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Alaskan Eskimo Education:
A Film Analysis of Cultural
Confrontation in the Schools
2/Eskimos and White men on the Kuskokwim
ESKIMOS
AND THE RUSSIAN FUR TRADERS
My search into the history of the Kuskokwim River
Eskimos has been directed toward understanding the continuity that is so
essential to the development
of any people. In this approach of ethnography and history I share the
view that education is a continuing process-out of the past, through the present
and into the future. Hence lifeways and sequences of acculturation seem
the
place to start in considering education for the Native American.
The nature
of White contact with Eskimos, or other Native people, holds important clues
to education and acculturation. School is a major acculturative
experience
where Native children, or any children, learn to adjust and cope with
the imposing world. For Eskimos, or Indians, Afro-Americans or Puerto Ricans,
wherever an
ethnic minority confronts a significantly different majority, this movement
away from ethnic self is an experience that either can give essential
cultural
perspective or can assimilate the child into ineffectual oblivion. Blindness
to Native history and insensitivity to Native self cut a deep chasm between
the White teacher and his Eskimo students, a space that education too
often fails to cross. This account of White-Eskimo relationships, past and
present,
is a description of this gulf that for two centuries has separated White
men from Eskimos.
I am concerned specifically with the Eskimos living
on the waterways of the Kuskokwim River in West Central Alaska. The material
is based
on my
experiences
on the Kuskokwim in the spring of 1969 and on four books that represent
source accounts of this isolated Eskimo environment. Early history
has been drawn
from Lieutenant Zagoskin’s Travels in Russian America, 1842-1844 and from Wendell H. Oswalt’s analysis of the chronicles of the
Moravians in the region, Mission of Change in Alaska, supplemented
by a missionary’s
personal account, Anna B. Schwalbe’s Dayspring on the Kuskokwim.
For contemporary ethnography I have drawn from Oswalt’s Napaskiak:
An Alaskan Eskimo Community, a detailed study of a Kuskokwim village
distinctly comparable
to those in which I worked. This range of observation-Russian trader,
Moravian missionaries, a modern ethnographer, and finally the contemporary
state,
mission, and BIA school personnel with whom I talked-gives us a view
of Eskimos as seen through White eyes.
Prehistory of the Kuskokwim is
barely known, though archeological surveys show contemporary villages
were lived in before the first exploring
White men. For
hundreds of years Yuk-speaking Eskimo have lived in the tundra of
the Kuskokwim Basin, fishing for salmon, gathering berries, hunting moose,
bear, deer,
and small game for food, sharing both dialect and culture with the
Eskimos in the
southern reaches of the Yukon. Both groups are surprisingly similar
to the traditional maritime Eskimos living northward along the Bering
Sea.
Though
the Yuk dialect would not be understood in Kotzebue and Nome, the
music, drumming, and dancing are essentially the same. Despite centuries in
the Alaskan interior,
the Kuskokwim people are still ocean-oriented, with a strong relation
to the sea a hundred miles westward. Seal oil and meat are still
the “soul
foods,” and
mukluks are made from seal and walrus skins. Until a decade
ago they hunted from traditional walrus skin kayaks, and two decades
ago they
lived in sod
houses similar to dwellings still used along the coast. Their courage,
laughter, and philosophy-and their tenacious skill with outboard
motors and snowmobiles-are
typically Eskimo.
Travelers, explorers, and more recently anthropologists
have consistently admired the resourcefulness and survival intelligence
of the Eskimos.
Their uniqueness
built no great architecture; for most traditional Eskimo housing,
as seen in White men’s eyes, appeared temporary. Building
materials were scarce on the coast and tundra. Though life was
migratory in
the search for food,
with dispersed hunting camps as well as villages, the character
of life was social. The wealth of the Eskimo cannot be found in
material
culture; rather
the richness was represented by courageous and skilled performance,
intense self-respect and self-determination. Accounts of Eskimo
culture throughout
the Arctic all tell of severe limitations of life that we today
call extreme deprivation. Out of severe limitation and struggle
for survival
the Eskimo
personality was cast and a ceremonial culture was created.
The peoples
of the world have always faced ecological challenges of survival-
heat, cold, extremes of moisture and aridity. Out
of such
circumstances
were created lifeways of hunting, gathering, fishing, or farming.
Values of competition
and cooperation, patterns of families and communities, and political,
moral, and religious systems were created. When all these climes
and circumstances
are viewed, it is not clear that men form similar attitudes in
response to similar environments. Writers like Ruth Benedict
in dealing with
personality point out that culture is also arbitrary, a result
of choices of how
to deal
with environmental circumstances. Thus, the Athabascan Indians
a hundred miles further inland faced an environment similar to
that
of the river
Eskimos, but
these two peoples have very distinct life styles and attitudes.
The Kuskokwim people from earliest description have sustained
a communal
village style
of culture. They could have broken down into extended family
groups and lived in smaller bands as did the Athabascans, but they chose
to be together.
From
the earliest observation their life has been village-centered,
social, and family-involved. This characteristic is as true today
as it was
150 years
ago.
What was it like on the Kuskokwim in the 1840s?
And what is it like today? How has White judgment of Eskimo life changed in
the intervening
130
years? The observations of Lieutenant Zagoskin give us a baseline
from which to
work forward (Michael 1967).
Zagoskin observed that the Eskimos
chose a social structure with maximum equality and minimal authority. Though
they may
have
appeared as “children” in
Western eyes, they were recognized as considerate with a
highly socialized sense of individual well-being. Interpersonal
concern
was cited many times
in Zagoskins writings. Overt criticism or ordering other
people to do service was avoided. Oswalt observed instances
of this
nature in the 1950s. So, in
the face of extreme circumstances of limitation and sometimes
starvation, the Kuskokwim people built a culture of remarkable
sensitivity. Among
other primitive” people who are credited with a high
degree of interpersonal refinement, we are reminded of Theodora
Kroeber’s story of Ishi, and
of John Marshall’s films and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s
writings on the Kalahari Bushmen.
The center of all ceremony,
communication, and general education in the old days was
the kashgee or kazhim, a spacious earth-covered
structure
which
was the men’s communal house.1 Describing
a twenty-four-day period in an Eskimo community, Zagoskin
starts and finishes
his account in this central
dwelling. The kashgee could be compared to the Southwest
kiva, where in archeological times a whole pueblo
might gather for special ceremony (for example, the Great
Kiva in the ruins at Aztec, New Mexico). In some villages
the kashgee could accommodate 500 people, indeed
all the villagers and guests from other communities.
This
focal point of sociability and ceremony was also a ceremonial
bathhouse for the men. Cleanliness may have been a basic
purpose, but more, the
bath was a time for men to socialize and to test their endurance
for places
of prestige. As if in balance with enduring bitter cold,
the kashgee was a place
to bear
unendurable heat. Men of the village gathered round a snapping
sprucewood bonfire with choking smoke that filled the kashgee before finding
its way out
the smoke hole. The room had tiers of benches, and while
adolescents crouched on the floor, the strongest men suffered
the heat
from the highest tier
where the smoke and heat were intense. Wads of shredded wood
would be held to the
mouth to filter out the smoke, and the endurance bath would
proceed till, one by one, the men would crawl out or be carried
out into
the snow.
The kashgee was chiefly a dwelling place
for men and boys, and here the mystique of the culture was passed on. Here
travelers from afar
were
given lodging,
food, and entertainment. Home was described as elsewhere,
in other smaller earth-covered dwellings. Men might bathe,
visit,
and doze
till past midnight,
and then slip away to join their wives or keep clandestine
rendezvous.
The organizing process of the kashgee continued up to the
proselytizing of the
Moravians, which succeeded finally in undermining its function
forever.
Russian enterprise had begun in the Aleutians and
Kodiak Island in 1741. In the following century Russia established
the fur
trade in
Alaska and
finally as far south as California. The first Russian
explorers, fur traders and
imperialists,
were familiar with the steppes and forested wilderness
of Siberia where standards of life were not so different
from
those of
the Eskimos. For sheer survival
the Russians had to accept many Eskimo standards, foods,
and technology, or perish.
There is little account of
Russian women in the early decades in Alaska, and there was a generous intermingling
and marriage
with
Native women.
By the time
the Russian American Fur Company penetrated the Kuskokwim
in the early 1800s, a large part of the company personnel
was “Creole,” which in the
Alaskan context means Russian mixed with Aleut, Indian,
or Eskimo. The most successful manager was himself
a Creole. Thus, relations with the Eskimos in
this period were far more relaxed for the Russians
than for the Moravian missionaries who came later.
The
Russian traveler, Lieutenant Lavrentiy Alekseyevich
Zagoskin, who came to the Yukon and Kuskokwim on a
tour of inspection
in 1842, found
the Kuskokwim
Eskimos living on the edge of hunger and sometimes
starving, so severe were the long winters. Leaving
marine hunting
grounds, where
some
sea mammals are available year round, may have posed
subsistence problems
for the river
Eskimos. They had come inland because of stable salmon
fishing and had learned
to exist on fish. But salmon fishing techniques were
not so efficient as today.
And what happened if the fishing harvest had been small,
or if for some reason a cache were destroyed, or if
spring were
too
long in
coming? The vast tundra
offered little other food that could support a sedentary
population. Large animals, moose, bear, and caribou
could not be depended
upon; they
ranged
too widely. Caribou herds moved fast and could disappear
in the night, and the
river Eskimos lacked the technology for inland hunting
in winter. Through the long winters and into the spring
when
fish supplies
ran low, there
was hunger
in the river communities. The winter solstice ceremonies
of many northern peoples describe the hardships of
winter hunger.
So
often the legend
is the same, whether
this be the premedieval Santa Lucia ceremony of Sweden
or the winter solstice deer dance of the Pueblo Indians.
The
village
is starving,
the snow too
deep for hunting, stored foods have run low. Then a
miracle saves families from
starvation. In Sweden it is a Viking ship coming across
the waters loaded with food. In Taos Indian pueblo
in New Mexico
it is the
charming of
the deer by
two deer mothers who lure the game to the village.
Much
of Zagoskin’s account is of mutually shared hardship.
The Russian post and the Eskimo villagers together
had difficulty surviving on the limited
game in the area, particularly through the last terrible
weeks of winter, when dried fish supplies were depleted
and travel to hunt for game became ever more
perilous as spring approached and the river ice grew
more rotten. Even today a delayed spring is a lean
time as stores run low. The Kuskokwim posts were
marginal operations, with only limited support from
the Russian American Fur Company whose headquarters
were far off at the mouth of the Yukon. Russian
traders and Eskimos alike had to exist on occasional
birds, rabbits, or other small game, though the Russians
with guns could apparently hunt game that the
Eskimos were unable to bring down either with snares
or bow and arrows. Zagoskin’s
journal describes these days:
April 17th. Murky; occasionally
fine snow; a fresh north by northeast wind until noon;
in the evening
a south
by southeast wind with
light rain squalls.
In the evening one of the returning hunters delighted
us. He and the Tungus
{shamans} had succeeded in shooting two deer and in
capturing three bear cubs; the she-bear had run away.
It is strange
that she decided
to leave
the cubs.
The tundra is almost entirely clear of snow. The dogs
are exhausted and the loaded sled is stuck in an overflowing
draw about 3
miles from the
fort.
The hunter has come for help. Who would refuse a piece
of good meat!
April 18. Murky and a fine snow in the
morning; a gentle west wind. Slightly cloudy in the afternoon,
gentle
north by northeast
wind.
Of the 5 puds {pud, a Russian measure weighing 36.11
pounds} and 35 pounds of deer meat, the men at the
fort were given
2 puds and
12 pounds.
Thus
it came about that we helped those who were supposed
to help us; praise God,
but without a reliable weapon I would have not agreed
to survey the Kuskokwim. . .
In place of fresh fish, which has not been caught since
the 16th, the natives are cooking dressed sealskin
and the bladders,
which
are empty
of fat.
Occasionally someone gets a grouse, someone else a
duck, the lucky ones a goose. All of
this food is given to the children (Michael 1967:257).
There
are accounts of Russian ruthlessness and insensitivity to the
Natives and their ecology. There are stories
of cruelty and
massacres
of Natives
in the Aleutians. But by the time the Russian American
Fur Company penetrated the Kuskokwim, the great wilderness
and
the need of
collaboration with
Indians and Eskimos greatly modified their behavior.
Their dealings with the Kuskokwim
Eskimos were inept but friendly. As stated, they “starved
together” when
hunger stalked the river. The accompanying Orthodox
priests were generally benign and made little inroads
on the ethnic well-being of the Eskimos. Lieutenant
Zagoskin, representing the Czar and the Russian American
Fur Company, laid
down in his report what might be considered the guidelines
of protocol between the traders and the Eskimos.
In
conclusion let me repeat that whether our trade flourishes
or diminishes in this region depends enormously
on the
ability and
good intentions
of the man in charge of the post. The native is very
appreciative of kind
treatment.
He sometimes finds himself in need of certain things
for which he is unable to pay, but no credit is extended.
But
if the
man in charge
handles his
affairs in this way, the take in furs will not cover
his expenses. Similarly his
profit will be small if he plays the gentleman, as
is done, for example, at Fort St.
Michael, and does not allow anyone in his room. Lukin
has always kept
open house; we have often seen a dozen natives in
his little room who will wait
silently for days at a time until he returns from
his work in the woods or at the fish-trap. If guests
arrive
at meal-time,
the piece
of yukola {dried
fish} and the teapot of “colonial” tea
are divided among those present. As he knows
their customs well, he never asks who a visitor
is or
for what purpose he has come (Michael 1967:255).
The
protocol of the Russian American Fur Company was
considerably more formal, but also reflected
the human
necessity for
genuine collaboration with the
Eskimos. The very survival of their enterprise
depended upon this. Zagoskin reports
in his journal the company’s instructions
to Lukin, manager of the post on the Kuskokwim:
In
the four villages nearest to the Khulitna, as
I have designated, inform my friends and acquaintances
that
I wish them to be
toyons {tribal elders,
term brought from Siberia; elders from each village
who were appointed overseers by Russian American
Fur
Company
were
called toyon.} (Michael
1967:332) in
those villages, and to have honor and fame from
God and our beloved Commander-in-Chief. I beg you
to
receive them as
trusted friends,
diligent in the interests
of the Company, with their loyal relations and
close comrades, and to procure medals for them,
and for
them to be loyal
subjects of
our tsar
Nicholas
Pavlovich
(Michael 1967:285).
From the first contact in the
1700s the Russians were involved in educating Native Americans.
The
White man
with his superior
sophistication
readily
assumes the role of teacher to the Native. Zagoskin
was no exception, and he made some
significant observations on the educational effect
of removing Natives from their environment to
a role in
the larger
Russian posts. Zagoskin
observed
that Creoles growing up in the relatively civilized
atmosphere of the posts were not as effective
as those living in
the bush.
One has to admit that in practical
experience all Creoles living in the outlying division far surpass
their fellows
who have
grown up in
the
principal settlements
of our colonies. This is only natural. From the
time he is small, the Creole in the hinterland
is trained
to work
and
by his native
keenness
of wit
and alertness he develops into a bold hunter
who is resourceful in the emergencies
that frequently arise (Michael 1967:262).
This
observation refers to the Creole, but with Native Eskimos the
principle
remains the same. Zagoskin complained that Native
girls who married into the
settlements learned to dance European steps and
adjusted to a life of relative
leisure, but they gave up their Native skills
and ability to work. The ineptness of Native
girls
gone civilized
in the Russian
settlements
was
so disturbing
that in 1837 a women’s training school was founded under the auspices
of the wife of the
commander-in-chief of the colonies. The goal
of the school was “to provide
well-brought-up and industrious housewives for the growing generation of Creoles,”
who must have represented the expanding population
of Russian America. Zagoskin observed,
At present
each pupil learns to sew and to dress birdskins and to make rain-
parkas, to weave various household articles such
as mats and others of grass and various roots-all
things
highly
useful to women who
intend sharing their
husband’s work in their homeland (Michael
1967:301).
This is a far cry from a Home Economics
class today in Bethel High School. In 1837 the
Russians
were
willing to skip European
academics
and elegance
for education to live in the Arctic ecology.
Zagoskin
as a White teacher was critical of the educational attitude of
some of his Russian colleagues.
Commenting
on company employees
who exploited
the credulity of the Eskimos to represent advanced
technology as magic, Zagoskin
says:
In showing them my watch, the compass
needle, the force of gunpowder, etc., I tried as much
as possible
to
acquaint the native with
the structure and
use of these objects. I explained to them that
this is all
the result of the cleverness
of man, and that they too, if they wished, could
learn to do likewise (Michael 1967:108, 292).
Zagoskin
also observed some of the pathos of the shift from subsistence
to trapping for trade
goods
after
watching Upper
Kuskokwim Eskimos
trade within
an hour 164 beaver pelts, 4 otter, 2 deer, and
2 black bear skins for a handful of trinkets.
Each
one covered his head with a blue cloth cap with red piping, and
laid in a
year’s supply of tobacco, beads, flint, and sealskin thongs
for taking deer. . .
The carefree children of the North dressed themselves
up and started to dance.
We must recall that a
beaver pelt is of no value in the eyes of the native. He kills
the heaver
for its
meat,
but only
uses the
hide
as a last resort
to make socks, or thongs for deer nooses. We
must remember that 10 years ago we
found this native with a stone ax, bone needles,
in a cold beaver-skin parka, starting a fire
by rubbing together
two wooden sticks,
and without any practical
domestic utensils. We must not judge too harshly
the
fact
that he sometimes exchanges what is of no use
to himself for something
which
has little
in our eyes. The northern native needs education
as does a child; his education
depends
on us. At the present time his prosperity on
earth depends on the possession of a gun and
10 rows
of potatoes. This
could be
achieved
with comparative
ease (Michael 1967: 269-270). 2
Here White education
began. What did the Eskimo need then for survival, and what does
the Eskimo
need
now? Can we
say today
with any conviction
that
the problems and the solutions are appreciably
different from those the Russian lieutenant analyzed
130 years
ago?
The Russian influence, ending in 1867,
appeared to have effected little change in Kuskokwim culture
in terms
of subsistence,
technology, or
hygiene. The
stability of the Eskimo life style in this period
is partly explained by the survival
balance of fishing. The Russians introduced firearms,
which broadened the survival base, and they introduced
a trading
economy based
on currency in the form of
beaver pelts. Certainly hunting beaver for trade,
trapping for trade goods
rather than for food, tipped the Eskimo’s
ecological relationships and drastically altered
many associations. But apparently these did not
disturb
the balance of the fishing economy. Salmon was
the reason for the Eskimo’s
presence on the Kuskokwim, and even today salmon
remains the ecological hub of survival. This
is in contrast to the experience of inland Eskimos
in the
Hudson Bay region who died away completely after
the Hudson Bay Company lured them away from caribou
hunting to trap for the company; then when the
fur market
collapsed, these Eskimos were technologically
unable to return to caribou hunting, and in a
short time the group perished.
The Russians were
the Eskimos’ first White teachers. Significantly
they had made the Kuskokwim Eskimos aware of
the surrounding White world with its
exotic wares, concepts of improved living conditions,
and an image of Christianity. The Russian priests
taught the Natives the litany of the Russian
Orthodox religion
and some aspects of Christian morality. They
were permissive teachers; the few demands they
made on the Eskimos were essentially ceremonial-that
they
cross themselves, learn the chants, and attend
to the ornate Orthodox calendar. In a real sense
the Russian Orthodox missions turned ceremony
over to the Eskimos,
for so rarely were priests able to visit the
villages. When the Russian empire withdrew Orthodoxy
remained, mystically absorbed into Eskimo ceremony.
THE
COMING
OF THE MORAVIANS
The sale of Alaska to the United
States only briefly interrupted the fur trade, since an American
receiving
company took
over the crumbling
assets
of the Russian
American Fur Company. But it was almost two decades
before a new and different American influence
entered the area:
missionaries from the
Moravian Church,
an Evangelical Protestant sect which had been
founded in Bethelem, Pennsylvania, in the early
eighteenth
century and which had
long
been active in the
mission field among American Indians.
Sheldon
Jackson, a Presbyterian educator and reformer, first drew the
attention of the Moravians
to the
Kuskokwim as a
new field
worthy of
their zeal.
Traveling in Alaska in the l870s, Jackson became
greatly concerned about conditions
of Eskimo life, by poverty and squalor and what
he considered moral degeneration, which he attributed
to unwholesome
White influences.
He felt that the
encroaching White culture had already destroyed
the
traditional Eskimo culture and
broken down their economy, and that only a major
effort of wholesome White influences,
namely Christian missionaries, could save them
from depravity. It was in direct
response to his lectures in the United States
that the Moravians decided to go to the Kuskokwim
(Oswalt
1963a:16-17).
Yet when we compare Jackson’s
account to that of Zagoskin forty years earlier,
it seems not unlikely that a large part of Jackson’s
reaction was one of extreme culture shock at
many normal elements of Eskimo life style-a
style that White sensibilities still find
upsetting today. The poverty and squalor were
reported
in almost the same terms by Zagoskin. Hunger
has always
stalked man in the Arctic. Housing was primevally
crowded, and practices of hygiene were (and still
are) ecologically restricted.
The Moravian mission
came to the Arctic a century later than the Russians.
The westward movement
of the United
States
had come much
closer to
Alaska in that century. Alaska was an extension
of the American frontier and
the vigorous
expansion of western progress. The Moravians
came as teachers from the United Stares of the
1880s,
representing
the good
life of technology
and material
achievement. Despite early frontier hardships,
the Moravians were to stay and bring modern White
values
to the Eskimos.
It was a
double drive,
to
bring not
only Protestant Christianity but the material
values, hygiene, and educational fulfillment
of White America
as well.
No doubt the missionaries carried
in their mind’s eye the orderly image
of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the spiritual home
of their denomination. What had been in the Russians’ image?
The vast wastes of Siberia? The primitive peasant communities
everywhere in eighteenth-century Russia? There was
far less discrepancy in conditions between Alaska
and Russia than between Alaska and the eastern seaboard of the
United States a century later. Reasonably the
expectations of the Moravians were far different
from those of the Russians, who were there to get fur and survive
as best they could. The Moravians came
as teachers and missionaries to bring “the
good life” as well
as “the good news” that the Eskimos
could enter heaven and be freed from their pagan,
poverty-stricken life; they saw it as their calling
to endure
their hardships until American modernity would
come and ease their lot and bring further enlightenment
to the river Eskimos.
As teachers they came as
outlanders and predictably would return where
they came from. The Eskimos
had come in
such a dim past
that they believed
they
had always been there. The message of the missionaries
and other White educators might be stated: “Yes,
you have always been here in this dreadful place,
but through our teachings you will be liberated
to leave.” It is creditable
to the zeal of the Moravians that some of them
did not leave but stayed on till death came by
accident or old age. Nevertheless the Kuskokwim
was a place
to leave, because of the hardships, the isolation,
the intense cold, the summer mosquitoes, and
the often revolting life of the Natives, including
their Christian
converts. This revulsion was no particular fault
of the missionaries. They were as a group generous
and dedicated, but they were White with customs,
values,
and styles that made the aboriginal ways of Eskimos
unacceptable and shocking. And of course, while
many stayed on, others left within a couple of
years for
medical reasons, for culture shock, or for comfort
in their retirement. So despite the continuous
residence of many of the mission’s founders,
the pattern throughout the mission history was
the same as today: to endure with
self-sacrificing zeal, but eventually to go home
again.
Epigramatically, the very ecology
and life style that challenged missionary zeal also quietly
became a measure
of their
fulfillment that ordered
life in the states did not offer. Individually,
I am sure, the Arctic and the
Eskimo
entered the missionaries’ psyche, but their
Christian programming appeared to keep these
involvements out of their teaching. In appreciation
of this
problem, White teachers today on the Kuskokwim
also get deeply involved in the Arctic drama,
but as with the Moravians, the drama that lures
White teachers
to lonely Alaska today only rarely finds its
way into the ordered White classrooms.
This brief
writing cannot fathom the motivations of Christian
missionaries, and members of the
White race
in general,
that send us to the farthest
corners of the world to sell our way of life.
Humanly we seem to be searching for
a challenge our home place does not offer, and
many of us find our fulfillment as outlanders
in strange
places.
The
compulsion
may be
both aggression
and, on the part of religious missionaries, guilt.
Christianity is not the only
creed of civilization, but historically Christianity
has been territorial. By fire and sword the lands
must be wrested
from
the colored infidels
by the
White crusaders. Dr. Albert Schweitzer, certainly
one of the inspired Western missionaries, could
not accept
his
precocious success as
a young professor
at the University of Strasbourg, saying, “It
struck me as incomprehensible that I should be
allowed to lead such a happy life, while I saw
so many people
around me wrestling with care and suffering” (Schweitzer
1949:84). He tried absolving his guilt in various
ways and finally determined to practice
medicine in the most difficult and primitive
locale in the world, in search of his own salvation;
at any rate, Lambarene deeply fulfilled Schweitzer’s
need.
Moravian teachers on the Kuskokwim
today seem equally fulfilled, friendly, warm people.
For
the Moravians,
of course, the
challenge was to save
Eskimo souls in the rigors of the Arctic. With
exemplary ethnocentrism Christians
are prone to feel that other peoples have no
concept of the soul-indeed that the soul is lost
except
through Christian
salvation. This
suggests that they
approach the Eskimo to be converted with the
preconceived image of an empty vessel to be filled.
The student
in the classroom
waiting to learn
is perceived
in the same way. Again, out of appreciation of
the cultural stranger, it is questionable whether
the
White teachers
in
Alaskan schools
today have
an appreciably
greater respect for cultural difference than
did the early pioneer educators of the 1880s.
What
is this
image that
is so significant
to the goals
and content of White education for Eskimos or
Native people most anywhere? We suspect the
image is drawn with the same chalk whether teachers
come to preach Christianity or simply to represent
what they
feel to
be a superior
society.
Moravian writings describe vividly
their first reactions to the Eskimos. Hartmann and
Weinland
were the Moravians
who first
surveyed
the Kuskokwim
area in 1884
for a possible mission sire. Oswalt summarizes
their reports:
They were appalled by what they
saw. They regarded the living conditions as filthy beyond description,
and the
Eskimos
were far more backward
than they
had anticipated. Two things, however, impressed
them beyond all else: the mosquitoes and the
lice (Oswalt
1963a:19).
After being in the field for nearly
two years, Weinland was still very displeased with the Eskimo
behavior:
Taken as a class, the Yuutes are
decidedly phlegmatic in temperament. They are content to take
things
as they come,
be it threatened
starvation or
overabundance, be it intense cold or drenching
rain, all seem to be regarded as so many
phases of life which must necessarily be experienced, & to
try to alleviate which they hardly dream. Life
is to them one prolonged series of sufferings;
such
as but few could endure, & yet suicide is
unheard of among them. They are deeply rooted
in their habits & manner of living, & it
is a difficult matter to get them to adopt even
the most striking & most evidently necessary
changes. White men have been living in their
midst for half a century, and yet today their
mode of living is rude, uncivilized, filthy.
Taken as a class,
the Yuutes are dishonest, thievish, and their
word cannot be trusted. In trade, they will rarely
acknowledge that they are in debt, and it seems
to be their
highest ambition to defraud the traders. They
cannot be called robbers, for they are too cowardly
to steal any large articles. But pilfering of
small articles
under circumstances where detection is difficult,
this is common, & to
be found out appears to be a greater disgrace
than the wrong doing itself (Oswalt 1963a:28).
This
observation is a brilliant summing up of Native
pragmatism on the one hand and the White
man’s ethnocentric concepts of morality
on the other. Weinland reflects his feelings
in detail in a letter describing the indigenous
half-submerged sod house called a barabarrah,
that is built with a tunneled
entrance to keep out the cold:
Through this tunnel
I must crawl every time I go to see my two patients.
. .
Emerging from the tunnel, through which you have
squeezed past several dogs, groped in the darkness,
and raised
a curtain of dirty matting,
you find yourself
in the barabarrah, or house proper. It is about
twelve feet square, with matting lying on the
ground around
the four
sides.
When
I entered this
evening, it
was dark, and calling for lights, a sight was
disclosed, which, alas, is but too common. In
this small space,
dirty, filthy,
and filled
with an
indescribable stench, were fifteen persons, men
women and children, besides several dogs.
The space in the centre of the barabarrah is
always occupied by buckets of water, dishes of
food, slop
pails, etc.
(Oswalt 1963a:29).
I sympathize with Weinland’s
reactions. Indeed it was an extreme step from
Pennsylvania to the conditions of the Kuskokwim.
For most of us, Christian
or not, thrown in this same circumstance, our
reactions probably would be the same. Quite aside
from moral considerations, White value judgments
were then
and still are very inflexible toward what we
consider hygiene. Filth, overcrowding, stench,
and darkness are bound to shock our sensibilities.
The culture shock
of the Moravians certainly must have blurred
the Eskimo personality. Culture shock is blinding
and negative and must have made it difficult
for the missionary
teachers to work with the positive elements of
Eskimo life. The missionaries intended to save
the Eskimo from his sufferings and despair, even
though as
Weinland was sensitive enough to note, the conditions
he found shocking were of little importance to
the Eskimos.
Missionary sentiment is expressed
poetically in The Moravian published in June 1895 (Schwalbe
1951:29):
The Cry of the Alaskan Children
Far
from the islands of Bering’s dark sea
Comes the sad cry of the children to me,
Help, in the name of the Father of all;
Give to us, starving in body and soul.
Out of our misery gather us in,
Give us a refuge from suffering and sin.
Mrs. John Kilbuck, one
of the original group of missionaries, wrote to a New Bedford
paper
defending
the value
of the mission work
and inviting
any
doubters
to come and see the results, saying, “It
requires only about six months of proper Christian
influence to change the listless animal-like
expression
into one of intelligence” (Schwalbe 1951:30).
This speaks not only of the academic accomplishment
of the mission school but also of the aptness
of the Eskimo student to be able in only six
months to communicate sensibly
with his Christian teachers in ways that allowed
them to appreciate that the Eskimos were indeed
intelligent and capable of human feelings.
Anna
Buxbaum Schwalbe, missionary from 1909 to 1948
and author of the Moravian chronicle Dayspring
on
the Kuskokwim,
observed
as did
Weinland
that the
misery of the Eskimo was primarily in the eyes
and hearts of the missionaries-which was a major
problem in conversion.
In the earliest years high
moral standards were entirely lacking. The
people seemed to fail to
see the enormity
of it all, saying
that such
were their
customs and that it had never marred their
happiness. Little girls of nine or ten were
made prostitutes by their parents. Polygamy
was practiced. Women thought nothing of leaving their
husbands and
vice versa. Men
travelling from
village to village
exchanged wives. Cruelty was common. Nothing
was thought of the killing off of unwanted
infants, especially girl babies. The
missionaries knew of one old woman believed
to be a
witch or
shaman who was
said
to have
caused
the
death of several children. She was clubbed
to death,
her joints severed, and she was burned in
oil. The dead were
wrapped in
skins or doubled
up into a
rude coffin. Sometimes they were placed on
scaffolds out of the reach of dogs. More often they were
placed on the
tundra where
they were
devoured by the hungry
beasts (Schwalbe 1951:30).
Most of these observations
are ethnographically sound and similar instances
noted by less partisan
reporters.
But
the missionaries
were unable
to see the reasons and the functions of the manners
and morals that so shocked
them, nor
had they the historical perspective to see an
affinity between the witch incident described
above and
the pillorying, burning,
and drowning
of
witches
in their
own not too distant European and New England
Protestant background.
The Russian traders had
to survive by ecological cooperation with the Eskimos. The early
Moravian
missionaries also
had to master
many of
the Eskimos’ skills
and help one another through the long winters.
On many levels life may have been even harder
for them than for the Russians, for the Moravians
came far
less prepared to deal with Arctic life and Native
values. But despite essential survival interaction
with the Eskimos, cultural difference drew the
curtain
so completely over Eskimo personality that even
when circumstance did present the humanism of
the Eskimo, and the missionaries acknowledged
these breakthroughs,
still they were unable to incorporate these insights
into their programming.
A number of missionary
wives bore children iii Bethel, and there was
concern as to whether this
was a good
addition to the missionaries’ work.
Of one
mission family Mrs. Schwalbe writes:
“Christie,” the eldest,
ran in and out of the native cabins, speaking the Eskimo language,
accepting their friendship and rejoicing greatly over
the small boats and the bows and arrows that
the old men carved for him and the little boots and other fur
garments that the grateful mothers and grandmothers
offered in token of their love for the small
Cossayagak (little white boy). More often than not, although
the mothers on the field view with the greatest
concern the possibility of the contaminative
influences, children have to be a very real blessing. “Now
you are really one of us” is the expression
frequently voiced by the native women when
the first-born comes to the missionary mother (Schwalbe 1951:74).
We
see that Eskimos love children after all and pay homage to the
first born, which is in contradiction
to earlier
missionary observations
on the callousness
of Eskimo parents about children.
Equally significant,
as Schwalbe (1951:87) notes, is the fact that “Christie,” born
on the Kuskokwim, in spite of his missionary
parents, “ran in and out
of the native cabins, speaking the Eskimo language,
accepting their friendship. . . ” Apparently Eskimo domestic
life that still shocks White teachers today did
not bother Christie, even as a missionary child.
Death
came to the missionary children too. In 1901 a whooping cough
epidemic carried away many
children,
including
the
infant son of
a missionary.
The natives, full of sorrow and expressing
their grief, came to the Weinlick home. It is
at such times that one comes to realize fully
the sympathetic heart of the Eskimo. Some have
pronounced
them an apathetic,
stoical
race of people.
It
may be that what seems to be a mask of indifference,
merely covers a kind
of timidity, a hesitancy to show a flood of
emotion that once opened could not
be controlled. Certain it is that the heart
is overflowing with love. Death has been such a
frequent visitor,
that, schooling themselves against his
coming, they have learned a calmness that few
of us achieve. They do not say, “We
shall die” but rather “We shall cease
living,” or “We
shall go from this earth” (Schwalbe 1951:87).
This
is an important observation about Eskimo compassion
gathered from a circumstance that
happened in the
early decades of the
Moravian mission.
Reasonably
this describes Eskimos prior to extensive Christian
teaching. Unless we support
the missionary thesis of nigh-instant personality
change experienced by Christian conversion, I
feel this early
record of Eskimo
sentiment offers
a positive
foundation for describing the Eskimo personality
as it was before the Moravians opened their first
boarding
school in
Bethel.
MORAVIAN INVOLVEMENT IN
THE LIFE ON THE ESKIMOS
The missionaries found
the river Eskimos living in organized communities
with
a fulfilling
ceremonial
life expressed
in the
potlatches or
giveaway ceremonies3 and
other communal activities surrounding the kashgee.
As earlier described,
this communal male
dwelling was a
center where
the whole village could assemble. For the Eskimo
man, day began and ended in
the kashgee. It was the hub of all enterprise.
For the boys it was also the school
and the portal which led into manhood. The missionaries
first witnessed the richness of Eskimo culture
in the kashgee, and it was within
the kashgee that the missionaries first preached
their gospel.
Weinland described a
ceremony he and Kilbuck visited in Napaskiak
in 1886, probably a “Boys Dance.”
On
entering the kashima, we saw the men hard at
work making masks, & finished
masks standing around everywhere. We were greeted
very cordially, different ones inviting us to
their seats on the benches. . . . Before long
four drums
were brought in, & a practice of the real
ekorushka was held. {Ekorushka is
a Russian-derived term under which the Moravians
lumped most of
the Eskimo
ceremonies.} A young man, masked, & holding
a wood chip in each hand, took his seat on the
floor of the kashima. A young man knelt opposite
him, & back
of this one, stood a woman & young girl.
At a given time one of the drummers opened the
performance by beating time on his drum, while
the masked young
man began some peculiar jirations, which were
imitated by the young man opposite to him, & by
the females standing further back. In a few minutes
the other drums joined in, an old man dictated
a song, & the entire company joined
in singing. Following this came an interlude,
during which the singing ceased, while the; drumming & the
corresponding jirations continued. Thus six
parts were gone through with, the entire performance
lasting about fifteen minutes.
. . . The entire performance was not regarded
as anything serious, for the more ridiculous
it could
be made the
better it was
liked . . . (Oswalt
1963a:59-60).
Two days later they returned for
the actual ceremony. This had not yet begun when the missionaries
arrived, but they
were ushered
into
the men’s house
to wait.
He told us to go to the kashima
meanwhile, where we found some of the natives practicing
their
parts. A
large number
of masks
were
hung around
the kashima, & my
first thought when I entered the place was, “This
looks like a fair.” Four
male performers, wearing large masks of most
wonderful designs, and one female performer,
occupied the stage, & were going through
peculiar jirations, keeping time with the beating
of eight drums, four on each side of the stage.
Soon after our arrival an intermission was taken,
during which the women & children
filed out. This gave me an opportunity to count
them, & I found that one
hundred & twenty people had been in the kashima....
Near
the roof of the kashima hung two representations
of birds, the one of an eagle, the other
of a sea-gull. On
the eagle
stood a stuffed
representation
of a male native & on the seagull that
of a female. Upon inquiry I learned that
these represented
the spirits of deceased natives being borne
upward after
death. The kashima was cold and draughty,
and, as I had wet feet, I began to feel very
uncomfortable
(Oswalt l963a:60-61).
On first experience the
missionaries did not equate religious experience
with the kashgee performances
because they
looked “like a fair” and
because “the more ridiculous it could be
made the better it was liked.” In
their Protestant Christian eyes there could be
no mixing of sacred and profane, of religious
ceremony and entertainment, so they were unimpressed
at any possible
religious significance of the performance. It
was not until later that the Moravians realized
the true significance of the kashgee ceremonies.
A
major function of many gatherings was the giving
and receiving of gifts. The gift-giving ceremonies
described
by the Moravians
appeared sincerely
directed to sharing, despite any social recognition
achieved by the host community and
the gift-giving individuals.
They play it in
this way. They ask the presents of each other. First, the women
asked for what
presents
they
wanted of the
men; then the
men of the
women.
The women came together, got a long stick,
tied strings to it at intervals of about an
inch,
then passed
it around to
each
woman,
who tied something,
anything to the end of one of the strings and
named what she wanted. The leader took particular
note
of what she
said and
the string
she tied to.
When all the women had asked for something
the leaders took the stick to the men
and told them what each string called for and
whom it belonged to. Each man then took off
one or more
of the
strings and
got as nearly
as he
could what
was asked for. When all have their presents
ready they meet, and the women also come together.
As soon as
all have arrived
at the
place of meeting
they begin to sing and dance and present their
gifts, with a dish of something to eat along
with it. If
they are able
they
give more
than
was asked of them; if not,
it is never noticed. When all is over, the
men in like manner ask
presents of the women (Oswalt 1963a:61).
Missionary
accounts written in these early years continue
to describe the splendour and generosity
of the ceremonies.
Considering
how
rude and distasteful
the
missionaries considered the physical level of
Eskimo life, no doubt they were baffled and impressed
by what they first
considered
to
be merry
entertainment to make life more tolerable for
the
Eskimos. Weinland. considering his
first impressions of the kashima programs, made
this observation.
We are unanimous in the opinion
that so far as these different performances themselves are concerned,
there is nothing
immoral in them, but that
much immorality is carried on under cover. It
cannot well be otherwise, where
so many uncivilized
people are herded together (promiscuously).4
Weinland
and the succession of missionaries that followed him certainly
expected to find scenes
of primitive
orgies, and
they must have
been surprised and
relieved at finding lifeways among the Eskimos
as well-ordered and civil as they were.
On first
contact missionaries did not feel the Kuskokwim Eskimos had a
religion, or if they
had, it was being
forgotten. Young
people were
unable
to discuss
the supernatural, and only under great pressure
would the old people reveal that they did indeed
have a
religious system. As in many
indigenous societies,
Eskimo religion was rightfully the domain of
the elders and passed on to the people only by
the
old people.
This circumstance
could
have misled
the missionaries
into believing that pagan beliefs were of little
threat to Christianizing the Eskimo. Yet Weinland
found evidence
that
the Eskimos had
very complex beliefs
about the soul, the supernatural, and life after
death. Working through an interpreter, he recorded
what he
felt was the
basis
of Eskimo
religion.
They believed in both a good & an
evil spirit. The good spirit was in the higher
regions where the crow flies, & hence, they
named him “Crow.” They
did not worship the crow itself as an image of
that god, they did not pray to the good deity,
nor did they sacrifice to him. They simply felt
instinctively
that there was a higher being who was creator & preserver
of the world, & they
taught their children “Do not do anything
bad, for He sees you.
The evil spirit existed, but they had no name
for him, & do not seem to
have concerned themselves any further about
him.
They believe that death does not put an end
to existence-that there is something beyond
this
world. The departed
descends to the lower
regions
by several
stages. At their provision houses they have
a ladder with four steps cut out of a log.
A similar stairway with four steps mark the
four daily stages in the journey to the other
world.
On the first
day the departed
gets
as far
as the first
step, where he must wait one day, the second
day he reaches the second stage, & so
on for four days. Ar the bottom of this ladder
are three rivers. Arrived at the first river,
the departed spends one day in cleansing himself
in this river,
the second day he reaches the second river, the
third day he reaches the third river, where he
must remain a long time, cleansing and purifying
himself in
its waters. Finally, his friends who have preceded
him, come to him & examine
him to see whether he is entirely pure. He has
by this time become almost or entirely transparent.
If they find that he is entirely pure from all
earth-stains,
they rake him along to the realms of the happy;
if not, he is allowed to remain or drift down
the stream, & no more notice is taken of
him (Oswalt 1963a:73-74).
Weinland may have projected
his own beliefs into this account; he was working
through the trader
and the
trader’s Russian-speaking interpreter.
If indeed this is an adequate description of
the Eskimo belief system, then the
Eskimo’s psyche does not seem so far removed
from the Christian spirit. The complexity of
Eskimo culture must have baffled the Moravians
and allowed
them at first to take a benign view of the kashgee.
Nevertheless,
their initial tolerance gave way to severe rejection
when they recognized that
the Eskimo
system
of good and evil
and the shamans
who personified
it were standing in the way of the Moravian conversion
process. Weinland, his wife, and their Alaskan
born baby had a great
deal of sickness,
and after two
years on the Kuskokwim they returned to the States.
For a year John and Edith Kilbuck were the only
Moravians in Bethel.
Kilbuck
was
a Delaware
Indian
and, though a third generation Christian, may
have had
more awareness of cultural
realities than the other missionaries. Though
many missionaries worked at it, he was the first
to
master the Yuk dialect.
As Mrs. Schwalbe
puts it:
Then he began to encounter the shamans
who opposed the work of the missionaries. Even as he gained
a deeper knowledge of the
language there came with
it a fuller revelation of the powers of darkness
and the superstition which
held
the people
in its grip (Schwalbe 1951:17).
Kilbuck recognized
realistically that the kashgee programs were indeed
religious ceremonies, and
hence he felt
the kashgee and
all its functions
should be
destroyed. Functionally he saw the kashgee as
a religious center outside the Moravian
power and that the kashgee would have
to be replaced by the Christian church as the
center of all
community life
in order
to bring
the Moravian Christian
faith to the Eskimos. In a letter to Weinland
in 1890 he wrote:
You remember the masquerades.
At the time we could not condemn them, because
we were unacquainted
with their
nature. Now,
however, that
we know that
they are no more than heathen rites, the one
grand
religious ceremony of the year,
we have condemned them, and seek to suppress
them (Oswalt 1963a:76).
From then on the Moravians
took a firm stand against all Eskimo ceremony, recreational or
religious,
and every Eskimo
rite
became an orgy in
their eyes. The Native
dance-dramas, upon which so much of the Eskimo
social life and prestige depended, were anathema
to the
missionaries and forbidden
to their
converts. Mrs. Schwalbe
recounts from a missionary’s diary one
such “dance for the dead” held
in 1898.
The necessity for some form of amusement
is present with people everywhere, and the
Eskimo with his
inherent dramatic
instincts,
his desire to
move across the stage before his fellows, pursued
his creative ability in
an interesting
style of self-expression. But in this he all
too often followed the lust of the flesh and
allowed
himself
to be drawn deeper
and deeper
into the
intemperate practices of superstition. . .
The dancers are usually girls and women in costume,
wearing elaborate head dresses and carrying dancing
fans. The
dancing is actually
genuflections of the knees and a co-ordinated
movement of the body muscles as they
endeavor
to interpret the song in pantomime. It is often
very skillfully done. Several persons occupy
the floor
at once but dancing
alone. The body
may sway,
but the dancer does not move about on the floor.
The muscles of the arms ripple
and then jerk as they manipulate their fans.
When the body sways and bends, then suddenly
comes upright
again,
these
body muscles
seem to
flow along
with
those of the arms. . . . During and after the
dances, the gifts were brought into the kashige,
and one
or more of
the chiefs
made the
distribution, being careful to observe certain
social codes. Such was the kind of
orgy that took
place in the isolated village of Ougavik that
winter.
The Helmichs were perplexed and naturally discouraged.
Mrs. Helmich’s
diary states that during the rime the skies
were dark and lowering, and their hearts were
dark
and heavy too ... (Schwalbe 1951:77-79).
After
the condemning of the kashgee ceremonies,
the missionaries attacked ceremonialism at every
level.
The goal of change
was to substitute
the Moravian church as
the community center, to strip the shaman of
his leadership position, and to replace him with
the
missionary preacher
and later the
Native lay Christian
leader in each village.
Circumstances and cultural
functions may have made this change from kashgee to
church reasonable. A potent force
for change
was of course
the unswerving
conviction of the Moravians that fulfillment
and
salvation could come only through Christian conversion.
Later
we may observe
secular White
teachers
among the Eskimo teaching with the same consistent
zeal that the “good life” can
come only through conversion to White values,
which basically are supported by Christian conventions.
The kashgee as a community center, the
Eskimos’ own
mystical belief in good and bad spirits, their
belief in afterlife, all appeared, at least superficially,
not to be in conflict with Christianity.
One major
difference between the two systems was the position
of women. The kashgee ceremonialism
and Eskimo
mystique
in general reinforced a subordinate position
of
women. The Moravians
on
the
other hand
offered
women an equal
or at least coordinate role in religious ceremony
and sanctions. The Moravian women whether married
or single
women, were
missionaries in
their own right.
A reflection of this can be seen today in the
village churches; women and children often make
up the
backbone of the congregation
and men
may
come
infrequently or only on special occasions of
celebration. So Moravian Christianity, reversing
the situation
of the pagan
kashgee, supported
the women’s role
and criticized the men’s role. This applied
significantly to the separation of the sexes.
The kashgee was essentially the separate
dwelling place of men.
Here they gathered for relaxation and sought
strength and status in the heat baths. The kashgee was
the men’s house, and women entered
only to bring the men food and on invitation
to take part in general ceremonies; the rest
of the time the women stayed in their own dwellings
waiting for the men to come to them. The Moravians
considered this morally wrong. In the eyes of
the
Moravians the family should live together as
a unit and the Eskimo dwelling was not a home
until it contained the Christian family unit
of husband, wife,
and children. Of course anything less than lifetime
marital fidelity was proscribed as sin.
Over the
years the church came to replace the kashgee,
both as a building and as a community
gathering
place; the house
became
a home,
a family
dwelling place; and the heat baths of the kashgee were
replaced by the smaller private steam bath houses,
adopted from the banjas of
the Russian traders. Here parts of the kashgee functions
were carried
on. Men continued
to be avid
bathers,
and the banjas are still a major focus
of sociability; with the changing status
of women achieved through Christian communization,
the banjas today are used by both men
and women.
Within the kashgee the block
to change was the shaman. Despite the division between
male and
female roles,
some of the shamans
were
women. Kilbuck
saw the shamans as frauds, as well as agents
of the devil, because they used
tricks to cteate magic. Shamans frequently claimed
they made trips to the moon, when
actually all they did was sir on top of the kashgee.
Kilbucks attack on them was to unmask them as
frauds, again striking
at the very
heart of
Eskimo
mystique and wisdom.
Priests of many religions-Navajo
singers, Zuni priests, medicine men of many tribes-indulge
in ceremonial
acts technically
involving tricks;
so,
it might
be said, does the Catholic priest conducting
the Mass. What missionaries label as trickery
often
may be acts
of symbolism
by which the
religious needs of
the group may be fulfilled. It is a question
whether the magical tricks of the Eskimo shamans
were not
understood by the Eskimos
themselves as religious
charades and accepted nonetheless as symbolic.
The tricks as observed by the missionaries were
also
ritual, and
ritual
formalizes
the
style of the
culture.
Medicine men, shamans, religious leaders in general,
are usually intellectual
leaders among their people with keen mystical
and psychological insights invaluable to the
group
and with practical
functions as well, such
as keeping track of
the seasons and predicting the weather. Hence
attacking the shamans as frauds also insulted
the intellectual
integrity of village
leaders, possibly
leading
to significant deterioration in the effectiveness
of Native leadership.
The Moravians, though strangers
to the life and death balance of the Arctic environment,
figuratively
took
over the role
of the
shaman. The question
that must be answered in terms of the modern
well-being of the Eskimos is: Have
the Christian ministers realistically been able
to lead the Eskimos into a fruitful harmonious
existence
with
their ecology
as did
the Native
spiritual leaders? As significantly we must also
question whether the
White schoolhouse
has adequately replaced the kashgee as
a school for a fulfilled survival in
the Arctic village and ecology. Moravian White
education offered the Eskimos survival by technologically
mastering
nature and
environment whereas the
Native shaman offered survival by achieving an
equilibrium with the forces of nature.
Hence White schools are oppositional to Eskimo
mystical as well as technological relationship
to his environment.
The
school
has replaced
the kashgee,
but does not offer Eskimos a life center that
this communal gathering place offered the traditional
village.
Certainly the missionaries were dedicated
teachers, willing to risk their lives to bring
their conception
of enlightenment
to
the Eskimos.
John
Kilbuck, by
kayak and dog sled, visited the most remote villages.
His generosity, friendliness, and also practical
medical skills
made him welcome
wherever he went. Yet
the missionaries’ progress was discouragingly
slow, in part because the Moravians did not consider
conversion an easy process. Where the Russian
Orthodox had
been content with immediate baptism, the Moravians
required of the communicants a high degree of
conscientious instruction in Christian precepts
and commitment.
In the third year eight Eskimos were admitted
into full membership in the church. All of these
had been baptized earlier in the Orthodox church,
yet Kilbuck
held them off for a year after they had first
asked for membership, testing their consciences
and preparing them for this important step. Kilbuck
wanted
complete conversion and complete rejection of
pagan Eskimo self and also “a
profession of faith in the Triune God,” for
interpretation of the doctrine of the trinity
was a major point of theological difference between
Orthodox
and European Protestant beliefs (Oswalt 1963a:75).
The
Moravians appeared as disturbed by some aspects
of Russian Orthodoxy and Catholicism as they
were of outright
paganism.
In the eyes of
the mission they
may have looked the same, and understandably
so. Eskimo paganism was deeply rooted in animism,
mystery,
and
the forces of
nature. Russian
Orthodoxy
built irs strength on pageantry and mystery and
was able to align itself harmoniously
with the nature worship of the Eskimos. This
has its counterpart in the Catholic missions
in the
American Southwest that
have also related
peacefully
across
the mysteries of Pueblo Indian nature-oriented
worship. The Moravian’s
insistence on total surrender of Eskimo self
slowed the conversion of the Eskimos, for the
Eskimo personality was inexplicably bound up
with their total relationship
to their natural surroundings.
The Kilbucks must
have felt the cultural wall between the missionaries
and the Native self.
The Eskimos
came to the
mission friendly
and grateful, accepted
Christian kindness, and then retreated into the
pagan darkness of the villages. How could the
Gospel carry
across this
gulf? One method
was
the initiation
of the “helper” program, enlisting
the dedication of converted Eskimos to carry
Christianity into their own villages. The first
two helpers
were consecrated by the Moravian bishop on his
visit to the mission field in 1891. Several villages
had been singled out for intensive proselytizing,
and
to each of these a helper was appointed. These
men aided in the church services and influenced
fellow villagers to accept the Christian teachings.
They became
the eyes and the ears of the missionaries, reporting
every strength and weakness, who was ready for
conversion, and who was slipping away. The missionaries
would
then make personal visits to these members. The
helpers worked right alongside Kilbuck in his
preaching, supporting the lesson of the sermon
wherever his
command of the Eskimo language broke down. This
innovation greatly accelerated Christian education
and opened the door to sweeping changes within
the villages.
For example, the village of Kwethluk, under the
pressure of a vigorous religious helper, was
persuaded to burn all their ceremonial masks.
The Moravians would
indeed have been slow in reaching the Eskimo
heart without the aid of the religious helpers.
Several Eskimos were ordained as ministers in
the early years. Today
Native assistants who are called lay pastors
are still the core of church strength in the
villages.
A high point of success came when
the son of a famous shaman, trained to follow in
his father’s power, joined the helper program.
Helper Neck appeared to be an exceptional example
of a Native who did move from a leader role in
Eskimo culture to leadership and responsibility
within the Christian value
system without losing the integrity and effectiveness
of his Eskimo personality. He retained his special
position of insight and influence and dedicated
himself
to overthrowing the shamans’ power, fighting
fire with fire. The missionaries referred to
him as “the Apostle to the Eskimo.” Helper
Neck devised his own intricate system of writing
to present Christian teachings in the Eskimo
language and taught the system to his co-workers.
He was the earliest and probably the most outstanding
Native teacher among the Kuskokwim Eskimos.
The
Moravians seized upon the value of Native teachers
to spread the Gospel, but they did not
reason from
there that
Natives
could also
be instructors
in their White schools as well. We have no record
of Natives being used in the
classroom in the effective way that the Eskimo
helpers were used to carry out grassroots Christian
education
in the villages.
We appreciate that
from the
beginning schooling centered around teaching
English as a means of reading and writing, and
Eskimos
would have
had
to master
English before
they
could function as English teachers. But if the
Moravians had appreciated that
Eskimo teachers teaching in Eskimo could have
been as persuasive and effective as
Helper Neck in presenting concepts, they might
have summoned the patience to train educational
collaborators
as well.
SHIFTING
ECONOMIC
CURRENTS
We
cannot consider the human effect of the American
take-over of
Alaska without a careful
look at where the Eskimos appeared to be in 1884
when the first Moravian
missionaries
arrived on the Kuskokwim. Earlier reports make
it appear the Eskimos changed very little under
Russian influence. Weinland
and Hartman,
like Sheldon
Jackson before them, were shocked at the “plight” of
the Eskimos, probably a shared response of culture
shock at the severe life style of the Eskimos.
Some eighty years later Edward Kennedy stood
on the banks of the Kuskokwim and expressed the
same shock at the simplicity of the Eskimo village.
In sincerity he too saw Eskimo life style as
poverty.
There is little evidence that the
spiritual and social structure of the river Eskimos had
changed
or decayed
appreciably. The kashgee described
by Zagoskin
and the kashgee described by Weinland
forty years later were
the same, except that the giving away ceremonies
had been enriched by new trade
items. Within
the twenty-year period between the departure
of the Russians and
the arrival of the Moravians, the general economy
of the Kuskokwim had
begun
a process
of economic and commercial change that has continued
accelerating into the still unresolved conflict
of contemporary Eskimo
life in Alaska.
To discuss the changes that began
with the American purchase of Alaska we must
trace through economic
variables and
speculate on
the effectiveness
of missionary
education to equip the Eskimos to meet the invasion
of American commercial values into their lives
then and
now. Certainly
the Russian American
Fur Company began this invasion, but within a
different cycle of history and
by a different
cultural style that rested with little conflict
on the structure of the Eskimo
village. When the San Francisco-based Alaskan
Commercial Company took over the operations,
traders and trading
culture changed
too. The influence
was not from imperial Czarist Russia via Siberia
but from the aggressive development
of the United States.
In 1884 when the first Moravian
missionaries, Weinland and Hartmann, arrived to explore the
area for a
mission site,
there were three
thriving posts
on the Kuskokwim, all owned by the Alaskan Commercial
Company. Trade was lucrative,
and Weinland was shocked by the evident exploitation
of the Eskimos by oppressively high markup on
trade goods and the
bare subsistence
pay
for Eskimo labor
offered at the posts and for paddling or lining
large skin
boats loaded with trade
goods up the river from seagoing vessels anchored
in the Kuskokwim Bay.
At that time the Alaska
Commercial Company operations on the Kuskokwim were run by a
Russian Finn named
Separe, with a total
monopoly
of all trading on the river. In the pattern of
trade with
Native peoples
everywhere,
the
traders
made a two-fold profit, first from the sale of
furs on the world market, and again from mark-up
on the
merchandize
they
traded
to the Eskimos
and Indians.
For a brief period Separe became an independent
trader with a newly formed company. While this
competition
was going
on, the
price
paid for furs
soared, and as an additional inducement to hold
trade the Eskimos were extended
open
credit. Then when the competing company withdrew
and Separe returned to the Alaska Commercial
Company, the
price dropped
immediately
and credit was
rigorously discouraged again.
With the discovery
of gold in the upper Yukon in the 1890s all of Alaska felt the
impact of
the
fever. Though
no significant
fields were found
in the Kuskokwim,
the movement of prospectors and speculators of
all kinds brought a rapid change as the commercial
White
world
moved into the
Eskimo
domain.
Trapping
eventually
become so profitable that White trappers began
to invade the Eskimo trapping grounds. As a measure
of change,
the price
of a mink pelt,
which was
25¢ in
1900, had risen to $4 by 1906. In 1907 a combine
of eight White trappers garnered $30,000 worth
of mink. The trading economy must have continued
affecting
Eskimo life patterns by encouraging heads of
families to stay on the trap lines rather than
return nightly to the sociability of the kashgee or to their family
circles. Traded fur filled life with countless
new items, and commercialization began shifting
the cultural base of Eskimo life. By 1910 there
were radical
changes in the pattern of Eskimo communities
and probably significant changes in the values
of the people.
Another measure of economic change
was a late potlatch in Bethel, one of the largest
gift-giving
ceremonies
on record,
and one
of the last.
A semiannual
missionary report on the activities at Bethel
contained this observation:
Good as the above
may seem (referring to the high fur prices and the quantities
of trade goods
in
Bethel), there is
nevertheless the unpleasant
feature
about the sudden prosperity of our people.
We hope that this will
be as short-lived
as were the temporary high prices of fur. One
of the
unpleasant features for the missionaries was
the great “give-away” dance among
three villages, which was held in Bethel. At
this particular dance (there were others elsewhere)
goods of all sorts were bought or collected
and brought into the kashigi where
they awaited their disposal. There were several
nights of dancing, entertaining and visiting.
Then, on the last day and night, this accumulated
material was
given away, the greater portion falling to
the entertaining village. Most of the people
received
some flour, some got seal oil, or skins for
boots, rifles,
stoves or cloth. It was estimated that at this
particular dance about twenty thousand dollars
worth of goods were given or danced away. Perhaps
there was
little actual waste, still we remonstrate because
of unfairness and unwholesome tendencies which
this practice leads to (Oswalt 1963a:82).
On one
hand the Eskimos were making huge profits for
the Alaskan Commercial Company trading posts.
On the
other,
Eskimos were
for the first time
dealing in conspicuous consumption. The first
response was to siphon off the wealth
in prestige potlatches to raise the status of
the village. The second response unquestionably
was
an accelerated
acculturation and change,
which Eskimos
as well as Indians have had a hard time ordering
constructively. The response of the Moravians
was to pray for falling
fur prices so that
the process
of Christian moral conversion could continue
uninterrupted.
Moravian records speak unhappily
of the invasion of miners and accompanying commercial entrepreneurs
around
the
turn of the
century. The mission
tried to be hospitable, but was unquestionably
glad when this rush of prosperous
strangers ended. On the other hand, the Alaska
Commercial Company was a respected partner in
bringing Christianity
to the Eskimos.
Mr. Lind,
the
trader at
Bethel who was a Finn and a Lutheran with an
Eskimo wife, saw great value in the missionaries
and was continually helpful and supportive.
Of
course the missionaries saw their function as very different
from the traders’,
but in perspective they were similar and complementary
agents of change. Despite disapproval of commercial exploitation,
the Moravians themselves became traders,
partly at the invitation of the Eskimos. In Eskimo
eyes all White men wanted to prosper by dealing in Eskimo furs.
The Moravians described most of their
operations in detail, except for their trading,
which they mention with an apology for mixing commerce with Christian
conscience. One statement to
the mission board in Bethlehem points out that
trading was a survival necessity to get food-which it was-and
to pay the overhead of the Arctic mission-which
may have been sheer opportunism.
Practically they
had to work hand in glove with the Alaska Commercial Company,
for their survival
depended
on the
company’s goodwill. Pragmatically
and culturally they had to work in harmony. So
from the beginning the Moravians have always
cooperated with business enterprise on the Kuskokwim.
This made
them symbolically and economically a unit of
the White enterprise in the Arctic. By 1900 the
pattern of exploitation of the Natives was well
established. White
men were looking for gold along the Kuskokwim
tributaries and trapping the hunting ground of
the river Eskimos. What did or could the Moravians
do about
this invasion? In terms of directed education
for the self-determination of the Eskimos, the
mold of education was cast, and Moravian education
continued
to direct itself to the moral basis of Eskimo
society without effectively involving themselves
with Eskimo economic survival. There was, however,
one action period
of realistic vocational Arctic education, created
by the introduction of reindeer from Lapland.
It
was Sheldon Jackson who seized upon reindeer
herding as a solution for Eskimo development.
He had made
the first report to the U.S.
Office of
Education on
the state of Native welfare, and his concern
had won him the appointment as special commissioner
of education
for
the Territory
of Alaska.
As mentioned he was appalled by the Eskimo life
and determined to help.
He was also
a realistic
economic observer and noted the increasing presence
of White
trappers and the general effect of material change
created by
the sale of
furs. He must
have
seen that the economic future for the Eskimos
was
precarious unless they got a more stable economic
base than trapping.
He saw reindeer
herding
as a source
of food, clothing, and profit for the Eskimos.
Jackson’s
reindeer project got under way in 1892 among
the Eskimos of the north coast. As a service
directly under the U.S. Office of Education,
the administration of the program was placed
in the hands of the schools, many of which were
missionary enterprises in those early days. In
1901 the
Bethel Moravian mission acquired a herd of 176,
followed by another group of 200. By 1904 the
deer in the Bethel area numbered over a thousand,
and the
Moravians were realistically, for the first time,
involved in the economic development of business
education for the Eskimos.
It took special training
to herd and manage the reindeer. Lapp herders came along with
herds
and stayed, first
as instructors to the Alaskans
but later
as reindeer owners. An apprenticeship system
was established in which selected Eskimo youths
were
assigned to the
herders. In turn
they
would be given
reindeer and become individual herders themselves.
These apprentices
had to have special
training in reading, writing, and bookkeeping
to succeed in their role, and this created an
action
curriculum
in the Moravian
School
at Bethel
to train
Eskimos to succeed in realistic Arctic skills
and economy.
Anna Schwalbe speaks nostalgically
of the school of the reindeer apprentices:
Often these swarthy
young men may have felt out of place spending hours at undersized
desks,
trying to re-acquaint
themselves
with textbooks
and pencils
rather than handling lassos and other gear
in the great wintry out-of-doors. Nevertheless,
they were
the envy
of the little
school boys and the
lions of the other sex. On the day of their
arrival in the village at the first
sound
of the little tinkling bells or the appearance
of
antlers on the horizon line, the cry of “Dundit,
dundit” (the deer! the deer!) caused boys
and girls to stampede pell mell from the schoolroom.
Sometimes shy little sons
and daughters, children of the herders, were
in the train, coming to attend school, remaining
in the home of some relative or with the missionary
until
the close of the term. These little folk were
generally better dressed than the village children,
wearing beautiful parkas with wide trimming bands
in
intricate design made by a loving mother’s
hands (Schwalbe 1951:137).
Here is an account
of spontaneous Native-oriented education that
appeared relevant to Eskimo survival
and self
appreciation. Here
White teachers
were integrated
into an Eskimo economy. Moravian teachers near
the reindeer herding not only instructed the
herders in keeping books
but were also
responsible for making
inspections of the herds and turning in annual
counts
of the deer. Moravian
education at this time was genuinely involved
in one practical aspect of Eskimo environmental
survival.
Anna Schwalbe
considered this a
vital period
in Moravian
service and successful education, saying, “All
of this, then, concerning the reindeer has resulted
in an education which may be said to have served
the Eskimo well, the effects being more far reaching
than we can now see” (1951:137).
This innovation
in education came after several decades of American
commercial interaction on
the Kuskokwim.
There had
already been
a serious invasion
of Eskimo life that had succeeded in giving the
Eskimo a compliant role to the
ever increasing White culture. Reindeer herding
might have become a model for motivating the
villages ideally
into
economic leadership,
but for
various reasons what developed was the concentration
of the herds in
the hands
of White
businessmen and Lapps, including the mission
and the government, with the Eskimos in a subordinate
capacity
as hired herders.
Though reindeer
herding
represented
a substantial industry for thirty years, a combination
of factors-the airplane, wartime employment,
vagaries
of the
market, wolves,
as well as sociocultural
factors of Eskimo village life-led to the decline
and virtual disappearance of the deer from the
Kuskokwim.5 White education
returned to its original role of
focusing on Christian morality, hygiene,
and survival in the
lifeways of
White people. Trapping continued into the 1960s
as a major source of financial revenue, but as
Sheldon Jackson
may
have predicted,
it has
failed to give
a secure base for Eskimo economic survival.
MISSIONARY FOUNDATION
OF WHITE EDUCATION FOR ESKIMOS
The Moravian mission’s moral
position clearly laid down the shape of White education for the
Kuskokwim Eskimos. Hence when
we consider the process and effect of Moravian
education in Christianity and basic White skills, we are looking
at the current of what may still be happening
today. Moravian education followed consistently
the pattern of education for Native Americans as far back as
its history can be traced.
Moravian Christianity is the center
of community
life in most
Kuskokwim villages and the basis
of education.
Throughout the New World missionaries
were the first White educators to the Native Americans.
In 1636
in Quebec the
Jesuits opened
what was probably
the first school for Indians of the Northeast,
a boarding school for the Huron
tribe. As usual, recruiting of neophytes was
the first obstacle. Parkman recounts this first
effort:
. . . Father Daniel, descending
from the Huron country, worn, emaciated, his cassock patched
and tattered,
and his
shirt in rags,
brought with him
a boy, to whom
two others were soon added; and through the
influence of the interpreter, Nicollet, the number was
afterwards increased
by several more.
One of them ran away,
two ate themselves to death, a fourth was
carried home by his
father, while three of those remaining stole
a canoe, loaded it with all
they could lay
their hands upon, and escaped in triumph
with their plunder (Parkman 1898:260).
Moravian educators
fared far better than this, but the problems they had to overcome
remain
basically unsolved
today. The
Moravians, too,
had a
hard time
recruiting their early students. Edith Kilbuck
wrote
of the problems of founding this first school:
In
our second year we opened a school. We had a great deal of
trouble in getting scholars.
Parents
said
they would
not send
their children
to school;
they would
die if they dwelt with white people, and
if they had their hair cut, their noses would bleed;
or we would
feed them
with salt,
and then
medicine men
would have no power over them, should they
get sick. . . . They asked us why we wanted
them to go to school. How much would we give
them? What price would we pay for a boy’s
time? (Oswalt 1963a: 35).
Even at this early date
White schooling was running up against structure
invisible to the educators.
Because boys away from
home were not
doing their chores,
someone else had to do their work for them, so
the parents
should be paid for loaning their children to
the school!
Yet from the outset of White education,
it has been the student who has had to change to become
educated.
From
the beginning
of the Moravians’ first
school in 1886 the lessons were taught in English.
This may have impeded education in the broadest
sense, but teaching English symbolized bringing
the Eskimos
a new style of life. It was inconceivable to
the missionaries that the Moravian school should
adopt elements from Eskimo life; this would have
been contrary
to getting educated. From the beginning Eskimo
children had to give up their own ways to accept
what the White teacher had to offer. They had
to accept
a rigid schedule in conflict with their sense
of time and program. Children ran away, and those
who stayed had to change their style of life
radically.
Even in this early beginning Native education
had to be a subtractive process; to add to the
net sum of the Eskimo child would have allowed
the pagan spirit
to live on within. The Native child had to be
purged of his original sin to accept the amenities
of Christian civilization.
Moral as well as temporal
values were forced upon the Eskimo students-White
morality that
at this
time related
in no
way to Eskimo life. Students
were whipped for disobedience, which must have
been a great shock since Eskimos
disciplined their children by nonviolent means.
Subsistence activities of families were seriously
interfered
with, for parents were
loath to make trips
to traplines
and fishing camps without their children. These
journeys were essential to survival, yet teachers
felt that
children should
stay behind
for school. The Moravians, many of whom came
from rural backgrounds and
were sensitive
to the
realities of subsistence cycles, were willing
to make adjustments that would
meet some of the demands of seasonal subsistence
migrations. But federal and territorial school
administrations were less flexible,
and then
and now the
pressure is to make the school year conform to
that of the lower states (Anderson and Eells
1935:296-297). Thus,
from the beginning,
White
education has plucked the child out of his ecological
life and education and directed
him away from his Native environment.
By the turn
of the century the U.S. Office of Education,
an agency of the Department of the
Interior, was
partially overseeing
the
Kuskokwim schools.
The government
paid for equipment used and paid salaries, but
the teachers’ salaries
were given to the mission, which in turn gave
the missionary teachers a Moravian stipend. For
the federally supported schools here and elsewhere
in Alaska general
policies and curricula were laid down by a superintendent
stationed in Seattle. The contracts called for
instructions, first of all in sanitation and
then
the three Rs, so mission teachers felt justified
in prohibiting Native customs that they found
objectionable. A teacher in 1907 strongly objected
to the smell
of fur clothing in the classroom, so even at
that early date White clothing had to be obtained
for the Eskimo children (Schwalbe 1951:104).
The curriculum
called for sewing classes for the girls. The
teacher wisely appreciated that the Eskimos were
far more adept at sewing then she was, so the
period was turned
over to the older girls and the students were
taught to make towels and handkerchiefs, many
of which were sent away to mission groups in
the states, presumably to
be sold for aid to the mission. Apparently Eskimo-style
stitchery and beadwork were not sent along with
the “hankies” (Schwalbe 1951:106).
There is no explanation for this choice of handiwork
for the mission societies back
home.
It is important that the first requisite
of federally directed education was hygiene.
From the first
Moravian contact
the Eskimos’ unconcern for sanitation
was a major point of shock. The missionaries
were fearful of contracting diseases from the
Natives, and exposed themselves to the unwashed
bodies and lice only
as a necessary sacrifice required by their zeal
to uplift the Eskimos in both body and soul.
Yet, before the White man came to the Kuskokwim
there were few
contagious diseases (Anderson and Eells 1935:65).
What the missionaries saw as lack of hygienic
custom in reality reflected the absence of certain
types of physical illness. Western hygiene has
been developed to guard against
particular illnesses; if we had no tradition
of sickness relating to germs, we might have
no values in hygiene.
The Eskimos had an entirely
different conception of disease. They recognized
illness that exterminated
whole villages
as catastrophe brought on
by the White men. Smallpox swept western Alaska
in 1838-39, and the Eskimos
burned
the settlement
called Russian Mission on the Yukon in revenge.
A Moravian
census made in 1890 revealed that 50 percent
of all Eskimos had some
chronic
diseases,
and
a large
portion of the children did not reach adulthood.
Death always stalked the Arctic villages in accidents
and
hunger, but
apparently by
1890 White diseases-smallpox, tuberculosis, whooping
cough, influenza-were well established in the Arctic. Ironically,
one
of the appeals
of the missionaries
was their ability
to treat White diseases that the shamans were
unable to cure. In 1896 there was an epidemic
of whooping
cough on
the Kuskokwim,
and mortality
among
the Native children was very high. In the same
period influenza swept away half
the population of the region. Hygiene was then
a mortal necessity, and a major function and
power of the missionaries
was treating
diseases that the mission itself may have been
instrumental
in bringing into
the
Arctic.
Diseases
and economic disruption came to Alaska with White
progress, and so, pragmatically, White education
should be able
to meet these
disasters
by special training
and sophistication gained through White learning.
The
advance of Christianity might be seen as illness
and disorganization of Native equilibrium,
but
of course missionaries
were just
one of the agencies of change in the Arctic.
Sheldon Jackson bitterly
recognized
that White enterprise
had seriously upset the Eskimos, and he saw the
missions as the only positive White force that
might balance
the damage already
done.
We must
see the
Moravians mission of change in the total context
of the White invasion of the Arctic.
The Moravians had a long tradition of missionary
work, including work with Eskimos in Greenland,
and may well
have been the
best prepared teachers of Native people in the
1880s. But of
course
they were White
teachers
with
White
solutions, and our interest in their program
is basically this content.
After the Moravians’ pioneer
school was opened in Bethel in 1886, their program
was extended to other villages up and down the
river, on the coast
of Kuskokwim Bay, and on the Nushagak River to
the east. As the Alaska Territory developed,
the federal government gradually built up a network
of schools for Natives, -for many years working
in close collaboration with
the missionaries, appointing missionary or “missionary-minded” teachers
to the village schools. Increased bureaucratic
intervention certainly must have made Eskimo
schooling even more rigid, along with the missionary
goals that were firmly implanted in the curriculum.
Native education throughout
Alaska was administered the same way, parceling
out school support to the various mission programs.
The missionary heritage also pervades the education
of American
Indians and still affects Bureau of Indian Affairs
schools throughout the country today. For example,
at the new $12-million boarding school at Dilcon
on the
Navajo Reservation in 1968, the principal and
60 percent of the teaching staff were Mennonites.
Indigenous
people all have schooling for survival, for subsistence,
for defense, and for psychic
resilience to deal with often
harsh environment. This intense
education does not necessarily take place in
the home, for often communal patterns do not
give the
nuclear
family
this
responsibility.
Eskimos
on the Kuskokwim
and elsewhere along the western sea coast of
Alaska did not have home and family culture as
westerners
conceive
of them.
The barabarrah was
for women
(often
two or more) and their children. For the men
and the growing boys living, in various dimensions,
circulated around a
communal dwelling.
As described,
men
worked, ate, relaxed, and slept in the kashgee.
It was the beginning and the end of their days.
Boys
grew
to
manhood in the kashgee.
And so,
before
the
kashgee became a church, it was a school.
We
observe that Eskimo parents are very permissive
with their children, especially their sons. Domestic
process
in the
home educated the
girls and taught them
to rear children, to cook and to assist in the
processing of fish, meat, and furs. But traditionally
the men
had little work to do
in the home;
all intellectual
pursuits and most manufacturing activities took
place in the
kashgee. Hence the home was not a place for discipline
or learning male
skills. Home was
a place to play, to love your children. The Eskimo
father could do this loving without restraint,
for the boys
would be dealt
with in
the kashgee and disciplined
by all the men of the community.
Formal school
was not in the home, and schooling was for boys, not for girls.
In many societies
this has
been the
case; even
in European
Renaissance
culture
schooling was only for boys (Ong 1963:444-466).
Among the Eskimos the kashgee was for men and
boys only,
and girls
had to receive
their education
spontaneously
in the life process.
The kashgee could be compared
to the longhouse on the Olympic Peninsula which was also the
school
of
the
community where
boys were disciplined.
The longhouse
itself has perished from parents memory, but
parents continue to be very permissive. A school
principal
suggested that
a mother should exercise
more control over
her daughter, who had been suspended for truancy.
The mother agreed
but later expressed her wonder, “Why do
they want me to make her go to school if they
can’t get her to stay there?” (Barnhardt
1970:54-57).
The White school is not a longhouse
or a kashgee. It is remote from the
village influence of the
men and
not involved
with
the day to
day survival
of the
village. The White school in this dimension can
be seen as an extreme contradiction of Eskimo
Native learning.
The Eskimo style of indirect
instruction or correction of error, technical
or social, appears as one
of positive reinforcement.
When a boy kills
his first game, there is rejoicing and a special
feast; nothing is said about
the game
that got away. When a girl cleans her first salmon
or picks her first bucket of berries there is
equal rejoicing
and
feasting.
Both in
social control
and practical instruction there is present a
constant concern not to embarrass or unnecessarily
discourage
the learner.
This restraint
carries
over to
allow the learner or the individual to ignore
a request when he does not wish to
comply. Children do not, in this way, refuse
to honor their parents’ order;
rather, they do not acknowledge that they hear
the command. This does not embarrass the
parent or attack his position. This behavior is characteristic
of other
societies. Spindler (1963:351-399) described
a similar attitude in Menomini education, where
criticisms are implied rather than forcefully
stated.
This is also the style of social control
among Eskimo adults. In the village of Napaskiak
on
the Kuskokwim
the village
council regulates
antisocial behavior by implicitly influencing
the miscreant to change his own ways.
If this fails
they suggest forcefully that he leave the village
(Oswalt 1963 b:69-70). But circumstances are
rare when an individual
would
be humiliated
in
order
to correct
his behavior. Apparently it would take an extreme
situation for the villagers to purge the wrongdoer
publicly.
There are indeed
records
of instances
of hysteria where destructive individuals were
stoned to death by the group, but this is
pathological behavior.
During World War II the
Alaska Territorial Guard was organized for possible defense of
Alaska.
Village leaders
were made
officers and
younger men
enlisted; uniforms and equipment were issued
freely, and the discipline usually associated
with White military establishments was not of
prime
concern. Consequently what developed was a practical,
paternalistic
arrangement in which
the villagers wore their uniforms daily and used
the rifles for hunting. After the war
the
organization was replaced by the National Guard
of the U.S. Army. Oswalt describes the situation
in
Napaskiak. Direction
of the
Guard was taken
away from the
village elders and given to young Eskimo sergeants,
those
who could communicate
in English with their Army superiors. Learning
was reversed, and to the shock of the whole village,
grown men were
shouted at for
minor
drill
infractions, and worse, young men were shouting
commands
at old people. Oswalt feels this
was a traumatic experience for all the village.
Here was a blunt change from Eskimo education
to White-style
instruction
and control!
(Oswalt 1963 b:69-70).
When the
Eskimo dwelling became a family home shared by
the man of the family and the kashgee function
came to
be replaced
by
the white
schoolhouse,
education
for survival took place only in the field. The
home, for children, remained a permissive and
tranquil environment. The White school
took over the
harsher disciplining of the child in both moral
and
academic excellence. The style
of learning and discipline was in opposition
to the home and the village world of the children,
which,
quite aside
from
curriculum, may have
added to the
distance between the White school and the Eskimo
community.
Outside the school Eskimo boys continued
to learn Eskimo skills in the survival process
by direct
participation in a task-mending
a
sled, stretching
pelts
for drying, netting salmon, setting traps and
snares. But very early in White schooling, school
attendance
cut across
the
subsistence processes of hunting,
trapping, fishing, and berry picking. White scheduling
and curriculum had
problems in accommodating this environmental
education. And the more
bureaucratically organized the schools became,
the deeper they intruded on the learning
opportunity of tundra and river. Often when the
families needed their children most,
they
were sitting in school rather than learning to
participate in the work culture of their villages.
Later, at
the
threshold of
manhood,
village
students who
want to go beyond the eighth grade must leave
for faraway boarding high schools, some going
as far
as Oklahoma.
Yet, in a report
of Eskimo education in
the late fifties, Alaskan educators were proposing
to keep the Eskimo children in educational camps
through
the
summer, the most important
period
of salmon fishing (Ray 1959).
In 1917 a Territorial
Department of Education was established which
developed schools “for white children and
those of mixed blood leading a civilized life” (Anderson
and Eells 1935:215) - Bethel was granted such
a school in 1923 (Schwalbe 1951:166) - Though
never absolute, this was essentially segregation
on both a racial and a cultural basis. The territorial
schools were the forerunners
of the present state schools. The federal schools,
chiefly seen as schools for Natives, were shifted
from the Office of Education to the Office (later
Bureau) of Indian Affairs in 1931.
The impact
of White schools on Eskimo learning affected
not only style and content but also
the method and
focus of learning.
Traditional Eskimo learning
was fundamentally a training in observation and
the analysis of this sensory reception. Content
was frequently
nonverbal
and
ecological
in experience-weather
prediction, ice prediction, warnings of blizzards,
the drift of game.
White learning shifted attention to the verbal
and the literate, which
had survival
value in abstract circumstances usually unrelated
to the natural world surrounding the school.
Humanly, the instructors’ role was shifted
from village men to strangers teaching content
administered from Seattle and Washington, D.C.
When
the Moravians opened their first school in 1886,
they taught the Eskimo children in the
only
fashion
understood and acceptable
in those
days. When
the federal government took more direct responsibility
for Native education in the succeeding decades,
the concept of
educating
Native people did
not change appreciably. By 1931 when Native education
was
shifted from the
U.S. Office
of Education to the Bureau of Indian Affairs
major changes in philosophy were rocking the
larger field
of American
education. But, as within
the BIA, these developments were from the top
down and rarely reached the
grassroots school or changed the formal shape
of public education. Paralleling this
consciousness
was a growing awareness that American Indian
education was already
in difficulties. In answer, radical new methods
were proposed and tried. Was this going
to
change White education for the Eskimo people?
There are of course many factors and
drives establishing the character of schools,
so that radical change, even within the controlled
program of the BIA,
has proved to be
difficult.
Home of the Postmaster in Tuluksak
(middle income).
During the
thirties the BIA introduced a new approach of Native cultural
determination that
shifted the
emphasis away from
boarding schools
toward community-oriented
day schools in an effort to bring grassroots
education to Native people. This effort coincided
with a
sweeping civil
rights
law, the Indian
Reorganization Act, which was written to give
Native Americans
administrative control
over their own destiny. This act directed even
more energy into day schools as
centers
of community development, and BIA teachers were
recruited to help Native communities organize
into self-governing
organizations with
activities
centering around the school. This program enlisted
a new character
of teachers who
directively and nondirectively reversed, if only
temporarily, some of the historical goals
of missionary education.
Such developments could
have resolved many educational problems and opened the door to
community development.
Many dedicated
teachers with zeal
equal to the spirit of the early Moravian teachers
struggled to redirect
the
course of BIA education. Certainly they were
in conflict with missionary goals,
but maybe even more seriously they were in conflict
with many of their own White
values and the pressures of accelerating progress
in Alaska. The program opened a contest between
the traditional
goals
of Christian
zeal and
Native self-development, between collective White
American conformity and Eskimo
difference.
The educational program of the Indian
New Deal may have come too late to salvage the destruction
of
a century
of miseducation.
Many
of the
ethnically
ideal
goals of this plan attempted to involve Native
survival culture that had become increasingly
dysfunctional. At the other
extreme, the
community school program
may have come thirty years too soon. Such schemes
today would be welcomed by many Indian groups
who are now
much more sophisticated
about their
identity
and concerned with cultural determinism.
Missionary
and White education, historically and still today, remains blurred
in relation
to goals
for Eskimo
survival.
The community
school renaissance
of the BIA program of the thirties tried to clear
this educational vision. But the overreach of
modern cultural
supremacy places
Eskimo education
today in a position not very different from that
of the Moravian school of 1900.
ESKIMO SOCIETY
TODAY AND
THE
PATTERN OF CHANGE
The
tundras of
the Kuskokwim
remained in great isolation through nearly a
century and a half of White European influence.
Change
began imperceptibly
with
the arrival
of the
Russian traders,
but the pace of change accelerated steadily with
each new wave
of White intruders. Change speeded considerably
under the Christian education
of the Moravians,
but still the relative isolation of the area
allowed the Eskimos to accommodate the challenging
influences
into their own life
style. The
pressure of
White intrusion increased as transportation and
communication breached the isolation
of the tundra. More trading posts were built,
the Kuskokwim River was charted, and deep water
vessels could discharge their cargos
directly
on the river
bank at Bethel. Wendell Oswalt feels that by
1925 the indigenous life style, with its belief
in the pagan
supernatural, was gone for
good
from the culture
of the river Eskimos.
Along the river, village
patterns had changed also by this date. Gone
were the barabarrah sod-covered
igloos,
though
sod dwellings
persisted
in isolated
tundra villages into the 1930s. Gone were the
kashgee communal centers-either
burned down or torn down; the last, in Napaskiak,
was burned in 1950.
By 1935 village patterns changed further under
the organizing influence of
the BIA
school and community program. BIA teachers had
the educational responsibility of organizing
village leadership to accommodate
the opportunities
offered in the Indian Reorganization Act. The
villages for the first time developed
governing councils. Many BIA teachers worked
zealously to effect community development on
many levels,
so
in a sense
this was
a period of genuine
community education. During this period, on their
own initiative, teachers introduced
electricity generating plants to some villages,
improved water supplies, and even stimulated
the forming of
a cooperative store, as in the
village of
Kwethluk. At a later date teachers in the isolated
tundra community
of Nunapichuk helped develop the first fishing
cooperative, which later formed the foundation
of the successful fishing cooperative at Bethel
that today affects the
welfare of many Kuskokwim communities. In 1918
when reindeer herding was at its peak
the federal government built a hospital at Akiak,
the herding center. Two years later it was moved
to its
present location
in Bethel.
The Second World War suddenly ended
the isolation of the Kuskokwim and ushered in
the state of
rapid change
that
is the character
of Eskimo life today.
The proximity of the Japanese enemy sealed off
the Kuskokwiin on one level, closed
schools, and interfered with social interaction.
War hysteria brought violent turmoil and also
at least
one example of
human futility.
The one Japanese
citizen of Bethel, whose skills helped build
defensive army installations there, was summarily
separated
from his Eskimo
family and deported
to
a concentration camp in California, where he
died (Schwalbe 1951:243).
At the same time the
wartime drama filled the Eskimo world with thousands of White
military
men and
dumped tons of
goods and
technology on
the river banks
of the tundra. Eskimos saw White skills transform
boggy tundra into expansive air fields and also
witnessed the White man’s material affluence
used, stored, or discarded as expendable waste.
Much that was thrown away entered
the Eskimo community, and the bulldozers, motorized
transportation, and vast technology entered the
Eskimos’ consciousness and expectations.
This turmoil is still the character of Bethel,
the important air hub of western
Alaska, an expanding city of White enterprise
in the Arctic.
The war recruited the Eskimo villagers
into scouring units and later into units of the
National Guard.
Oswalt feels
that this
postwar
development was the largest
single influence in changing the structure of
the Eskimo village. The National
Guard gave ample equipment and prestige to its
men and placed the administration of all this
activity in the
National Guard
Headquarters
in Bethel.
This unquestionably diminished the prestige and
leadership
of the newly formed
village councils
and made young men more prestigious than the
old. The Guard brought obsolescence into the
villages
and linked
the values
of the village
with the other
White world. It would be distortive not to appreciate
that the National Guard
also contributed to village organization, further
educated the adult population, and gave the men
special technological
training.
But
positively or negatively,
it broke the isolation that had given each village
its own destiny.
Wendell Oswalt’s two studies
of the Kuskokwim, taken together, offer details
of both change and continuity. In Mission
of Change in Alaska he traces
the pervasive influence of the Moravian missionaries
who in the forty years between 1885 and 1925
managed to bring an end to major manifestations
of classical Eskimo culture. Yet in Napaskiak:
An Alaskan Eskimo Community Oswalt
reports details of a great deal of Eskimo culture
that was surprisingly unchanged. Napaskiak,
six miles downstream from Bethel, came through
World
War II still retaining much of its man-to-nature
relationships as well as many ritual patterns
of Eskimo culture. Probably the beliefs behind
these rituals
had faded but the ceremonies went on. Growing
up in Napaskiak still required many traditional
rites of passage. Male-female relationships,
patterns of marriage,
and the dignity of growing old persisted in the
traditional way. There were still two shamans,
an old man and a young girl who had “the
power of healing.” At least in Napaskiak
this apparently created no conflict.
Significantly
Napaskiak is a Russian Orthodox village. It was
among the first communities that
the Moravians
tried to convert,
but
for unclear
reasons
they failed. Was this because Napaskiak was a
recognized mystical center and so
was able to repel the missionaries? More likely
it was an
especially self-contained organization and resented
the particular pressures
of the Moravians. Though
the Russian Orthodox Church was not active in
the Kuskokwim when the Moravians arrived, something
of the earlier
tradition persisted
and
was contrasted
in the Native mind with different emphases of
the
Moravians. In 1905 a visiting Russian priest
baptized half of
Napaskiak, and
the other
half was baptized
a year later. Then whenever an Orthodox priest
visited he was welcomed to preach
in the kashgee, until in 1935 a Russian
Orthodox chapel was built. This may not mean
that at any
one point
they had lost
completely
their indigenous mystique,
but rather that they needed a new form in which
to express their
feelings.
The mystery and color of Orthodox ceremony may
have allowed a dynamic sublimation of Native
spirit. Moravian Christianity,
on the other
extreme, meant strict
rejection of all Eskimo ceremony.
Up the river
from Bethel the nearest Eskimo village is Kwethluk,
also a predominantly Orthodox community
with
an old Russian
church. Kwethluk
has
a small Moravian
church as well, and is just a few miles from
the Moravian Children’s
Home which was established there in 1925. Both
Kwethluk and Napaskiak are recognized for their
order and self-determination.
The life style Oswalt
observed in Napaskiak in 1955-56 revolved around
Native subsistence of
fishing, trapping,
snaring,
hunting, and berry
picking. Ceremonialism
surrounded these functional activities. The first
game killed by a boy was celebrated with a feast
that marked
passage
toward manhood.
The first
salmon
a girl cleaned by herself was equally celebrated,
as was her first pail of berries picked. The
patterns of subsistence
prescribed
the Eskimo’s
day, season, and year, and created the Eskimo
way. Hence survival of Eskimo ways had significant
economic meaning. All the villages at this date
shared
these subsistent economic ties with their ecology.
The villages remained dynamic centers; extensive
family ties were functioning and important. Age
roles
from youth to manhood to old age were ordered
and respected. Sex roles had changed because
women held more recognized importance now that
the home
was the center rather than the kashgee.
Villages with Orthodox churches had a brilliant
calendar
of ceremonial events comparable to the indigenous
calendar
of ceremonials. Conceivably the villages that
were predominantly Moravian may have changed
psychically and spiritually toward a more individual
destiny
accomplished through the religious value attached
to morality and hard work, but all acculturation
was modified by the life style of Arctic existence.
Yet
by the end of the 1960s, Eskimo life style was
drastically transformed. Innovations entered
Kuskokwim
life that
wrought more profound changes
than all the years of Moravian teaching. Change
came not through objective teaching
but through accelerated diffusion of modern technological
process and modern technological economy.
A similar
transformation has taken place among the Hopi, Zuni, and other
Indian villages in
the Southwest
with
comparable historical circumstance. The Hopi,
as one model, not very long ago had a delicately
balanced subsistence
of farming and stock raising, both of which succeeded
or failed depending
on rain. Rain
for crops laid down the Hopi’s total association
with their world, and ceremonial and supernatural
life revolved around moisture, fertility,
and harvest. Hopi character and social structure
were established around these realities.
Home
of the janitor of the BIA school in Tuluksak
(upper income).
The Hopi, too, were living in
great isolation-of plateau desert instead of moist tundra. The
Hopi
lost their
isolation through
worldly education
at
boarding schools and later by traveling away
from home to seek work, as well as by the
accelerated invasion of strangers. Finally roads
penetrated the Hopi world so that the trading
centers of Winslow
and Flagstaff were only
hours away.
Diffusion of modern needs, washing machines,
radios, and most expensively, pickup trucks,
required cash.
Hopi desert
gardens
cannot supply
dollars. Fleece and lamb crops, like beaver and
fox pelts, proved
an unstable
base because
pasturage became over-grazed, drought decimated
flocks, and the price of wool fluctuated for
a host of reasons
unrelated
to grass
or vagaries
of
rain. Today
it can be safely said that no Hopi family makes
its major subsistence from farming; someone in
every
family works
for cash somewhere. Yet
the social order and ceremonialism of Hopi remain
remarkably
stable, simply because they have
replaced the subsistence functionalism of farming
and dance prayer for moisture with new recognition
of the need to
retain their
villages and
go on being
Hopi people. Hopi integrity had to find survival
in the modern world.
The tundra Eskimos now face
a similar challenge. White technology and White
values have become
rooted in Eskimo
ways, and the
subsistence economies of river and tundra no
longer supply the trade value
that can purchase
White-type
needs. In effect, Eskimo survival economy and
the remote villages have
become obsolete in modern eyes. The market for
fur is unstable. The time it takes
to trap fur is no longer expendable. A self-sufficient
existence in nature becomes increasingly difficult.
Like
the Hopi, the Eskimos live each year in less isolation. Outboard
motors, motorized snowmobiles,
and the constant
roar of the bush
planes have put
the remotest villages in close contact day after
day with the modern world. Wage
work has entered the Arctic in successive waves
since the war with oil exploration and fish canneries.
Building projects
and national
defense
projects have
employed whole villages and interrupted their
ways
of Arctic survival. This has happened
less on the Kuskokwim than elsewhere in Alaska,
but
going away
from the village to make cash is increasingly
becoming an economic necessity.
When the subsistence
base of the village goes, the very survival of
the village is shaken. Innovations of the last
few years
have radically
altered
the functions
of the villages.
The war began the intrusions
that place the villages in a precarious balance today. This balance
has
been tipped
further
by federal
and state relief.
This has struck at the economic heart of a frugal
basically subsistence economy. Relief, old age
pensions, Social
Security, and unemployment
insurance have
filled the villages with a new source of cash
usually with the stipulation that the recipient
not be
self-employed. The Post
Office becomes
the trap line.
In 1969 in Tuluksak only one Eskimo ran a trap
line, a
man already employed as the VISTA worker’s
assistant. Various sources of relief shared around
enough affluence so that the hardships of winter
hunting and trapping were pragmatically unnecessary.
Eskimos are very practical folk, and why go off
into the frozen bush when you can just as productively
socialize at home?
Significantly, this inertia
does not affect summer fishing and hunting, which
is for food rather
than for cash.
As soon as the
ice begins
to break in the
rivers the Eskimo community awakes from the long
social winter. Relief subsidies are forgotten.
Steps quicken,
smiles lengthen.
Everyone
is getting ready
for the fishing, repairing canoes for muskrat
hunting. Boats piled along the river are cleared
of ice
and trash, scraped
and recalked.
Outboard
motors that
have lain unattended in the snow all winter are
broken down and lubricated. The village reaches
an action
pitch as the
first
boats are launched.
And while ice pans still crowd the channel, Eskimos
race their outboard-driven skiffs
up and down the river to the rejoicing of the
villagers who crowd forward to see the spring
activity begin.
The introduction of the motorized
snowmobiles in the late 1960s is another technological innovation
that
instantly affected
the Eskimo
ecology.
Dog teams are created by nature, fed by nature,
and are adaptive to the crises
of the
Arctic that threaten survival. Dogs can be the
eyes and ears that save the traveler in the swirling
blizzard.
Indeed
as
a final resort,
you
can eat
your dogs! But despite these advantages, dogs
are
a lot
of trouble and eat a lot
of fish both in summer and in winter.
Snowmobiles
feed on imported gasoline only when they run, but they have no
eyes and ears. They
are very
costly and
have a
short mechanical
life.
Worse,
they can break down at the most critical time
in Native eyes. Yet snowmobiles are White man’s
magic and the utilization of White man’s
power. An Eskimo has to have a Sno-Go just as
a Hopi has to have a pickup truck. The
technology involved is not entirely new. For
years the river Eskimos have had outboard motors
which greatly affected their salmon fishing and
gave them great
summer mobility for trading in Bethel. The Sno-Go
gives them even greater mobility in winter. It
requires no fish-which probably is affecting
patterns of summer
fishing, for dog teams have always been a major
reason for smoking and storing fish. In a few
years snowmobiles have phased out many dog teams.
Now fishermen
sometimes have a surplus of salmon, which can
be consumed by the family as well as the dogs.
Salmon is increasing as a commercial commodity
and taking
the place of furs as currency. If fishing were
organized, salmon could become an economic mainstay,
for the commercial demand for salmon may be far
more
stable than the market for fur.
How have the Hopi
and other modern Indian groups survived the onslaught
of change and needs that
appear hostile
to traditional
cultural
survival? In
some fashion their sense of integrity has been
gained by education, awareness, and
sophistication. Can White schools help Eskimos
into a self-determined future? Or is this an
absurd notion?
Is the realistic function
of White studies
to integrate Eskimos into the economic mainstream
of American life? Does this
automatically doom the villages? Or can Eskimos
appraise their life style the way the Hopi have
and reestablish
themselves practically in modern
Alaska? White educators in Alaska generally say
the villages
are doomed, but then
outsiders
may not be able to see any other function than
profits made.
Boarding school education for countless
village young people has already drained off much vitality.
Eskimos
have career
jobs in
Bethel in various
state and
federal agencies. Do they find fulfillment in
Bethel or Anchorage? Saturday morning in the
remotest
Eskimo village
is a roar
of bush planes skimming
down on the river ice. This is the return to
the village from cash jobs in Bethel.
Each weekend scores of single youths and young
couples pay the $80 for a round-trip charter
flight to spend
two days
in their
village,
to rake
a steam
bath, to
ear Eskimo food, to relax and socialize in the
hospitality of the village.
Does this contemporary
desire to return to the village describe new needs and fulfillment
in
Eskimo culture
within the Arctic
ecology? Is living
successfully within the tundra environment essential
to the fulfillment of many modern
Eskimos
as it was for Eskimos two or three generations
ago?
The increase of White men in the Arctic
indicates that the “good life” is
there for modern man as it was for the indigenous
hunter. What do Eskimos need to learn today to
master the modern ecology if they wish to find
their identity
in their home land?
1 Kashgee is the form preferred by Oswalt for the
men’s house. Michael, in a comparative vocabulary, gives kazhim as the
Russian word and kazhzhyyak as the form in the Kuskokwim dialect. The early
Moravians called it kashima, while Mrs. Schwable used the term kashige. Anderson
and Eells spell it khashgii.
2 The Russians brought many new
foods to Alaska including successful vegetable gardening. Today
there are only meager gardens here and there in the villages.
Yet agriculture still holds a promise for Arctic Alaska. Long
summer days promote excellent growth and make up for the short
season. In the 1930s the Farm Security Administration established
a successful farming community near Anchorage, which today thrives
commercially on vegetables and potatoes, milk and eggs.
3 Oswalt refers to the giveaway
ceremonies as “potlatches,” saying this term is frequently
used by Whites in describing the ancient communal ceremonies of
the Kuskokwim Eskimos. The relationship between these ceremonies
and the potlatches of the Northwest Coast Indians is very remote.
4 Oswalt l963a:67. The parenthetical “promiscuously” is
Oswalt’s interpretation, as is other parenthetical material
in quotations from Moravian texts.
5 See also Lantis 1952:127-148.
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