After the pandemic
erased a generation, putting the pieces of the puzzle back together.
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Yup'ik dancers at a
dance festival at Toksook Bay in 1996. JAMES BARKER
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IT WASN'T SO LONG AGO that Yup'ik culture, in Alaska's
subarctic Bristol Bay, revolved around dance. There were dances
of greeting, dance festivals, dances that went all along the river
and into communities. These days, many, if not all, of these dances
have been lost to cultural memory. "We don't do that anymore,"
says Arnaq Esther Ilutsik, the director for Yup'ik Studies
for the Southwest Region Schools in Dillingham, Alaska. "It's
no longer practiced, because of the big flu epidemic."
As an educator, Ilutsik has dedicated decades of her career to
filling a long-standing cultural void, the one left after the so-called
Spanish influenza swept across Bristol Bay in 1919, wreaking extraordinary
devastation on the area and its peoples. She interviews Yup'ik
elders, for instance, and transcribes and translates what she can
to prevent knowledge from being lost entirely. Inevitably, holes
emerge: She hears individual words she's never heard before,
she says, "words that we don't know, because we don't
have that high vocabulary fluency." She jots them down, and
tries to follow up where possible. "But it comes to the point
wherewell, we're getting old, too."
Over the winter of 1918, as outbreak after outbreak of influenza
made its way through the United States and the world, the people
of Bristol Bay were protected by isolation. Home to one of the world's
most productive salmon fisheries, Bristol Bay is beautiful, wild,
and extremely remote. One 1920 account, by missionary Hudson Stuck,
describes a bitter climate and sometimes desolate landscape. "Yet
it is not without scenes of great beauty and even sublimity, and
its winter aspects have often an indescribable charm," he writes.
"A radiance of light, a delicate lustre of azure and pink,
that turn jagged ice and windswept snow into marble and alabaster
and crystal." But few people outside the Native community saw
this icy beauty: From September to May, the area was naturally walled
off by multiple mountain ranges and the frozen Bering Sea.
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Bristol Bay is isolated
by geography and boasts a productive salmon fishery. DESIGN
PICS INC / ALAMY
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As the sea ice began to thaw at the start of 1919, says Alaskan
historian Katie Ringsmuth, the first fishing boats of the season
arrived, and people started to gather once again. "That winter,
people thought [the epidemic] was over," she says. "They
had shut everything downthe school, public gatherings and
churches, and all of a sudden, springtime, they thought it was okay
to come back." By the time canners arrived from San Francisco
to work the salmon fishery in May, people had already begun to succumb
to the virus.
Accounts of how the flu arrived differ. Some sources point to a
Russian Orthodox priest who held a large Easter service attended
by many local people. Others suggest that the dates behind that
theory don't hold up to scrutiny, and it must have been some
unknown outsider in the weeks that followed. Either way, by the
third week of May, dozens had died. It would grow much worse.
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A salmon cannery in Nushagak,
327 miles southwest of Anchorage, ca. 1912. THE PICTURE ART
COLLECTION / ALAMY
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In the mid-1980s, Harold Napoleon, a respected Yup'ik elder,
spent nine years in prison after killing his four-year-old son in
what he described as an "alcoholic haze." While incarcerated,
Napoleon wrote a powerful treatise about what his people had endured
the past century, entitled Yuuyaraq:
The Way of the Human Being.
Before Westerners came to Alaska, he writes, the Yup'ik were
ruled by the same cultural practices and spiritual beliefs they
had maintained for hundreds of years. Everything was prescribed:
the relationships between individuals, the correct way to hunt and
fish, every song and dance, every kayak and umiak. "When the
Yup'ik walked out into the tundra or launched their kayaks
into the river or the Bering Sea, they entered into the spiritual
realm," he writes. "They lived in deference to this spiritual
universe, of which they were, perhaps, the weakest members."
The arrival of Western explorers, traders, and missionaries in
the 19th century disrupted these practices. At first, the Yup'ik
continued to live as they had always done, resisting Russian efforts
at colonization, but they were susceptible to wave after wave of
disease that decimated their population. By the turn of the century,
outbreaks of measles, smallpox, influenza, and other diseases had
reduced the Native population of southwestern Alaska by more than
a quarter. These successive tragedies both traumatized survivors
and undermined their cultural practices. "In their minds, they
had been overcome by evil," writes Napoleon. "Their medicines
and their medicine men and women had proven useless. Everything
they believed in had failed."
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A yup'ik shaman
exorcising evil spirits from a sick boy in Nushagak in the
1890s. CREATIVE COMMONS ATTRIBUTION 4.0 INTERNATIONAL (CC
BY 4.0)
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By 1918, the Yup'ik were a people in transition. "They
still lived mainly by hunting and fishing, and sought out shamans
to interpret the spirit world for themespecially when they
were sick," writes Laura Spinney in Pale Rider: The Spanish
Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World. "But many now
lived in modern houses, wore store-bought clothes and, in the Nushagak
area, professed the [Russian] Orthodox faith."
That winter of 1918 and 1919, as the flu moved across the world,
Linus Hiram French, a cannery doctor employed by the Alaska Packers
Association (APA), had imposed a quarantine on the region, restricting
travel in and out of the villages, even as the region itself was
isolated by ice and geography. As the spring came, and the flu appeared
to be abating elsewhere, the restrictions gradually fell away. When
it arrived, there was little to slow the contagion.
On May 19, an APA steamer arrived in Bristol Bay from Seattle.
Aboard the ship was Shirley Baker, the federal Bureau of Fisheries'
warden, who later filed a report on what he saw. "The Government
hospital was crowded with victims, and the whole hospital staff
was sick with the disease," he wrote. "The dead were lying
unburied in their barabaras, and in many instances half-starved
children were found in homes with the badly decomposed bodies of
their elders about them." For the next three weeks, he helped
locals to bury the dead: "Many of the bodies were far gone
in decomposition; ravenous dogs had been feeding upon them, and
the conditions were too harrowing to narrate in this report in detail."
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Toksook Bay seal hunters
George Chimigak and James Charie near Nelson Island in 1980.
JAMES BARKER
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Though millions all over the world perished due to the influenza
outbreak, "more people died per capita in Alaska than anywhere
in the Americas," says Ringsmuth. Throughout the territoryAlaska
did not become a state until 1959Native communities were hammered.
"Many didn't have running water," she says. "Culturally,
people lived in very close proximity together. So you have a situation
where when one person gets sick, then everybody does, and it moves
through communities very quickly."
In Bristol Bay, the hospital was overwhelmed, with insufficient
nurses and doctors to treat the scale of the outbreak. The sickness
spread throughout the community, Ringsmuth says: "It was also
the ethnic migrant workers, who worked in the canneries that were
brought up. They got sick, too, and they were blamed for that, because
of their race, and I think that helps us to understand the kind
of racism that existed at that time." These were essential
workers, feeding the world, and many of them perished. "It's
also a story of complacency," she says, pointing to a report
made by the governor at the time. "He was furious with Congress,
because Congress did not allocate enough funds to save Alaskans.
Again, it was because they didn't see Alaskans as humans, as
Americans."
Though three institutions did work to rescue the sick in Bristol Baythe
Coast Guard, the Bureau of Education Territorial Hospital, and the
APAthere were numerous bureaucratic and practical problems,
ranging from sick team members to insufficient vessels that could
make it up the river to treat the sick in remote communities. Racist
attitudes, including the quasi-phrenological belief that Native blood
was somehow inferior for warding off disease, sometimes interfered
with caring for highly traumatized, starving children.
It's hard to know exactly how many people died due to the
outbreak, though estimates of the total population loss are as high
as 40 percent. In some cases, entire villages were abandoned after
all the adults died, with children raised by relatives or in orphanages,
without the languages or cultural practices that ought to have been
their birthright.
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A 1919 photo taken in
Dillingham, Alaska, at what is now known as Kanakanak Hospital,
shows children orphaned by the epidemic. THE FRENCH FAMILY
VIA THE BRISTOL BAY HERITAGE LAND TRUST
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Even a hundred years on, the 1919 influenza outbreak still feels
very close, says Ilutsik. "I'm really concerned with COVID-19,"
she says. "We've really tried to be really strong about
who comes in and goes outI myself grew up without any grandparents,
because my parents' parents both passed in the flu epidemic."
Though she spoke the language with her parents when she was a small
child, Ilutsik was placed in a white foster home for three years
due to a tuberculosis outbreak. When she returned to her family,
at age six, she'd forgotten a great deal, and the language
was further suppressed in schools and other official settings. When
she had children of her own, she opted not to speak Yup'ik
with them. "My daughter understands why I never spoke Yup'ik
to her, because it was a forbidden language. And so you have it
deep in your memory that you don't use that language."
Her own mother eventually helped her to pick it back up, though
she says she'll never have the fluency or cultural familiarity
of previous generations.
"The big flu really devastated a lot of different cultural
traditions and practices," she says.
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Vera Spein at her fish
camp near the Yup'ik village of Kwethluk, hanging subsistence-caught
king salmon to dry. photographed around 2004, this process
goes back thousands of years. COPYRIGHT 2020 CLARK JAMES MISHLER
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"They used to have a really strong kinship system. I grew
up in a traditional home, but we didn't really have any relatives
around to reinforce different ideas and values." When speaking
to her father, a reindeer herder, she would be expected to pass
questions on through her mother, even if he was sitting right therea
practice that's long since been abandoned. "My parents,
especially my mother, would always excuse me for my accent, because
I didn't know that proper way, the etiquette, the way to honor
different parts of the family."
Now, as a teacher of Yup'ik Studies, Ilutsik works to educate
Native youth about traditional Yup'ik ways and language, in
addition to instructing new Alaskan teachers on the region's
culture and history. "I've had no training in language
preservation or how to build a program or that kind of thing, so
it's all new to me," she says. High school students in
the area can learn Yup'ik to replace foreign language credits,
in addition to taking subsistence classes to learn about traditional
foodways.
But it's a challenge, especially when it comes to getting
distracted teenagers to engage with their cultural heritage. Ilutsik
has tried to look beyond teaching numbers and colors, and to the
sharing and maintaining of the storytelling that has long been a
critical part of Yup'ik culture. Here, the accounts relayed
by elders are especially useful, as they paint a vivid picture of
what once was. "We're trying to put the pieces of the
puzzle together," she says.
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