Travelers' Tales Alaska by Bill Sherwonit Read Free Book Online

In a memoir published a year after Muir’s death, Young described the meal served to the two white men in “huge washbowls of blue Hudson Bay ware.” The first course consisted of dried salmon stacked in each guest’s trencher like kindling, drenched in seal oil. Then the tubs were washed out and returned with a secondcourse, “great long hunks” of deer back fat drowned in seal gravy. Following this, bowls were again washed and set before the visitors, this time heaped with walnut-sized Russian potatoes ascending from a puddle of oil. For dessert, fleshy rosehips as big as plums overflowed from their bowls, again dripping with grease. After a period of exquisite moans and lip-smacking by his gracious hosts, Muir leaned toward Young and exclaimed, “Mon, mon! I’m fashed we’ll be floppin’ about i’ the sea, whiles, wi’ flippers an’ forked tails.”
    Traditional foods were discouraged at the Presbyterian mission that followed two years later. Beef, poultry, and flour became staples in the boarding school through which each Tlingit child passed. The same language used expertly by Reverend Young to translate his and Muir’s speeches was banned among Native speakers. However, despite non-Native efforts to squelch an identity centuries in the making, Tlingit ways persist today. Even the gradual settlement of a couple thousand non-Natives in this venation of green valleys walled by glacier-draped crags has not deterred the rule of citizens waxing Tlingit by blood or association. They never signed a treaty, never relinquished the power that they now share with the strangers who came to their table. And I have felt the grace of their generosity.
    Consider the contents of these pages a tribute to the generous spirit of subsistence people. Their blood flows with blueberry shine, sockeye wiggle, rain, wind, and impetuous sunlight. Described herein are two pathways, both of which I have trod. Each leads to a scene made familiar in the history of the world when people share food: one, like Muir’s banquet, is by auspicious invitation. The other, like the roadside scene, is a bungling intrusion. I carry the lessons from these occasions as reassurance and warning, reminders of my place as a guest at the table.
    Green-bottle tones glint from the clear water that tumbles a rocky mile from Chilkoot Lake to the sea at Lutak Inlet. Filling the narrow wooded valley is the same liquid conversation that once spoke to a village of about one hundred twenty L’koot Tlingits, people of the Sockeye clan. On this day in late May, 1991, perhaps two dozen descendents scurry between work stations, their spirited palaver punctuating the river’s drone with ancient grammar and laughter rarely displayed on Main Street in Haines, ten miles distant. Their chief, Austin Hammond, is called Donawak, after the leader who invited John Muir to his banquet. Austin has asked me to come out, take pictures, pose “good questions,” and watch with white man’s eyes as clan members attend to the business of cultural survival.
    Diaphanous boundaries of kin and culture keep Tlingit folk distinct from non-Native residents, but their presence in Haines insinuates itself on nearly every level: politics, religion, education, business, food. Subsistence sets Alaska Natives apart from most other shoppers on the continent. Their traditional ways define an ancient culture with each recipe for salmon or seal gut, with each prayer for bountiful harvest. Beyond consumerism, though, Natives operate with a set of principles based on stewardship of the places that supply their groceries. Overharvest threatens their identity, disrespect can insult the spirits of plants and animals on which people depend. Food usually arrives when it is supposed to arrive, although fish stocks and other species have declined dramatically in parts of the state. Even the legendary tribes of eulachon, whose runs still