During the Cold War (if it was cold, was it a war?), politicians and corporations began claiming an Interstate system was necessary, if the need arose, for national defense to move munitions and weapons. And for a number of years when Americans were digging bomb shelters and their children were being taught at school to “duck and cover,” we believed the “national defense” argument until it became apparent the four-lanes were there to move not rifles but radios, not bombs but baubles; they were there to sell autos, tires, and gasoline; they were there to push public transportation toward private transport, to give semitrailer trucks a publicly paid-for right-of-way. And we bought into all of it, perhaps driven by a new nostalgia for real highway adventure; we even turned truckers into instant folk figures, mixes of Casey Jones, Mike Fink, and Bronco Billy.
As we watched the Interstates dice up city neighborhoods and then move into the country and, like vacuums from Hell, suck the mercantile life out of a Main Street by pulling commerce to Interstate off-ramps only weeks ago woods and meadows, we could pass down mournful, vacated Broadways. With them, one more of the reasons for slow travel all but disappeared. It was harder to see how a particular place functioned and to understand how Fairfield did things that made it different from Springfield. Town centers turned into broken bones, the marrow gnawed out, and we were slow to see that a lunch at Qwik-Nuggets in Bangor would more likely put us next to a guy from Ohio or Delaware than beside a Down-Easter. The village-café coffee corner? Bye-bye.
Economies of scale and expediency had come to define much American travel: Plates of foodlike substance assembled in New Jersey arrived in cartons requiring only a microwave before reaching our table (if there was one), all of that stuff served up in places of reiterated vinyl-jug architecture where signs and chairs were made from leftover burger-boxes. Town after town embraced its strip of low-margin-high-turnover polystyrene food where the Big-Belly-Jumbo-Whopper box tasted about as good as what was inside. All that remained was to find a way to keep us in our cars, keep us moving through: Speed equals corporate profit. Hello, Drive-Thru.
And, at night, that framed repro-painting above the motel bed in Battle Creek—wasn’t it the same one we’d seen a day earlier in Kokomo? People began to reminisce about once sleeping in a motor court where each room was a concrete teepee with a Magi-Fingers-Massage bed, twenty-five cents for ten minutes. And what about that cup of joe from a roadside stand in the shape of a two-storey coffeepot? Eateries that were not playpens but, well, just eateries where one might entertain a child with—oh my god—observations about the place and its people—waitresses and waiters, cooks and cashiers—all of it creating conversations that could show a child how to observe differences and converse with strangers.
So, we became a nation of movers who drove fast and long to arrive someplace that could just as well be where we’d started from; the main thing the open road had given was a tired back and bloodshot eyes. Something had gone awry in the grand Interstate scheme.
By the late seventies, vacationers began asking, “Why drive when we can fly?” and their rhetorical question had its point: Wasn’t it faster and easier to ignore the land between home and destination? And we had a new term—flyover country—one more way to detach from the actualities of our nation: the cop with the bad breath, the Samaritan who helped with a flat tire, the scent of sagebrush after a rain, a wheat field under harvest. We were getting good at deleting experiences, disconnecting from potential memories, and ultimately degenerating our lives.
About then a few Americans, seeing consequences, began trying to turn themselves from passive tourists back into active travelers who explore the genius of a place, searchers for the quiddity of Owyhee County or Hell Roaring Creek or the Rosebud Reservation, or an alley in Charleston. And as they headed off down some of the abundant and often vacated miles of American two-lane, those travelers started to uncover living fossils: a village still possessed of its mercantile heart, a diner grinding its own coffee beans, a clam shack so good the kid in the backseat stopped thinking of clams as slimy, a neighborhood tavern with a fellow or two who knew why Peculiar Street was so named, a nineteenth-century inn where one could sleep inside history. Before we might have realistically expected it, something new appeared: guidebooks to bed-and-breakfasts, historic hotels and lodges, real ice-cream stands, flea markets, catfish emporiums. Many titles of those guides employed words like forgotten, hidden, secret, lost, mysterious, secluded, small, old, genuine. Initially they came from amateur publishers, people who had witnessed the nullifying corporatization of the American road.
A number of Americans, driven mad by the Interstates, awakened. Knowing the frontier trails were gone but for broken traces and ruts, travelers began seeking highway adventures in a broadly settled and thoroughly roaded land now rarely wilderness but still similarly full of challenges and unpredictabilities to sharpen one’s senses, whittle perceptions into keenness, and carve a lasting mark into memory. To escape the expressways was to have a chance at distinguishing Penn Yan from Mandan, knowing differences between the several Mount Vernons west of the Appalachians from the one on the Potomac, being able to differentiate the speech of coastal Carolina from that of the Piedmont, remembering in Rockport, Massachusetts, you might find creamed lobster but in Rockport, Missouri, the best dish could be bread soup.
Ike’s Interstates don’t much disturb me any longer because their 46,000 miles did not just open up three million miles of two-lanes; they also reminded us how to travel in ways that give a chance to enter the American landscape and to inhabit our heritage of history and place. I think that may be why, the week after next, I’ll be headed for Tennessee. There’s this place I remember not far out of Tullahoma.
North of Denison, Texas
A NEW ORDER
In 1984 I was sent to a corner of southeast Alaska, not far from Skagway and near the foot of the Klondike Trail, to look into potentially significant changes coming to the Tlingit people who have traditionally taken their livelihood from the cold waters of the North Pacific Ocean. I was asked to concentrate on relevant economic topics and perhaps a few social ramifications resulting from the return of massive portions of Alaska to native tribes. “But,” warned the editor, “go easy on the totem-pole stuff.”
Twenty-eight years later, the difficult and complex distribution of tribal lands continues in the face of various challenges, but the number of indigenous shareholders in Sealaska has grown by a third, to more than twenty thousand. Chris McNeil is now president and chief economic officer of the native corporation and, with his wife, has established a generous college scholarship for Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian youth.
Designing a Corporate Potlatch for the Next Century
The crayon mountains I drew as a child always came out the same: a jamming up of apexes, a piling of triangles, each peak unsoftened by snow, every foothill crept over by spruces. Growing up on the edge of the tallgrass prairie, as I did, I’d never seen mountains like the ones I drew, and I eventually considered them only as impossible creations of a childish imagination, fantastical stones no traveler but the one who walks dreams would ever see.
In the spring of 1984, in the long light of a late Alaskan afternoon, there, rising before me, was an approximation of those crayon mountains, ones in living stone. Although I’d never before laid eyes upon them, they seemed like a remembered image, and a whimsy came to me that an ancestor or two of mine might have crossed the Bering land-bridge twenty-thousand years ago and walked down this very valley and seen the range. It was as if a genetic memory moved in my blood even though later ancestors had not stayed there but eventually continued on to the valley of the Missouri River.
I’d traveled three-thousand miles by plane and boat to talk to an Alaskan Native about those mountains and the descendants of the people who first saw them, and about their survival along the forested coast for at least ten millennia before Europeans began wandering in.
Chris Edward McNeil Jr.’s tribe is the Tlingit (
Klink-it) nation, known for its artistry in carving totem poles and masks and weaving the famous Chilkat blankets. His forebears did not continue on southward into the continent but stopped right there to take up the land at least ten millennia before Europeans—including his Dutch great-grandfather—began wandering in. If such mountains could somehow reach me from across the generations and from so far away, they could surely hold the Tlingit people who have lived under the peaks for four-hundred generations.
We were standing in Klukwan, McNeil’s mother’s native village, on the graveled main street with its few bisecting dead-end lanes. Klukwan is not a pretty village, nor quaint, but with the Chilkat Mountains on the south and the Coast Range to the east, one can overlook the wrecked cars heaped to rust, and the clapboard houses in perilous leans this way and that.
The Tlingits chose this place for its jagged cordillera and for the Chilkat River running fast along the edge of the village. From the greenly gray snow and glacier melt, the people gill-net salmon: king, sockeye, coho. Klukwan is full of the deep gargle of ravens and, in season, the vertical drops of bald eagles coming to fish the Chilkat as the Tlingits do.
I was there to learn about land possession from McNeil, but it wasn’t until I actually stood in the tumbledown river-village under the mountains that I could understand the passion underlying the Alaskan Natives’ long struggle not simply to keep what is theirs, but to keep what keeps them. From that afternoon on, whenever I heard Chris McNeil speak of federal land-transfers and corporate earnings and cultural dispossession, I saw the Chilkat Mountains, so stony the snow could not scumble them, and the late-spring river ready for sockeye, and the salmon smokehouses of slab-fir sides darkened from alder fires.
A Tlingit blanket
During our conversation I asked him how an American Indian could possibly believe the old legal chestnut that “possession is nine points of the law.” In 1492, perhaps a million aboriginal people possessed about 3.5 million square-miles in the United States for twenty-thousand years; today Native Americans hold fifty-two-million acres, less than 3 percent of their original lands.
What truly—that is, legally—constitutes possession of property in America today? Certainly neither loving the land nor living on it for twenty millennia. In the case of Indians, McNeil offered, not even holding properly conveyed title is enough if ownership means having sufficient strength to deal with trespass. Armed might didn’t work all that well amid intertribal struggles, and in the face of European encroachment, ultimately it proved futile.
But today, McNeil said, Tlingits and other Alaskan Natives—the term refers to Indians, Aleuts, and Eskimos rather than simply anyone born in the state—have found contemporary sources of power through law and corporate structure, and are beginning to use them to possess what in their minds has been theirs since the days when Europeans were also living by stone tools. Alaskan Natives, he made clear, have never needed any government to tell them that their ancestral land belongs to them, but what they have needed was a government making land ownership clear to its agencies and any non-Natives casting an acquisitive eye toward indigenously possessed territories.
It did just that in 1971 with the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, legislation awarding almost a billion dollars and forty-four-million acres of land to various tribal groups as compensation for aboriginal property taken earlier by the federal government. Thirteen regional corporations, along with two-hundred smaller urban and village corporations, formed to manage the assets. The largest and one of the most successful of these is Sealaska whose holdings lie in the southeastern panhandle of the state, a place of dense forests and rich coastal fishing grounds. Sealaska, with total assets of almost a half-billion dollars, including nearly two-hundred-thousand acres, ranked number 745 on Fortune magazine’s 1982 list of the top one-thousand industrial corporations in America.
McNeil’s Tlingit name is Shaahakooni, but he’s reticent about its meaning. He’s thirty-six years old, a couple of inches under six feet tall, squarely built, his facial features manifesting both his Indian and Dutch ancestry. Speaking calmly with thought to implications in his words, he shows the mien not of a fierce warrior but of a sagacious attorney. He is general counsel and one of the five vice presidents of Sealaska. His wife, a Winnebago from the Great Plains and also a lawyer, has worked for a Sealaska foundation. McNeil’s father, of the Nisga’a tribe in British Columbia and now a naturalized American citizen, separated from McNeil’s mother when the boy was twelve, and he spent much time with his maternal grandmother and uncle in Juneau. It is the Tlingit way for the mother’s brother to serve as disciplinarian and guide to a child. Uncle Judson Brown, once a longshoreman boss and now on the Sealaska board of directors, offered guidance to young McNeil by teaching him the obligation to assist his people. “He and my mother and maternal grandmother,” McNeil said, “valued education as a way to help our people sustain our culture.” They showed him a quiet pride to mitigate racism that can shape the way an Indian child comes to feel about himself. “But we were never overtly beaten down,” he said. “It was more subtle.”
McNeil, whose father wanted him to become a salmon fisherman, may become the president of Sealaska in 1991 when Native shareholders might be permitted to sell their stock to anyone—Indian or not. McNeil could be the man, say pessimists, who will oversee the dissolution of the last great aboriginal land-claims in America, and with them the core of his people’s tribal identity.
Although early opposition to the Settlement Act came from whites, today many of them hope Sealaska will prosper. They realize that the Native corporations are part of the solution to one of the most snarled areas in current public policy. White thinking today is this: If tribal Americans become corporate shareholders, then the expensive and debilitating struggle between Indian self-determination and federal domination may find resolution. McNeil knows that little good will come from continuing the two-century-old economic dependence of red America. His people understand that the vaunted American sense of justice is not enough to end their dependent status; they now hope that the white-middle-class wish to end tax expenditures by making Indians earners and spenders will help them begin something new. In theory, that wish is a place where red and white, liberal and conservative thought can meet.
Chris McNeil sees his way as an attempt to find an “intersection between corporate life and Alaskan Native life,” an integration that does not exclude one from the other. Such intersections have always been a colliding of values that every tribal American faces. McNeil does not say much about his own encounters with the agonies that so often curse the lives of Indians—poverty, alcoholism, ruptured families, racial scorn—but then, neither does he speak much about his master’s degree with honors from Yale in political science, nor about his law degree from Stanford. Yet, under his words, it is all there.
On a drive north from Juneau to show me the cove where he once fished and smoked salmon with his father, McNeil pointed from the window of his BMW 528 to Seventh Street, his boyhood neighborhood. Although now condominiums, it was once a boardwalk settlement with houses on pilings above Gastineau Channel; toilets flushed openly onto mudflats for the tide to carry off the sewage. I asked whether it had been a slum. He looked surprised, as if the question were new: “I guess it was.”
If McNeil has come close to finding that intersecting of ways, he knows many Sealaska shareholders—Tlingits, Haidas, and Tsimshians—have not. He understands that should enough of them fail to find a crossing of ways, Sealaska may not survive. His people’s search for a union of cultures and values shows in the corporate symbol: conjoined heads of a raven and an eagle sharing a single eye, one bird looking east, the other west. David Katzeek, president of the Sealaska Heritage Foundation established in 1980 by the corporation, said of the search: “Let us be of one mind.” Katzeek believes that McNeil may be the man to help create that unity of vision and purpose.
Tlingit painting on a meetinghouse
As part of the alterna
tive service required by his Vietnam-era conscientious-objector status, McNeil began as the educational coordinator for the Tlingit and Haida tribes. Seven years afterward, he joined Sealaska and later helped establish the Sealaska Heritage Foundation. He came to understand the urgency of educating shareholders to retain ownership and keep the corporation alive, and he realized that many people, living on little, have had to sell two-hundred-year-old ancestral artifacts. “If a family will give up a tangible piece of its heritage,” McNeil said, “then what will it do with a piece of paper that has brought in less than seven-thousand dollars over the past thirteen years? Stockholder education has got to show the need for making decisions based upon an awareness of our distinctive culture, but that doesn’t mean that Native identity and cultural survival depend only upon the success or failure of the corporations.” Others are not so sure. Just because physiological bloodlines continue does not mean that cultural ones will keep flowing. A community must have an economic base, whether sea-otter skins or dollars. Yet many influential tribal elders, McNeil realizes, believe that the gap between heritage obligations and corporate assets may be irreconcilable. He also knows of the poorly educated who say, as they have for years, “It’s our land. Why do we have to do anything at all?”
Much of McNeil’s time goes to meetings in remote villages that can be reached only by ferry or seaplane. Once there, he listens to local voices call for immediate distribution of corporate assets. Says McNeil: “When the corporations began, the people had extraordinary expectations that Sealaska would solve most of our problems. But the reality is, while the corporation has helped, the overall economic impact has been marginal. No Native corporation can ever be a complete cure. In our peak months, even if all sixteen-thousand shareholders were qualified, we could hire only two thousand—at best.”