Wisdom Keeper (11 page)

“We propose that we declare war on the United States government and secede from the Union!” stated a nervous young man. He was part of a delegation of young men, ranging in age from seventeen to twenty-seven, who demanded an audience at a critical last-minute meeting of community leaders and Elders I had called. He was the oldest of the group.

Officials from Washington, DC, were about to follow through with their intention to abandon the Pribilof Island communities of Saint Paul and Saint George, as announced one year before. The government had offered no solutions as to how our villages would survive after it left, leaving it up to us alone to figure out how we would survive as Unangan communities. It was a desperate time.

Deep within me I felt that we were being guided by unseen forces—that whatever would transpire after this moment in time was necessary for us to move to the next phase of our lives and spiritual journey. We had tried everything to stop this day from occurring, but no time-tested skills, abilities, commitment to our people, and persistence could stem the tide of the unseen forces. It seemed that a great weaver was creating this fabric of human drama in such a way that we could only hold on for the ride.

On the eve of the official withdrawal, all the village leaders of Saint Paul Island gathered in City Hall to plan. We wanted to avoid community-wide panic over the drastic changes and try to find a way to restore hope in a community that felt hopeless. We had no idea what was happening on Saint George, but it had to be similar.

Now we faced the mirror of desperation and anger in the community, reflected by these young men. By their grim demeanor, it was clear that they were very serious. As chair of the meeting, I told them that they
had just as much stake in these decisions as anyone, so they could speak their mind.

“Our plan is to declare war against the United States, bulldoze across the runway so no planes can land, station armed guards around the island, and take over the U.S. Coast Guard station by force! We want your support!”

Stunned by this proposal, the entire gathering of Elders, organizational heads, and spiritual leaders held its silence. I knew we were all thinking the same thing—if this is not handled properly, we would have an even greater disaster on our hands than the one we had gathered to discuss.

I felt it was my place to guide the discussion—but for the first time in my life I was at a complete loss as to what to do or to say. The slightest mistake could provoke serious trouble in our village. Like most of our community leaders, I was already exhausted and stressed, almost beyond the point of human endurance. At the time of our meeting, the entire community had struggled through a year of unfathomable grief, pain, violence, and death, while living in a state of deep depression and widespread panic. In addition to the increased suicides and murders during this tumultuous year, alcohol abuse and domestic violence had skyrocketed. The four police officers, the physician's assistant at the clinic, and our five-member Emergency Medical Technician Squad were severely fatigued from responding to emergency calls around the clock for months on end. In a community of this size, everyone is like family. We share in every tragedy at a deeply personal level.

As the scene with the young men unfolded, I thought back to one of the numerous tragedies I had witnessed or been a part of in the past eight months.

I was sitting next to the community store in my pickup. I had left my window open as we always did in the village, so that we could talk with passersby. People approached me constantly during these very trying times, seeking help of some sort or consolation because of my position as a community leader. There was nowhere I could go, day or night, without being approached by someone seeking hope or solace. Therefore, I
did not think anything of it when a twenty-two-year-old young man approached my vehicle, obviously quite drunk. His eyes were unfocused. He staggered, barely able to keep from falling down. As he leaned up against the truck door, he pulled out a .22 caliber pistol, cocked it, and put it to my head.

“I want a job! If you don't give me a job, I will blow your %#$%& head off!”

My heart froze. I knew this young man well. I had watched him grow up. He was always troubled, but he had never done anything beyond getting into fistfights and drinking alcohol. This was different. I could feel his desperation and sense of powerlessness at the confusing events we had all faced in the past year. He could not take any more. I knew he was so drunk, so full of rage and hopelessness, that he was capable of killing me—or killing himself. Someone in such crisis could just as soon kill himself as others.

My mind raced through options for a response. The people nearby watched in disbelief, afraid to intervene lest the gun go off accidentally and kill me. I was on my own.
Should I open the door quickly, forcing him to the ground?
I thought to myself.
Maybe if I swing my left arm up quickly enough, I could push his gun hand away from my head!

Then a clear voice “dropped” into my head—it was the voice of my beloved grandfather, Paul Merculieff, long dead.
Always speak the truth!
the voice said loudly. I swallowed hard, looked the young man directly in the eyes and said gently and clearly, “You're drunk. You know that this isn't the way to try to get a job! Shooting me won't get you the job. It will destroy me and you. Please go home, sober up, and I will talk with you anywhere at any time about this.”

Internally I braced, holding my breath, not knowing if what I said would precipitate his firing the gun. I realized in that moment that I would accept whatever happened. Each second was the proverbial eternity. Finally, he lowered the gun and staggered off. Feeling immense relief, my heart went out to him. I knew his demons and what he must be going through.

He never did sober up, and I returned to my frenetically paced
work—dealing with the anticipated government pullout, not giving the incident any further thought. Two weeks later, while I was working on my skiff next to my house, he passed by. He lived two houses down from me. We exchanged greetings. I did not know that he was going home just after falling off a cliff. He died the next day from internal hemorrhaging. Tremendous grief overtook me. I will never know if I could have done anything to prevent his death, and I was haunted by that thought for years.

On another day, as I was driving through the village, I heard frantic screams and headed toward them. It was my cousin. When she spotted my truck, she ran alongside, screaming wildly, “My brother is trying to kill himself down by the dock! Help me! Help me!” She had an utterly wild look in her eyes, her long hair chaotically blowing in the stiff wind, her face contorting as she screamed. She looked like a demon possessed.

I left her behind as I raced to the west landing dock. Sure enough, there was Tata—hip-deep in water, half-naked, two men fighting to bring him back to shore. I jumped out to help bring him in, but the two men were already returning him to shore. The Bering Sea water was bitter cold and the night, wrapped around this unfolding tragedy, felt ominous.

Tata sobbed uncontrollably, “I want to die! Let me die!” The men escorted him to a truck and drove off. I found out later that he was okay, thanks to his friends who stayed with him until the crisis passed. Ironically, sometime later, he single-handedly stopped two teenagers and one pre-teen from doing exactly the same thing collectively, one very early morning. These children were so intent on killing themselves that they kicked and scratched him as he physically fought them back to shore. He saved their lives.

Yes, that year of horror profoundly changed the character of our people and our community forever.

My attention refocused on the meeting of village leaders as the silence and the tension in the room grew. These young men stood with determination, like warriors waiting for a blessing from the Elders to go to war. I could not blame them for feeling that the U.S. government had abandoned us—we had been in its service first as a captive labor force
and then as civil servants for over one hundred years.

I studied these young men and watched the body movements and expressions on the faces of the community leaders. I felt like a witness to a historic human drama. I knew I would always remember these times—an ultimate test to the character of my people once again.

I wondered if we had what our ancestors had—that which allowed them to survive so that we could be sitting in that room on that night. Like the Jews, our ancestors had survived a holocaust. Like the African-Americans, we had suffered enslavement. Like the Japanese-Americans, we had suffered forced relocation during World War II. However, unlike the Japanese-Americans, we had lost ten percent of our people—infants and Elders. My grandmother, Alexandra, died in the camp. Her remains, along with all the others who died in the two years of internment are still on Admiralty Island, marked by Russian Orthodox crosses. Yet, despite such challenges to the greatest of human spirits, our ancestors persisted. It is a testament as to how remarkable my people are.

And at that moment, in the room with the leaders and angry young men, we were experiencing a trial that required the use of our hearts, not our minds, if we were to avert more tragedies. Finally, an “Elder in training” decided to speak. I knew him as a brother and mentor who helped me learn the Unangan ways of hunting. His name was Mike Zacharof—known to his peers as “Dead Eye” because not only did he have one “lazy” eye that cocked off to the side, but he was also a skilled marksman in his day. Anything that he took aim at in a subsistence hunt was dead.

“Okay, we will agree to declare war against the United States government and take over the Coast Guard station, but on one condition: you have to do it our way.” Mike said in a calm and steady voice.

The leaders and Elders remained silent, watching this surreal scene play out, not sure what Mike had in mind. No one interfered. The young men clearly did not expect this proclamation. They knew their plan was so outrageously bold that the leaders would not accept it. This was too much to hope for.

The young men caucused to decide whether to accept or reject Mike's
terms. The decision was quick because they wanted to seize the moment. They accepted.

Mike said, “Alright, here is the plan. We take one rifle with one bullet out to the Coast Guard station, fire one shot into the air and declare war against the United States government, and then we immediately surrender!” The young men were so stunned by this proposal that they didn't know how to respond. We leaders were equally dumbfounded.

Mike continued, “Look, everybody knows that anyone who is at war with the United States and surrenders gets all the foreign aid in the world that they could possibly want! This way, we lose and we win—how can you beat that?”

Everyone, including the young men, laughed hard at this twisted but strangely wise logic. We laughed until there were tears in our eyes, partly out of relief that the tension had been broken, partly out of sheer physical and emotional exhaustion, and partly out of the realization that we were actors in a stranger-than-fiction scene that could only have happened in the movies. Unangan humor had prevailed as it did so many times in past personal and community trials and tribulations.

The young men, seeing that there was wisdom in the room, decided to leave us to our eleventh-hour deliberations—the government was physically and symbolically moving out by the end of the next day, October 28, 1983. Thankfully, we never did have to act on their proposal, not knowing what a rejection would cause them to do.

We estimated it would cost us at least five million dollars a year, at the bare minimum, to keep both Saint George and Saint Paul as viable communities, to maintain the costly infrastructure the government had put into them, and to buy and ship food in bulk from Seattle.

At that moment, in that room, everyone was afraid that we might not succeed in saving our village. The three million dollars needed for Saint Paul was a lot of money for people who lived on government rations, subsidies, subsistence wages, and traditional foods such as halibut, seal meat, reindeer, and ducks. We had to be prepared for the worst, so we planned to buy one-way airline tickets for everyone in both communities to Anchorage, on the mainland. Just in case. We had no further
plan as to what to do if we became refugees in the city. Life was and is so profoundly different in a city than on our two tiny, remote, pristine islands—inhabited by two million seabirds, one million northern fur seals, seven hundred Unangan on Saint Paul, and one hundred Unangan on Saint George.

I had no idea how we Unangan people—who had lived for two hundred years on these remote islands, under colonial governments, never being allowed to make decisions for ourselves until the early 1970s, with no money, no savings from our low-paying seasonal work, and having lived mostly on traditional foods—could make it in a city. I knew that, if forced to evacuate, our people would be in a whole world of hurt and many would not make it.

We had to succeed. Failure was not an option.

I stoked up my courage to speak. “We have to give hope to our people, even if we don't have the answers now,” I said matter-of-factly. “The one thing that kept our people together is that we did things together, as a people. We should have a parade; get all the people out, show everyone that we are in this together and we will stick together no matter what.”

“What do we have to celebrate anyway? The government pulling out? I don't think it's right,” Sam stated, with the strain of the year obvious in his voice. I heard the uncertainty and the fear that we all felt.

“Sam is right! We can't celebrate. We can't celebrate a disaster!” Jimmie
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said angrily.

“Well, maybe you are right, we have nothing to celebrate,” I replied. “But, how about honoring our ancestors who went through really tough times and still made it? We could say that this parade is to remember that Unangan are strong people when we stick together like our ancestors did. They went through worse times than we did.”