Racing Toward Recovery. Lew Freedman

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СКАЧАТЬ getting our hair cut and I didn’t like the haircut the way it looked.

      They also inspected us. You had to get up at a certain time of day and make your bed. There were all these details and orders that we had to follow and if they weren’t just right under the rules we got yelled at. We were yelled at all of the time. They would go, “You!” And it was do this, do that. Go to bed, be quiet. It was a completely different environment from Yup'ik home life. It was different and we didn’t like it. What kept us boys going was that we had each other. We could talk to one another in Yupiaq, so we had our own language. We had each other and that helped us to survive.

      Really, from the time we first started school, the United States government, through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, worked to wipe out our culture. At home we spoke Yupiaq, but when I entered elementary school in the BIA school I started learning to speak in English. It was not a bad thing to learn English, but they would not allow us to speak our native language at all. When we were not in the classroom, though, we spoke Yupiaq with our friends. We just kept speaking it when no one was around to tell us not to do it.

      The goal was to make us into good little American boys. They had an assimilation process and that’s what they stuck to doing. We had to learn about Dick and Jane and that nuclear family even if our lives were completely different from the lives that Dick and Jane led. They were always clean—they didn’t get dirty from working outside—and they had a nice car. We didn’t have cars in Akiak. The teachers presented this to us as the ideal, the way we should be and the way we should aspire to be.

      The same thing continued at the Wrangell Institute for a year. We looked at pictures of Dick and Jane and we knew we didn’t look like that or act like that. I’ll never forget an instructor teaching us what a “curb” was. We didn’t have paved streets in Akiak, never mind sidewalks with a curb. It seemed like a long year. I didn’t really want to be there. It was not something I had expected to do. There was some value in the curriculum. The math skills and working on the English language, I got something out of those. They helped me. That was definitely preparation for secondary education.

      But there were also long periods of homesickness. You cried. I was a teenager in 1968. My family didn’t have a telephone in Akiak so I couldn’t talk to them. We never spoke. We communicated by letter only. We were completely cut off except by letter. They were far away. Wrangell was a hard place to be for a lot of kids and we lost out on parenting. They deprived us of our loving parents and our way of life. I missed hunting and fishing. It was different to have to follow all of those rules and regulations in boarding school and having to march around.

      There were also kids there that were much younger than us. They went to school there because their village did not have a school that went up to eighth grade. So you had some really small kids there, eight, nine years old, from villages. I think a lot of those kids could not handle it being away from their homes and they lost it afterwards. They were much younger than us and they had been removed from their homes.

      As an adult I understand what they were thinking. They were trying to provide some sort of education, but not in our own culture. I think they could have afforded us the same education in our communities and eventually that’s what happened. I believe the federal government had the responsibility to provide education in our communities and it did not do that. They just provided K through eight instead of K through twelve. They should have provided the whole thing without sending us to boarding schools. I think we’re still living with the damage done to some of those individuals. Later, when Alaska got oil money and there were lawsuits, schools were built in all of the villages to provide K through twelve as it should have been from the beginning.

      That form of schooling out of town changed us from having a strong family unit to breaking us down. Then we had to adjust when we came back to villages. It was very difficult for us. Also, as adults that had children, they had a tough time raising them in the proper Yup'ik way, in the traditional way, as had been done in the past.

      One thing I did like about being at Wrangell was the sports teams. That was good. I really enjoyed getting involved. I played basketball and I participated in track and field and long-distance running. For me, that was a relief from the rest of the routine.

      When the school year ended in the spring I went home and it was so good to be back. My family was going to spring camp for hunting and I went almost directly from Wrangell to spring camp. That was so nice. It was a good homecoming. It was always good to be back with my brothers and sisters.

      Looking back I can see that not everything was wrong at Wrangell. The curriculum, the schooling, was OK, was even good in some respects. But the marching around was silly and it was a loss not to be with our parents at a young age when you need your parents. We didn’t have that. We resented that somewhat and we would be angry at members of the staff that we felt treated us badly. I think I’ve gotten over it, but I still feel some resentment about the way it was all done. There were kids who went to school there and later hurt themselves, committing suicide, or drank themselves to death.

      Sometimes I think a majority of those kids from Wrangell did not succeed in life. Or maybe they succeeded in a limited way. But I think damage was done. There was some healing. Going to Wrangell that year affected my life. My old friend Willie and I still talk about it sometimes. We say, “It’s get-up time. It’s detail time.” We make those sarcastic comments. We remember those days.

       CHAPTER 3

      That was a very good homecoming after Wrangell. I got back to doing what I had always been doing with my family. But after the summer passed I was in the same situation again. If I wanted to continue my education, go on and attend high school, there were not many choices. There was no high school in Akiak.

      I ended up attending Chemawa Indian School in Oregon. The year in Wrangell was just preparation for four years of high school, starting with the ninth grade. Part of me still wanted to stay home, but I was also excited a bit by going outside of Alaska and seeing another state. This was another boarding school. Going to live out of state seemed different from going to another school in another part of Alaska. I flew into Seattle and then took a bus to Salem, Oregon.

      Chemawa was a lot like Wrangell, but it was bigger. There were three dormitories there, Brewer Hall, McNary Hall, and Mitchell Hall. But they had the same kind of rules. It was the same thing as at Wrangell. We had to get up in the morning at a certain time, do this, do that. But the kids were more independent because we were older than we had been at Wrangell. I arrived for high school in the fall of 1969.

      Sports had been a high point for me at Wrangell so I wanted to continue playing sports at Chemawa. One big difference was that they had a football team. That was one thing I wanted to try and I did. The mix of people at the school was interesting. There were people at Chemawa from all over Alaska, from Point Barrow, Southeast, the Interior, and also Indian tribes from the Northwest. There were kids there from the Navajo nation.

      There were a whole bunch of tribal kids in the student body and we were all curious about football. Nobody had really played, but we had seen games on television and wanted to try it. There were Eskimos from everywhere who signed up. On the first day we were in the locker room and the coach came in and gave as all of the equipment to put on. He said to put it on and go out and play football. We had to figure out how to put the equipment on by ourselves.

      Nobody told us how to do it. If you have ever seen all of the pads that go on under the uniform you will know it is not as easy as it sounds to figure out what goes where. We put the hip pads on and then we tried to figure where the piece that was the tail guard went. We wondered what it was for. Was it for our backsides? Or was it to protect our private parts? We didn’t СКАЧАТЬ