Racing Toward Recovery. Lew Freedman

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ for each other, so nobody bothered us. We defended ourselves if we had to and we kicked butt in high school.

      So Ted got drafted and I got drafted and sent to South Korea. Ted went into combat, into the war, and I didn’t. When he got out of the army and returned to Akiak he had post-traumatic stress disorder. He had survived the bullets, but he couldn’t stand being back in Akiak. He had nightmares from all of the killings. He survived that, survived enemy bullets, but he couldn’t survive alcohol. We actually ended up coming back to Akiak at almost exactly the same time, except that he came from Vietnam and I came from South Korea.

      Frank taught me a lot when I was younger, but I was close with all of my brothers. Walter was one of the top sprint mushers in the Bethel region. He was the best in the west, you might say. In 1983 he competed in the Iditarod and finished in thirty-first place. That year Rick Mackey won and the race was still slower. It took longer than twelve days to take first place. Walter finished in over fifteen days.

      For a while after that I kept asking him if he wanted to keep running the Iditarod and he said he did not. He said, “No, Mike, you do it. I’ll just run the Kuskokwim 300.” And that’s what he did. He won all of the races around here for about ten years, the short ones and the middle- distance ones. For us, the Kusko 300 in Bethel, which everyone thinks of as the best and biggest middle-distance race, was even more important than the Iditarod.

      Walter won all kinds of races in the area. All of our friends and family were there to watch him and he didn’t have to travel to Anchorage to the starting line. He never captured the title in the Kusko 300, but he finished fourth twice. Walter really specialized in the village sprint races. He won the best sprint race in Bethel three years in a row. We went to Dillingham and he won that.

      When we were kids we all pretty much did the same chores. Some of those chores involved taking care of the dogs. We trained the dogs at a young age. We took care of their feeding. We took care of their health. My dad usually had trained dogs to use for transportation by the time the pups grew up. We made leaders out of them. We did all the chores that needed to be done around the dog yard and we also helped with the hunting and fishing. Walter was a top racer and my brother Gerald—he was one of my favorite brothers—always helped me learn how to do things in the dog yard. He was my handyman fixing things when they broke.

      Once, when we were small, Gerald threw an open can at me and it landed here on my eye. I still have a mark. I don’t remember what he was mad about. I think it was a can of beef stew and the top cut me. It did some bleeding for a while. But Gerald was the one who helped me fish and we did a lot of fish tendering together for the local fish processor. We fished at the same time and that’s how we made our money. He was always there for me.

      Timmy Jr. was the youngest and he did the same thing as all of us. He did some work in the house and he helped raise the puppies. In a sense we were all trainers of the dogs. Fred, too. All six of the boys worked with the dogs and ran dogs.

      When we were young my family attended the Moravian Church. My mom and dad and everybody in the village went to church on Sundays. It was our religion, but it was also a social occasion to bring everyone together. We didn’t have TV and we didn’t have extracurricular activities in town, so everybody went to church on Sundays. We did it consistently and we did it year-round. That helped make for a strong community, I think.

      There was a strong belief in God. My parents wanted us to respect the God who controls all of the universe and all that he made. That is what they told us and what they taught us. Every week we had Sunday school teachers. Sunday was a very respected day in my family. My mom and dad did not want us to do anything on Sunday except to rest. That’s what we did. It was a rest day. We didn’t go out hunting or fishing. That was a big influence on me. The Elders were consistent with my mother and father. All the Elders who came to our house taught me about their belief in the Creator.

      Those Elders, my parents, uncles, and people of those generations, grew up speaking Yupiaq. Some of them learned English, some of them did not. My generation, people now about sixty years old or more, was the first generation to focus on learning English. My generation made the shift. The older people were highly educated in Yup'ik ways and traditional teachings. Before contact with the whites they were very healthy people. They did not have problems with their teeth from eating sweets, diabetes, alcohol misuse, or any major regular health problems.

      Our language and culture were intact. Our whole lives were complete then. But then contact came with gold miners, government workers, and missionaries starting in the late 1800s. They brought diseases that we had no immunity from, and they brought alcohol. It used to be that the Elders said if they heard about a death from a hundred miles away they cared about it and felt the same about that one death from far away as they did about one in their village. People had their own government, their own way of taking care of themselves, living off the land. They had a complete way of life that they enjoyed.

      Obviously, things have changed. They changed with contact. The amount of deaths changed from smallpox, diphtheria, whooping cough, tuberculosis, and sexually transmitted diseases, too. Alcohol was brought in. People who had experienced their healthy way of life were subjected to trauma. At one time in Akiachak, which is only eleven miles from us, there was mass starvation because people couldn’t take care of themselves. They had to dig mass graves and some of our relatives were among them.

      That was as the result of first contact. It was a little bit what our brothers and sisters in Indian tribes in the Lower 48 experienced with the Trail of Tears—all of that loss of their land, death, war, alcohol, and the killing of women and children.

      This was not something I was really conscious about when I was a kid, but the Elders would talk about it. They talked about what they had seen and the starvation and about the ways of living that were going away. They talked to us about that. In their youths they had the language, ways of life, culture, hunting, and fishing all set. They all had rules that were followed. Then first contact hit us right between the eyes. It is hard to imagine how much grief and trauma occurred. So many families could not take care of themselves. Then the missionaries came. The Moravians established an orphanage. Parents and other adults were wiped out. The Moravian orphanages were established because children could not take care of themselves. The Bureau of Indian Affairs started its schools. The goal was to provide education, but only up to the point of eighth grade and only in English. It was good to learn English, but they didn’t have to ban the speaking of Native languages. Yupiaq was prohibited here.

      If children spoke Yupiaq in school they were punished. Their mouths would be washed out with soap, or they would be hit for speaking their Native language. The teachers were instructed to assimilate the students with other American children. My mother told us stories about that. They were telling us that our way of life was not a good one and their way of life was better and we had to adapt.

      Then Sheldon Jackson came around to establish missions and churches. He came to Alaska in 1877 and during his career it was said that he traveled more than a million miles and established more than one hundred missions and churches. Many of them were in Alaska and most of them were in the western part of the United States. He had it in his mind that he was going to save these lost Eskimo and Indian souls. His thinking was that these Yup'ik people are lost and our way of life is better. The feeling was that everyone had to learn English and that’s that.

      They taught English. It was made clear to us that it was important and useful to learn English, though in my mind it didn’t have to be force-fed in such a harsh way. One missionary was a man named John Kilbuck, a Delaware Indian. He lived in Akiak and died here and he is the one who told people the importance of learning English. He said it was important to learn as much as we could about the ways of the white man because of what he had seen in the Lower 48. John Kilbuck had studied the history of Indians losing their lands, of being put on tribal reservations and before that the killing of women and children by the government. СКАЧАТЬ