St Paul, Pribilof Islands 57.08 N, 170.17 W
Once, there was a curious Aleut boy, and early one morning he set out from his village in his sealskin kayak to hunt. He drifted on calm waters away from his native shore paddling to the west where the seals came through a pass between two islands. There he waited watching the sea birds alight themselves from the waves to dive on bait fish, when there came a mother pregnant with calve, swimming to the north*. ‘Why is it,’ he wondered, ‘that all the pregnant mothers swim past our island to the north?’ So he endeavored to follow her to find the answer of where the seals came from.
The further from his shore he paddled the heavier the breeze blew, until a gale had built up blowing winds from the south, the worst of directions for the wind to blow from. He had no choice but to run with the storm, for he could not make way against it to return home. For three days he drifted on the wide tossing sea, and everyday the water and the wind were colder than the day before, until on the morning of the fourth day he was becalmed in a dense fog to which he could not see beyond even the bow of his kayak, now burdened with accumulating ice. Bravely he had held up against his trial at sea, but now, disoriented and cold, he felt at his loneliest and darkest.
Then, from out of the mists he began to hear the baying sounds of seals. He paddled towards the noise until he heard the sound of breaking surf. Cautiously he pushed his craft forward peering into the gray nothingness until a surf landed him ashore amid a vast gathering of seals, and as the mist broke and the sun pushed through he could see that the cold barren beaches he had come to were occupied by innumerable seals, so many that he counted them to be as vast as the stars.
Legend has it that he stayed with the seals for a year. Learning their ways and becoming kin to them before setting out again, now under a northern wind, for his home in the Aleutian Islands. When he did arrive the people did not know him, but when he unraveled the greatest skin they had ever beheld, and told them of his trials they held for him a great feast, and he recounted his story many times.
* In later times European and American seal hunters would kill the pregnant mothers for the soft skin of the unborn, this was called pelagic hunting. Pelagic is derived from the Greek Pelagos, meaning sea. This practice was outlawed, but was very difficult to enforce.
This island, and the lesser three among it was St. Paul of the Pribilof Islands. 250 miles to the north of Dutch Harbor this archipelago stands as lone promontory outpost in the Bering Sea. These islands look no more than to be frozen plateaus raised from the water. In the era of discovery they became a prominent sealing station for the Russians, and criminals were sentenced to the island where they were given a quota of seals to kill, skin, then tan. The hunting was so easy one only had to walk about the shore and club their prey over the head, and the quota could be met in less than half a year. The life expectancy on these islands was little more than a few years, assuming the convicts arrived at all, for the leaky ships that made the voyage from Kodiak Island were prone to sinking. With them were also sent Aleut slaves, who were valued for their knowledge in tanning seal hides. The US came into possession of the Pribilof Islands as a part of the purchase of Alaska, known by the opposition of the purchase as ‘Seward’s Icebox’, in 1867.
Today St Paul has been made infamous by those who have had to travel there, and the conditions they have had to endure. In comparison with the Aleutians the air here is without humidity. The dry wind howls unrestrained across the sea at a sustained 30 + knots and is known in gales to gust above 100. The mercury is prone to stay well below zero, usually 30-40 degrees below. The harbor here freezes and the seas around it become eerily becalmed with furrowed ridges and small spires of jagged ice. In winters past the Malolo had to break the ice of the harbor in order to land her barge, then break a road through for the fishing fleet to come and process. One year, I have been oft told, the sea froze as far as sixty miles south holding the little tug in. She pushed her way slowly through, the wind howling about her at 60 knots, but her steady in the still and swell-less sea. However, our two visits were mild, and this has been a record warm year for these islands.
The population of the island is mostly Aleut, and there is a cannery owned by Trident Seafood that provides the only economy for the populace. Without the cannery, this community would probably not exist, and so there are government incentives for it to remain in operation. Here the harsh realities of the native peoples of these far northern regions are presented with disheartening truth. Alcohol and depression related illnesses are the leading causes of death here. Levels of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome are among the highest rates per capita in the US.
From the very limited understanding that I have from my short visit to this part of the world I can speak with no great authority as to these intertwined diseases among natives, if with any authority at all. Instead, I am confronted with many questions regarding their origin. Is alcoholism spawned by the depression, or the depression by the alcoholism? In the case of the former the depression is the primary condition, and the alcohol the copping mechanism. And so what would be the root of the depression? The environment?
This could seem likely to one not accustomed to long winters of darkness followed by long summers of daylight, and the winters made longer by the extreme cold, wind, and complete isolation from the world beyond. But their ancestors, as well as like ancestors of other native northern cultures, such as the Inuit, survived for many millennia before in this environment. However, it is hard to say how deep the depression was before the arrival of Europeans and Americans. We do know that other northern cultures of Caucasian ancestry also suffer elevated rates of depression. Therefore, data could further the argument towards environment being our root cause of depression.
The more interesting question, and one that is pertinent to a present day discussion on a global level, one even relevant to our own society, is one concerning the separations of a people from their life-ways. Research indicates that the land-bridge has been open multiple times in geological history, and that the first peoples arrived to North America 29,000 years ago. They were confined to the northern regions by the geography and ice, and so did not migrate down through the planes until 11,500 years ago, or even before that, as new archeology indicates. Regardless, more reliable archeological evidence indicates that the Aleuts settled into the Aleutian Islands around 12,000 BCE. Their first encounter with the white settlers advanced technology and domineering / industrious ways was only just over 270 years ago. And it is worth mentioning that during the times in which most native peoples of America came into first contact with Westerners was at the dawning of the industrial revolution, in which the societies of the arriving new settlers were undergoing their own accelerated growth and change. The question then is presented; how quickly can a cultural identity bend, or totally conform to a new and dominant culture, especially one so much more economy driven and complex? What psychological effect does this bear on ones cultural identity, and how intimate is their cultural identity with their personal one? And this question relates to our own culture, as new technology accelerates at alarming rates, as we are more and more removed from the food chain, and our many micro-cultures become mixed into one global society. I am not one to answer the question, however it is one worth asking.
Or is it the natives lesser tolerance to Alcohol that sparks alcohol abuse, carrying over to into the disease of alcoholism and sparking depression. I am told that there are other native communities along the northern extents of the Bering Sea in which Alcohol is banned. These communities are said to be cleaner, and have better established public services and economies. In these communities religion is a larger part of their society, and the people are often kinder to visitors, instead of skeptical and bitter towards them. In short, they are proud peoples.
“There is the bar,” one native said to our second mate, pointing out across the small harbor to the township. “That is where I live,” he said, moving his hand only slightly, indicating a short distance walk to the right. Then he moved his hand back to a point in-between the bar and home, “That is where I got my DUI,” he said, then said it was cold that night, and he didn’t feel like walking.
And so as a city ordinance the municipality of St. Paul has given up alcohol during the season of lent, and unfortunately, even with a cannery, there is high un-employment, and the majority of the labor force is imported, largely from overseas.
The crew bears great racist resentment towards the natives. Perhaps this, too, is a piece to the puzzle. The expectations of the whites here towards the native people are beyond low, to one of disgust and suspicion. And so after we tied up, and with the sun out and the temperature fresh above freezing, and the half the harbor still iced and good snow on the ground and an hour or two to kill until we began working our barge I told the Captain I was off on a walk about.
This was met with reluctance. To begin, he is not one who likes his crew leaving his sphere for any length of time unless on official business. Second, he made it clear to me that I was not to talk to any natives. That they were dangerous, would drag me into an alley, steal my money, and knife me.
And so, weary of the natives, I disembarked the ship, stopping to take note of the black feral foxes that occupy the island, as well as puffins, and other exotic fowl of arctic origin, then climbed a nearby hill for a good view of the sea, and of the island.
I saw him, hunched and with hands in pocket leaning into his steps, catching a glimpse of a stranger in his eye he veered his course towards where I stood. His long gray hair blew back atop his shoulders, dark skinned and slant eyed, and no taller that 5 feet, he came alongside me with a genuine grin and he stood quietly looking out across the water. As I gazed across the blue I was looking on it as one come to see it for the first time, this northern sea foreign to my eyes, but him, he looked out on it with some gaze beyond familiarity, but of oneness, as one looks into a looking glass beyond the features of their face and into their own eyes seeking some connection with their soul unseen, and him seeking from the water a glimpse of something constant to measure the passing of his own time, the sea ever moving yet ever unchanged, and in this same way I look on the old graybearded mountain of home, that ever present foundation and anchor that I recall from my earliest of being, the ever enduring that I can measure my own mortality by.
Then he looks over and says, “Halloo.” And asks me if I came in on the ship. I said that I had, and he begins to tell of his days fishing, or of his life when he lived in Seattle, then Anchorage, there was a hint in his narrative of a woman, a love from his past, a romance sadly ended and now him being here living with his sister, working three hours a day at the AC Value Store, but wanting to work more, but there isn’t any work, and he is lucky to have what work he has. Then he was silent as he grinned, both of us looking out over the water.
“We don’t get a lot of sunny days you know,” he says. “Got to get out and enjoy them when we get them.”
In the end we shook hands bid each other a good day, and went our separate ways, him to some small shack of a home standing against the ever constant wind, and me to work at breaking the chained lashings from containers, off load, then backload our barge, 18 hour days of hard work against the elements, all for wages, before setting out again for the south, to the islands which once defined this man’s people.
Soon after, in the early morning, as I was having my coffee and planning out the meals of the day, I came across an editorial in a magazine. In it, the editor Christopher Kimball, quotes a Buddhist aphorism, “Through our suffering, and in the suffering of others, we discover our own humanity”. I summarize this sentiment in words from the wisest of all southern men, Atticus Finch, with Scout on his knee, saying something to the effect that; you can never know a man until you get into his shoes and walk around a while. The world is full of them, remote places with remote people hidden from our mainstream eyes, living in isolation, watching through some picture box the ways of the busy world beyond theirs, and looking about their reality, their expectations of themselves brought down low and repeatedly lower, feeling now imprisoned by the same sea or mountains or deserts that once sustained and insulated them. We may not ever understand this kind of poverty, or any other kind, most will never catch a glimpse of it, though it is everywhere, but we can stubbornly greet strangers with dignity, listen to their story, and imagine wearing their shoes for a while, because they are watching us, and they long to walk about in ours.