Native, and non-Native village residents (although there are very few non-Gwich’in villagers) in order to gain as clear and complete a picture as possible of present village social and economic conditions. Like Caulfield and Kruse, I paid each respondent a small gratuity ($10) for their time spent answering the first survey questions. By 2013, I had increased this amount to $20 per questionnaire. I implemented the first survey in August 1999. Of the forty dwelling units occupied during the survey period, I was able to gather data from thirty-five households (87.5 percent). In general, the interviews lasted from half an hour to two hours, although the average time spent with each respondent was about thirty-five to forty minutes. It was my observation then—further confirmed in later surveys—that the Gwich’in genuinely wished to share their views and stories with me. As Lincoln Tritt had said, it was my job to listen; many were quite forthcoming as a result.
In June and July 2006, July and August 2011, and June 2012, I implemented follow-up surveys that included questions on service provision in the village, including education. I posed virtually the same questions on each survey concerning the role of the school and educational development in the village. However, some questions were modified, added, or improved from survey to survey. In 2006, thirty-nine households were surveyed. In 2011, the village continued to grow and forty-six households were surveyed. In 2012, forty-eight were surveyed. Upon completion of each survey, all quantitative data were coded for analysis using SPSS Statistics for Windows. Given the small size of the data sets, chisquare significance testing was used for all quantitative data, where p ≤ .05 (Poppel 2015).
The implementation of the March 2013 Youth Survey was similar though not identical to the approach followed above. As one might imagine, institutional review board protocols demanded that I tread lightly when interacting with interlocutors under the age of 18. I did so only with the written permission of a parent or guardian and, even still, spoke to children aged 8 to 12 only with an adult present. The survey was cleared by village adults in advance and consisted of benign questions that merely sought a sense of how the children view their school, village, and futures (i.e., what is your favorite subject in school?). Lastly, although I seek here to quantify issues such as community views on the development of the village by using some standard planning tools, I combine these tools with participant observation methods, recognizing that approaches like the static survey often have limited use in indigenous village environments (see my lengthy discussion of these methodological challenges in Dinero 1996).
Much if not most of what follows stems from my personal role as participant observer in Arctic Village over the period of study. Indeed, I believe that I gathered particularly significant data in the village simply by living there and speaking informally with people each day—most though not all of which confirmed data gathered through the more formal process. Still, a few provisos must be noted in this regard: 1) the villagers always knew that I was there as a researcher, even if I also participated in various local activities; I always made clear my purpose for asking questions and never sought in any way to mislead someone into speaking their mind; 2) all quotes found here, therefore, are true to the villagers’ own words. In some instances, I have edited for clarity, but what is written here is what was said to me. As noted, sources are anonymized when necessary. As such, this book combines a variety of methods, including some more recent approaches to the material such as autoethnography. In short, I am drawn to this framework because it “acknowledges and accommodates subjectivity, emotionality, and the researcher’s influence on research, rather than hiding from these matters or assuming they don’t exist” (Ellis et al. 2011).
Thus, I went from being an Outsider “studying” the community (1999) to one who gained intimate knowledge of events and activities within (2014) simply because I was there, experiencing and being a part of those events. When I was not conducting interviews, I myself was picking berries, fishing or “hunting” (i.e., I was along for the ride, no gun in hand), or hammering or digging or cooking. In other words, I increasingly became more of a participant in village life and less of an observer of it. This text illustrates the nuanced experience of the participant observer: on the one hand, I am of course still an Outsider, an academic studying a community, a culture now in the throes of challenging circumstances. On the other, I also spent time working with and on behalf of villager interests, particularly with regard to the Church (see chapter 2). The chapters that follow reflect this role; using a “layered account” approach (Ellis et al. 2011) allows me to interweave literature, quantitative data, qualitative data, and my own reflections into the presentation of a comprehensive tapestry of compelling material and analysis.
Introduction
Alaska has long provided Americans in the Lower 48 states, as well as peoples around the world, with a multitude of romantic ideas and images. To many, this is a land of wide-open spaces teeming with abundant wildlife. Bears, wolves, caribou, moose, and sheep roam below a midnight sun that never sets or in the shadows of the northern lights perpetually dancing overhead.
In recent years, a spate of reality television programs that have sprung up on cable networks reinforces these views. A “Jack London” lifestyle prevails in such shows; there are few roads (and those that exist are quite treacherous), and survival for both “man and beast” is precarious and hardscrabble. Life in America’s “Last Frontier” is one of outdoorsy strength, independence, fortitude, and take-no-prisoners gutsiness not found elsewhere. Reinforced by the media coverage of former Alaskan Governor Sarah “Mama Grizzly” Palin’s 2008 vice presidential bid, such fancies about the state, its people, and its culture have become increasingly common throughout the latter twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In short, Alaska sparks the postmodern imagination; it is one of the few places left on the planet that is seemingly “untouched” and “primitive”—a so-called frontier teeming with possibility and potential.
Moreover, of course, residing throughout this vast land are the “Eskimos,” or at least some vestige of Native peoples who, according to popular stereotypes, ride swiftly across the tundra by dogsled, dressed in oversized parkas and skin mukluks. Very few Americans in the Lower 48 have ever interacted with actual Alaska Natives, who remain the stuff of high school English class reading assignments. Even visitors of the state are unlikely to venture out into the Native bush; rather, a more likely scenario includes a chance encounter along Two Street in Fairbanks or Fourth Avenue in Anchorage during a search for souvenir trinkets on a cruise side trip. The romantic image of the benign Native hunting seals in the Arctic with a primitive spear—the winter sun just barely peaking over the horizon—in total peace and harmony with the natural environment and essentially frozen in time alongside the sea ice begins to fade, only to be replaced with other equally destructive images of the Native as lazy, an alcoholic, or, worse, an obsolete anachronism in the modern era.
The Disneyesque visions of Alaska and its Native peoples are all well known. In an age of rapid change spawned by globalization, Orientalist ideas and images about Alaska, especially her Native peoples, often do a disservice rather than make a true contribution to a more accurate perception of what is in fact happening in Alaska today. The purpose of this study is to contribute toward a better understanding of one tribe,1 the Nets’aii Gwich’in of Arctic Village, and to correct many of the misleading beliefs now perpetuated about this land and her people.
To be sure, I do not claim to offer a complete picture of every aspect of Alaska Native life in the early twenty-first century. Rather, I seek to provide an important window into the rapidly changing world of an Alaska Native community emblematic of such indigenous communities not only in North America but indeed across the globe. I have no interest in romanticizing the past or writing about “noble savages” now passing from “tradition” to “modernity.” I strive neither to nostalgize nor to present the Gwich’in as static beings who belong on a museum shelf. Rather, I believe the following pages well reveal that theirs is a culture that continues to grow and evolve; the narrative presented here tells the story of who the Gwich’in
