Wisdom Keeper (2 page)

I come from a truly amazing group of people who are little known in the world. My people, the Aleut people, or Unangan as we say in our language, Unangan Tunuu, have survived and thrived along the remote Aleutian Islands and Bering Sea shorelines for more than ten thousand years. Anthropologists and archaeologists agree that the Unangan had one of the most sophisticated maritime cultures in North America prior to any contact with the outside world. Although they are uncertain about whether the original Unangan people came over from Russia and Mongolia by seacraft or across the Bering Land Bridge, they agree that our people settled on a group of some two thousand islands along an archipelago now known as the Aleutian Islands. Anthropologists and archaeologists have acknowledged that by the time the Russian fur traders, called “promyshlenniki,” found our people, the Unangan people were living in what was to become known as the most densely populated linear mile of shoreline in North America.

Archaeologists have uncovered an old settlement estimated to have been the home of as many as five thousand Unangan. This discovery later demonstrated how extraordinarily well our people survived harsh environmental conditions; how they thrived on rich traditions of art, dance, music, storytelling, ceremonies, and rituals; and how they successfully used their knowledge of science and technology. They accomplished these feats because they were “real human beings” or “real people” who lived in the present moment and in their hearts. The heart was viewed as the place where a being is in constant communication with “all that is.” It was from this great sense of connection to everything that our laws for living grew, as did our natural laws and our spiritual instructions.
It was what kept the people safe while working under and with the often brutal conditions of the Bering Sea. We were a deeply spiritual people. Everything we did and developed, including our technologies, were spiritually based.

The Aleutian and Bering Sea islands were formed either by volcanic activity or are tops of submarine mountains and as such are relatively barren except for the summer's rich carpet of green tundra grasses and colorful wildflowers. Other than arctic foxes, there have never been any indigenous land animals. However, the Unangan found the Bering Sea teeming with marine mammals, fish, and birds—wildlife that was to be the foundation for supporting an Unangan population estimated to range from twenty to thirty thousand strong.

The Unangan, an advanced seagoing people, used their seventeen-to-twenty-foot kayaks, called iqyaxes (one-hole kayaks) or oolooxtahns (two-hole meat boats), to travel to the South Pacific islands, the Russian coast, southern California, and throughout the Bering Sea and North Pacific for weeks. These highly advanced sea kayaks were considered the “second wife” of the Unangan hunter and fisherman, and used to hunt whales, walruses, sea otters, porpoises, Steller sea lions, and northern fur seals. Ingenious methods were designed to catch large halibut from the kayaks, using seaweed rope and V-shaped bone hooks that ensured that the halibut never got loose once hooked. The sea-lion-hide-covered kayaks one made of driftwood, shaped over nearly a year's time, to create an incredibly quiet, swift, and durable high-seas craft. To this day, Unangan kayaks are considered some of the best open-sea kayaks in the world, designed to take high seas coming or going with amazing stability. The kayaks are built in such a way as to move with every nuance of the sea, as if they are part of the sea. Unangan kayaks are the first high-seas craft known to have a form of ball bearings, made of ivory, to allow every critical part of the craft to bend with the movements of the sea.

A friend and I built an iqyax one year. It took us nine months, the same amount of time that it takes for a baby to be born. From building this craft, I was amazed to learn how my people knew the sea. We built the iqyax as closely as possible to the original way it was done. It was
seventeen feet long and twenty-two inches wide. A split bow prevented the craft from submarining in rough seas—the sea would go through the split bow and lift it up so the craft did not submerge. The rear was of such a design that it helped maintain control of the craft in a following sea when the craft is moving down a swell, no matter how large the swells of the sea. The “ball bearings” would allow the craft to move with every movement of the water, making one feel as “one with the sea.”

There are stories told to me by my Kuuyux, a special Unangan mentor, of Unangan men who traveled in their seventeen-foot iqyaxes as far south as the tip of South America, southern California and the Pacific Islands, and as far north as Point Barrow and the Russian Far East. Our people's navigational abilities were unparalleled in North America at the time. Because the Bering Sea has an average of twenty days of sunshine a year due to the Japan Current meeting with the cold air of Siberia, creating clouds and fog, our people could navigate without the stars—a feat that requires tuning into, and merging with, the “spirit that lives in all things.” The real human being is able to navigate by feeling the energy of the sea and land, watching the direction of swells in the sea and the kinds of birds and seals that come through the fog, knowing the direction of tidal movements, feeling the rhythm of the water, listening to animals on the rookeries and cliffs, intuition, “gut feel,” and heart sense. All of this was done without thought of any kind,
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and hunters passed down songs and stories about Unangan navigation for coming generations. Today, there are still some people who can travel this way without a compass or any modern-day navigation aid. Most of the men who fished for halibut when I was a child had this ability. However, today young men use modern navigation aids such as radar and GPS. Years later, I traveled to Patagonia, in southern Argentina, to see the Mapuche people who had invited Elders from Alaska to visit. It was at that time I found out something furthermore interesting about the travels of my people, which I write about in the chapter called
“The Mapuche of Southern Argentina.”

Unangan men began their kayak training as young boys when they would be required to sit in the water along the shoreline for hours each day for several years. They were also required to run up and down hills while carrying large basalt rocks with outstretched arms before being considered ready to join the men. Bruno Frohlich, a forensic anthropologist with the Smithsonian Institute who studied Unangan cultures for three decades, noted that the average Unangan man would be considered an Olympic athlete today, with biceps that would shame most men.

Anthropologists have documented that the Unangan practiced a basic form of brain surgery, unsurpassed in the Northern Hemisphere, with words for every part of the body and a sophisticated mummification process that equaled that of the Egyptians.

With small poison-tipped spears and from iqyaxes and oolooxtahns, our ancestors successfully hunted large whales while they were foraging in bays for several days. When a whale was shot with the spear, the poison, rendered from a plant, would make its way to the heart of the animal and nowhere else. After three days, the whale succumbed.

The appreciation for aesthetics is readily obvious in everything made by Unangan craftspeople, from the intricately painted steam-bent wooden hats, the kayaks, spears, clothing, waterproof garments, tattoos, and ceremonial and hunting masks, to bone and ivory carvings. These items, in museum collections around the world, demonstrate that Unangan built beauty and utility into everything they crafted, with a keen sense of spirituality and connectedness with everything in Creation.

The nature of Unangan spirituality can be gleaned from the art and paintings on the wooden hats used in rituals and ceremonies or worn during the hunt or wars. Unangan men believed that the hunted animal is to be honored, so the hunter comes in his finest. The Unangan bent-wood hat frequently includes four- or eight-petal rosettes, indicating the use of the “sacred four” known in many Indigenous traditions around the world, and the famous Flower of Life, which has been found, for example, in Egyptian and Mayan glyphs. It contains the patterns of
creation as they emerged from the “Great Void.”

The wings of the hat, called volutes, are made of ivory and display a spiritual worldview in their design that includes the “third eye,” balance of the masculine and feminine, one's spiritual center, and the center of all Creation. The volutes were all carved differently, depending on where one was from and what station the person had as a hunter. However, all volutes contain a “hidden” message of Unangan spirituality.

The volute itself, when turned on its side, is shaped like a bird or bird's beak, signifying the Thunderbird. The Thunderbird was known to our people as a bird with the power of death—a reminder that we must die the “small deaths” if we are to live. These small deaths may be loss of a loved one, a home, a friend, death of someone you cared about, death of the old “you” and birth of the new, etc. The piece, ranging from six to eight inches in length, would be carved with a curve on its length, ending in a spiral. The spiral represented Agox, the Maker of all Creation, which never ends—our people knew that life was a circle, but a changing circle. In the center of the spiral was the third eye, our center, and the center of the universe. The stem of the volute conveys the understanding that male and female aspects in all creation must be balanced in order to live as a real human being. Even the land, I found out, has a male and female aspect. A phallic symbol appears on the stem along with circles with dots in the center to indicate the “sacred circle” and the center; designs of three circles attached to one “originating” circle denote the sacred feminine number three, and the place from which we originated.

Intricate designs on the hat may depict a hunting story, or animals and birds. The hat, like all other Unangan objects, had a practical use. The beautiful hunting hat, with its elongated visor, was made specifically for the volatile Bering Sea; to prevent being blinded by oncoming waves, the hunter would simply look down whenever a wave broke across the bow of the craft.

Unangan culture, for its time, was advanced in its treatment and value of men and women. Unangan society was egalitarian in that the roles of men and women were equally honored, and both men and women
could have more than one spouse if circumstances dictated. Use of a moon calendar demonstrated a reverence for the sacred feminine and its connection to water and thus all life. The sacred and great power of women was acknowledged in practice, in which a man would not hunt during his spouse's moon-time. Because the moon-time was sacred and a time when women, at their greatest power, could disrupt normal, everyday living and hunting, women were separated from the community in what some may call a “moon lodge.” It was also the women who initiated the “shamans” because they have a more direct connection with the mysteries of life. Finally, people who had one gender and embodied the other gender in their persona were considered spiritually advanced because, in the spirit world, there is no duality—the two genders are merged into one.

Unangan spiritual development and understanding of the human being's place in Creation were the foundation for our people.

When Vitus Bering arrived in the Aleutians in 1741, looking for fur-bearing riches for sale to China, he found an abundant and thriving people. Little did Vitus Bering know that this historic event of contact would soon mark the beginning of the end for Unangan culture. By the time the Russian priest Veniamenov arrived in Unalaska in 1824, only two thousand Unangan survivors were left, having experienced genocide, disease, and starvation at the hands of the Russian fur traders, the promyshlenniki. In some cases, entire settlements were leveled without firing a shot, victims of diseases such as smallpox, measles, and tuberculosis.

Under Russian rule, Unangan shamans and their apprentices were executed; Unangan survivors were forbidden to practice any form of their spirituality, language, or customs; and they were required to learn Russian. Women and young girls were taken as concubines, and many were taken back to Russia. The Russian Orthodox Church sent missionaries to convert Unangan people into their form of Christianity. And any Unangan who joined the Church was required to take the name of a Russian saint. Unangan who joined the Church were treated more civilly than those who did not.

Eighty percent of the Unangan were wiped out within fifty years of the Russian fur traders' arrival. Stories are still retold about the horrors the Unangan faced during this mass destruction. One story relates how a group of women and young girls jumped en masse off a cliff on Umnak Island, refusing to be the sex slaves of the Russian fur traders. Another story recounts a bet between two Russian traders about how many Unangan a musket ball could kill. Unangan men were lined back to back and shot point blank. The answer was nine. And yet another story about how the Russian fur traders found out that it took almost a year to build the
kayak used to hunt the large marine mammals needed to keep a large community nourished: Russian fur traders went into a village on Akutan Island early one morning and destroyed all the kayaks. The residents of the village starved to death.

In 1763, many Unangan organized an uprising against their cruel enslavers and killed dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Russian fur traders. A Russian captain by the name of Soliev decided to teach the Unangan the cost of resistance, and to take revenge. Soliev organized a small war fleet with a plan to kill every Unangan on the three largest islands in the Aleutians: Akutan, Unalaska, and Umnak. After the killing spree began, many Unangan from the three islands, mostly women, children, and old men, escaped to a small island off Unalaska Island to seek refuge. In a short period of time, after the Russian fur traders had already killed or imprisoned thousands of Unangan on the three largest islands in the central Aleutian Chain, up to three thousand more Unangan may have been killed on that refuge island once the Russian fur traders found them. Subsequent investigations of that site indicated that the traders had slipped powder kegs down the entrances of Unangan semi-subterranean houses, killing all inside. It was to be the last major battle between the Unangan and their oppressors.

The traders make little or passing reference to this dark period in their ship's journals. And the Russian Orthodox Church, to this day, only speaks of the good things the Church brought to the Unangan, who were forbidden to speak of the Russian conquests until most stories were forgotten. In fact, having forgotten accounts of these events, Unangan collectively have never grieved their own enslavement and genocide.

The remaining survivors of the holocaust were enslaved by the Russian fur traders to hunt and kill fur-bearing animals to the south and north of the Aleutian Islands (going as far south as southern California). Having heard stories from Unangan about fog-shrouded islands filled with millions of northern fur seals, Russian fur traders sent expeditions to find them. Even today people tell the story about a chief's son, named Igadagik, whose kayak was blown away from Unimak Island during a three-day storm. When the storm settled, Igadagik could hear the
tumultuous barking of seals in the fog and headed toward the sound. When he could see land, Igadagik was astounded by the teeming numbers of fur seals filling every space on basalt boulder–covered beaches. He stayed on the island for a year. It was only during a low tide and clear spring day that he could see the mountain tops of the Aleutians. Upon his return to Unimak Island, Igadagik recounted his experience, and the Pribilofs became known as Tanax Amix or Land of Mother's Brother. The shamans told the people that this place could only be visited for hunting and never inhabited. It was a sacred place.

A Russian sea navigator, Gerassium Pribylov, with a handful of carefully selected and enslaved Unangan men and their families, set sail in 1787, and uncovered one of the islands, naming it Saint George, after the Russian Orthodox saint whose birthday fell on the day Pribylov found the island. The following year, he then uncovered the neighboring large island and named it Saints Peter and Paul, later to be called Saint Paul. Along with three smaller, additional islands, the group of five islands became known by the Russians as the Pribylov Islands (later, when the United States took over, the name was changed to Pribilof Islands). With Pribylov's captive Unangan labor force now forcibly resettled permanently on the Pribilofs, a new era began: thousands of seals were killed in a back-breaking process each brief summer when the animals came to the islands to breed. At that time the Pribilofs were estimated to have 4.5 million northern fur seals.

Life in the Pribilofs must have been brutalizing for my people during this time. A handful of men killing upward of twenty to forty thousand seals in a few months, skinning the animals, and then transporting the pelts from as far as twelve miles away to the newly established settlement in large fifty-foot Unangan crafts called nixalax (baidar in Russian). It had to have left the men exhausted and spent at the end of each day.

Food was relatively abundant during the summers as the seal carcasses had no value to the Russian fur traders but were a staple in the Unangan diet. But winters in the Pribilofs were in stark contrast to the summer abundance. The Siberian low systems, bringing stingingly cold and moist winds, would batter these remote islands every winter, with
wind speeds as high as a hundred miles an hour. Large snow storms buried the subterranean homes, and all marine mammals and cliff-nesting seabirds migrated to warmer climates. What few marine mammals remained did not come to shore. The winter seas were tumultuous and too dangerous to negotiate, even for the accomplished Unangan seaman. One can only imagine how the Unangan, left behind for the winter by the Russian fur traders, fared during these extremely harsh times. But somehow, the Unangan survivors, slaves in a brutally conquered nation, persisted against all odds.

Under the rule of Russia for more than 120 years, the Unangan were forced to learn Russian, adopt the Russian Orthodox faith, take Russian surnames, and, eventually, embrace the Russian ways, some even inter-marrying with their oppressors and migrating to Russia. The people with Unangan and Russian blood became known as Creoles. The Creoles took on the work of the Russian fur traders, and even became Russian Orthodox priests, interpreters, and captains of the Russian sailing vessels that carried furs back to Russia.

The conditions of privation under Russian domination continued until the 1867 Treaty of Cession when Russia sold jurisdiction of Alaska to the United States and the Unangan once again had to change their ways, this time under the heavy hands of U.S. government oppressors. Learning English was mandatory and speaking Russian or Unangan (outside of religious practice) was forbidden. The Unangan were only allowed to retain their Russian Orthodox faith, stubbornly holding onto it perhaps because it was the only thing they had that brought them hope. The language used in the church was, and still is, Slavonic and Unangan Tunuu, written with the Cyrillic alphabet (prior to the establishment of the Russian Orthodox Church in the Aleutian Islands, the Unangan language was never written down). I found out from Father Michael Lestenkof, an Unangan priest, that Unangan shamans had encoded Unangan spiritual messages in the Lord's Prayer, written in Unangan
and passed down through the generations.

The U.S. government contracted with private companies to continue killing northern fur seals for their thick luxurious pelts. The Alaska Commercial Company received the first twenty-year contract, and the North American Commercial Company won the second twenty-year contract before the U.S. government took over direct jurisdiction in 1910.

What hard-won gains the Unangan managed while surviving under Russian domination were wiped out after the Treaty of Cession, including being treated as people with the rights of Russian citizens, attending Russian schools in Russia, and becoming Russian Orthodox priests. The private companies followed by the U.S. government insisted that the people learn the Western ways, a practice carried on from similar oppressions against Native Americans. Speaking a language other than English was subject to washing one's mouth out with soap or being hit with a specially designed stick with holes in it to increase the pain.

As Elder Gabe Stepetin once said about his childhood under U.S. rule, “they did not want us to get too smart. Only to learn how to say ‘yes sir, no sir' and that was it. We would listen to music played by the teacher all day long, then go home.” Stepetin also talked about the food they ate one winter, as detailed in a journal he kept, “It was my birthday and all we ate that day was bread and tea. We had nothing else. It was always like that. Look at my journal entry here . . . we ate bread and had tea for most days. This day I wrote that we had bread and tea, don't know what we are going to have to eat tomorrow.”

These conditions lasted through the early 1960s.