My Name Is Not Easy (60 page)
Read My Name Is Not Easy Online
Authors: Debby Dahl Edwardson
Many of the events in
My Name Is Not Easy
actually did happen. Students at the Copper Valley School did earn a bus with Betty Crocker coupons, and they did earn tuition by hunting and were, unbelievably, allowed to keep their guns in their rooms. Junior is a fi ctional character, but his “uncle” Howard Rock—the editor of
Tundra Times
—was a real person, origi-nally from the village of Point Hope, just a few miles north of the very real proposed site of Project Chariot. Project Chariot was conceived by the Atomic Energy Commission as a means of demonstrating the peaceful use of atomic energy by creating a new ocean harbor through a series of simultaneous nuclear blasts 189 times the size of the one that leveled the Japanese city of Hiroshima.
Th
e Barrow Duck-In is also a real historical event. Th e
Duck-In and Project Chariot are the topics of two documen-tary fi lms written and directed by my daughter, the fi lmmaker Rachel Edwardson, and produced by Jana Harcharek, director of Inupiat Education for the North Slope Borough School Dis-trict.
Th
e military’s Cold Weather Research iodine-131 experi-ments were conducted in the late 1950s in the Iñupiaq villages of Wainwright, Point Lay, Point Hope, and Anaktuvik Pass, and in the Athabascan villages of Fort Yukon and Arctic Village—
as well as at Copper Valley School. Researchers wanted to fi nd out why Native peoples living above the Arctic Circle seemed to thrive in cold weather, while non-Natives suff ered. Th ey wondered whether the thyroid gland played a role in regulating the body’s ability to withstand extreme cold, but later found out that
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it does not. In 2000, following the release of a study done by the National Research Council, the North Slope Borough obtained a settlement for the victims of iodine-131 testing who had lived in the villages under its jurisdiction. Although the National Research Council has concluded that those tested as children were at the highest risk of developing cancer, none of those who were tested as boarding-school students have received settle-ments or acknowledgement of any sort. Some of these people have since died of cancer.
Th
e Good Friday earthquake of 1964, measuring 9.2 on
the Richter Scale, was the largest earthquake ever to hit North America and the second-largest earthquake ever recorded. Th is
earthquake caused 115 deaths in Alaska, 106 of which were due to tsunamis.
Th
e story of Luke, Bunna, and Isaac is based, in part, on the story of three real brothers. Th
ose brothers did have an uncle who
told them that Catholics eat horse meat. Th
e middle brother did
die in a plane crash, fl ying home from boarding school. Th e
older brother was not on that plane because he did, in fact, have a premonition about it and did try to stop his brother from fl ying. Th
e youngest brother was adopted out, without the family’s permission. He grew up in Texas and returned home as an adult.
I know these stories well because I married the oldest brother.
His real name is George Edwardson. I never knew my brother-in-law Bunna, and for reasons I still do not fully understand, I was unable to change his name, despite the fact that his story, as recorded here, is indeed fi ction.
Most of the older leaders of Native Alaska today were, like
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my husband, educated at boarding schools. Th
e “family” net-
work that boarding-school students created among themselves still survives today and has been instrumental in aff ecting the many political changes that marked twentieth-century history in Native Alaska. Students similar to the students of Sacred Heart became leaders in their home communities—state legis-lators, city mayors, and tribal presidents. Th
ese people lobbied
for change in Washington, D.C., and united their tribes to speak forcefully with one voice through the Alaska Federation of Natives, the organization that was instrumental in securing passage of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA).
ANCSA returned 40 million acres of Alaskan land to Native ownership, paying a cash settlement of $900 billion to compen-sate for lands lost. Th
e land and money was distributed through
a network of regional and village corporations. Most of those who organized and ran ANCSA corporations were once boarding-school students.
I wrote
My Name Is Not Easy
for the children and grand-children of these people—my own included—to let them know what their relatives endured, so they can look not only at what they lost but, of equal importance, at what they learned and how they used it.
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Acknowledgments
As always, I am eternally grateful to my mentors at Ver-mont College of the Fine Arts: the brilliant Louise Hawes; the inimitable and endlessly intuitive Tim Wynne-Jones; Ellen Levine, an indefatigable supporter who never, for one moment, doubted me (and who said once that hefting around the massive initial manuscript was increasing her upper body strength); and Marion Dane Bauer, whose wisdom and pas-sionate belief in this story have meant everything to me. Th ank
you, too, to my daughter Rachel Edwardson, whose research on the Duck-In and Project Chariot fed this story; and to the staff of Tuzzy Library in Barrow, Alaska: David Ongley, Sara Saxton, and Gabe Tegoseak, who researched the obscure, for-gave overdue notices, fi xed obsolete microfi che readers, and generally indulged me.
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