An Act of Contrition

In a way this posting is a form of “mea culpa.”  It is an act of contrition for a time of my life that when I look back, I feel sorry and ignorant.  I was a product of the society around me and in that I became what it wanted me to become.  As a man who tries his best to think logically and independently I am ashamed that I surrendered myself in the manner I did.

I was the product of Alaska in the late 1960s and 1970s.  It was almost a frontier but not quite.  Alaskan’s proudly called it the “Last Frontier.”  Roads were still often dirty and dusty.  Nothing was manicured and most was created out of necessity as opposed to methodically planned.  Those that lived in the state were divided between a small subset of long term hardy Alaskans that arrived during World War II or an even smaller set that came before.  They were truly the hardy mountain man types.  The ones that had lines of seasons written in their faces like the rings of a tree.  My family was of a new class.  It was a group who migrated to the state in the 60’s and 70’s to meet the needs of an expanding economy.  Resource exploitation was booming and with all those workers came a need for a society to support them.  My parents were part of that group.  My mom went as a nurse, school nurse and later a high school teacher.  My natural father worked for Dunn and Bradstreet, a variety of small jobs and finally became a Social Worker for the State of Alaska.  At that point he moved to a tiny village on the Bering sea where he lived out his days.  My step father came as an architect and later became a university professor at the University of Alaska, Anchorage.  For my part, I was a child who knew nothing different.  I just grew up in an outpost in the far north and lived my life with all that it entailed.  

There was another side to Alaska.  It actually made up the majority of the state and it consisted of people that had lived there for the last 14,000 years.  It was a collage of tribes each representing their own unique part of the states history.  Yupik, Aleut, Haida, Inupiat, Tsimshian, Tlingit, Athabaskans and Eskimos among others.  What I knew of native culture came from two sources.  One was the blankets and baskets my mom would accumulate and an occasional field trip to the history museum.  The other was through school when we would integrate activities like a blanket toss with no understanding of why we were doing it.  

The natives around us, especially those that lived or migrated into Anchorage tended to be the most troubled.  They were often seen drunk wandering around victims of alcoholism and substance abuse.  God knows how bad it must be these days with so many more things to abuse.  In the eyes of an ignorant child they were people to mock and look down at.  

Some of my earliest memories revolve around a family in my neighborhood.  My mom at the time was a single mother and desperate for someone to watch me after school.  I played with a couple of brothers named Rusty and Perry and their gracious mother Marge agreed to let me go there after school.  I can still remember the patriarch of the family sitting in his chair in front of a large picture window in the small living room of their house.  It was 1976 and he told me he was voting for Jimmy Carter.  In those early years I never really gave any thought to the fact they were Alaskan Natives.  Today I realize they must have been Aleuts when I remember their links to the islands.  

As I grew older my friendship fell away and was replaced by incidental racism when I would mock drunk natives for laughs.  Somewhere around 1978 I visited my natural father in Bethel and it was the first time I had ever been to a community where white people were aliens.  My father had taken up with a native woman and eventually had a child with her who became my half sister Sarah.  It felt like I was at the end of the world out in that cold windswept treeless place.  It was the only time in 21 years of living in the state I ventured to a place not connected to roads.  

What I lament is not that I was racist, I was not.  It was that I didn’t give these people the respect that I should have.  I didn’t recognize their traditions and their history.  I didn’t know at the time what a terrible history it was.  The history of Russian Alaska was an ever present part of the mythology of the state.  It existed in the crosses you might find in an abandoned cemetery that had the separate downward slanted piece and two cross parts at the top.  It was in the occasionally onion domed churches you might find were natives actually followed the Orthodox Church.  It could be found in some of the small South East Alaskan towns like Sitka and Kodiak.  It was quaint and forgotten.  A passing piece of time like the Gold Rush that was resigned to picture books and fading history.  It was certainly not representative of what it was.

Russian history in Alaska was brutal and devastating.  They raped and pillaged, exploited, murdered and committed near genocide.  They had little respect or reverence for a people that had survived off the land nearly as long as humanity existed as a cohesive entity.  They destroyed the environment in the fur trade offering an early glimpse at the catastrophe of over exploitation.  In their quest for exportable commodities they enslaved native Alaskans in a brutal fashion destroying what was largely a gentle and self sustaining people.  In other words, they were a colonial nation of the worst order.  

I am not here to atone for Russian behavior, I am here to atone for my own.  For my ignorance in not learning or understanding anything deeper about these people then the alcoholism that surrounded me.  I am a living example of an educational system that ignored truth in the face of convenience.  We were simply never taught these things, they were never discussed.  

Sometimes I think about Rusty and Perry Parker.  Their father passed when I was young and their chain smoking mother must have departed this world at some point.  I remember another native kid Morris Rustan.  He had a perpetual smile and indestructible good humor.  Wherever they are I am truly sorry for never understanding your heritage and the pain your families must have endured.  You are and will forever be the true Alaskans, in your shadow I was simply a pretender.