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For information on the Harriman Retraced Expedition e-mail: harriman2001@science.smith.edu |
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Kenai Fjord National
Park and Barren Islands. We boarded zodiacs in Surprise
Bay, Kenai Fjords National Park at 7:30 this morning. Zodiac
procedure is flipping a tag to show you're not onboard , and
donning a life vest that is only a few inches in
circumference, but will self-inflate immediately if you fall
in the water. It was about a two-mile ride to
a small rocky beach with smooth, oval stones and beached
lion's mane jellyfish. Several of the Harriman scholars led
nature walks. Natashia [Dallin, Alaska High School
student and member of the Young Explorers team], Smith
College student Allison Eberhard and I tagged along with the
film crew -- Larry Hott and Stephen McCarthy. I carried a
backpack and an enormous tripod bag that resembled Artemis's
quiver. At the end of our time on the
beach, the film crew interviewed scholars Richard Nelson and
Paul Alaback about the forest. Paul made the point that you
can't preserve just part of an ecosystem because it is all
intrinsically connected. "Sure, protect the forest, but
you've got to protect the ocean and the streams as well. The
forest is healthy because salmon swim up the streams and die
and the nutrients from their bodies seep into the soil." I
like this sense of interdependency. Back on the ship, Bob Peck gave
a lecture called "The 1899 Harriman Expedition; Observers,
Collectors and Conservationists." It focused on John Muir
and John Burroughs, and placed the original expedition into
the context of the conservation movement. Burroughs, for
instance, was a notoriously romantic writer, not a
scientist. When he joined the expedition, his first thought
was that everyone on board was wonderfully learned. He wrote
"I am the most ignorant and most untraveled man among them,
and the most silent . . . Nature will only reveal herself to
the lovers of nature, and not to the professional
naturalists. Botanists, entomologists, and glaciologists,
geologists are partialists so intent on the body they miss
the soul . . . Can I see nature under such
circumstances?" Muir was a little more
practical. He said, "saving these woods from the ax and saw,
from the money changers and the water changers is in many
ways the most noble service to God and man I have heard of
since my forest wanderings began." He saw his role on the
Elder as a chance to recruit people for the preservation of
wilderness, which at turn-of-the-century, was seen as raw
material to be harvested for commercial profit. Bob Peck
said that we see here in Alaska "a terrific -- and I use
that word in all of its implications -- terrific boom and
bust cycle where resources are exploited to the full until
they crash and then people regroup and either move to
another resource or wait until the original one recharges."
At the time of the Harriman Expedition, Alaska was still
considered to be so vast and so inexhaustible that there
seemed to be no reason to fight the conservation battle. But
now this seems to be the eternal battle in Alaska -- do we
harvest and try to turn a profit, or do we preserve for the
intrinsic value of wilderness? Natashia and I ate lunch with
glaciologist Kris Crossen and David and Diane Rockefeller.
Perhaps as a result of the lecture, conversation centered
around economics vs. conservation and the value of tourism
in Alaska. I think tourism is good because
it instills a sense of urgency in the tourist to care about
and protect an area. It also provides jobs. The problem is
that tourism requires infrastructure, and in developing
infrastructure -- roads, hotels, etc. -- the place is
changed. The ironic thing is that we are all being tourists
right now, traveling by cruise ship. After lunch, Aron Crowell gave a
lecture, "Culture and History of the Alutiiq People." The
indigenous people along the western Gulf of Alaska are
Alutiiq, and share 10,000 years of common history. "Aleut"
is the Russianization of Alutiiq. In Alutiiq life, the spirit and
human worlds were closely related. A hunting hat represented
a companion hunting spirit and transformed a hunter into an
animal. The hats were very powerful, very important. When a
masked hunter danced, he invited the hunting spirits to come
from the sky and sea worlds. Whistling at any time was
dangerous because whistling was the voice of the
spirits. When the Russians came, they
baptized the Alutiiq into the Russian Orthodox Church and
taught school in the Russian language, but didn't attempt to
suppress the Alutiiq culture. Instead, the Russians
translated their missionary work into Alutiiq so it would be
more widely accepted. But Americans went about deliberate
acculturation. They instituted government schools run by
Presbyterians and Baptists, and forbade Native language and
ceremonies. The objective was to "civilize the Alutiiqs, to
make you speak English, wear Western clothes, live in
Western homes, be Christian," wrote one Alutiiq elder about
the American government schools. When Aron began studying
the Alutiiq, he said what was most important was that he
approach the work as a scientist, and ask permission of the
people he wished to study. I spent all afternoon on deck
watching humpback whales, Megaptera novaeangliae, as
we passed by the Barren Islands. In the evening, there was
the Captains welcome cocktail and dinner.
Unimak Island. Unimak Island is the first of
the Aleutian Islands. Like everything since Geographic
Harbor, it is treeless. Looking across the island in morning
light, the yellows and greens fade together like a
watercolor painting. Natashia's knee was hurting so she
stayed on the beach to help David Koester with his driftwood
study. I joined a group for a tundra
walk. [Photographer] Kim Heacox walked with us,
making raven calls across the flowered land. The flowers
really were amazing -- monkshood and gentian, and other
yellow and pink flowers. We followed a stream for a short
distance, then climbed onto the tundra on the bluff beside
it. I feasted on crowberries and salmon berries as we
went. The higher we climbed, the more
our perspective of the island changed. After a while, we
could see the way the island had been formed, starting at
the center with iterated concentric circles. Each circle was
a ridge formed as the waves pushed up sand. I don't know how
many years each circle represented, or if there were
multiple circles for a single year, but if I did, I could
calculate the length of time Unimak had been an
island. A few of us climbed to the top
of the bluff. When Kes Woodward, Patricia Savage, and I came
over the top, we saw an Arctic fox running parallel to us,
backlit. When it saw us, it sat, then lay down to watch us.
I started to stalk it, but got called back because it was
time to head back. Back on the beach, I joined
David, Natashia, and the rest of the Young Explorers Team
with the driftwood study, labeling zipblocs, measuring logs,
and using a serrated hacksaw to cut samples. We returned to the boat for
lunch. After lunch Vera Alexander gave a lecture, "The
Bering Sea Ecosystem: The Big Picture." The more I hear
about the Bering Sea, the more it fascinates me. There are
40 species of birds, 25 species of mammals, and more than
400 species of fish and marine mammals. This richness is
accounted for by the 50- to 100-foot drop between the sea's
shelf and deep basin, connected with underwater canyons. The
coastal current is driven by melting glaciers in southeast
Alaska. Diatoms, plants with two silica
shells separated by a girdle, are at the base of the Bering
Sea food chain. They are cylindrical, oval, or in chain
form, and are photosynthetic. Phytoplankton, which baleen
whales and other large marine mammals eat, are single-cell
photosynthetic diatoms or flagellates. They are important,
not only because they are the basis of the food chain, but
because they indicate a regime shift in environment. They
bloom when the ice declines. In 1997, there was a large
bloom of coccolithophores in the Bering Sea which turned the
water milky. Scientists were concerned because
coccolithophores typically bloom in warm, nutrient-poor
water. "Once an ecosystem changes its state it doesn't go
back," Vera told us. "It becomes something
different." She also talked about ice, which
can move fifty m.p.h. in the Bering Strait. This movement
creates leads and polynyas, patches of open water. The
temperature and amount of salt in the water determines its
density, and determines how high or low an iceberg will
float. Right after Vera's lecture, Bill
Cronon gave a lecture, "The Kennecott Journey: An
Introduction to Environmental History." Bill has written
several books -- Changes in the Land, Nature's
Metropolis, Uncommon Ground -- and this was an
essay from one of them. It was an interesting mix of science
and anthropology, connecting the Native people of the
Kennecott area to their environment. I was really interested
when he started talking about food. "Think in terms of an
ecologist," he said, "of energy flows and nutrient cycles.
People inhabit ecosystems. People choose food, those parts
of the ecosystem that will inhabit their gut. By the foods
they eat, people decide what they think their place in
nature should be." Bill then read off a food list
from the Kennecott Mine. All of it was imported. There was
nothing Alaskan about it. I've been re-evaluating my
vegetarianism this entire trip, and I think I've found
what's been bugging me about it. Salmon and crab are
indigenous to Alaska. By not eating them I am denying part
of where I live. I need to live in Alaska in a way I
couldn't live anywhere else. Food is crucial. From food, Bill jumped to trade.
He said trade is the most important impetus for ecological
change because it links the ecological system of one economy
with the demands of another. Any item can be transformed at
that moment of trade. The place in which goods are consumed
is usually very different from where they were produced.
Cities grow where people are not limited by local
ecosystems. Bill made three other
observations I wanted to think about more: fat is stored in
summer. In certain Native communities, introducing reindeer
was an ecological vehicle for settlement conducive to
Christianity. Lights are required people interested in
reading beyond the normal hours of daylight. Kim laughed at me as I sat there
when Bill finished, trying to sort through and organize all
of the ideas. "It's pretty amazing, isn't it?" he asked.
Then he added, "our language shapes how we think about
things. If our language is inexact . . . " Richard Nelson summed his
thoughts up with the term, "geographic determinism."
Landscape determines the life. Tonight the Committee on Music
and Entertainment planned a poetry and piano program with
Vera Alexander, David Rockefeller, and Sheila Nickerson. But
David Policansky, Dale Chorman, Allison Sayer and I couldn't
tear ourselves away from the bow of the ship. I think I fell
in love with the sea tonight. The light was amazing, the
Bering Sea's evening sunshine on the bow of a ship, and
hundreds of thousands of whiskered auklets flying by. They
must have flown around us for full fifteen minutes. The wind
was icy and tore along my scalp, but it was the birds that
made me shiver.
Gambel, St. Lawrence
Island After breakfast, David Koester
gave a lecture, "Cultures, Local Ecologies and Political
Histories in the Russian Far East" in preparation for our
visit to Russia in two days. He talked mostly about the
history of the area. The Russian Far East has been
inhabited for 14,000 years. Modern Russians arrived on the
Chukchi Peninsula in the 1640s. In the twentieth century,
the Soviets began a "Liquidation of Illiteracy Program," in
which they taught the Russian language, and started schools.
But all of this fell apart when Stalin came into power. It
is slowly being rebuilt. Now, Russian villagers attend U.N.
meetings. On the Chukchi, few people earn a living, although
salmon caviar is a sure bet for cash. Just like everywhere
else, people are leaving villages and moving to towns and
cities I liked it when David emphasized
the distance between Moscow and the Far East and when he
asked what was happening in these remote places while
governments far away changed the political soul of the
country. Lunch and "I and
Thou" Lunch was right after the panel.
I ate with the kids and Bill Cronon today. We had several
really interesting conversations. [Teacher] Melissa
Wockley told us how she counts incessantly as she walks, and
thinks of things like calendars and weeks and days as
shapes. Julia O'Malley talked about cultural theater, and
asked if something could be authentic if it were public.
Then Allison Sayer talked about Martin Michael Buber, and
"I/thou" and " I/it" relationships. Whenever you're in a
relationship, you want something. You want someone to like
you or understand you, or you want to keep the image of a
beautiful sunset, of a flower by taking a picture of it.
That's an "I/it: relationship." In an "I/thou" relationship,
you don't want anything at all. The caveat is that the
moment you realize what's happening you want to preserve it,
and, therefore, lose it. Martin Buber was talking about God
when he said all of this, but I immediately thought of the
sea lions I saw yesterday. When Sergey brought us back a
second time and asked us not to take pictures, that's what
it was: "I and thou." Just beautiful, and my mouth hanging
open. Basketball and
Four-wheeling at Gambel After lunch we landed at the
Siberian Yupik village of Gambel, on St. Lawrence Island.
The beach was covered with tiny, rounded pebbles that were
difficult to walk on. The villagers came down and gave
four-wheeler rides to anyone who didn't want to walk. They
charged $5 each way -- Clipper issued us tickets the drivers
collected, then redeemed for cash from the boat. Natashia and I opted to walk,
not because we didn't want a ride, but because we wanted to
go more slowly and look around. Whale vertebrae and ribs
were scattered everywhere. People who live in Gambel
subsist mainly on sea birds, bowhead whale, and walrus --
you can tell just walking around. I think that's really
neat. When we got into town, Natashia
and I wandered over to a community center where residents
were selling ivory. It was mobbed. Instead of going inside,
we talked to some of the villagers standing around outside.
One villager, a 20 year-old Village Public Safety Officer
named Kyle Booshu was particularly friendly. I showed him a
list of people my mom had known when she had in Savoonga,
the other village on St. Lawrence Island, in the late 1970s.
She thought it would be neat for me to meet some of the
people she had known. Kyle recognized all of the names, but
said they were all still over in Savoonga. Natashia asked him if there was
anywhere to play basketball. He grinned, asked us to wait,
took off on his four-wheeler and returned with a flat
basketball. He told us to climb on. We raced back toward the
beach and stopped next to an old building. Beside it was a
cracked, canted cement court and a hoop without a net. We
shifted a couple of white buckets and odd bits of machinery
off the cement and had a court. Kyle shook his head,
grinned, and shot the ball at the basket. It went through
and hit the cement with a thud, not rolling. I jogged over
to retrieve it and smiled. We shot around, taking turns
retrieving the ball and shooting. After a while I mentioned that
we had to get back to see the dancing. Natashia jumped onto
the four-wheeler and asked to drive. Kyle laughed, doubting
she could. "It's a kick-start,"he
said. "I know," she said. "It's like
mine at home." Natashia kicked it into gear.
"Get on." He shook his head, grinning, and got on the back
beside me. We went to the qerngughvik (community center) for
the dancing. It was beautiful. Natashia told me later that
she finally decided she liked Eskimo dancing. For the last
dance, they invited the audience to join in. Kyle, Natashia,
several other people and I did. It was a lot of fun.
Everyone laughed at our awkward attempts. After the dancing, Kyle offered
to drive us around the village. Natashia wanted to drive, so
Kyle and I climbed on the back. After a while, Kyle said he
had to sign out at work and directed Natashia, who was
racing over gravel speed bumps and ruts, to the police
station. This was a double-wide trailer with two men, a
radio, a bathroom, and two tiny rooms at the far end that
served as cells. "We mostly get drunk, so we don't have to
be real secure," one of them said. The only locks I could
see were in the doorknobs. Kyle still had 15 minutes left
on his shift, so he pointed out the boarded- up teen center
and store, and suggested we walk over to the store and check
it out. The store was tiny, barely anything except for candy
bars. If you hadn't known before that the village was mainly
subsistence-based, you would know it by coming here. It
reminded me of the store in Alakanuk, where I used to
live. Natashia called her parents and
bought candy bars, I waited and talked to the cashier. A few
minutes later, Kyle and his uncle showed up. As the three of
us talked, Kyle and his uncle kept slipping into Yupik. When
Natashia got off the phone, it was time to go. Kyle's uncle
gave us a ride back down to the beach on his
four-wheeler. As soon as everyone was back
onboard, there was a recap and briefing in the lounge. David
Koester said that the Russian word for the ocean north of
St. Lawrence Island translates to the large kitchen garden,
and that the ruble/dollar exchange rate is 28:1. Carmen
Field said that only Native Alaskans can use raw, that is
not-yet-fossilized, ivory for carving or scrimshaw. It's a
law meant to prevent walrus from being killed for their
ivory, but it can be frustrating for people like her
husband, Conrad, who likes to scrimshaw. After dinner, I wandered out on
deck. It was very windy and no one else was out. After a
little bit, David Policansky joined me and we talked about
Gambel. I told him I was surprised how much the villagers
relied on four-wheelers. The loose gravel makes it extremely
difficult to walk, and the only efficient way to move about
is on a four-wheeler. I guess I was just kind of surprised
there weren't any walking paths. Before we got too deep into
conversation Melissa came down the stairs and asked me to
come to the lounge, so David Koester could teach all of us
kids some Russian. The spelling is phonetic, but here
goes: I'm going to do my best to
memorize it all tomorrow. Poor David and everyone else who
will have to listen!
For information on the Harriman Retraced Expedition e-mail: harriman2001@science.smith.edu
August
5, 2001, 11:12 P.M.
Clipper Odyssey,
Cabin 302
Lecture Notes: Robert
Peck on the 1899 Harriman Expedition
The Tourist Economy
Lecture Notes: Aron
Crowell on the Alutiiqs
August
10, 2001, 12:23 A.M.
Clipper Odyssey,
Cabin 302
On the
Tundra
Lecture Notes: Vera
Alexander on the Bering Sea
Lecture Notes: Bill
Cronon on the Kennecott Expedition
Falling in Love with
the Bering Sea
August
15, 2001, 11:37 P.M.
Clipper Odyssey,
Cabin 302Lecture Notes: David
Koester on the Russian Far East
Back on the
Odyssey: A Russian
Lesson
Kak tebye zavoot
-- What's your name?
Breve-yet -- Hello
Dobre-ootra -- Good morning
Da -- Yes
Nyet -- No
Ya ni zni-you -- I don't know.
Mojna sni-mot -- May I photograph?
Vaam -- giving to someone older
Tib-ye -- giving to someone the same age or
younger
Spaseeba -- Thank you
Minya zavoot -- My name is
A tibya -- And you?
Ti -- You
Ya ji-voo na Alaskiyet -- I live in Alaska.
Da-svidanya -- Goodbye/Until we meet again.
Da-vye -- Let's go!
Puj-jolista -- Please/Your welcome
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