Four Quarters of Light (27 page)

This was the invitational dance, and I noticed some white faces swaying in the ring. This was the secret of the caribou dance. The sacred dances had honoured the spirit of the beast and it had come among us. It invited us into its world where we were all one with it and its wilderness spirit. This is what bound the Gwich'in to one another and to the land they inhabited. This is the power they drew on to exist in this extreme place and to overcome against all the odds. This is what made them the few Spartan warriors holding back the incredible might of the forces of Babylon. Every instinct in me felt the lure of what was happening in front of me. I wanted to be part of its incredible embrace, but something held me back; something told me I wasn't ready to lose myself. My rational self was putting a harness on my desire. I didn't know it yet, but my power creature was yet to come to me in another place where only the invisible eyes of the outback would witness it.

In a rising crescendo, with drum, rattle and chant rending the air, the dancing stopped and within seconds the dancers fell away to the margins of the room. Like a scattering of caribou, they were gone. Chief Evon stood on a chair and announced that all had now been welcomed, and he invited us to share in the discussions
that we might better understand the Gwich'in and their plight. But first we should all take time to reflect and make our hearts ready to listen. Then, as an afterthought, he added that we would have to wait until the dancers had changed and put away their costumes. ‘It takes many hours and much hard work to make a costume,' he stated, ‘and because these dances are important to us we must treat the costumes with respect.'

During the break, many of the villagers and some of the visitors went to partake of the communal lunch. I joined them. I asked one of the camera-crew men, whom I had noticed in the final dance, about the roast chicken and the loaves of sliced bread. It did not seem to be native fare to me. The chicken, he explained, was probably ptarmigan or wild duck, and as for the bread, he explained that home-baked bread had been introduced by Russian traders and missionaries, but as money was scarce in these villages very little was spent on shipping in flour. He had been working sporadically in Alaska for many years and had witnessed many changes. ‘Modernism is making it harder and harder to maintain the old subsistence ways of living. The kids here are like kids anywhere, they are conditioned by TV, and as they get older they expect the things they see on TV. When they're older, some of them go off to university or to learn “white men's work”. They train as electricians, pipeline workers and house builders. They earn regular money and spend it on consumer goods. TVs, radios and videos are always a preference. Years ago, I remember working on a programme about the Eskimo people up near Bettles. At one of the village's councils the debate was about which TV programmes should be allowed and which should be banned, and it went on for some hours. It was a real toss-up between
Starsky and Hutch
,
Charlie's Angels
,
The Six Million Dollar Man
,
Sesame Street
and some Disney cartoons. The village elder, who had never been to school and who only had some pretty basic English, argued as hotly as the younger people. It was like an addiction. They were all high on TV, even if the older people could not have understood the language and speech rhythms of
Starsky and Hutch
!'

I could imagine the impact of TV and radio after centuries enduring the wilderness. I could imagine sitting in one of the village homes through the long, bleak months of winter when everything was dark and nothing moved but the snow and the wind blowing it. To flick a switch and instantaneously have your landscape transformed by a million hallucinatory images must have been electrifying. I looked at the piles of food and the growing number of people. I could imagine that many of the rituals about killing and preparing such food had also been abandoned. It is important to understand that for these people subsistence is more than a matter of ‘living off the land' and specific protein intake. As a way of life it is close to the concept of ‘kosher' in Jewish belief or halal observances in Muslim society. The Alaskan natives had traditional ways of treating their fish and meat and preparing it for consumption or utilizing it for clothing and tools. As in other orthodox societies, there are certain rules and rituals that must be followed to ensure a future harvest and the wellbeing of the people. I asked my new acquaintance about this. He felt that many of the native villages were attempting to recover their lost traditions and restore them in a modern way. Their way of life was under tremendous pressure. The young people especially were torn between two worlds. I remembered the compelling rhythms of the dance and how so many of the young people had given themselves to it with genuine abandon. The spirit world of the caribou dance was certainly one they entered into with unembarrassed ease.

Perhaps the ancient stories were no longer told long into the night. But even if modernism had thrown up the opportunity for these young people to live better than at any time in their history, and even if some of them were lost to their tribal traditions, they had still come back here from Anchorage, Fairbanks, Washington, Seattle and Canada. The pantheon of the new gods of Paramount Pictures and HBO, Schwarzenegger, Stallone and the retinue of action heroes, had not yet erased the power of the old gods. The raven, the bear and the caribou still moved across this land, and their spirits could still be felt.

I asked my new friend about the lavishly coloured beadwork on the caribou costumes. He smiled. ‘That's the Russian concept of fair exchange. Before the Americans bought Alaska from Russia they used to exchange coloured beads for animal pelts, which they sold to the Chinese. Apparently, Russian merchants were fascinated by exotic goods from China. I suppose the natives were equally fascinated by the rich colour of the beads. Native people here, like many other indigenous peoples elsewhere, believed that the hole in a stone or shell, for example, was a portal for a spirit power. The blue and red beads were highly valued, and the Russian hunters and traders got very rich.' I didn't know if he believed in the ‘power' of the beads, but I did, and I understood immediately why the costumes were special and the beadwork so meticulous. The circling caribou dance was another portal, like the concentric holes in the beads. I was glad I had resisted the desire to join in. I felt sure I would have been swept away.

I finished eating, told my friend I might catch up with him later, and moved off among the villagers. I engaged in easy conversation with a few of the camera crews and was assured that I could travel with them after the Gathering, but I found the villagers hard work. They were polite and answered any question I asked them, but they hardly got beyond formalities. There was a reticence about them I could not fathom. At first I put it down to shyness or embarrassment, on both our parts, but the more it happened the more convinced I became that it was more than just social awkwardness. I was the only stranger here who was not part of a TV team, so I was different. But that was hardly sufficient reason to justify the kind of distance I was being held at. Maybe another day, once my face had become more familiar, I assured myself as I walked away from the crowd towards the communal building.

Evon Peter, the young chief, was introducing the old chief, or what some people called the traditional chief, to a few outsiders. Moses Sam was in his nineties and hardly able to walk. Evon and a few other younger villagers led him about the hall with an
obvious display of tenderness and ceremony. Moses Sam seemed happy to meet the strangers, though I was certain he could neither hear much nor understand what they were saying. Because of my own anxiety about how I was being received I inched away from the presentation and stood near the door.

‘Well, are you enjoying our gathering so far?' a woman's voice behind me asked.

I turned round to see the Canadian woman who had flown from Fairbanks with me. I smiled in deep gratitude. She was the only native person who had approached me so far. I told her how much I had enjoyed the dancing and explained how after being washed out during the night it had greatly lifted my spirits. ‘An Irishman shouldn't be afraid of a little rain,' she joked. ‘Have you met many of the Gwich'in yet?' I admitted that I hadn't, and tried to sidestep my feeling of displacement by asking her if this was her original home village. She said that her mother had come from another village on the Yukon flats but she had moved to Canada with her mother and father, who was a Canadian Athabascan, when she was young. She made several trips home to visit her cousins and other relatives. ‘The family is important to us,' she stated, then questioned me about my own family and why I was in Vashraii K'oo. I told her I was researching a book. Curiously, she then proclaimed how kind it was of me to come to the Gathering. ‘We need lots of friends now,' she said.

At those words, and because of the way she had befriended me, I made my confession that I was finding it difficult to get into conversation with the villagers. She looked at me puzzled. I told her how the villagers had walked past my camp whispering and pointing, and how one of them had just stood and looked, then walked away in silence.

‘Oh,' she said, ‘you are the man who has hung his sleeping bag on the caribou antlers, the one with the tent covered in a big blue plastic sheet?'

‘Yes,' I said sheepishly.

Suddenly she started laughing aloud and gave me a big hug as if I really was some innocent abroad. Then she called over Chief
Evon and explained who I was, identifying me by my tent. He too laughed loudly, and shook my hand. ‘I wondered who it was,' he said. ‘Some of the villagers had been asking.'

Now I really was perplexed.

My travelling companion, whom I now knew as Margaret, continued, ‘I thought, Evon, that you should explain. It would be kinder, and would help our friend feel less lonely.'

The chief smiled softly again. I must have been twice his age and his solicitation and sympathy were increasing my discomfort. But as he spoke the penny dropped very fast.

‘We are the people of the Porcupine caribou herd,' he began. ‘They are, to us, like brothers, like our own family. As a mark of respect for what they give to us we keep the antlers of these creatures we have hunted. Where you are camped is like what you would call a graveyard. It is a sacred place.'

My look of absolute horror struck him immediately.

‘Please,' he reassured me, ‘you are welcome here, and we are honoured that you have chosen to come to be with us. My people did not know how to say this to you for fear of offending. But I know now that you have come a great distance and would not be expected to know many things.' I attempted to make a profound apology, but the chief only squeezed my shoulder. ‘It is not a great problem that you should worry about.' He turned to Margaret. ‘I should tell him also about the plastic covering on his tent?' Both of them laughed again. ‘The plastic sheet you have on your tent is a product of the oil industry. Our village has decided against using this material as a protest, and also because it is unnatural. It will remain uselessly cluttering up our tribal lands for many generations. You may have seen the trailer full of polystyrene that has been abandoned near here; this too is manufactured, a byproduct of oil, so we forbid its use in the village.'

Had I had one wish at that moment it would have been that I should immediately turn into a mosquito and fly off into oblivion. I hesitated for a moment, then confessed that I had used some of it to prop up the side of my tent.

‘I know!' said Evon, and laughed again. ‘Your tent and sleeping
bag are not made for this kind of country, and in any case there was no dishonour in what you did. I can arrange for you to stay with one of the families, or perhaps you would like to stay with my family?'

I was too embarrassed and too overcome by my own bungling stupidity to accept. ‘No,' I replied, thanking him. ‘I will move to somewhere else immediately.'

‘There is no need, my friend,' he said. ‘We are happy for you to stay here if you wish. Anyway, I think maybe the caribou wanted you to stay close to them also. I must go now. We must start again soon. We will talk again, I hope.' Then he got up and left, and I watched him speak with some others at the far end of the room from where we had been sitting. They smiled and nodded as he undoubtedly filled them in on my predicament.

For want of something better to do or say I took some of the insect spray from my pocket and said, ‘Well, Margaret, I've brought the wrong kind of tent and an inadequate sleeping bag, I've slept on holy ground and broken all the tribal taboos, and this spray is about as useless against mosquitoes as I am feeling right now.'

Margaret was determined I should not feel sorry for myself. ‘It's not really holy,' she said. ‘That is a Christian way of thinking. But it reminds us who we are and our debt to the caribou, and I think your camping there with your plastic sheet and wet sleeping bag hanging from the antlers may have helped us focus our mind a little more.'

‘So I'm not totally useless then!' I exclaimed.

‘Oh no. No-one is ever totally useless.' Then she fumbled in her bag and pulled out some incense sticks. ‘You left the flaps of your tent open. By now it will be full of mosquitoes so you should burn these for a while to clear them out. I think you will learn much from the Gwich'in before you go.'