Shadows on the Koyukuk

by Sidney Huntington

  The young man and his wife spent a sleepless night. If they were to survive, they must join the trek to the meat cache on the morrow.

  Early in the morning after the young man and his wife had loaded everything in their sled, the mother walked out of her igloo with a coil of rawhide rope. She moved steadily toward a birch tree at the side of the trail. She put one end of the rope over a branch of the tree, sat down and put a loop over her head and around her neck.

  Then she faced away from the trail and called, “I am ready, my son.”

  He pulled on the rawhide rope.

  All of the Koyukon elders know this story, but, as one old woman told me, “We can’t tell such stories because it is against our beliefs to tell these stories to others.” For this reason, many of the oral traditions of the Koyukon people are being lost.

  Many stories I have heard from Koyukon elders illustrate that all thoughts and energies were aimed at survival. After about 1850 when rifles and shotguns were available, starvation largely ended for Alaska’s Athapaskans.

  I caught a glimpse of how difficult early Indian life was from Johnny Oldman, a Koyukon elder. In 1934, he was seventy-two and I was nineteen. Just before Christmas that year, my brother Jimmy and I left Hog River with Johnny, his son, Abraham, and a four-year-old girl. With two dog teams, we headed for Hughes, where the potlatch for Little William was to be held. (Little William had made the snowshoes for me when I was a child.)

  Temperatures were –50 degrees and colder during the day, and even colder at night. Jimmy and I helped to break trail for the two sleds, which were loaded with bear and moose meat for the potlatch. The little girl was bundled up in one of the sleds.

  On the second day out, near dark, when we crossed a creek in the bottom of a valley the thermometer on my sled registered –68 degrees. “Leave the meat, go to the top of the ridge, and make camp. Put up the tent,” Johnny Oldman instructed Jimmy and me. “It’ll be warmer there.”

  As Johnny had predicted, the temperature was warmer on the ridge, only –52 degrees. Jimmy and I put up the tent, set up the woodstove, and quickly built a fire. The stove heated the tent rapidly. When Johnny and Abraham arrived, Johnny suggested that Jimmy, Abraham, and I return to haul the meat out of the valley that night to save time the next day. When we arrived back at camp with the meat, Johnny had finished cooking dog food and our supper was ready.

  The mercury in my thermometer was now almost down to –60 degrees. When we got inside the tent we found the little girl inside, naked, her skin blue from cold. She had wet her clothes during the long day of riding the sled, and Johnny had hung them over the stove to dry. Feeling sorry for the poor girl, I started to wrap her in my spare long johns.

  “Don’t do that Sidney,” Johnny said. “It’s not really cold. She has to get tough. A long time ago Indians had to be tough to live. That’s why a long time ago our people were strong. Only the tough boys and girls survived. The weak, the sick, and the crippled died. If we wrap up those kids all the time, how are they going to grow up to be tough?”

  Twelve years later, when Johnny Oldman was eighty-four, Edwin Simon and I visited him at the Alaska Native Service Hospital at Tanana. Things weren’t looking good for Johnny. He was in a bed in a small ward. His thinning hair was gray, and age wrinkles lined his face. His gentle brown eyes sparkled with intelligence, but he was thin and frail. He had little time left.

  I talked with a nurse who cared for him. She complained, “His skin has to be at least half an inch thick!” She usually bent the needle of her hypodermic syringe while trying to force it through the thick skin of Johnny’s buttocks. Johnny had spent most of his life out in the cold; I guess his body reacted by developing a thick, tough skin. The only way she could make the needle penetrate was to ram it, hard; sometimes she bent the needle, pulled it out, and tried again.

  Many Alaska Natives were coming to the hospital for treatment. “You know, Sidney, too bad, but I can see the days of the good, strong, healthy Indian coming to an end,” Johnny said, sadly.

  “How’s that, Johnny?”

  He spoke slowly, in a weak voice. “Sidney, I’m almost at the end of my life, and I am ready to go. I have lived a good clean life. I know I did right in my life. You even show me that by coming to visit me before I die. I like to thank you for coming.

  “You see all these people come here from all over Alaska? Many are very young. Even young women come to have baby. Young people these days are sickly. You can see they are not going to live long; only medicine keep them alive. Now look at me. That medicine don’t help me because I’m stronger than the medicine they got. People are not strong anymore. Not long ago only the strong ones lived.

  “They raise all the weak ones now, what we call ‘misfits.’ How can the good, strong Indians last when they breed with weak people? People used to be born from two strong, healthy parents who survived to grow up when things were tough, when nothing came easy. Koyukuk Indians were strong then. No more, Sidney. No more strong Indians,” he said sadly, slowly shaking his head. Johnny Oldman died soon after our visit.

  Although Alaska has a national reputation as a region of abundant wildlife, it is a poor land when compared with almost any other state on the basis of pounds of game produced per acre. The Koyukuk valley, which straddles the Arctic Circle, with its short growing season and harsh winters produces few pounds of meat (in the form of wildlife) per acre. Small wonder that the early Koyukon people perpetually wandered, always looking for places where there were game and fish in abundance.

  Chief Henry told me of years when little or no game was available, which meant little food and no new clothing for the people, often for long periods. People saved their good winter clothing for cold weather because with everyday use the fur wore off, leaving nothing but leather to protect from the cold. “That’s what we called being poor,” he told me.

  Women made all clothing from skins. There were no mosquito nets or insect repellents. Smoke was the only way to escape these pests, and during summer every family had to keep smudges burning. One early Athapaskan technique to escape mosquitoes while canoeing was to place a dish of wet moss, or a piece of bracket fungi, with a few hot coals in the bow of a canoe; when the canoe was in motion the smoke surrounded the paddlers and discouraged insects.

  Matches were not available, and there were few or no metal tools, no steel traps or snares. And all medicines came from plants.

  Braggarts were looked down upon by the early Koyukon people, and hunters went to extremes to present a modest front. A hunter who had killed two large moose might return to the village and say, “I finally caught two calves,” to give no hint of bragging.

  Chief Henry and other elders believed that all animals have personalities, and they treated them accordingly when shooting, trapping, or snaring them. If you didn’t treat an animal properly, its spirit was offended. Then that animal would refuse to be caught in your snares or traps. These beliefs and values still linger among many of the Koyukon people.

  At one time there were Koyukon songs that honored each and every species of wildlife. A few people still know some of those songs. No old-time Koyukon would laugh at an animal, or speak disparagingly of it. They believed that you had to be careful in talking about the animals, so as not to offend.

  You never said you were going hunting; you were just going for a walk, or for a ride in your canoe to see the country. In this way you didn’t let the animals know your intentions. Even after killing an animal, the Koyukons had certain ceremonial obligations. For example, a hunter or trapper carrying a wolverine home would sing something like, “…a rich person (or a chief) is coming to the house.” A good blanket was spread on the floor next to a wall of the house or of a tent, and the wolverine was placed in a sitting position, its back propped against the wall. Each person who visited the house placed a small food item near the wolverine. The wolverine was to be well treated and not offended in any way.

  A small piece of dried fish or other food wou
ld be placed in the mouth of a fox, a marten, or other small game, and grease or lard was smeared over the nostrils so the animal would not be offended by the smell of the inside of the house.

  Wolverine and wolf carcasses were burned, not simply discarded or buried. Unused brown (grizzly) bear meat and other parts were buried or burned to destroy the spirit. Beaver and otter bones were returned to the water with a request to “make more” (of those animals).

  You never would point your finger at an animal to indicate where it was because he would feel your finger pointing at him and walk away.

  A wolf in a trap might be spoken to: “Wolf, I ask that more of you come to my traps,” and only then would it be killed. Any trapped animal was killed as quickly as possible to reduce suffering, and trapped animals were always treated with respect.

  Spirits of birds were also catered to. A hunter might say that he had “bothered” some ptarmigan when he had hunted them, indicating that he had inconvenienced the birds.

  When talking about hunting or trapping, people might say, “I am going to hunt for nothing,” to not offend any animal by specific mention. They believed that one should always sound humble toward animals. Being too confident and acting as if shooting or trapping animals were easy wouldn’t show proper respect. If you behaved respectfully, animals would allow themselves to be caught in your trap or shot by your gun.

  Hunting provided not only meat for early Indians, but also clothing, bedding, tents, rope, string, sinew for sewing, and bones for making tools and needles. Caribou bones are the hardest, and make the best scrapers and other tools. Caribou skin makes the warmest winter parkas, pants, boots, and mittens, but the animals have to be killed when the hair is just the right length.

  To obtain good caribou skins for clothing, early Koyukon hunters traveled 50 to 100 miles or more to the hills and mountains seeking fawns in late July and early August. Some year-old caribou were killed, but their skins made clothing of only fair quality. Nothing could beat the quality of fawn skins. When taken at that time of year, the hair of fawn skins is strong: it doesn’t break off and shed as does the hair of older caribou. Also, the leather, as light and as soft as chamois skin, can be worn against the skin.

  “How did the people keep warm in winter?” I once asked Chief Henry. “You never keep warm,” he replied. “We had to be tough, and use a good head and watch ourselves.”

  When Chief Henry was very young, his family moved from the Koyukuk River to the Yukon to fish for salmon because salmon had stopped coming to the Koyukuk. He said his parents saw famine coming, and their medicine man told them to move.

  “You must not stay in one place too long. When you do, you kill all the fish. There is no game to eat. You must not take a chance and get caught at freezeup in the wrong place, where there are no fish,” he warned.

  Winter was the critical time to the Koyukons. The deep snow, the extended periods of extreme cold, the iced-over rivers, the few hours of daylight—all make life difficult in the Far North. The regular winter home of the early Koyukon people—the half-buried sod house—must have been dank and dark, even with a fire burning most of the time.

  When the Koyukon people camped out or needed temporary winter homes, they erected a tepeelike igloo made of spruce poles and insulated with moss. A fire in the center of the floor was likely to create a smoky interior, but you could sleep on the floor under the smoke where it was warm. According to old-timer Louis Golchik, you could even sleep without blankets if a fire burned. I once visited Golchik’s comfortable spruce-pole igloo. It was dark, but it was warm, roomy, and comfortable.

  At times the early Indians had to ration fish. Even the skins of fish were saved, for they were valuable as food.

  In some years, the cyclic snowshoe hare was important food. This creature, which is brown in summer and white in winter, literally floats on loose snow because of its huge feet. Roughly every ten years it becomes abundant in some places, and the lynx, foxes, marten, wolverine, and owls feast. In the old days, so did the Koyukon people, for the hare is easily snared and the food is good, although it has virtually no fat. Rabbit skin is fragile, easily torn, so the people used to cut it into long strips, which they wove into blankets and sometimes clothing.

  The spirit of the snowshoe hare was considered to be rather weak. Nevertheless, people would break the legs of hares when they brought them inside to cut up, keeping their spirits from running around loose.

  When hares suddenly erupted in great numbers, Koyukon elders explained that the winter-white animals had “fallen from the sky with the snow.”

  No matter how clever or careful the Koyukon people were, they sometimes got caught without food. If they didn’t migrate soon enough, starvation was not uncommon. To be effective, moves away from the Koyukuk had to be made across the last crust of the spring snow. Wearing snowshoes, they moved swiftly, making it possible for them to reach the Yukon in time to build a fish trap before the summer runs of salmon began. Salmon were regarded as lifesavers. The Koyukon people usually eventually returned to their Koyukuk valley home, commonly after years of living on the Yukon.

  When the whites arrived, they brought flour, valuable for mixing with other foods—meat, fish, skin—to make gravy. Flour stretched what little food the Indians had. When caribou were scarce, meat was dried until it crumbled and then it was mixed with flour and water to stretch it to the maximum.

  The coming of whites—and the fur trade, which was long Alaska’s economic mainstay—also brought a new type of economy to Alaska’s Natives. Their subsistence economy was converted to a trade economy in which store clothes and white man’s food replaced skin garments and, in part, the food derived from the hunt, fish traps, and the trapline.

  Gradually, periodic moves by the Koyukon people seeking better hunting and fishing grounds ceased because supplies were available from traders. By 1900, a trading post could be found in most of the larger Native villages along the Yukon and Koyukuk rivers. During the last half of the twentieth century, more and more villages came into existence and the perpetual wandering of the people ceased. Schools, churches, and permanent year-round homes were built, and a new way of life was set for the Koyukon people.

  16

  SIWASH

  When I was thirteen years old, I became aware of prejudice against half-breeds. At Nulato I had joined a soccer game in progress on the mission playground. Suddenly one of the kids on the opposition team poked his face into mine and sneered, “You half-breed Siwash.” I continued to play, not realizing that the boy had intended an insult.

  “What’s the matter with you, Sidney. Are you afraid of him?” a friend asked.

  “No. Why?”

  “Didn’t you hear him call you a half-breed Siwash?”

  “Yeah. What’s that mean?” I asked.

  “Those are awful dirty words to call you. He wants to fight you, I think.”

  I ran to the guy and asked, “What did you call me?”

  “Half-breed Siwash,” he answered, with a mocking look.

  “What do you mean by that?” I asked, genuinely puzzled.

  “Don’t you know that means you’re a dirty coward?”

  I understood “dirty coward” all right. He immediately had a fight on his hands, even though he was a couple of years older. I had had plenty of practice fighting at Eklutna school, so I gave him more than he had bargained for.

  Other boys started to come to his rescue, but Father Mac, the Catholic priest who had been watching the game, held them off, allowing me to finish the job. When the kid had had enough, I let him up from the ground.

  “What happened, Sidney? You don’t look for trouble,” Father Mac asked.

  I told him what the boy had called me, that I hadn’t understood “half-breed Siwash” as fighting words. “But,” I told Father Mac, “I understood ‘dirty coward’ and I was only trying to accommodate him.”

  “I’m sure he understands that now,” said Father Mac, with a barely repressed smile.
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br />   My dad, who in 1897 toiled his way over Chilkoot Pass into the Klondike gold fields, claimed that Indians around Skagway were called Siwashes; he thought it was a tribal name. As he traveled into the headwaters of the Yukon River, he saw more Indians.

  “What Indians are those?” he asked another gold rusher.

  “Oh, they’re Siwashes,” was the answer.

  The next step to “lazy Siwashes” or “damn Siwashes” came easy. When something was stolen, even if a white man was the thief, some “low-down Siwash” took it.

  To the Athapaskan Indians along the Yukon and Koyukuk rivers, by the 1920s and 1930s the term certainly had a negative connotation. Call someone a “Siwash” and you had an instant fight on your hands. It was even more of an insult than “son of a bitch” was among whites.

  At Koyukuk an Indian once called me a son of a bitch, and I lit into him with both fists. He backed off, claiming I was fighting him for no reason. “I only called you a son of a bitch,” he explained.

  As stampeders from the Klondike gold rush moved down the Yukon River, “siwash” became more degrading. I’ve seen terrible fights among Indians who were careless how they used the word.

  My dictionary says that “siwash” comes from Chinook jargon (in the Columbia River country, Chinook was a lingua franca), with its root the French “sauvage,” meaning wild, or savage. One definition is, “To camp, live, or do things after the manner of an Indian; esp., to travel without equipment.”

  “Siwashing out” is a commonly used term in Alaska and elsewhere for tough camping with minimal gear. It probably came from the reputation, deserved or not, that Indians (“Siwashes”) have for being able to survive in the woods under extreme conditions.

  Some folks’ version of siwashing out is pretty tame compared with real “siwashing.” I have known many Koyukon people who often siwashed out when conditions were really tough—people like my uncles Weaselheart and Hog River Johnny, Edwin Simon, Johnny Oldman, and others. Most of them later in life paid a heavy price for exposure to extremes. As they grew older, arthritis or rheumatism crippled them with constant pain.