Alaska Dispatches
# 11  —  27 December 2000

Rituals

An elder died a couple of weeks ago. I went with our neighbors to visit the body, walking across the village at around midnight. Entering the house into the kitchen, we saw the body laid out on the floor to one side of the room. People filled the kitchen and a back room, talking quietly, eating and praying. In another room off of the kitchen several members of the church choir sang hymns and gospel songs accompanied by a couple of high school boys strumming guitars. 
The funeral was scheduled for the following day, three days after the death. The atmosphere in the house was a cross between a wake and a feast. We stood in front of the body for a short while. Some people prayed at the body’s side, and some cried. One teenager wept inconsolably the entire hour or so I was there. People drifted in and out, grabbed some food and sat at the table, moved into and out of the back room, shook hands. Custom dictates that visitors eat something during their visit out of respect for the deceased, so I helped myself to dried fish, cookies and tea.
The Yup’ik traditions surrounding death involve the entire community. After a death here, the house remains open to receive visitors 24 hours a day. Traditionally, there is a second feast 40 days after the death, and members of the immediate family of someone who dies abstain from all hunting and gathering activities for a full year. It must also be custom, therefore, for the community to provide for the family of the deceased. Many of these Yup’ik mourning rituals bring to mind sitting shiva, the Jewish rituals concerning mourning.
Historically the body is not supposed to be carried out of the door of the house. Customarily a new hole was created in the structure, but nowadays families that follow this tradition carry the body out of a window.
Like with many facets of life here, the rituals surrounding death are losing sway and seem to be adhered to in varying degrees by different members of the community. Historically the entire village shut down to grieve. Nowadays only certain things seem to be put on hold, and activities are suspended without much rhyme or reason as far as I can tell. For instance our gifted and talented class, part of the normal school day, was cancelled, but the same afternoon I visited a well-attended after school program that brings elders and youth together to build traditional crafts. I avoided ice fishing between the death and the funeral, figuring that fishing would show disrespect, but on the eve of the funeral I saw a guy out setting his nets.
The day of the funeral was extremely cold with fiercely blowing snow, so I stayed home with Jules while Leisy went to church to sing with the choir. Because of the weather almost nobody accompanied the pallbearers and the coffin to the graveyard, a half-mile or so from the church. Directly after the funeral there was another feast for the entire village at the deceased elder’s house.
There is something to be said for the communal approach to grieving, especially compared to city life, where unless we are immediate family we take a couple of hours off of work to attend a funeral and then get on with our own business. It is another enviable aspect to village life, and another example of what seems to me to be a paradox: the inverse proportion between the size of a community and the degree of loneliness within it.

It was heartwarming to receive a half a dozen invitations to Thanksgiving dinner; that just doesn’t happen to us in San Francisco. In village fashion the invitations came without much advance warning. As we walked along the boardwalk during Thanksgiving Day folks invited us in to join them for the big meal, or some called as their turkeys became ready. We ended up having two relatively traditional Thanksgiving dinners, one with the teachers and one with Greg and Hannah and their family. Hannah called early in the afternoon to ask if we could cook their turkey at our place, since their oven tends to burn everything. We expected her to show up with a dressed and stuffed bird ready to pop into our oven. I glanced out of the window to see her strolling up the icy boardwalk pulling a child-sized sled, in which she towed a large turkey, still in its plastic wrapping from the store.

Ironically, being in a Moravian village for Christmas felt more comfortable for me as a non Christian than being in a more diverse locale where the holiday is so constantly and overwhelmingly thrust in your face through every possible media channel. I spent the entire period between Thanksgiving and Christmas without seeing a single Christmas advertisement or hearing even one cheesy holiday melody. On the other hand, the centerpiece of the half-day school winter program here was the Nativity play, put on by the entire elementary school. It makes sense, I guess, as the entire village practices a single religion, but it was still bizarre to see a Christmas tree at school and the entire 3rd grade dressed up as angels. So much for the separation of church and state.
On Christmas Eve we attended a long church service in which Leisy was invited to be the soloist with the “mixed group,” another local church choir. This was an honor, and Jules and I were excited to be there to watch her perform Oh Holy Night. Jules had a hard time staying quiet through the service, something that every Yup’ik child seems to be able to do. I found myself shuttling him back and forth to the “baby room” set up behind a window in the back of the church, but he settled down at the right moment long enough to allow us to watch Leisy solo with the group of 40-odd singers to a completely packed house.
On Christmas morning the preacher called Leisy to tell her she had been requested to sing Oh Holy Night again. She was flattered, until she later found out who had made the request. A member of the choir who had been videotaping the service (there was an array of dozens of video cameras lining the back wall of the church) planned to rewind his tape to record the song again. He wanted to get an error-free version. Leisy knew that she had made a couple of mistakes, but she hadn’t known if anyone else had noticed.
There is a village-wide Christmas gift exchange here, which is a huge deal. A family gives their names, written on slips of paper, to one person who serves as the event organizer by a deadline early in October. A few weeks later, the organizer brings the names house to house so participating families can draw the same number of names of people to buy gifts for. If a family of eight enters all eight of their names, they are responsible for buying gifts for eight others. Along with a name you enter a complete list of sizes and a wish list. It is customary to spend several hundred dollars on presents for each name that you have drawn. For example, a man might receive several sets of winter clothes as well as some nice tools. A women might receive clothes and a complete set of pots and pans. Weekend shopping trips to Anchorage in November and December seem to be standard for most families. Before the Christmas Eve service, participating families bring their gifts to a small building near the church, and after the service families pick up their gifts and take them home by snowmachine.
Unfortunately, we were not in town when names were drawn, so we were not able to participate. Since we weren’t part of the big exchange, we weren’t sure how to deal with Christmas gifts here. Leisy asked our neighbor if people buy gifts for friends in addition to drawing names, and if so how much people generally spend. Our neighbor replied: “It’s OK, we know that when Kassaqs give something little, it means a lot.” She was basically saying “we understand that white people say it’s the thought that counts, even though we think that’s bullshit.”
We bought nice presents for all the folks we thought might get us something. As it turns out we received some gifts out of the blue from families we weren’t expecting anything from, and we gave presents to families that didn’t give us anything. In a few cases we actually exchanged presents, but we were never able to decipher the logic of who did or did not give us gifts. It is a stressful thing, exacerbated by our status as visitors and erstwhile representatives of our race here, because if you give too little it feels terrible, and if you give too much you can make people uncomfortable. I think we erred on the side of being too generous, which is the right way to err, it seems to me.
Christmas cards presented another small dilemma. Boxes are set up on the counter of the two village stores, and you look through to find cards with your name on them. Not being sure who might send us cards, we wrote out about 50 cards and delivered them to the store. It turned out that hardly anyone wrote us a card. Oh well. 
Another institution of Christmas in Piniq is the caroling that happens here. Leisy joined one of the three or four crews sent out to hit every house in the village. It is customary to have something for the carolers when they come to your house, and Leisy baked dozens of cookies. Most people handed out gobs of candy and the carolers, who were mostly high school kids with a couple of chaperones, came to our door with huge bags stuffed with candy. It was Halloween all over again, without costumes. I tried to keep Jules awake for their arrival, but they didn’t make it to our house until after 2:00 AM, and he was fast asleep. The group came in, said a prayer, and then sang a verse of Silent Night. It was time for juice and cookies. The group seemed bashful at first, but when Leisy showed her intimate knowledge of the system by busting out the tin foil, the plates of baked goods quickly disappeared into neatly wrapped packages for the road.

©2000, Michael Thornton Wyman