Post by blackcrowheart on Oct 22, 2005 17:11:26 GMT -5
Tetlichi offers this bleak assessment atop Old Crow Mountain, 5 miles from the village. He has just killed a bull caribou. It is one of five he will shoot this season to feed his family - a perfect animal lying in the snow under an electric blue sky. Panting with exertion, Tetlichi chops off the bull's head and scoops out the finger-size botfly maggots that infect most caribous' throats. The eyes in the decapitated head are huge. Even dead they shine like molten tar. Occasionally, from certain angles, they catch the Arctic sunlight and reflect it back pale green, the color of lightning.
---
Gale Norton, the U.S. secretary of the interior and the senior government official responsible for ANWR, once visited Gwitchin country in Alaska and responded to elders' anxieties over oil drilling in the refuge by urging the Indians to "expand your worldview."
What Norton implied was: The needs of the industrial majority trump the needs of the aboriginal few. Her advice, though, fundamentally misreads the nature of modern Gwitchin life. It isn't narrow. It straddles millenniums.
According to archaeological evidence found in caves in the Yukon, the Gwitchin may be the oldest native culture in the Americas. The tribe's ancestors arrived from Siberia at least 13,000 or 14,000 years ago, long before the more famous Eskimo.
Shadowing herds of migratory animals, they dragged moose-hide tents with the aid of harnessed dogs. Their shamans conversed with animals through dreams - particularly with the vutzui, or caribou. The tribe, linguistically related to the Navajo, was fond of tests of strength, such as wrestling matches for men and women. And having reached what is now central Alaska and the Yukon, they settled down to gorge on wild berries, salmon and a cornucopia of game.
Few modern Gwitchin sugarcoat this past: They are still too close to the land for that. In famine times, infant girls were killed to save food, and crippled elders would ask to be left behind to starve.
Today, willow bows and dog sleds have given way to high-powered rifles and motorboats in Old Crow. But because of the tribe's profound seclusion, the pace of modern assimilation still feels jarring, raw.
Junked snowmobiles and plastic lawn chairs crowd yards alongside gory piles of decapitated caribou. Inside the cramped little homes - simple frame structures that cost the tribe an average of $120,000 to build because every nail must be flown in - hanks of jerked caribou meat, rifles of all calibers, antlers, skin blankets and other frontier artifacts jostle with satellite televisions that rarely seem to be switched off.
Teens sporting baggy hip-hop pants and eyebrow rings now monitor the caribous' migration on a Web site that tracks collared animals by satellite. Meanwhile, at the village store, a relic of the famed Hudson's Bay Company fur-trading empire, Indian elders scratch their heads over cans of Pringles-brand potato chips. A single air-freighted cucumber costs $4.10.
"Too much white man's stuff too fast," says Tetlichi, the village healer. "It's like eating a lot of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Heartburn avenue."
Tetlichi, 53, is deeply worried about the Americans' plans for ANWR. But he sees it as just the latest blow to a way of life already reeling under the combined assault of television, alcohol and the wage economy.
Old Crow is a relatively healthy Arctic community. It isn't plagued to the same terrible degree as other native settlements by problems like drug abuse or teen suicides. (In Alaska, the suicide rate among Indian youths is three times the national average.) Still, the Gwitchin aren't completely immune from the effects of cultural erosion.
The village school teaches up to ninth grade. Half the kids who leave for a boarding school in Whitehorse never return. And those who do often end up working low-paid tribal jobs. Very few live completely off the land anymore, as their parents did. Many feel adrift, caught between worlds, and seek solace in drugs or alcohol. Though Old Crow is officially "dry," liquor is smuggled into the village, most recently in a shipment of dog food. A bootleg pint of vodka sells for $150.
"That's what makes saving the caribou even more important," says Tetlichi, who has the cautious step of an alcohol survivor. "They are - what's the English word? - the anchor."
Tetlichi wears his long braids tucked up under a baseball cap. He is munching happily on dried caribou in his house. He slathers the dark jerky, which he eats all day, with butter - like toast - while his wife, Mabel, hunches over a table, tenderizing red caribou steaks with the butt of a butcher knife. Overhearing mention of ANWR, she declares, "We are very" - WHACK - "angry with" - WHACK - "President Bush!"
Their son Randy Jr. isn't listening.
He's mesmerized by the MTV show "Pimp My Ride," which features an auto shop that tarts up jalopies. "Lady, you ain't gonna recognize this Mustang!" the host is promising from the set in faraway Los Angeles.
A few pickup trucks have appeared in Old Crow in recent years, brought in on temporary ice roads or barged to the otherwise roadless village on the Porcupine River. Randy Jr., 11, has never seen a real sedan.
---
By early summer, the sun never sets in the Arctic. The quality of light is hallucinatory. For about three months it drenches the world continuously, giving the impression of a landscape without secrets. Even the deepest tree shadows are a pale, watery blue - a hue that, if it had a taste, would chill the palate like spearmint.
This sunny simplicity, however, is deceptive.
ANWR may well be, as many activists say, the biggest environmental battle in a generation. And it probably has spawned the most organized and focused Native American resistance campaign since the Red Power movement of the 1960s. But all this human drama is unfolding against a backdrop of complex and troubling environmental change.
According to the U.S. Arctic Research Commission, today's Arctic temperatures are the highest in 400 years. Canadian data suggest that the Yukon alone has warmed by 3 degrees since the 1960s. Glaciers are in retreat. Arctic seas have heated up, changing fish distributions. And spruces and grizzlies are advancing poleward into the once treeless tundra.
The effect of climate change on caribou has been perplexing.
In some regions, according to wildlife experts, the early-greening tundra has provided a bumper crop of caribou food, and the herds have boomed. This fact is recited often by the oil companies working on Alaska's North Slope. (At Prudhoe Bay, the largest oil patch in the United States, the caribou herd has grown fivefold since 1978.)
Yet 100 miles to the east, the Gwitchin's beleaguered Porcupine herd has plummeted from 178,000 to 123,000 animals in the past 16 years. Researchers think that erratic thaws and freezes in the wintering grounds may be the culprits. This creates an icy armor over the snow, preventing hungry caribou from reaching the forage beneath.
"You used to see 500 animals at a time crossing this river, like one big stampede," Frost the hunter recalls, standing on the gravel riverbank of Old Crow. "Today, you're lucky to see 50 at a time."
It's a luminous May afternoon in the village. Gunshots echo in the distance. Hunters are bringing in dead caribou on boats and on four-wheeled buggies. But old Frost has stayed home. His legs ache - new aging pains. And his wife, too, isn't feeling well today.
Upstream, a tributary of the Porcupine has thawed and broken up, and chunks of ice slide down the currents. Mini-bergs the size of pianos collide, tinkling musically on the waters like falling glass. The river sounds like a crystal chandelier swaying in a breeze.
"This is how the land wakes itself up, renews itself," Frost explains, squinting poker-faced from the shore, his hands balled in his pockets. And given his burden of woes, it's a measure of the man that he says this without the least self-pity.
---
Dorothy Frost is crying.
It's the last weekend in May - Big Caribou Days, a homespun festival celebrating the annual spring migration in Old Crow. And Dorothy, a tribal administrator and one of Stephen Frost's numberless relatives, is supposed to be giving a pep talk. She fidgets in the log community hall before a crowd of villagers clad in rubber boots and fleece jackets, outlining the Gwitchin's caribou crusade. But her voice trails off. Normally a jovial woman in glasses, she covers her eyes with her hand and sobs. Later another speaker, an elderly man just returned from lobbying in Washington, also breaks down. So does a young woman who stands in the audience to offer reassurance. It's hard to watch.
"Everybody's emotional right now," says Dorothy Frost, recovering her composure. "Things are coming to a head."
The Gwitchin people have no legacy of armed resistance to European invasion, no mythic or bloodstained Wild West to draw grim inspiration from. There was no Gwitchin Geronimo. No northern Sitting Bull. Like most Canadian Indians, the usually peaceful tribe was incorporated into a tumultuous world the invaders called "New" through commerce, when the Scottish explorer Alexander Mackenzie first showed up on the Porcupine River in the 1790s, paddling a bark canoe packed with furs and trade beads.
"Nearly all European travellers who have visited the (Gwitchin) refer to their fine physical appearance and pleasant dispositions," wrote an anthropologist studying Old Crow as recently as 1946. "I found them to be self-confident and forthright, kindly, generous, intelligent, and honest."
The great irony of their long battle against the United States is that, win or lose, this very act of defiance has opened the door to change. And now, an alien new bitterness simmers in Old Crow. If Congress approves oil development in ANWR, some tribe members are vowing to meet the bulldozers at the refuge boundary with their hunting rifles.
"I've got news for the Americans," an angry young lobbyist named Shawn Bruce tells the somber community hall crowd. "If it comes down to it, we will become militant over that herd. We got Gwitchin men over in Iraq now. We got Vietnam vets. We will train warriors. We won't let them in the calving grounds. I burn. I am mad."
Stephen Frost, the master hunter, is more philosophical.
"I think what upsets people most isn't that them Americans will drill, but that they'll drill without even knowing we d**ned Indians exist," he sighs. "They'll get the oil for their cars. That'll be it."
Surveys taken since Hurricane Katrina jacked up gasoline prices tend to bear him out. According the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, public support for oil development in ANWR has risen from 42 to 50 percent over the past six months.
Back in Old Crow, Big Caribou Days ends on a down note. Almost nobody joins the late-night jigging contest - a dance competition set to fiddle music inherited from 18th century European trappers. Frost walks home early, complaining about his knees.
A man of habit, he had gone out caribou hunting the day before, one last time for the season.
Ethel was away in Anchorage, undergoing a checkup at the cancer clinic. And the Frost household, long since emptied of its 11 children, had been unbearably silent.
The old man had sat on the banks of his beloved river, feeding willow sticks into a small fire. He never took a shot. Only a few straggling bulls were fording the Porcupine by this late date; the cows were already up north, leading the migration to their embattled Alaskan calving grounds some 200 miles away.
Frost passed the time calling to the birds. He did this uncannily, mimicking the squeal of field mice in distress. Again and again, Arctic owls in their snowy winter plumage swooped low. And ravens diverted from their high tangents in the sky to investigate.
He smiled. For a little while at least, all his troubles seemed like a dream. And for the first time in weeks, Frost seemed truly happy.
---
Gale Norton, the U.S. secretary of the interior and the senior government official responsible for ANWR, once visited Gwitchin country in Alaska and responded to elders' anxieties over oil drilling in the refuge by urging the Indians to "expand your worldview."
What Norton implied was: The needs of the industrial majority trump the needs of the aboriginal few. Her advice, though, fundamentally misreads the nature of modern Gwitchin life. It isn't narrow. It straddles millenniums.
According to archaeological evidence found in caves in the Yukon, the Gwitchin may be the oldest native culture in the Americas. The tribe's ancestors arrived from Siberia at least 13,000 or 14,000 years ago, long before the more famous Eskimo.
Shadowing herds of migratory animals, they dragged moose-hide tents with the aid of harnessed dogs. Their shamans conversed with animals through dreams - particularly with the vutzui, or caribou. The tribe, linguistically related to the Navajo, was fond of tests of strength, such as wrestling matches for men and women. And having reached what is now central Alaska and the Yukon, they settled down to gorge on wild berries, salmon and a cornucopia of game.
Few modern Gwitchin sugarcoat this past: They are still too close to the land for that. In famine times, infant girls were killed to save food, and crippled elders would ask to be left behind to starve.
Today, willow bows and dog sleds have given way to high-powered rifles and motorboats in Old Crow. But because of the tribe's profound seclusion, the pace of modern assimilation still feels jarring, raw.
Junked snowmobiles and plastic lawn chairs crowd yards alongside gory piles of decapitated caribou. Inside the cramped little homes - simple frame structures that cost the tribe an average of $120,000 to build because every nail must be flown in - hanks of jerked caribou meat, rifles of all calibers, antlers, skin blankets and other frontier artifacts jostle with satellite televisions that rarely seem to be switched off.
Teens sporting baggy hip-hop pants and eyebrow rings now monitor the caribous' migration on a Web site that tracks collared animals by satellite. Meanwhile, at the village store, a relic of the famed Hudson's Bay Company fur-trading empire, Indian elders scratch their heads over cans of Pringles-brand potato chips. A single air-freighted cucumber costs $4.10.
"Too much white man's stuff too fast," says Tetlichi, the village healer. "It's like eating a lot of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Heartburn avenue."
Tetlichi, 53, is deeply worried about the Americans' plans for ANWR. But he sees it as just the latest blow to a way of life already reeling under the combined assault of television, alcohol and the wage economy.
Old Crow is a relatively healthy Arctic community. It isn't plagued to the same terrible degree as other native settlements by problems like drug abuse or teen suicides. (In Alaska, the suicide rate among Indian youths is three times the national average.) Still, the Gwitchin aren't completely immune from the effects of cultural erosion.
The village school teaches up to ninth grade. Half the kids who leave for a boarding school in Whitehorse never return. And those who do often end up working low-paid tribal jobs. Very few live completely off the land anymore, as their parents did. Many feel adrift, caught between worlds, and seek solace in drugs or alcohol. Though Old Crow is officially "dry," liquor is smuggled into the village, most recently in a shipment of dog food. A bootleg pint of vodka sells for $150.
"That's what makes saving the caribou even more important," says Tetlichi, who has the cautious step of an alcohol survivor. "They are - what's the English word? - the anchor."
Tetlichi wears his long braids tucked up under a baseball cap. He is munching happily on dried caribou in his house. He slathers the dark jerky, which he eats all day, with butter - like toast - while his wife, Mabel, hunches over a table, tenderizing red caribou steaks with the butt of a butcher knife. Overhearing mention of ANWR, she declares, "We are very" - WHACK - "angry with" - WHACK - "President Bush!"
Their son Randy Jr. isn't listening.
He's mesmerized by the MTV show "Pimp My Ride," which features an auto shop that tarts up jalopies. "Lady, you ain't gonna recognize this Mustang!" the host is promising from the set in faraway Los Angeles.
A few pickup trucks have appeared in Old Crow in recent years, brought in on temporary ice roads or barged to the otherwise roadless village on the Porcupine River. Randy Jr., 11, has never seen a real sedan.
---
By early summer, the sun never sets in the Arctic. The quality of light is hallucinatory. For about three months it drenches the world continuously, giving the impression of a landscape without secrets. Even the deepest tree shadows are a pale, watery blue - a hue that, if it had a taste, would chill the palate like spearmint.
This sunny simplicity, however, is deceptive.
ANWR may well be, as many activists say, the biggest environmental battle in a generation. And it probably has spawned the most organized and focused Native American resistance campaign since the Red Power movement of the 1960s. But all this human drama is unfolding against a backdrop of complex and troubling environmental change.
According to the U.S. Arctic Research Commission, today's Arctic temperatures are the highest in 400 years. Canadian data suggest that the Yukon alone has warmed by 3 degrees since the 1960s. Glaciers are in retreat. Arctic seas have heated up, changing fish distributions. And spruces and grizzlies are advancing poleward into the once treeless tundra.
The effect of climate change on caribou has been perplexing.
In some regions, according to wildlife experts, the early-greening tundra has provided a bumper crop of caribou food, and the herds have boomed. This fact is recited often by the oil companies working on Alaska's North Slope. (At Prudhoe Bay, the largest oil patch in the United States, the caribou herd has grown fivefold since 1978.)
Yet 100 miles to the east, the Gwitchin's beleaguered Porcupine herd has plummeted from 178,000 to 123,000 animals in the past 16 years. Researchers think that erratic thaws and freezes in the wintering grounds may be the culprits. This creates an icy armor over the snow, preventing hungry caribou from reaching the forage beneath.
"You used to see 500 animals at a time crossing this river, like one big stampede," Frost the hunter recalls, standing on the gravel riverbank of Old Crow. "Today, you're lucky to see 50 at a time."
It's a luminous May afternoon in the village. Gunshots echo in the distance. Hunters are bringing in dead caribou on boats and on four-wheeled buggies. But old Frost has stayed home. His legs ache - new aging pains. And his wife, too, isn't feeling well today.
Upstream, a tributary of the Porcupine has thawed and broken up, and chunks of ice slide down the currents. Mini-bergs the size of pianos collide, tinkling musically on the waters like falling glass. The river sounds like a crystal chandelier swaying in a breeze.
"This is how the land wakes itself up, renews itself," Frost explains, squinting poker-faced from the shore, his hands balled in his pockets. And given his burden of woes, it's a measure of the man that he says this without the least self-pity.
---
Dorothy Frost is crying.
It's the last weekend in May - Big Caribou Days, a homespun festival celebrating the annual spring migration in Old Crow. And Dorothy, a tribal administrator and one of Stephen Frost's numberless relatives, is supposed to be giving a pep talk. She fidgets in the log community hall before a crowd of villagers clad in rubber boots and fleece jackets, outlining the Gwitchin's caribou crusade. But her voice trails off. Normally a jovial woman in glasses, she covers her eyes with her hand and sobs. Later another speaker, an elderly man just returned from lobbying in Washington, also breaks down. So does a young woman who stands in the audience to offer reassurance. It's hard to watch.
"Everybody's emotional right now," says Dorothy Frost, recovering her composure. "Things are coming to a head."
The Gwitchin people have no legacy of armed resistance to European invasion, no mythic or bloodstained Wild West to draw grim inspiration from. There was no Gwitchin Geronimo. No northern Sitting Bull. Like most Canadian Indians, the usually peaceful tribe was incorporated into a tumultuous world the invaders called "New" through commerce, when the Scottish explorer Alexander Mackenzie first showed up on the Porcupine River in the 1790s, paddling a bark canoe packed with furs and trade beads.
"Nearly all European travellers who have visited the (Gwitchin) refer to their fine physical appearance and pleasant dispositions," wrote an anthropologist studying Old Crow as recently as 1946. "I found them to be self-confident and forthright, kindly, generous, intelligent, and honest."
The great irony of their long battle against the United States is that, win or lose, this very act of defiance has opened the door to change. And now, an alien new bitterness simmers in Old Crow. If Congress approves oil development in ANWR, some tribe members are vowing to meet the bulldozers at the refuge boundary with their hunting rifles.
"I've got news for the Americans," an angry young lobbyist named Shawn Bruce tells the somber community hall crowd. "If it comes down to it, we will become militant over that herd. We got Gwitchin men over in Iraq now. We got Vietnam vets. We will train warriors. We won't let them in the calving grounds. I burn. I am mad."
Stephen Frost, the master hunter, is more philosophical.
"I think what upsets people most isn't that them Americans will drill, but that they'll drill without even knowing we d**ned Indians exist," he sighs. "They'll get the oil for their cars. That'll be it."
Surveys taken since Hurricane Katrina jacked up gasoline prices tend to bear him out. According the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, public support for oil development in ANWR has risen from 42 to 50 percent over the past six months.
Back in Old Crow, Big Caribou Days ends on a down note. Almost nobody joins the late-night jigging contest - a dance competition set to fiddle music inherited from 18th century European trappers. Frost walks home early, complaining about his knees.
A man of habit, he had gone out caribou hunting the day before, one last time for the season.
Ethel was away in Anchorage, undergoing a checkup at the cancer clinic. And the Frost household, long since emptied of its 11 children, had been unbearably silent.
The old man had sat on the banks of his beloved river, feeding willow sticks into a small fire. He never took a shot. Only a few straggling bulls were fording the Porcupine by this late date; the cows were already up north, leading the migration to their embattled Alaskan calving grounds some 200 miles away.
Frost passed the time calling to the birds. He did this uncannily, mimicking the squeal of field mice in distress. Again and again, Arctic owls in their snowy winter plumage swooped low. And ravens diverted from their high tangents in the sky to investigate.
He smiled. For a little while at least, all his troubles seemed like a dream. And for the first time in weeks, Frost seemed truly happy.