Alaska trip

First Thoughts

I woke up too early this morning. Alaska has invaded my thoughts and my dreams.

<b>Dreams of the Tundra</b> -- I dreamt of sinking into the tundra as if it were a bog. I've read of the spongy ground but I have no idea what it is really like. I am afraid to go to Unalakleet because it will be so foreign to me. I will be a visible minority--a cossack, white skin making me stand out from the crowd--for the first time in my life.

<b>Native Americans</b> -- Anchorage has a hint of familiarity, like so many other towns in the West. A mixture of modern conveniences, Old West gold-rush memorabelia, and Native American culture. When I grew up on Long Island, the only reminders of "Indians" were the names of places and the arrowheads hidden under layers of decayed oak leaves in the woods. I went to Comsewogue High School, shopped in Patchogue, canoed in the Nissequogue. But I never saw a Native American. We had no museums to remember and honor the original inhabitants of our islands. I knew that "they" sold Manhattan island to "us," but I never wondered where they went. In the West it is different.

<b>Food and Subsistence</b> -- Here's a topic I can't get away from. Ever since I read "<a href="http://www.wwnorton.com/catalog/fall01/002017.htm">Coming Home to Eat</a>" by Gary Paul Nabhan, I have been painfully aware of the origin of every item I put into my mouth. I found local foods here on the tourist trap gift-shop shelves: wild berry jam and candy, local smoked salmon (some smoked and packaged in Washington state!), and local berry and rose-hip teas. I am happy to find local foods, yet I find myself wondering if the harvest of these items by commercial packagers is depriving rural Alaskans--Native and cossack--of their daily sustenance.

I have to think about this; the whole reason for the existence of the Oomingmak co-op is to provide cash to families in small coastal villages. To provide cash so they can buy gas, clothes, possibly an aluminum boat. Things that replaced, at least to some degree, dogs and sleds, fur parkas and fishskin raincoats, handcrafted kayaks. It all makes me worry, disturbs my dreams and my waking thoughts.

Why does the good of the many outweigh the good of the few? Individuality is worshipped in America, but only when the individual conforms to the majority appearance, the majority ideology, the majority consumerist values. Native Alaskans do not. And so, as has been happening since Europeans first "discovered" this continent centuries ago, the rights, wisdom, and ways of the first Americans are trampled and devalued. Is this a paradox, or simple hypocrisy?

Now that I’m awake, I may as well have a cup of coffee….