On March 25th, 2009 I was asked by Ernestine Hayes to speak during one of the Sessions at the Tlingit Clan Conference. Below is the written speech I delivered. If you are interested in more information check out these Links:
Juneau Empire
Clan Conference Main Site
Good afternoon and thank you for the blessing and honor at being allowed to speak before you all today. I especially want to thank Ernestine for believing and trusting in me enough [perhaps foolheartedly] to stand up here and tell my story or at least part of it. Gunalchéesh and forgive me if I offend – that is not my intention.
I stand here before you as a halfbreed. And in the words of the 1953 Georgia State Representative David C. Jones and State Senator John D. Shepard, as reported in the New York Times March 1st of that year: “halfbreeds are not conducive to [a] higher type of society.” Well. I beg to differ. In today's society, and perhaps almost every society past and present, we all become halfbreeds of some sort or another.
I stand here before you all as a halfbreed, as the grandson of a Norwegian and Aleut Grandmother and a Russian Grandfather, with a mother of such ancestry and a biological father whose ancestry is of some unknown white predecessors. My step-father is of Alutiiq-Russian decent who speaks Sugpiaq fluently. In a some ways, I am an ultimate halfbreed. I am the son of alcoholic parents, who through tragedy and strength, quit drinking, and became active and involved parents in my life and education – a transformation I am constantly aware and in awe of. Notwithstanding, I am a collage student who drinks beer with friends and has maintained an nearly 4.0 GPA throughout my educational career. I am an individual who went to predominantly white and native schools and was accepted by each of my peers as an equal.
I grew up learning and singing and dancing Alutiiq songs while also growing up as an Orthodox Christian, being honored as blessed Sub-Deacon under the recent Bishop Innocent. While today I neither sing or dance Alutiiq song or attend Orthodox services, I hold a deep respect and love for both the cultural and religious traditions that they represent respectively. While I attended a predominantly Native Alaskan high school (Mt. Edgecumbe High School), where Inupiaqs, Yupiks, Athabaskans, Haidas, Tsimshians, Aleuts, and Tlingits, shared their culture through oral stories, song, dance, and food, it was there that a crazy White man took a group of us high schoolers out in the woods to fast for three days to find our spiritual selves. It was also the place where I took language classes in Chinese and where I fell in love with literature and its power. I grew up with parents who drank coke-a-cola, I prefer Pepsi – don't tell my parents.
Identity in our modern society is tricky business – perhaps it always has been. My halfbreed personal history – embodied not only in my blood but also in my experiences – might be better described as “multi-breed”. But there is something more that strikes a deep resonant chord within me. Something that enrages and enlightens me. Something that sparks my resolve and ambitions. Something that compels and disheartens me – our collective histories.
In a speech that Ernestine Hayes gave some time back, she asks - “What do we do with our histories?” The histories she spoke of are our shared past of oppressions. Within the sphere of Alaska, beginning around 1742, with the Russian directed exploration by Bering and Chirikov, a slew of Russian fur traders (промышленник) , having exhausted fur bearing animals of Siberia and the further regions of Russia's northeast, sought after the profitable sea otter. In the process, while traveling west through the Aleutian Islands, on through Kodiak, past the Kenai Peninsula, and then into Southeast Alaska many of these traders enslaved Alaskan Natives of nearly every decent to do their hunting for them – you know the stereotypical old joke that white men make bad hunters – well, here is a historical example. Many families, especially of the Aleutians, went hungry without the extra contributions of men. Many men, women, and children alike were mistreated or beaten or patronized by Russian fur traders, Russian American Company workers and mangers, and (yes) even Orthodox Clergymen – even the famous and renowned St. Innocent or Father Veniaminov (an insightful and profound humanitarian for his time), looked fairly paternalistic over Natives and their traditions and culture, employing the now cliché terms of “savages” and “heathens” upon them. Russian's came with presumptions of superiority concerning their own culture, religion, and traditions. Their work, ultimately, was the work of an empire – colonization.
That work was continued under the United State's government and its citizens in 1867, where the Russian government signed a treaty that indicated that all the lands of Alaska, most of which not a single Russian had set foot on or mapped or charted or hunted upon or seen or smelt or touched with their own hands, was not only their property, but presumed to have the sovereign right to sell a vast piece of land at a profit to themselves, without so much as even a mere gesture of consultation to its original inhabitants. Imagine if a daily circulating newspaper existed way up north in 1867 – the New Inupiaq Times, for instance – that proclaimed “500 Russians sell Alaska to U.S. at a Penny an Acre!” Anyone would have been outraged, especially after they found out that it wasn't a joke. I pose Ernestine's question again here – what do we do with this history? Laugh? Weep? Shrug our shoulders? Accept? Move on?
What do we do?
But, there's more. During the course of Russian occupation it is believed that no more than 500 Russian's were actually within Alaska during its entire period of control. What the Russian's lacked to cling onto Alaska were Russian citizens willing to take up habitation here. The U.S. government and it citizens made up for it. With their own cultural mythologies and assumptions concerning manifest destiny and white superiority, coupled with an insatiable need and demand for gold, whales, salmon, timber, security during WII, and finally oil, wave after wave of enterprising and hopeful white settles flooded the land. In their wake Native peoples where stripped of their land, their languages, their culture, their traditions, their dignity. White businessmen dealt unfairly with Natives, if they chose to deal with them at all. Politicians subscribed to racist policies and assumptions about Native people. Missionaries, for enlightened and short sighted purposes, educated the Nativeness out of its pupils because of their convictions that they knew better, that they were saving “the Indian.,” that they were right, that they were saving souls in the name of all that is good in the world. Tell me. What do we do with this history?
Even more pointedly, what do we do – what do I do – with today and tomorrow, our contemporary society? I don't walk anywhere today and see signs snidely demanding “No pets or Natives allowed.” But, what do I say or do for the Native man or woman of my own generation that are so consumed with past oppressions and wrongs they cannot reach beyond them? Cannot see anything but the raping of people and land, the slander and murder, the racism and cruelty? They are so enraged with fundamentally historically true feelings of subjection that they substitute personal growth and hard work with wallowing and self pity. They've become the defeated, weak and weeping victim of absolute evil and cruelty. What do you or I do in the face of this?
What do I do with my step-father's knuckles that were slapped for speaking his original tongue? What do I tell a Black, a Latino, a White, a Mexican, a Chinese, a Japanese, or any other American when they ask me about my access to health care, to dividends, and other rights and privileges they don't enjoy? Do I turn towards my history, our history, and say: “See, I've been more oppressed than you. My hardships are greater than yours?”
For I tell you hear and now every societies history, nearly every individuals story, contains elements of hardship and endurance. Oppression is the language of history, weather it be of the Jew's driven from the Promise land or slaughtered under Nazi Germany, or Palestinians relocated and subjected by Israel, or Armenians murdered and quieted under the Ottoman Empire and Turkish government alike, or the tribes of Europe; the Gual's conquered by the Romans, the the Anglo-Saxon's overthrown by the Norman's in 1066, or that of Asia; the Chinese and Koreans suffering brutal occupation under the Japanese, Tibetans struggling under Chinese control, ancient people's of the far north of Russia (the Komi, Sami, Nenets, Enets, Dolgans and many more) faced with the advancement of the Russian Empire, or the Aboriginals of Australia subjugated under British peoples, the African tribes and people who met with British, Dutch, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, German, and Belgium peoples proclamations of control extending to their vary enslavement, or the Marshallese people of the south pacific who were relocated by the U.S. government so that nuclear war heads could be tested on their homelands and the effects of nuclear fallout on humans could be tested on Marshallese people.
Oppression extends beyond the boundaries of inter-ethnic and cultural conflicts, but intra-societal as well. Humanity's societies have devised ways to subjugate among their own peoples – fear of the other goes beyond simply one's skin – but also discrimination based on socio-economic class, cultural capital and status, as well as religious institutions affiliations and beliefs have been the purveyors of war's over resources the world round, and its the poor who have largely bared the brunt of this burden.
In today's society, first world countries wield their mighty capitalistic markets like a blade that drive rural people into urban areas of commerce to survive in this modern world, that cuts into third world people's countries to give them meager pay and mindless work, that dump mass amounts of pollutants into their water sources and air, that trample trees and disregard wildlife leaving resources decimated or weak to the point of extinction. This oppression takes root in an age old vices – greed, ignorance, and a willful irreverence for life. Does this story sound familiar? Does it enrage you, as it does me? We must, again, turn to Ernestine – what do we do with these histories, these contemporary facts of our time?
Through this collective history delineating oppressions and my own personal “halfbreed” history we've missed something – and I've been trying to steer us to this point, but my thoughts and words are slow. Forgive me.
By looking at history through the lens of collective oppressions we often times lose sight of the fact that history does not fit within nice and neat binary oppositions of good and bad. We lose sight of the fact that Native Alaskans, since time immemorial, moved around, created technologies of their own, and changed with time – just as they had done during their contacts with the Russian and Spanish explorers, and White settlers from the United States. We lose sight of the fact that Native Alaskans, indeed all indigenous people the world round, have been agents and purveyors of their own history, their own culture and traditions.
The evidence for this agency can be found in your faces, in the beautiful artwork I see all around town, in Nora's stories and humor. By approaching history through oppressions, we lose sight of the fact that the oppressors and oppressed alike suffer in turn. I lose sight of the fact that Mt. Edgecumbe high school, the boarding school I attended, once a place of forced assimilation into western society during most of the 20th century, now operates to preserve cultural knowledge and traditions. We lose sight of the tried and true strength of communities and individuals to adapt and persevere and succeed in the face of hardships and heartaches.
We must not lose sight. Turning towards reflection upon my personal history, our collective history, and the complex layered history the world has in all its immensity and beauty – I come to several conclusions. My blood and experiences do not make me a half or even multi-breed. Indeed, they don't even make me human. I am not Aleut. I am not Russian. I am not Norwegian.
I am alive. I am my mothers son.
I have been, we have been, born into a community of life with all of its messy inconsistencies and troubled and humorous stories. With this birth we undertake the responsibilities inherent in a community of life – care and respect for our ancestors, families and friends, our home communities, the plants and animals that surround us who sustain and teach us. But this responsibility extends throughout the great chain of existence, it binds us in a contract of mutual care and respect. By turning to our experiences, to holistic views of history, we might garner the moral energy and fortitude to address and change the problems and issues of our communities. We might better grapple with life's ferocious capacity for change, and in so doing, make positive steps for our own personal growth, the betterment of our communities, and (if we play our cards right) the sustainability of this planet and all its life that gives us so many gifts.
In closing, I want to turn to two statements – one by Ernestine and another by a Pequot, William Apess, who wrote An Indian's Looking-Glass For The White Man in the year 1833. I turn to these two, because their words taste like fruit and make me tingly. I turn to these words because I think they ardently proclaim the thoughts and idea's I am merely trying to echo.
When Ernestine posed her difficult rhetorical question – what do we do with our histories – she had this powerful thought on the matter, that:
If we truly learn about one another – if we are silent for an extra moment when we think before we speak – if we remember that dominant is not a synonym for superior – then perhaps we can take some time to evaluate not the shortcomings of others but the limitations of our own way of seeing.
In a smiler vein, Apess, again writing in 1833 – 176 years ago – commented on the legacies of oppressions between white settlers and Native Americans, in perhaps one of the most moving passages I've ever read, he says:
“It was indeed nothing more than the spirit of avarice and usurpation of power that has brought people in all ages to hate and devour each other,” but, he goes onto say, “You and I have to rejoice that we have not to answer for our fathers' crimes, neither shall we do right to charge them one to another. We can only regret it, and flee from it, and from henceforth, let peace and righteousness be written upon our hearts and hands forever.”
Don't those words taste good? Aren't they powerful? I hope you think so – I feel they give me power and strength to work towards a better life, community, and world. Perhaps they can do the same for you. Gunalchéesh.
