Four Quarters of Light

by Brian Keenan

  The building was approximately sixty-five feet by thirty and was constructed of pine logs, which I suppose had been barged in on the Yukon River. Inside, the walls were lined with villagers of all ages. Their rounded features and skin colour were an ethnic mixture of pale Siberian Asian and the deep copper and aquiline features of the Plains Indian. But there were other faces that were neither Asian nor Indian. I looked briefly at the leaflet outlining the day’s speakers. Names such as Shawn Martinez, Mabeleen Christian, Princess Peter-Raboff and Kimberly Carlo hinted at bloodlines other than Athabascan. Even the young chief, Evon Peter, sported looks that were more Mediterranean than native Alaskan, and his name sounded as if it might have Scandinavian roots.

  I casually read over my programme again, learning first that ‘Arctic Village’ was the white man’s name for the place; at all times the village was addressed by its Athabascan name, Vashraii K’oo. The principal part of the day was to be taken up by ceremonial dances and song. After songs of prayer and dedication there were to be four welcome dances celebrating the caribou and the raven, and at the end of these there would be an invitation dance in which everyone was expected to join to become one with the herd. The dances were given Athabascan names which I could neither spell nor repeat. Above the names of the dances, printed in bold capital letters, was the warning ‘NO CAMERA OR VIDEO OR RECORDING PERMITTED’. Obviously the Gwich’in were determined that their culture was not to become a sideshow.

  The ceremonies were not to begin until everyone had arrived, so I walked outside to mingle. A group of young men were chatting and smoking near me, gathered around a large ghettoblaster radio, listening to rock music. They were dressed in baseball caps, T-shirts and training shoes and they spoke American English with the slow, pronounced rhythm of the native. But their talk was not about tribal politics, it was about cars and TV programmes, or about some action movie and who had what video to exchange. Young girls moved in and out of the group with ease, and with equal ease roared about the village on quad motorbikes.

  Gradually their numbers depleted, and I was sure the festivities were about to begin. A few of the Australian crew arrived and introduced me to some members of a TV crew from Washington, French photographers and some people from Germany and Sweden. If this kept up the international contingent would outnumber the natives. Most of the non-natives were media people, so I remained outside while they went in. All of them intended to observe the prohibition about cameras, but I didn’t want to be seen as another TV person.

  After a few minutes I made my way inside. Not much had changed. The tribe were ranged out around the room on plastic chairs or benches. It could have been a village get-together anywhere. The village elders were already making speeches of welcome, reiterating tribal values and giving personal testimony of their own life in the village. The speeches were innocent, and perhaps because of this were irresistibly moving.

  One particular white man stood out among the rest. He was obviously not a media person. Underneath a shabby corduroy coat with leather elbow patches he wore a purple shirt and clerical collar. He had a heavy beard and wore his hair in a long ponytail. Across his chest he wore several rows of beads. His wellworn jeans were filthy and tucked into a pair of plain cowboy boots. Beside him stood the local Indian priest, who had been speaking as I entered. There was nothing remotely clerical about him. He had at one time been a Gwich’in chief and was still the local fiddle player, but somewhere along the line he had become ordained as an Episcopal priest. The man standing beside him, I learned later, was the Bishop of Alaska.

  Soon the speechmaking came to an end. Evon Peter, the handsome young chief, walked to the head of the room and informed us all that the dances were about to begin. He reminded us that these dances were sacred to his people and asked those who had come to ‘share’ with the Gwich’in to respect this and refrain from taking photos. ‘Any of these dances you take home with you should be taken home in your heart, that you may remember us and the caribou from which we first came. There will be other dances during the time we spend together that you may photograph.’

  Even as he was explaining, dozens of tribespeople poured in through the doors. Men and women young and old, children and babies, all wearing yellow and brown buckskins decorated with the most elaborate beadwork. It was as if someone had opened a great chest full of giant butterflies. The atmosphere in the room instantly changed from one of serious intent to intense excitement as the dancers milled about in disarray. Then, from somewhere, a slow, rhythmic drumbeat began, and from different parts of the room a native chant started up. I was sure this was not by any prearranged design; the villagers were engaging in spontaneous prayer and worship. It was, I suppose, the equivalent of Christian plainsong, but this was much older and more primitive. It didn’t move me in the heart as a plainsong did. It unleashed itself and resonated into the pit of my stomach.

  Soon, again with unorganized spontaneity, the dancers began to wheel about the centre of the hall. There was no distinction between sexes or ages. The dancers became one amorphous whole, wheeling slowly and releasing instinctive guttural chants. The hypnotic drumbeat tightened about them as native rattles set up an eerie free-form accompaniment. As the circle of bodies moved, their shuffling feet added a kind of basso profondo note to the primitive tempo. The chanting cries of the dancers had the effect of coming not from individual voices but from the lumbering ruck of the caribou people. As the movement became more intense it produced an unnerving trance-like effect in the onlookers. Everyone stood in awed silence as the four ritual dances moved one into the other. Then, as if the pull of the circle was too much to resist, the people sitting and watching outside the circle were pulled into it. They became one with the dancers, one with the animal energy of the herd.

  I, too, felt the irresistible pull of it. Only the fact that this was a sacred moment and that I was an outsider kept me from falling into the vortex. The coloured beadwork set against the soft browns and yellows of the hide costumes was like looking down a kaleidoscope. The unending patterns, endlessly fascinating, had their own kind of power. It was like some wondrous flower rapturously opening.

  This was the invitational dance, and I noticed some white faces swaying in the ring. This was the secret of the caribou dance. The sacred dances had honoured the spirit of the beast and it had come among us. It invited us into its world where we were all one with it and its wilderness spirit. This is what bound the Gwich’in to one another and to the land they inhabited. This is the power they drew on to exist in this extreme place and to overcome against all the odds. This is what made them the few Spartan warriors holding back the incredible might of the forces of Babylon. Every instinct in me felt the lure of what was happening in front of me. I wanted to be part of its incredible embrace, but something held me back; something told me I wasn’t ready to lose myself. My rational self was putting a harness on my desire. I didn’t know it yet, but my power creature was yet to come to me in another place where only the invisible eyes of the outback would witness it.

  In a rising crescendo, with drum, rattle and chant rending the air, the dancing stopped and within seconds the dancers fell away to the margins of the room. Like a scattering of caribou, they were gone. Chief Evon stood on a chair and announced that all had now been welcomed, and he invited us to share in the discussions that we might better understand the Gwich’in and their plight. But first we should all take time to reflect and make our hearts ready to listen. Then, as an afterthought, he added that we would have to wait until the dancers had changed and put away their costumes. ‘It takes many hours and much hard work to make a costume,’ he stated, ‘and because these dances are important to us we must treat the costumes with respect.’

  During the break, many of the villagers and some of the visitors went to partake of the communal lunch. I joined them. I asked one of the camera-crew men, whom I had noticed in the final dance, about the roast chicken and the loaves of sliced bread. It did not seem to be native fare to
me. The chicken, he explained, was probably ptarmigan or wild duck, and as for the bread, he explained that home-baked bread had been introduced by Russian traders and missionaries, but as money was scarce in these villages very little was spent on shipping in flour. He had been working sporadically in Alaska for many years and had witnessed many changes. ‘Modernism is making it harder and harder to maintain the old subsistence ways of living. The kids here are like kids anywhere, they are conditioned by TV, and as they get older they expect the things they see on TV. When they’re older, some of them go off to university or to learn “white men’s work”. They train as electricians, pipeline workers and house builders. They earn regular money and spend it on consumer goods. TVs, radios and videos are always a preference. Years ago, I remember working on a programme about the Eskimo people up near Bettles. At one of the village’s councils the debate was about which TV programmes should be allowed and which should be banned, and it went on for some hours. It was a real toss-up between Starsky and Hutch, Charlie’s Angels, The Six Million Dollar Man, Sesame Street and some Disney cartoons. The village elder, who had never been to school and who only had some pretty basic English, argued as hotly as the younger people. It was like an addiction. They were all high on TV, even if the older people could not have understood the language and speech rhythms of Starsky and Hutch!’

  I could imagine the impact of TV and radio after centuries enduring the wilderness. I could imagine sitting in one of the village homes through the long, bleak months of winter when everything was dark and nothing moved but the snow and the wind blowing it. To flick a switch and instantaneously have your landscape transformed by a million hallucinatory images must have been electrifying. I looked at the piles of food and the growing number of people. I could imagine that many of the rituals about killing and preparing such food had also been abandoned. It is important to understand that for these people subsistence is more than a matter of ‘living off the land’ and specific protein intake. As a way of life it is close to the concept of ‘kosher’ in Jewish belief or halal observances in Muslim society. The Alaskan natives had traditional ways of treating their fish and meat and preparing it for consumption or utilizing it for clothing and tools. As in other orthodox societies, there are certain rules and rituals that must be followed to ensure a future harvest and the wellbeing of the people. I asked my new acquaintance about this. He felt that many of the native villages were attempting to recover their lost traditions and restore them in a modern way. Their way of life was under tremendous pressure. The young people especially were torn between two worlds. I remembered the compelling rhythms of the dance and how so many of the young people had given themselves to it with genuine abandon. The spirit world of the caribou dance was certainly one they entered into with unembarrassed ease.

  Perhaps the ancient stories were no longer told long into the night. But even if modernism had thrown up the opportunity for these young people to live better than at any time in their history, and even if some of them were lost to their tribal traditions, they had still come back here from Anchorage, Fairbanks, Washington, Seattle and Canada. The pantheon of the new gods of Paramount Pictures and HBO, Schwarzenegger, Stallone and the retinue of action heroes, had not yet erased the power of the old gods. The raven, the bear and the caribou still moved across this land, and their spirits could still be felt.

  I asked my new friend about the lavishly coloured beadwork on the caribou costumes. He smiled. ‘That’s the Russian concept of fair exchange. Before the Americans bought Alaska from Russia they used to exchange coloured beads for animal pelts, which they sold to the Chinese. Apparently, Russian merchants were fascinated by exotic goods from China. I suppose the natives were equally fascinated by the rich colour of the beads. Native people here, like many other indigenous peoples elsewhere, believed that the hole in a stone or shell, for example, was a portal for a spirit power. The blue and red beads were highly valued, and the Russian hunters and traders got very rich.’ I didn’t know if he believed in the ‘power’ of the beads, but I did, and I understood immediately why the costumes were special and the beadwork so meticulous. The circling caribou dance was another portal, like the concentric holes in the beads. I was glad I had resisted the desire to join in. I felt sure I would have been swept away.

  I finished eating, told my friend I might catch up with him later, and moved off among the villagers. I engaged in easy conversation with a few of the camera crews and was assured that I could travel with them after the Gathering, but I found the villagers hard work. They were polite and answered any question I asked them, but they hardly got beyond formalities. There was a reticence about them I could not fathom. At first I put it down to shyness or embarrassment, on both our parts, but the more it happened the more convinced I became that it was more than just social awkwardness. I was the only stranger here who was not part of a TV team, so I was different. But that was hardly sufficient reason to justify the kind of distance I was being held at. Maybe another day, once my face had become more familiar, I assured myself as I walked away from the crowd towards the communal building.

  Evon Peter, the young chief, was introducing the old chief, or what some people called the traditional chief, to a few outsiders. Moses Sam was in his nineties and hardly able to walk. Evon and a few other younger villagers led him about the hall with an obvious display of tenderness and ceremony. Moses Sam seemed happy to meet the strangers, though I was certain he could neither hear much nor understand what they were saying. Because of my own anxiety about how I was being received I inched away from the presentation and stood near the door.

  ‘Well, are you enjoying our gathering so far?’ a woman’s voice behind me asked.

  I turned round to see the Canadian woman who had flown from Fairbanks with me. I smiled in deep gratitude. She was the only native person who had approached me so far. I told her how much I had enjoyed the dancing and explained how after being washed out during the night it had greatly lifted my spirits. ‘An Irishman shouldn’t be afraid of a little rain,’ she joked. ‘Have you met many of the Gwich’in yet?’ I admitted that I hadn’t, and tried to sidestep my feeling of displacement by asking her if this was her original home village. She said that her mother had come from another village on the Yukon flats but she had moved to Canada with her mother and father, who was a Canadian Athabascan, when she was young. She made several trips home to visit her cousins and other relatives. ‘The family is important to us,’ she stated, then questioned me about my own family and why I was in Vashraii K’oo. I told her I was researching a book. Curiously, she then proclaimed how kind it was of me to come to the Gathering. ‘We need lots of friends now,’ she said.

  At those words, and because of the way she had befriended me, I made my confession that I was finding it difficult to get into conversation with the villagers. She looked at me puzzled. I told her how the villagers had walked past my camp whispering and pointing, and how one of them had just stood and looked, then walked away in silence.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘you are the man who has hung his sleeping bag on the caribou antlers, the one with the tent covered in a big blue plastic sheet?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said sheepishly.

  Suddenly she started laughing aloud and gave me a big hug as if I really was some innocent abroad. Then she called over Chief Evon and explained who I was, identifying me by my tent. He too laughed loudly, and shook my hand. ‘I wondered who it was,’ he said. ‘Some of the villagers had been asking.’

  Now I really was perplexed.

  My travelling companion, whom I now knew as Margaret, continued, ‘I thought, Evon, that you should explain. It would be kinder, and would help our friend feel less lonely.’

  The chief smiled softly again. I must have been twice his age and his solicitation and sympathy were increasing my discomfort. But as he spoke the penny dropped very fast.

  ‘We are the people of the Porcupine caribou herd,’ he began. ‘They are, to us, like brothers, like our own f
amily. As a mark of respect for what they give to us we keep the antlers of these creatures we have hunted. Where you are camped is like what you would call a graveyard. It is a sacred place.’

  My look of absolute horror struck him immediately.

  ‘Please,’ he reassured me, ‘you are welcome here, and we are honoured that you have chosen to come to be with us. My people did not know how to say this to you for fear of offending. But I know now that you have come a great distance and would not be expected to know many things.’ I attempted to make a profound apology, but the chief only squeezed my shoulder. ‘It is not a great problem that you should worry about.’ He turned to Margaret. ‘I should tell him also about the plastic covering on his tent?’ Both of them laughed again. ‘The plastic sheet you have on your tent is a product of the oil industry. Our village has decided against using this material as a protest, and also because it is unnatural. It will remain uselessly cluttering up our tribal lands for many generations. You may have seen the trailer full of polystyrene that has been abandoned near here; this too is manufactured, a byproduct of oil, so we forbid its use in the village.’

  Had I had one wish at that moment it would have been that I should immediately turn into a mosquito and fly off into oblivion. I hesitated for a moment, then confessed that I had used some of it to prop up the side of my tent.

  ‘I know!’ said Evon, and laughed again. ‘Your tent and sleeping bag are not made for this kind of country, and in any case there was no dishonour in what you did. I can arrange for you to stay with one of the families, or perhaps you would like to stay with my family?’