Natives were turned into corporate shareholders by the Settlement Act of 1971 which extinguished virtually all Native claims so that Alaskan oil fields discovered a decade earlier could be opened. Although land claims began with the 1867 purchase of Alaska from Russia, it wasn’t until 1929 that the aboriginal people took to the courts. They were spurred, in part, by the quest of the Alaska Native Brotherhood to end racial discrimination. (McNeil’s maternal grandfather and his uncle Judson Brown were active in ANB; his mother, as a bright fifteen-year-old student, was put forward by the Brotherhood in a 1946 test case in Juneau to break down public-school segregation.) Because the Native claims effectively blocked oil-leasing rights, in 1966 Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall placed a moratorium on all federal land-transfers, Native and white alike; his action became the catalyst to resolving the litigation. It clearly was in the interest of both the state and federal governments, as well as non-Natives, to quiet claims that could have prevented the leasing of oil rights for two or three decades.
The Settlement Act granted a hundred shares of stock in at least one of the Native corporations to every American citizen born on or before December 18, 1971, who could prove Alaskan Native ancestry of at least 25 percent. The shares are judgment-proof for twenty years, but they cannot be sold during that time. Eighty-thousand Alaskan Natives statewide received forty-four million acres and nearly a billion dollars in compensation. Not all aspects of the transfer have been answered, and some of it is tied up in satellite litigation.
“Because it establishes something that had not existed before,” McNeil said, “the Settlement Act is a grand experiment.” But what had not existed is much more than legal realty-titles: a genuine chance for American aboriginal peoples to free themselves from reservation ghettos and the domination by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. “At last,” McNeil said, choosing the right words, “we could set our own destiny. We could seek values to guide us and form the core of our community.”
As in any federal process, bugaboos and snafus abound. He spends his hours now seeking a course for the people, a task made no easier by a widespread feeling expressed even by Heritage president Katzeek: “There should be a better way than the Settlement Act, but I don’t know what it is.” In a 1983 National Geographic story, an Eskimo shareholder in a financially weak Native company complained, “My shares in the corporation? Give me ten bucks and a six-pack, and they’re yours.”
Even though McNeil minimizes their views, cynical observers contend that such attitudes are just what many whites who supported the settlement actually wanted—corporations that will weaken tribal identities while eliminating their claims on the land. It could happen. If the corporations succeed and shares grow in value, what economically limited person would refuse to sell? If the shares are worth little or paying small dividends, why keep them? As has been shown repeatedly in the lower forty-eight states, an Indian without his homeland quickly loses his tribal identity, and with that goes his resistance to assimilation and his opportunity to contribute to the energizing diversity of America.
The Tlingit way of expressing realty ownership reveals subtle yet crucial attitudes: rather than saying, “This is my land,” a Tlingit speaks of “the land of my grandparents.” Every tribal member is a custodian of the heritage. McNeil showed me a recent open-letter from a stockholder calling for renewed determination to hold on to that heritage. She wrote: “The most difficult, almost impossible accomplishment will be to end 1991 with our heads facing the right direction, with the pride in knowing we accomplished the impossible—we beat them at their game, using their game board.”
McNeil said, “One of the crucial flaws in the Settlement Act is its assumption that any shareholder owning fungible stock will want to keep it. In actuality, only people with a capital surplus can afford the luxury of accepting small dividends while waiting for stock growth.” Also disturbing is the arrival of Termination Day in 1991 when shares of stock will be counted as assets in determining eligibility for government transfer programs like food stamps.
Should Sealaska—the wealthiest of the Native corporations—fail, the historical agonies of Indians of the contiguous states would be even more disruptive to Alaskan Natives. In America, Indians bring up the rear in per-capita income, life expectancy, and educational achievement. They lead in unemployment, child mortality, violent death, and alcoholism. Three of the five poorest counties in America are on reservations. What is more, this new idea of incorporation to help aboriginal peoples toward self-determination will have effects beyond the United States: Watching also are Canadian Indians and Eskimos, Norwegian Lapps, Mexican Mayas, Peruvian Quechuas, Australian Aborigines, Japanese Ainu. Although McNeil does not wish to exaggerate effects, he knows the waves of Sealaska may travel far.
The corporation began in 1972 with total assets of almost $79,000. Only seven years later it had grown to $162 million through additional governmental land-conveyances. Today it has nearly a half-billion dollars in its primary holdings of fishing, canning, timber, building materials, and a coastal water-transport service. Most of the timber and much of the fish go to Japan and Korea. “We work well with the Japanese for reasons besides market proximity,” McNeil said. “Alaskan Indians and the Japanese traditionally have eaten similar food—raw fish, fish eggs, sea urchins, seaweed.” He smiled at that.
But rapid growth and inexperience have created problems. In 1982 Sealaska lost $28 million because of unfavorable exchange rates, high interest, a poor timber market in Japan, and a botulism incident in Belgium that affected all American canneries. A year later, however, profits rose to nearly four-million dollars. All the shareholders know that should the corporation fail, it will not find rescue as did Chrysler. Katzeek said, “You need to keep in mind that any newspaper reference to Sealaska is followed by ‘Native-owned corporation.’ Now, when has anyone ever spoken of Chrysler Motors as a ‘white-man-owned corporation’? If we fail, others will say it is because we are ninety-nine percent Indian-owned.”
Ninety-nine percent owned, yes; operated, no. Sealaska employs only about 12 percent Alaskan Natives, although all of its board of directors and two-thirds of its corporate officers are tribal members. The company has struggled to increase Indian employment, but it takes time to train people, especially for management jobs. To that end, McNeil cites the shareholder intern program which seeks to prepare Natives for corporate positions, but so far only one person has risen from an internship to Sealaska employment. For some shareholders, the inability of the corporation to lower tribal unemployment significantly is more important than its new power to represent aboriginal interests in the statehouse or its help to village economies.
To many shareholders, the Sealaska Heritage Foundation, which has awarded almost seven-hundred-thousand dollars for student aid over four years, is the cement of the corporation. Younger people like the forward look of its educational grants; elders like its archives and programs to preserve indigenous languages, music, and crafts. In fact, many shareholders throughout Alaska believe that the ultimate purpose of the corporations is to provide an economic base for enhancing cultural survival. After all, Indians for centuries have resisted assimilation by believing more in the value of their origins than in the worth of a dollar.
Sealaska, then, has become a steward of Alaskan Native economic self-determination and cultural identity. In the face of continual threats to their existence, the coastal tribes have survived because they have been flexible in shaping themselves and their economy without losing their unique heritage. “Some of our people,” McNeil said, “see any isolated village as culturally pure. It’s even a last bastion to some. I don’t believe that, and I don’t believe any people possesses a life purified of outside influences. For a thousand years, my tribe has been traders, and trading inevitably mixes cultures. Our coastal people endured because they were not rigid.” An old Tlingit clan song:
Tlingit house painting of a bear
I am heading into a new land,
br /> I am heading into a new destiny.
When McNeil and I were leaving the tribal house of his mother’s family—the Killer Whale Clan—he mentioned another Northwest Coast Indian custom that’s a precedent for cultural survival through an economic structure—the potlatch. Potlatches are of several kinds and serve different ends: celebration, competition, confirmation of status, stimulus for the arts. Before the coming of Europeans, a wealthy family wanting to commemorate an event—marriage, birth, death—would distribute its own goods to other tribal members. Excluding through deeds in battle, Tlingits changed social position only by sharing their prosperity. Still practiced today, the ancient custom provides economic stability and a linking of families and generations. Chris McNeil sees the potlatch as a metaphor of a traditional means for Sealaska to ensure the retention of lands and waters that feed body and spirit. It can be a sustainable engine of survival.
A TRIO OF POSTCARDS
Starting out for the Scottish Isles in the mid-nineties, I left with instructions to send back something like a trio of picture postcards which would run sequentially in three issues of a magazine—in truth, a clothing catalog. The editor phoned to say he wanted a close focus where a part stands for the whole. “Control any inclination to the encyclopedic,” he said. “Synecdoche! Metonomy! Micro over macro!”
Just South of Ultima Thule
I.
On a map of the North Atlantic, the Orkney Islands look as if a cartographer dropped green ink from a careless pen, splattering three-score jagged splots around the northern tip of Scotland lying about nine miles south. The biggest droplet the Orcadians call Mainland although it is only twenty-three miles wide and a bit less than that in length; the Scottish mainland is, of course, only a portion of the British Isles, so, in short, the closest real mainland, peninsular though it be, lies almost 400 miles eastward: Norway.
In the Orkneys, even on Mainland, one can never get far from the scent of salt spray off the North Sea to the east or the Atlantic to the west, and all of the Orcades, except for the above-high-tide rocks, are deeply and prodigiously rent by bays, sounds, firths, and saltwater lochs. Nevertheless, it wasn’t the omnipresent sea I felt there; it was time, and in those isles the sea is only the oldest visage of time.
Except for the faces of children and a few other things like heather blossoms or a plate of fish and chips, everything in the Orkneys attests to age, eras so far gone even the islands themselves have had eons enough to move from fifteen degrees south of the equator to nearly the sixtieth parallel, the latitude of the southern tip of Greenland, of what was once ultima Thule. Northern Europe and North America lay joined when these islands, such as they were then, sat in a vast freshwater lake called Orcadie. Should the fossil fish sleeping in their sandstone cribs for nearly four-hundred-million years awake, they would find themselves not in a warm equatorial broth but on the edge of the Arctic Circle. And, still, those fossils are new when seen from the basement rocks the Orkneys rest upon, granites and schist one-and-a-half-billion years old, among the oldest exposed stone in Northern Europe.
Like most travelers here, I didn’t go for the so-called living rock; rather, I was there for other stones, the ones humans quarried and dragged from the ancient strata and then set upright or laid out in courses, labors begun and finished several hundred years before the Great Pyramids of Egypt started to rise. That people were even here in this tree-shorn land five-thousand years ago seems incredible not so much because of any real harshness in the terrain or climate, but rather because of the remoteness of the Orkneys. In my vade mecum for the trip, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, Samuel Johnson writes, “Of these islands it must be confessed, that they have not many allurements but to the mere lover of naked nature.” The Doctor was the chap who said, “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.” He was, of course, a Londoner.
Yet, on the northern island of Papa Westray, directly against the blast and clamor of the North Atlantic, there’s a settlement called the Knap of Howar, a few stone houses embedded in the earth a thousand years before pharaohs even began dreaming of laying up limestone into pyramidal tombs. Other than the Vikings, no one else passed through; the Orkneys are hardly on a crossroads to anywhere but the frozen north. Because those neolithic dwellings are small and as humble as the dirt surrounding their rock walls, they have a capacity, inexplicable yet consequential, to carry a traveler in time still further than those distant islands do in space. The power in the age of things Orkney can indeed transport visitors to some Thule of the mind and convey their imaginations into a realm beyond mere topography.
The greatest of the prehistoric Orkney monuments is on the west side of Mainland just above a sea loch penetrating a green and rolling moor and within sight of the large ring of ancient standing stones of Brodgar. Maes Howe, one of the finest chambered tombs in Western Europe, lies in an area of glacially shaped hillocks, its grassy roundness making it appear as almost a natural part of the landscape until one sees it from the south, where a thirty-six-foot-long passageway opens to align beams from the sun at the winter solstice to strike the back of the chamber. Neither the claustrophobic nor obese happily enter the low and narrow and often damp entry-tunnel made of massive and rather regularly shaped flat stones. People must bend themselves in the middle, stumble into the darkness, each step taking them deeper, creeping farther from light, reaching more distantly into the past until the corridor opens into a small chamber that silences everyone as if it were airless.
In the dim beam of a flashlight, my eyes adjusted and things began to appear, creating what felt like a nether realm despite my being not down but merely within. The arch, the wheel, and metal tools were all still generations away when those stones went up. The tidy simplicity of the walls, long stones lying precisely parallel or at ninety degrees to one another, bespoke age and the silence made it resound. That far past was full of mortality: After all, for nearly five-thousand years the chamber was but a sepulcher. On his grand tour of northern Scotland in 1773, Samuel Johnson wrote in his Journey, “Edifices, either standing or ruined, are the chief records of an illiterate nation.” So a visitor must try to read masonry.
The light played over the walls, flickered, stopped, and the past seemed to remember its voice as if it had been but waiting for someone to arrive from across the years. A yesterday is of no age and of every age, so it can pick its generation to speak from. Under the incandescence, time murmured from both four thousand years after the neolithic people built the chamber and from a millennium before flashlights existed. When the beam crossed the stones just so, from the walls emerged long and faintly etched lines wavering in the unsteady glow as if coming alive. At first, seeming to ramble across the sandstone, they appeared nothing more than adventitious scratches from one rock dragged over another; but slowly, like stick figures, they began to dance into orderly patterns composed in a backward alphabet lacking cursives and cross strokes. The scored lines showed themselves for what they were: runes, words scotched in by Norsemen who broke into the tomb in their perpetual hunt for plunder.
Those lineations constitute the largest collection of runic inscriptions in the world, and Maes Howe, its interior barely large enough for a dining table, is their library. As the Norse words wobbled under the uncertain light, they became voices to anyone who can listen with the eye. Some of the graffiti may have been left by raiders, surprisingly literate, who took shelter in this chamber during a fearsome snowstorm, an enforced stay in the close and darkened tomb that caused two of them to go mad. The words from vigorous men were at once surprising and predictable. Their Kilroys were there, of course, sometimes attached to the usual bravado of graffiti: “These letters carved by the man most skilled in runes in the western ocean.”
And what else? Yes, that too: “Ingigerth the most beautiful of women” is, perhaps coincidentally, next to a crudely etched slavering dog. And: “Many a woman has walked stooping in here.” And the simplest: “Thorni bedded.” Those wor
ds, so much newer than the walls holding them, changed the mausoleum from a chamber of the dead into a shelter for the living, where more blooded passions found expression. That mixing of eras and peoples and vocabularies and moods turns Maes Howe, like other things in the Orkneys, into a time machine spinning travelers back through millennia even faster than the contraption imagined by H. G. Wells. And after stooping again down the long passageway and coming once more into the sunlight striking across the sea loch, visitors may feel they’ve returned from one of the farthest journeys they are likely ever to take.
II.
The Shetland Islands are not at the end of the earth—nor could they ever be, since globes don’t have ends any more than they have corners, remote or otherwise—but when travelers reach the far extremity of the archipelago lying somewhat more than a hundred miles north of the tip of Scotland and smack between the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea, they can be excused for feeling they have reached the ultimate back of beyond. That cluster of green hills and rock, stepsister islands to the Orkneys, although fifty miles north of them, has a sere and ragged beauty and often an appearance of some far place coming to an end, a land running out of terrain as it nears the Arctic ice. When Samuel Johnson made his 1773 tour through northern Scotland with James Boswell he wrote of the Highlands south of here in his Journey:
An eye accustomed to flowery pastures and waving harvests is astonished by this wide extent of hopeless sterility. The appearance is that of matter incapable of form or usefulness, dismissed by nature from her care and disinherited of her favours, left in its original elemental state, or quickened only with one sullen power of useless vegetation.