i enjoyed your post, its very important. my elders also taught these things, and stressed the improtance of dreaming to communicaate with the creator and nature. my greandmother sploke with trees and told me that hteir thoughts are very slow, you have to have a lot of patience to understand them. But she said they told her things. When I run my dogs I feel this way. like the forest is trying to tell me something. I am trying to learn how to listen.

Larry,

I feel for those communities that will need to move entirely – it’s a monumental cost both economically and personally. I’d like to see the Federal government help out, but the issue rubs me a bit the wrong way because from my perspective as an Alaskan, I hear two conflicting messages from the Native community: 1) We were here first and shouldn’t have to follow any US Federal laws that we don’t like and 2) the US Federal government is not doing enough for us. Well, why would you expect me to think such hypocracy is OK? You want my tax dollars yet you want special privileges that I can’t have. I have lived here as long as many natives – why shouldn’t I be allowed to subsistence hunt as much as I like? Why should your children get land allotments and not mine? How is this any different than me prohibiting you from using a cell phone or snow machine because it wasn’t part of your traditional culture? That is, why should you be allowed the advantages of both cultures and I shouldn’t? It seems to me that if you want my tax dollars to bail out your community, then your community should not be demanding to be legally treated differently than me in any other ways, especially based solely on race or heritage. We all have a heritage that has been ‘adapted’ by a more powerful culture, most of them in much more brutal ways than the Alaskan native culture was.

So I’d like to hear your comments on why you think the federal government should pay for these costs and not your native corporations? Or whether you see any hypocracy here in the way you make your case for help?

-Matt

Hello Matt. Thank you for your straightforward opinions and questions. I appreciate that. I have heard similar thoughts expressed in many forums over the years and a lot of them, in my opinion, are due to misinformation, misperceptions, lack of Knowledge about the history of Alaska Natives and this land, and misunderstandings. I will try to answer them as best I can.

Alaska Natives had all been nomadic throughout our ten thousand year history in Alaska, and moved from hunting camp to hunting camp, governed by seasons. It was only in the last century that westerners came and passed laws that made it unlawful to not put a child in school. This forced all Alaska Natives to settle in one place where the schools were built and profoundly changed the way Alaska Natives had to life. By settling in large numbers in one location, new requirements for getting water and disposing of sewage occurred in order to avoid sicknesses like giardia, impetigo, diahrea, and many forms skin diseases. Because of government regulations and laws, water and sewer infrastructure had to be built with government funds. No community in the U.S. was or is built without government funded infrastructure. There is no state in the union where their citizens are not enjoying the benefits of government subsidies or funding in such areas as agriculture, roads, bridges, airports, water, sewer. street lighting, road maintenance, health/food/technological/biological/ and other forms of research, and on and on. The communities affected by Katrina and other such events were and are supported by billions of dollars of government funds. Corporations are subsidized in many areas, including research, telecommunications, tax breaks, and food production subidies.

It is not well known that the numbers of Alaska Natives in this state before outside people arrived were between 700,00 and 1.5 million. These people occupied and used all the lands suitable for subsistence for ten thousand years. The epidemics brought in by outside people decimated as much as 80 percent of the people in the early 1800’s and early 1900’s. The survivors and their progeny continued to use and occupy a large areas of land. Some estimates were as high as 100 million acres into the 1960’s. The Alaska Native Land Claims Act conveyed title to only 40 million acres. This Act was passed to clear the cloud to land title so U.S. oil companies could drill and produce oil on the North Slope. As part of the deal, Alaska Native leaders agreed to forgo their likely strong legal claim to up to 60 million acres of Alaska Land in return for a monetary settlement of less than a dollar an acre. Only a handful of the 224 village corporations and most of the regional corporations formed with these monies are successful. But their success only generates a few hundred dollars a year in dividends for most of the corporation shareholders. Even so, no Alaska Native born after 1971 (the year the Act was passed) can be shareholders unless they inherit stock from a deceased relative. A majority of Alaska Natives live at or below the poverty line and so depend heavily on wild foods. The average Alaska Native consumes about 420 pounds of wild foods per year. And yet, the government passed another law in the 1980’s which effectively locked up or highly regulated Alaska Native subsistence uses in wildlife refuges, wild and scenic riivers, wilderness and the like. Alaska Natives are likely the most highly regulated citizens in the U.S. in terms of food security. And that comes at a great cost to their cultures and ways of living. If the average U.S. citizen were as regulated, I think there would be a huge outcry from the citizens.

Among my people, we lost more land when the U.S. military occupied a lot of Aleut lands during WWII, then sold the lands they occupied when they were finished with them…such as lands in Dutch Harbor on Unalaska Island. The military took over Adak Island in the Aleutians and did not allow the former residents to return after they were repatriated from Japanese prisons. The residents of this land were never compensated. The list of injustices go on and on and I don’t want to belabor the point. The salient point is, what we receive is not charity. It was paid for by loss of lands, life, and liberties.

I hope this answers some of your questions.

Larry

Dear S. Little Wolf. Thank you for your comments. Your grandmother is of the wise generation that soon will be lost. I am heartened to know you listen to her and , no doubt, to the Elders who carry such wisdom.

Larry

Larry,

Thank you for the thoughtful reply. And yes, I do hope we can continue to talk bluntly and sincerely without fear of sounding rude or arrogant.

While I do not mean to diminish the hardships that native Alaskans have endured, in fairness it seems to me that it has really been the traditional culture of native Alaskan that has suffered most, not native Alaskans as people. This is certainly true when compared to the other dozen or more forced assimilations or ethnic cleansings that have occurred in the 20th century (eg, in Germany, Cambodia, Iraq, Rwanda, Serbia etc). And if we are to go back to the time of Columbus and the Spanish invasions of the Americas that led to the plagues that decimated the indigenous populations, then there are a few hundred more deliberate ethnic cleansings we need to add to the list. By comparison to these, what happened to native Alaskans as people barely ranks on the list of atrocities committed by man to man.

I could argue that what happened to my people was much worse, for example. My grandparents were born in Ireland. My great-grandfather lived through ‘potato famines’ caused totally by the British desire to ‘cleanse’ the countryside of my ilk and my cousins lived through many similar cultural and physical horrors in terrorism from both sides in Northern Ireland up until 30 years ago. Should I define myself as an Irish American and try to make the world feel guilty about what happened to my elders? This can only end in wasted effort at best and more violence at worst. Even as a 40 year old, none of this happened to me anyway and the people that caused the problem initially are long since dead. Seems to me that my time would be better spent trying to limit future racism or cultural terrorism locally, rather than to demand that the English government give me back my great-grandfather’s potato field.

So I guess there are two things that rub me the wrong way, and I bring them up in this spirit of trying to limit racism. First is the assertion that there is someone other than natives to blame for the current state of native culture. As things go, it’s a free country and no one is currently stopping anyone from camping on the tundra nomadically, dressing in skins, home schooling, etc., and given native land allotments, special hunting laws, lack of law enforcement, etc, it’s especially easy for them. For example, I was in Kaktovik a few years ago when a kid plinked a polar bear cub with a 22 purely for recreational torture. It limped around for another day until an adult dispatched it, as well as the mother who was guarding it. But US Fish and Wildlife did nothing about it because the kid happened to be native and so they were afraid to their job. Had I done this I would have been lucky to get out of Kaktovik alive, let alone not put in jail for life once back in Fairbanks. So while natives Alaskans may be the most regulated citizens in the union, it’s an open question to me whether this limits their opportunities or expands them. And in terms of poverty and needing to hunt for food, more than a 15% of the country’s population lives below the poverty line and, while not to diminish the hardships this may cause for native Alaskans, this problem is not unique to them and I don’t think there is a shortage of opportunities for wage-income only a shortage of desire for that sort of work. The native culture of old is gone forever, and it seems to me that the challenge for the future is retain and promote the essence of the good parts of it without alienating the rest of the population.

The second thing that rubs me the wrong the way is the assertion that only those with a particular skin color have the capacity to ‘respect the earth’, or live the traditional native hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and such statements. Once given the power brown-skinned people act just like people with any other skin color. You carry a cell-phone, fly around the state at will, drive a car, shop at Safeway, etc. and my wife flies in tons of soda and pampers into your village each week. On the larger scale, check out this month’s Alaska Magazine’s article on Native Corporations, which use loopholes in the law to get sole source military contracts worth tens of millions of dollars to do things like train troops in Iraq, run nuclear power plants, and the like. Where is the “we’re so gentle” in all of that? Don’t get me wrong, I have no blame for these corporations doing this (and at least some of the profits are spent on scholarships and community works), but I hope this demonstrates my point – there is little point in playing the race card because nobody really buys it (but most people are afraid to say anything about it because they erroneously think that doing so is racist, when in fact it just facilitates it). In terms of the lifestyle, whether you raise brown skinned, white skinned or purple skinned people to subsist or spend much of their lives outdoors, you’ll get the same proportion of good hunters, good naturalists, good gatherers, etc – skin color has nothing to do with this, and so by creating a two-tiered law system regarding it will only lead to increased future tensions. And in terms of ‘respecting the earth’, in the backyard of nearly every villager I have ever met are the rotting hulks of numerous snow machines, four wheelers, or outboards, all dripping oil – the oil companies do a much better job in Prudhoe Bay than natives in this regard. My point here is not to beat up natives or native culture, just point out that skin color and genes have nothing directly to do with culture, they just happen to evolve together sometimes, but more often not.

How does all of this relate to Climate Commons? Perhaps not very well. But I bring it up because what I would like to see native Alaskans do is live up to their self-proclamed reputations as ones who know how to live with Nature and do so in a way which promotes the essence of native culture for all – that it is those that live in a place that have the ability to understand it best and thereby help it best, regardless of their skin color. Rather than (or perhaps in addition to) rake in the dough from military contracts with your corporations, use them to secure climate change funding from the government to train locals. That is, solve local problems by raising local scientists and engineers – no one should care more about village’s problems than villagers themselves. So rather than spend $150 million on rebuilding a New Jersey suburb at Shishmaref, design and build something that actually works in arctic coastal conditions using local knowledge. You’ve got so much wind there that there is no reason to burn so much diesel, and having a centralized water and sewer is preposterous. In Kaktovik two years ago the government spent tens of millions centralizing plumbing, only to have it all freeze and break a few months later when the power went out went out for a few days and nobody could heat their homes because they had no backups. Sure such pork government work is great for local incomes, but it’s a crime against sanity in my opinion. I live just fine in Fairbanks without running water or grid power, and it would only be easier for me if more people were doing it as well, and if we can do it in Fairbanks we can do it on St Lawrence island or anywhere else. So what I would like to see is native leaders rising above prior wrongs and demonstrating through action that all humans have the capacity to lead smarter and better lives. I agree with you that everything is connected, and it doesnt matter whether we live in Fairbanks or Savoonga or Seattle, how we live our lives affects everyone else in some way.

So, I think your hopes would receive much more traction in the broader community if there was less “us natives versus the world” and more “we the people that live here”. I hope that you would agree, and that you understand that my note is well-intentioned and not meant to attack you or the culture of your ancestors, just share my perspective sincerely on the issues as I see them.
-Matt