Alaska Dispatches
# 6  —  14 September 2000

Flood

Have you ever gazed out of your window to see a house appearing to float, as if it were an island? Piniq flooded recently. We woke up one morning and the roads had disappeared. While the high water didn’t quite reach our house, our neighbors had to be rescued by boat, and it may not have been the last flood of the season. This is another reason to move over to the other house on higher ground.
There is a rudimentary sewage system here that serves the school and the teacher’s housing complex. It is housed in a small building between the school and the teacher’s apartments with an exposed pipe that dumps waste water into a large trench. This pit is surrounded by mounds of earth perhaps 5 feet tall. During the flood the ground water level surpassed the protecting mounds of earth, and so the flood water blended with the sewage waste water, and before long everything was everywhere. There was a stench in the air for a few days.
This is a striking example of the sensation one gets here that we are in a zone somewhere between the first and third worlds. There are so many developed aspects to life here: a reliable post office, satellite connections to ESPN, phones in almost every home. At the same time we shit in 5 gallon buckets and distill our drinking water. I made the mistake of drinking from the water fountain at the school my first week in town. It was force of habit. I was in the public school, a modern building, and there was a drinking fountain so I drank from it. A few days later I saw a Boil Water Notice posted above the fountain. These new signs let potential sippers know that they should boil the water coming out of the fountain for at least 10 minutes before drinking it, a message more than likely lost on the youngest students, and ignored by the older ones.
The timing of our trip to Ohio next week is pretty awful. We originally planned to get here before August, and so it feels too early for a break. And as it turns out I'll be missing the three best weeks of fall subsistence activities. Leisy will come back on October 2nd, but I think I would have a hard time explaining to my mom that I had to miss Yom Kippur with the family to go geese hunting. It is hard to believe that I'm bummed to be leaving, and to be gone for so long. We'll see how I'm doing come December.
I continue to feel incredibly clueless about shotguns, skiffs, fixing boiler heaters, gill nets, gutting ducks – basically all of the essentials of life in Piniq. I am beginning to sense what Greg meant by feeling more and more real by living here. When you are forced to take care of things on your own, you are forced to learn by doing. The more you do, the more you learn. And it seems like each day there is an opportunity to take care of something else, and to learn by doing.
I could see spending all of my time helping out on projects and tinkering with the house, the heater and eventually the snow machine. There are also a number of projects I could try to work on, like making a film or writing, but the challenge will be to decide on something and to focus my energies and limited time.
Last night I tried this delicacy that I can't remember the name of, but which is affectionately referred to as stink fish. Basically they take a whitefish, gut it, and then leave it out on the porch for a few weeks, allowing it to ferment. It is served frozen, dipped in seal oil and soy sauce. Yum!
There is a certain informality to life here that can be incompatible to outsiders. I imagine it is similar to life in small communities anywhere. For a while I was uncomfortable with my initial interactions with new people I met. I was often left feeling awkward, until Leisy pointed out that people aren’t used to meeting new people here with whom they have no connections. Imagine living in a place where you have known everyone your entire life and are related to almost everyone. There is rarely a need to introduce yourself , or to ask the kind of initial questions I am so used to interchanging, like how many brothers and sisters do you have, where are you from or what do you do. All of this, as well as much more, is known by everyone about everyone in this community except us newcomers. Add to this the general lack of regard for Kassaqs and it is no wonder I feel alienated at times.
It would be basically impossible to show up in a community such as this one without a connection. It is also easy to imagine being forced to leave. There is the story of a white guy who was living with his Yup’ik girlfriend here. He was allegedly selling drugs, and refused to recognize the jurisdiction of the tribal court. After a struggle the tribal police put him on a plane and told him not to come back. When he did, they cut off the power to his home, leaving him without heat in the middle of winter, and supposedly circled his house on snowmachines one night until he left. I am fortunate to be benefiting from the relationships Leisy established and fostered over three years of teaching here and several more years of hard work on the elder’s project.
I am still getting accustomed to spending so much time with Jules. While Piniq has its own set of unique aspects of interest to a two-year-old, it lacks any of the more conventional outlets for killing time such as a playground, aquarium or fire station. It's exhausting a lot of the time, but in a really good way. Although Jules will not remember a moment of this, I know already that this will be a year filled with fond memories for his father.
I have recently started volunteering at the school, teaching web design to a handful of gifted and talented kids in grades 6 through 12. It is slow going so far, since the subject is so broad and there is a wide range of ages, abilities and interests in the group. We meet in the very popular computer lab on Fridays after school has let out, adding multiple distractions and motivational challenges to an already difficult set of circumstances.
The school situation here in general is troublesome. In 1971, a landmark court case strongly encouraged the state to build and maintain village schools in Alaska – prior to this interested and eligible students were taught at BIA regional boarding schools. However the unique challenges of finding and keeping teachers in such small, remote and often impaired communities where English is a second language were underestimated. These obstacles combined with a lot of oil money in the state made the Alaskan bush somewhat infamous as a final, short term stopping point for greedy teachers approaching retirement. There are scattered committed, non-Native teachers around, but in places where knowing the community and way of life is so important, the average teacher stays less than three years. There have finally been steps taken to increase the numbers of Native teachers in local schools, but no one would deny that the schools are still struggling.
Piniq is a very strong community compared to others in the region, with more than its share of good and caring teachers, but it still has an incredibly high turnover rate – in one year the school went through 3 principals. Statewide tests, standards based education and other pedagogical undertakings, while well intentioned, seem rather misguided here. Putting myself in the shoes of a local high school student, it is hard for me to see the rewards of the labor required to succeed at school, other than the accomplishment of graduating for its own sake.
I also sense a distinct lack of coordination or camaraderie between the Native and white teachers. There was an open community meeting when the school year started, and the white teachers and administrators stood before a group of 100 or so Yup’ik parents and talked in English about new discipline rubrics and the like. Looking around at the blank stares I felt awful. Eventually, a guy in the back began opening calling out for a translator. There were a number of Yup’ik teachers capable of translating who didn’t step forward to do so. Perhaps they do not want to be aligned with the white teachers and administrators who seem fairly removed from the issues and needs of the community.

©2000, Michael Thornton Wyman