely hard worker. “So, you up to working for me? I need someone who is reliable and strong, willing to work long hours doing whatever is needed!” Lee stated firmly, gazing intently at me. At the time I was a skinny teen, but I had, as they say, plenty of pluck. “I can do the job!” I replied firmly.

“Good, then you start first thing in the morning. Craig will show you what you need to do.”

I felt proud.
I am not working for the government!
I said to myself, feeling satisfied that I was still a rebel. Little did I know what was in store for me. I began working on the day of the largest kill of fur seals: some 3,000 seals. The people had taken no more than a 100 seals for food, leaving about 2,900 seals to be processed that day.

I showed up at the processing plant at 6:00 the next morning. Craig took me to the gear room where we suited up in heavy rain-pants and jackets, with rubber gloves, rain cap, and hip boots. I wondered why we
needed all this gear and protection, but I didn't have to wonder long.

Craig was a big guy for his age. He was the same age as me, but, except for a few of us, most Unangan boys stayed away from the son of the government island manager. I was taught to be kind to everyone, however, and my parents and grandfather never said a bad word about “white people” despite the horrible treatment they received throughout their lives. In all the years before Craig's father showed up, the government agents were relentlessly condescending and racist, never believing that Unangan people were their equals. Even the law did not recognize Unangan as citizens of the United States until 1966. Until then, we were “wards” of the government, to be treated like wayward children, to be pushed into becoming like the “white man.” Unangan were not allowed to vote in U.S. elections, or even in state elections after Alaska entered the Union in 1959.

I befriended Craig, nevertheless. I liked the fact that this awkward young man was a rebel at heart, but a kind and intelligent rebel. His father was a Native American himself, from the lower 48, and that's probably why Craig was not racist. Most of the adults in the village liked his father. Howard was the first outside agent to treat our people like people, even if all the other government employees on the island did not.

“Okay, the trucks are going to start coming in from the killing fields and we gotta be ready,” Craig said. By ready, he meant standing inside the chute where the large trucks would raise their dumps and discharge the bloody cargo into the building. Adjacent to the chute was a conveyer line of grotesque hooks that circled around to the meat grinder. Our job was to grab the forty-to-fifty-pound skinned seal carcasses and impale the heads or necks on the hooks. That was it. I thought that this job would be a cinch. I thought.

The first truckload of some two hundred seals was unceremoniously dumped into the chute, and bloody carcasses spilled all across the concrete floor. The sight of these once incredibly beautiful, graceful, strong animals transformed into ghoulish-looking bloody husks, with bulging eyeballs still attached, chilled me to the bone. The way the carcasses were treated was in extremely stark contrast to the way my Aachaa taught me
to regard the animals, even when we killed them for food. I was utterly disgusted, nauseated, and horrified. Then my teenage self took hold. “I will show them I can do the job as good as any white person!” I lifted the first carcasses and flung them onto the large hooks. Craig followed. “We gotta make sure every hook has a seal!” he hollered over the din of the truck engine and conveyer motor. “And we gotta keep up, because it is going to get tough!”

It took us about a half hour to handle this truckload, but before we were finished, the next truck came, then another shortly thereafter, then another, until we were literally waist high in dead, bloody, seal carcasses. Each truck carried about 200 to 250 seal carcasses. Now I knew why we had on all this gear. After the first six hours of nonstop “hooking,” we had a lunch break. I was so beyond relieved, but even after six hours of “hooking,” seal carcasses were piled up five feet high off the floor and stretching at least thirty feet in any direction, and there were more truck loads coming in the afternoon!

I was already exhausted, and my back, neck, shoulder, and arm muscles ached. My fingers were tired in a way I'd never felt before in my life. Every inch of my outer gear was covered with dry blood, and the smell was abhorrent. Taking my rubber gloves off, my hands were yellow. The blood had actually soaked through the rubber! And there was dark encrusted blood underneath all my fingernails. Even my hair was encrusted in dried blood.

I hopped on Craig's small Honda, and we rode the mile into town to my house. When I arrived, my grandfather, brothers and sisters, my uncle, and my mother were all preparing to eat at the dinner table. Unangan have their main meal at midday. It was a strategy for survival as the men needed the energy to do hard work every day. My dad, however, was still out on the killing fields, having begun his grisly work at 4:00 a.m.—the government made it clear that the stunners would receive a special bonus at the end of the season.

Gathered at the lunch table, my family looked at me aghast as I arrived at the house. I must have looked like some kind of monster, covered with blood the way I was and smelling quite foul. “Wash up real
good!” my mom ordered. I washed for fifteen minutes. When I thought I was presentable, I went to the dinner table. My sister Rinna plugged her nose in disgust. “Eeeee, you smell terrible!” she exclaimed. “I'm not sitting here with you!” Everyone quickly left the dinner table, leaving me to try to eat alone. My stomach was still nauseated, but I knew I had to eat. I looked down at my plate. We were eating seal meat that day.

That fall, after I graduated from high school, I traveled to Seattle to attend the University of Washington. I was the third person in my village to go to college. Two others had gone before me but never returned to the island, and one person from Saint George. So I and a childhood buddy of mine, Pat Pletnikoff, who was accepted at Western Washington University that year, did not have anyone to talk to about what life would be like at the university.

I did not know how to take a bus or use a telephone when I arrived in Seattle. Still, I found my way to campus and to Terry Hall, the dorm to which I was assigned. It was ten stories high!

I was assigned to the top floor on what was, as I learned later, one of two floors housing the “crème de la crème” of students who lived in that dorm. Most of them were white and came, as I learned, from relatively rich families—including my roommate. We greeted each other and talked about where we came from. As it turned out, we became good friends. Still, I could not relate to the rest of the students in the dorm, and I found they could not relate to me.
They have a strange sense of humor,
I thought to myself. Quick-witted would be a term that fit. Native humor is much slower and usually self-deprecating, so I often could not join their conversations. In fact, I had difficulty relating to most conversations around the campus, so I felt very alone.

The next day at registration I was asked what classes I wanted to take. I had gone through all the university classes in the book they had sent me on Saint Paul and already had classes in mind. I did not know that a student's average class load was twelve to fifteen credits. I thought that classes were organized the same way they were in high school, so I
signed up for twenty credits, which was six classes.

The campus was so massive it took up to half an hour to walk between classrooms. I remember the time my sister Eva visited me at the “U of W.” I was giving her a tour when she remarked, “Wow, the University of Washington is sure big,” to which I responded in the affirmative, not knowing what she meant. She was commenting on one building at the “U” and not the whole campus.

And the class sizes were huge too, averaging about three hundred students—half the population of my village! At first I was a bit overwhelmed by this, having come from an average high school classroom of about twenty students. It took some time to adjust. I neither had a face-to-face conversation with the instructors during the entire four years at the university, nor did I ever see an academic counselor. I had been taught to figure things out by myself from my traditional upbringing, and with some effort I did.

Not satisfied to just study the issue of Native American economic poverty, I decided, in my sophomore year, to ask the university president why there were only four students who identified themselves as Native American at a university with an enrollment of 34,000 in a state with twenty-two Indian reservations at the time. I knew that the quickest way to get an answer or decision about something was to talk directly to the person in charge. I went directly to the president's office complex where his secretary asked me if I had an appointment, which I did not. “He is a very busy man, and anyone who wants to see him has to make an appointment,” she said kindly.

“Well, maybe I can just wait here in case he has some time to talk with me,” I replied. This response prompted her to ask why I wanted to see him. “I am an Unangan Native American from Alaska, and I was wondering why there are only four other Native Americans at a university surrounded by Indian reservations. I thought the president might tell me why.”

She studied me carefully and decided I was sincere about seeing him. “Just a minute, I will see if he can see you,” she said. A few moments later she returned, saying “the president will see you, but he has only a
few minutes.”

I thanked her as I entered the large office of the president. He was in his fifties or sixties, wearing a three-piece suit, milling over his paperwork when I walked in. “Good morning, young man. I am President Odegaard. I understand you have an issue with the university that needs some attention,” he said in a soft voice.

“It is embarrassing to the university that it would educate 34,000 students and only four identify themselves as Native American,” I said. “And on top of that, this university is in a state with twenty-two Indian reservations!”

He thought for a moment, then said, “Okay, you are right. How would you like to start a program to recruit Native Americans to the university? I will give you a state car, an office, and a small budget. Not only would you recruit them but counsel them if they need help. What do you say?” I was dumbfounded at this outcome. I did not think he would make such a decision on the spur of the moment and ask an eighteen-year-old to do such a job, but he did. Thus began my work, at five hundred dollars a month, visiting Indian reservations to recruit students to the university, and I had use of a large state car for travel. I credit the people of Saint Paul for always affirming me every day. By the time I went to the university I was raised to believe in myself, never to see obstacles. The program I started became known as the American Indian Education Program, which still exists today. And the University of Washington now has a department dedicated to Native American studies.

It took me four and a half years to complete the university requirements for graduation because, by the time I reached my junior year, I was still unsure about what I wanted to major in. I approached the Dean of the School of Community Development and asked if I could take independent study for the remaining years I had left. I proposed a study of the reasons most Native American tribes were in a state of economic poverty. I planned to visit several reservations in and around Washington State. The study was approved, and in two years I visited thirty or more reservations in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Arizona.

During this time I was also visiting Phyllis and her parents. I first saw
Phyllis on Saint Paul when I was fourteen and she was eleven, and she came running out of the community hall one day. I didn't yet know her, but I knew she would be my wife. She and her parents later moved from Saint Paul Island to Bothell, Washington, approximately twenty-five miles north of Seattle. I had never let Phyllis, or her parents, know about my childhood premonition, but we reconnected and grew very close. Phyllis and I married when I was twenty and she was eighteen.

As the youngest director of a university Native American program, I was invited to be part of the Convocation of American Indian Scholars. The gathering was composed of one hundred selected scholars who were dedicated to addressing human rights violations of Indigenous people in the western hemisphere. The first meeting I attended was at Princeton University. It was a heady crowd for an eighteen-year-old. This was where I met N. Scott Momaday, the first Native American Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist; Vine Deloria, who wrote
Custer Died for Your Sins;
and Buffy Sainte-Marie, an internationally recognized Native American singer/songwriter—to name just three.

This was also when I first became aware of the brutality of some governments toward aboriginal peoples. We watched a homemade movie showing Indigenous people from a South American country being slaughtered by a machine gun from a helicopter. The people being attacked were throwing spears at the helicopter. The killing was that government's effort to stop the Natives' resistance to construction of a road to access precious metals and oil.

For the better part of the week we discussed how to stop these atrocities. Finally, a decision was made we thought would not only end the persecution, but restore land to the Indigenous people. We would quietly reveal the footage to the government and private companies involved, with the threat that it would be shown for all the world to see if they did not comply with what the Convocation wanted. An agreement was reached and the atrocities stopped, with provisions to restore some lands back to the Indigenous peoples.

In the summer of 1968, the tribal president of the Aleut Community of Saint Paul, Gabe Stepetin, asked Patrick (Pat) Pletnikoff and me to meet with the council. I thought that this must be some kind of big deal, especially since the entire council was seated when we arrived. Gabe explained, “Congress just passed the bill giving us rights as citizens, including the right to form a city. But, we don't have any money to create a city. We would like to hire the both of you to represent us in Washington to seek funds for this effort and any other thing that may help us. We know both of you are in college, and, therefore, you speak English better than us and have experience working in the white world, which is why we selected you. We will give you four thousand dollars to cover your expenses and pay. What do you say?”

I was surprised that the tribal officials would even consider hiring two kids with just a year of college under their belts to be the tribal representatives and help implement the Fur Seal Act of 1966. I stood up and answered affirmatively. While I was responding, Gabe said, “Larry, why don't you speak English?” I realized then that I had picked up the way the white people spoke, which was not village English. “I am sorry. I did not mean to speak this way. It was just something I picked up in college. I will speak English from now on.” What Gabe was saying was that I talked like a white person.

So, Patrick and I were hired as tribal representatives that summer. We knew that Flore Lekanof from Saint George, the only person who went to college, besides Patrick, and graduated from Saint George, worked in DC for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, so we called him. He agreed to arrange a meeting with Senator Stevens, the senator from Alaska. As representatives of the tribe, that was all we knew what to do.

We arrived at Dulles Airport. I decided to rent a car for us but did not have the presence of mind to ask for a map. I must have driven for six hours before we found DC. It was only twenty miles from the airport. I stopped at the first hotel I saw. It was the Marriot and expensive.

The next morning we drove into DC and hit Dupont Circle. I got into the Circle okay, but couldn't find a way out. I drove around and
around the circle. Cars were in every lane. Finally, I decided that the only way to get out was to cut across three lanes to an exit, and to the sound of honking horns. At last, we found the office where Flore worked. He introduced us to the Commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, then took us to Senator Stevens's office on Capitol Hill.

It was an ornate office with a couch and a large mahogany desk. Mementos from all over Alaska were on every wall, including photographs. Senator Stevens greeted us warmly, while Flore explained that we were representing the tribe on Saint Paul. I said, “I am glad you agreed to meet us, Senator. We are here to see if it would be possible to get some funds to create a city as authorized by the Fur Seal Act of 1966. And possibly to see if we could get a boat harbor started. We are still dependent on the government for jobs and the maintenance of critical systems that support the island. Although we pay for these services, it is subsidized.” I had added the boat harbor because my uncle, Eddie, who had passed away a year earlier, thought it would be a great economic base. I thought so too, so I brought it up without consulting anyone.

Senator Stevens thought about it for a moment and said, “Okay, I will see what I can do. I realize that the people of the Pribilofs have had it hard under government rule, and you all don't have much money. So, I will see what I can do.” That was it. After saying appropriate goodbyes, we left the office feeling as if we had accomplished what we had set out to do. When we got back to the car, I had a parking ticket. In fact, during our stay in DC I received seventeen parking tickets.

No one heard from Senator Stevens until that fall, several months later, while I was at college. The tribal council received word from his office that it would receive fifty thousand dollars to start up the city and that the senator would come for a visit perhaps the following summer. He made good and visited Saint Paul and Saint George in the summer of 1970, at which time, in preparation for the visit, the tribal government of Saint George ordered the public works crew to bulldoze across a road adjacent to the village. That was to be the first airstrip on Saint George since flights first stated operating in Alaska. Prior to that point, mail had been dropped from an airplane.