Looking for Alaska

  The totem park in Klawock on Prince of Wales Island. PHOTO BY PETER JENKINS

  If you can imagine Seattle, its climate and look, as an island with 990 miles of coastline and only sixty-three hundred full-time residents, you can visualize this place. It’s six hundred miles north of Seattle. Steep, forested mountains two thousand to three thousand feet high cover it. Glaciers carved this place, leaving deep, U-shaped valleys. I would soon find out from Tina about the other powerful forces at work here that had carved her into so many conflicting pieces.

  The clouds today were not ethereal, mixing with the trees and rocks and hard world. They were high and heavy, well-defined. There was no wasted babbling between us in the car. From Tina came either silence or passionate conversation, each intense in its own way.

  “My grandfather was an artist, like me, like many Haidas. The Tlingits liked to make slaves of Haidas because the Haidas carved better totems, better canoes. You mention that to Bill, see what he says. My grandfather would lie on his back in his boat and look at the clouds and the trees and the eagles and ravens. This is where our designs and patterns came from. I will show you some incredible totems in Hydaburg, right next to the Presbyterian church.”

  We drove by the school, the sawmill, and a lot where a construction company was busy clearing the forest to build some low-income government houses. There are not many jobs on the island. Some whole hillsides had been clear-cut, maybe five, ten years before, on Native land. The massive stumps had not yet rotted; a jungle of devil’s club, spruce seedlings, ferns, and all kinds of green had grown up among them. Tina mentioned that all kinds of herbs and usable plants were in the clear-cuts. She seemed to know every car and truck we passed and who was inside each one. I guessed everyone knew that Tina was driving down the road with me, a man no one knew. In a place like Prince of Wales Island everyone knows which man should be in which car with which woman, who should be close to whom. She didn’t care. Tina is bold and in your face; I heard her say several times, you let small-town people rule you, it will drive you crazy.

  “I lost my grandmother, my mother, and my sister in Hydaburg. For years I couldn’t go there much, the pain was too intense. I had to get away from there. You can’t run far on this island, but Craig and Hydaburg are very far apart, much further apart than the forty-six miles we will be driving. You will see.”

  Tina pointed out a brand-new SUV driving by. She said large amounts of marijuana were grown on this island, in basements and on whole floors of some homes. That person knew where most of it was, she mentioned. There was some kind of history or connection between Tina and seemingly every man-made object, and man and woman, on this island.

  “Lately, I’ve been able to go back. I cut fish again and gossip about everyone until they come around and then we talk about someone else. My grandmother’s house was a typical old Haida lady’s small wood house. Always smelled like fish and holigan grease [rendered from a small, oily fish and used for preserving everything]. There would be seaweed drying around, cases of canned berries and salmon and other gathered foods everywhere. Her favorite things were her smokehouse and her skiff.”

  Right before Klawock she pulled into a gas station and filled up. She didn’t seem to mind pumping the gas herself, although after she put the hose in, she got back in the car and kept talking. It was if she didn’t want to stop, take a chance things she wanted to say to me would stop coming to her.

  “My childhood in Hydaburg, I just knew I was a princess, a black-haired Haida princess. My grandmothers told us all the time about our people. We didn’t think of who we were and I wouldn’t have except for my grandmother. My grandmother Helen Sanderson, she was one of the very first Native teachers in Hydaburg. She was trained in Seattle. They even have named the elementary school after her. She was the biggest influence in my life. She had me reading encyclopedias, Tolstoy, Gone with the Wind, Faulkner in the ninth grade. I was real interested in Russian and southern writers.” A tear, just one, fell down her cheek. She wiped it away as if it made her mad that she showed this emotion.

  Outside Klawock, Tina stopped her car, got out, and motioned for me to follow her into a clear-cut. The ground was not clear anymore but jammed with growing things. She gathered some Hudson Bay tea, talking while she worked, then we got back in the car.

  “I was a cheerleader when I lived in Hydaburg. We used to all pile on my uncle’s seine boat and ride to the basketball games, be gone a few days. In 1970, Patty, my friend, she wouldn’t be on the pep squad or be a cheerleader—she wanted to play basketball on the boys’ team. So they had a meeting and let her play. These basketball games are each like a little war.”

  A woman passed us in a red Chevy; its rear fender was dented in the middle. Tina said the woman had a main squeeze in Hydaburg, even though she was Tlingit. A black bear appeared standing atop a tree that was felled but not used. As we watched, it hopped off and was gone.

  “When I was small, there were only two cars in the whole town and no road to get here. There was an old green Ford and one of those chubby kinds of cars. The big thrill was all of us kids would pile on and we would get a ride out the one-and-a-half-mile road, then back. The boys used to play cowboys and Indians all the time. All the boys wanted to be cowboys until they figured out what was going on.”

  We passed a small sign stuck in the ground, which seemed out of place because there had not been much evidence of human life for a while. It said, “COHO for SALE $1.00 a pound. Prince of Wales Hatchery.” Coho are silver salmon.

  “Everyone around here that smokes sockeye and kings, they give cases and cases of it to their cousins and family that live in places they can’t get it or can’t smoke it. Early Haidas made villages where there were good sockeye streams. And certain families actually owned their own stream, where they would move every year when the salmon returned. Without the salmon there would never have been the Haidas on these islands.”

  The sky allowed enough light through the dense growth and tall trees to see about half of our surroundings. We turned off on State Road 913 and headed to Hydaburg (pop. 400). If we hadn’t turned, we would have ended up in Hollis at the state ferry dock, the cheapest way for someone to get off the island. Local people call leaving “getting off the rock.”

  “There is a place on this road where Haida country begins and the rest of the world drops off. Just past the Natzahini River is where our country begins. You can take the Native out of the village, but you can’t take the village out of the Native.” Tina seemed strengthened just by the spirit of her people’s land. She looked strong and clear now that we were nearing Hydaburg. Tina’s face showed just where she was at any moment.

  “This is what has been wrong with me: I’ve been living in the confused world of Craig too long, part white, part Native, too influenced by a material world and spiritual influences that are not my own. Yet, it is a world I feel I must have. I get lost unless I can kneel on the beach where three hundred years ago they knelt down and dug clams, where the women had babies, kneeling in the woods. I was born in 1958. I weighed four pounds eleven ounces, delivered by a midwife up there in Hydaburg.”

  Tina’s personal power regenerated the closer we got to her home village. I could feel it inside her Subaru; it was a power source that she could harness. She said that lately she has felt that maybe what she needed to do is move to an island and just “put up” fish and seaweed, do her art, weave, smoke fish, and cut wood.

  “You know death comes in threes.” It was an abrupt statement, and I wondered where it came from, where she was headed, with such an observation.

  “You know what my grandmother used to say about all the Yankee sea captains and other ships that first came through here in the late 1700s, early 1800s, trading with the Haidas and Tlingits?” Tina asked.

  “No, what?” We had another ten miles to go.

  “She used to say, ‘If it wasn’t for all those sea captains long ago that came from New England, the Yankee traders, us Haidas would
all be ugly.’ Haidas have always been bold towards outsiders, never afraid. Our best carvers who did the eighty-foot totems even carved what they called ‘the Boston man’ with the stovepipe hat into their totems.” Back at her house she had said that she was sorry the Yankee traders had ever come to Alaska.

  The road to Hydaburg is twenty-three miles long. As we went over bridges, I saw salmon fighting their way through the clear water. Bright red huckleberrys mingled with some dark hemlock and cedar left uncut. The land had an almost tropical look. A haunting spirit lingers over the land on either side of the road to Hydaburg, one that is compelling but also a bit frightening. Riding down it today was not just a way to get to Hydaburg but a spiritual quest, a haunting flashback. Fireweed grew six feet high and added its pink-purple to the overwhelming green. We drove by a second black bear; this one trotted along in the other lane, headed away from the village.

  I struggled to understand these different sensations, this different spirit that wove in and out and on top of this Haida land we had entered. It wasn’t just because it had been logged. It was as if the spirits of the Haida forefathers and those who had died too early of substance abuse or suicide or car wrecks had not left the area but lived out here. They guarded what was left of their land, their way of life, from people like me. Once this whole island had been theirs, as had the sea that surrounded it as far as their superior canoes would take them. This spirit had obviously taken hold of Tina.

  “I will never forget my first trip to the outside world. I was so excited I couldn’t sleep for days. My aunt and uncle took me to San Diego. I’m not sure why we were even going.” She shook her head.

  “I will never forget what I thought as I packed my prettiest dresses and holiday shoes, getting ready for California. It was in the early seventies and I just knew I would be considered beautiful and rare and smart down there. My grandmother told me this all the time, how special and smart and pretty I was. We were royalty, really, Haida royalty. I wondered if people in California would know without anyone telling them that I was a Native, one from a high-class clan.” She gritted her teeth and held her chin up.

  “We got there and it seemed that everyone was blond and tan. It was like we walked through a door and entered the Twilight Zone, everything, everyone, was so different. I’d never wanted to be blond or tan. There is no real way to be either in Haida country. Black hair is what is beautiful to Haidas. You try to lie in the sun around here, you will grow mold.”

  She was so overwhelmed thinking about that first trip to California, she pulled off the road, on a bridge. She said we were probably seeing so many bears because the salmon were this far up in the streams. The wolves would be working the streams too. This Hydaburg road allowed Tina to pull over, to go as fast or as slow as she wished, to just stop. How many places were there left in our world where someone could take a drive the way Tina was today and look over his or her life?

  “The people that we saw driving the nicest cars, in the yards of the finest houses, all seemed to be blond and tan. We went through a Mexican neighborhood and they seemed to have little houses and old cars, lots of people in each car. They looked more like Haidas.

  “I remember we went to a hamburger place, I was so excited, we didn’t have anything like that on Prince of Wales then. Didn’t even have a road to get out of Hydaburg. The waitress was Mexican. I was so in awe of all the people and the shiny cars and this restaurant. I guess I looked like someone who had just crossed the border. Anyway, she spoke to me in Spanish. When I obviously didn’t understand, she asked me in English what country I was from.” Tina reached out and turned off the music.

  “See, our grandmothers told us our whole lives we were the first people in this country. We had our own world, creating beautiful art, hundreds of years before all the people’s relatives I was seeing in San Diego got here. Our Grandma Helen told us Haida stories all our lives; she showed us rare Native artifacts and pictures she had collected. In California I felt like we were treated like second- or third-class people, not first-class people. It was like no one wanted to know who I was.” Something ferocious rose up in Tina, remembering.

  “It was confusing to me. It made me angry. I went home to Hydaburg feeling like maybe there was something wrong with us Haidas. After that I didn’t feel like the world was waiting for me to see it. I didn’t leave this rock much after that. That world was a shock.”

  It suddenly started to pour, gray rain overwhelming the windshield wipers, which were on high. Tina turned on the air-conditioning and defroster so we could see.

  “I remember thinking back on all that happy sun in California and being around that happy world and thinking that maybe being Native was not what I needed to be. There was so much sadness sometimes. I wanted to be happy and bright like in California, I thought.”

  On both sides of the road now the trees had not been cut, so it was dark and dense. The farther we drove, the more this place seemed to me to have the same kind of spiritual qualities that the Navajo lands do, the feeling it had been lived in forever, unchanged, spirits everywhere, although the two places could not have looked more different. I kept expecting Carlos Castaneda to appear, standing in the middle of the road.

  “It wasn’t long after I got back from California that my mother left. When I was fourteen years old and my sister Jody was nine, my mother, explaining nothing to us, went to the ferry and a doctor’s appointment in Ketchikan. She didn’t come back for ten years. We found out later, she went through woman’s counseling, got a job and another relationship. My father was postmaster then.”

  We passed another bear, this time a small one, lying in a ball on the side of the road. Tina slowed down; it lifted its head. She thought that the mother must have been run over and the Hydaburg people were dropping off food to the little one here.

  “I don’t know why I have had so much confusion in my life. I have tried so many ways to answer my questions, to solve my problems. There is no preacher or pill that has helped me figure it all out. I’ve tried them all: counselors; self-help books; Oprah; pastors. Seems like I’ve taken all the pills: Librium, Valium, amitriptyline, lorazepam. Nothing I’ve tried seems to help me as much as being Native does: cutting strips [salmon], picking berries, going hunting, walking on the beach, being in the village with my people, doing my art. All that other stuff I tried from the non-Native world just dulled the pain. It came back worse. I drive down this road and I can feel me coming back to life. There is a place just back there on this road where the rest of the world drops away. That spot is a place of peace for me. Why don’t I come here more often!”

  Tina was so consumed in the telling of her life, sometimes I felt that she didn’t remember I was there. She’d be going forty-five, then slow down to fifteen miles per hour. Going that slow on this road felt bizarre. Physically we were traveling in slow motion when we should have been speeding; we had the road all to ourselves. Yet Tina could not make herself go any faster.

  “A lot of my depression and my anxiety, and I think this every time I come back here, comes from my disconnection from my people and nature. I need to go back, or I try to go back to nature every day, because that is where God is every day, all the time.”

  I wasn’t sure what Tina was fumbling around in her purse for; she again said she hoped we did not see any more bears. She pulled out a small, battered white envelope. She pulled the car over; we had only seen one other car the whole time we’d been on this road. She opened it and pulled out a black braid of hair.

  “This is my sister’s hair, my older sister. She committed suicide. She went through such a deep time of sadness and confusion; I spoke to her the day she died. I couldn’t tell what she was planning to do. We believe that if you have someone’s hair, their spirit is always there.” The life seemed to go out of Tina’s face for a moment, then returned, albeit weakened.

  “This place has always had some kind of hold on my family. My grandfather ran away from Indian boarding school in Oregon when
he was twelve, made his way to Seattle, then worked his way on a fishing boat from there to Hydaburg.”

  When we finally got to Hydaburg, there was no sign, just a couple of dirt streets. The main road, Main Street, ran along the water, Sukkwan Strait. On it were Tina’s auntie Martha’s house and the ANB (Alaska Native Brotherhood) community center, where they have memorial dinners for people who have died, play bingo, host traditional Native dances. Because of all the twists and turns of the bays, roads, and mountains on the collection of islands in this part of Southeast, if you didn’t know exactly where you were, it would be impossible to tell from looking at the mountains or the coastline whether you were on the main island or one of the smaller surrounding islands. It seemed to me like an intricate maze. Suddenly, Tina stopped, not pulling over to the side; she just put the car into park right in the middle of the “busiest” road in Hydaburg.

  “I have this amazing sense of smell, everyone who knows me knows that. I remember that in summer we were all barefoot, running right through here. I can still smell the dust and the way it mixed with the ocean smells. In summer, all us kids would be on the creek snagging salmon. There was only one little store, Grant’s; they had chains for your chain saw, penny candy.” About three young boys, followed by two mixed-collie dogs, ran in front of us. One carried a fishing pole with a snagging hook on it.