From String Stories to Satellites: Portrayal of the Native Alaskan in Literature and Folklore

FROM STRING STORIES TO SATELLITES: PORTRAYAL OF THE NATIVE ALASKAN IN UTERATURE AND FOLKLORE Charles J. Keim and Jack Bernet Mrs. Hana Kangas earned her B.Ed. degree at the University of Alaska in 1940, her M.Ed. in 1967. In the twenty-seven-year interim this half-Eskimo woman raised a family and taught school. She vividly recalls sitting on the floor of the family barabara in the Arctic and watching the Eskimo string storytellers. Weaving a loop of sinew or cord on their hands into various figures reminiscent of the cat's cradle familiar to American folkways, they told the traditional beliefs, practices, and tales of the Eskimo people as they made the string figures. Even today, other Eskimo students relate similar experiences of communication enhanced by figures drawn into the earth during the telling with story knives. Some of these knives are intricately carved ivory instruments several inches long, which have been passed down from one generation to the next. Other instruments are simply table knives or nails that will scratch a fairly legible illustration into the earth to help more fully communicate the narrator's story. At the same time they employ these ancient means of communication among a people whose language only now is being developed into written form, native Alaskan storytellers today practice their art and reach larger audiences than ever by means of satellite communication. Through the auspices of the Fairbanks North Star Borough Library, the studios of the Lfniversity of Alaska's KUAC-FM radio station and the ATS-I satellite each week broadcast tales contributed by native storytellers to villages virtually throughout the 586,400-square-mile state. Such activity, coupled with an accelerating movement to publish native folklore, gives solid assurance that this important twenty-five percent segment of Alaska's population will at last receive its proper literary due, which, in rum, will lead to further political and social recognition. More important these efforts enable natives to carry their heritage across the multi-cultural bridges to understanding. The native Alaskan deserves a new, more accurate "image" than that generally projected in the past, particularly from the Gold Rush era of 1898 to about the mid-1920s, by Anglo-American authors who did have a written language and printing processes at their disposal. The traditional stereotypes which usually emerge in the works of the known poets, short story writers, and novelists follow to a great degree the precedent set in the anonymously composed, widely published "Kobuk Maiden," which portrays the Eskimo 167 168RMMLA BulleitnSeptember 1973 girl as dirty, lousy, seduced and made pregnant, and abandoned by a white man. Poet Sam C. Dunham is more sympathetic. In "I'm Goin' Back to Dawson " he plans "to feed the starvin' Tananas."1 And in "Why the Devil Never Visits the Yukon," he sees an Indian girl as A maiden half-fair, with raven-black hair And a beautiful bear-tooth brooch.2 Robert W. Service, best known of the Gold Rush era poets, draws graphic word pictures of the roles to which the natives were relegated as was the Indian woman in "The Low Down White": This is the pay-day up at the mines, when the bearded brutes come down; There's money to bum in the streets tonight, so Tve sent my klooch to town, With a haggard face and a ribband of red entwined in her hair of brown. And I know at the dawn she'll come reeling home with the bottles, one, two, threeOne for herself, to drown her shame, and two big bottles for me, To make me forget the thing I am and the man I used to be.3 Even today the expression "pissing in the Yukon, killing a brown bear, and sleeping with a klooch" relegates the native woman to the level of a prostitute for white adventurers. Other poets reflect the same attitude toward the Indian people that Pat O'Cotter does in "The Throwback": Scorning the letters recalling, Forgetting the friends he had known, Turning his back on the Outside, Facing the future alone. A Cabin, a Squaw, and a Fishwheel, A bend in the river's flow, A band...