as the more commonly known story goes, the Nets’aii Gwich’in people came to settle at the confluence of the Vashr’aii K’oo Creek and the East Fork of the Chandalar River for very rational reasons related to the access of wild food resources. The village is ideally located in the direct migration path of the Porcupine caribou herd, which is central to the tribe’s social and economic survival. Similarly, there is a wealth of fish in the area, though numerous creeks similar to the Vashr’aii K’oo that also teem with fish intersect the Chandalar. As one elder related to Mishler (1995: 457) some years ago:
There was no village [yet] but they used to gather there [at the creek] during spring break-up. So they all gathered there until break-up and also for fish. So that’s what they did. We were living there, fishing. Chief Christian was there. We really depended on him. He was not having hard times and had no children. He helped people a lot.
It was at this point that the community determined to settle in one place and to follow a single leader who would run the political and economic affairs of the community:
So that’s what they did. They told everybody what they had planned. They all thought that was a good idea. So everybody got together. In those days there was hardly any money. Our main thing was getting food to eat. So they elected Chief Christian for their leader at Arctic Village. People all helped one another. They helped one another with wood, food, and other things. They all worked hard to do this.
So that’s how Arctic Village became a village. The kids used to pack water for each household. And they did the same with wood. There used to be wood piled up in front of the houses. Those were happy times. (459)
While this version of events is certainly compelling, settlement not only hinged upon food availability, which presumably had always been a concern from time immemorial, but was also further incentivized by two social institutions imposed by the outside, namely the church and the school. The missionaries had come to the area beginning in the 1860s (Caulfield 1983: 88). Formal education was introduced thereafter, designed to teach the Nets’aii Gwich’in Western cultural values (Hosley 1966: 231) and how to follow Christian social mores (VanStone 1974: 87). As I have noted previously, “the creation of schools and the requirement that all children attend them played a direct role in the settlement process of the community” (Dinero 2003b: 143).
Integration into the regional economy via the fur trade also helped in fostering permanent settlement at Arctic Village (Hosley 1966: 153). In the early days, furs were traded at the local store for basic provisions, but in time cash became an increasing part of the village economy as villagers made the 17-to-23-day round-trip journey to Fort Yukon to acquire more specialized commodities such as ammunition and tea (Peter 1966). Since the early 1840s, during the Russian-American era, Gwich’in trappers had traveled regularly to the fort to conduct commerce, especially with coastal Alaska Natives (Inupiat) and other local peoples (Bockstoce 2009: 212–16). The cyclical dynamic of introducing fur trapping to the Nets’aii Gwich’in subsistence culture, selling furs for cash, and subsequently using cash in commercial establishments to purchase non-Native food, clothing, and other fabricated goods including firearms (Bockstoce 2009: 212; Mason 1924: 25) was a major social and economic development that would permanently alter the course of Nets’aii Gwich’in society.
The village was slow to grow to a significant size of permanent settlers. Those who settled at Arctic Village then—or even now—should be recognized as the most committed and determined of Native villagers. It is, in effect, one of Alaska’s furthermost outposts, far from other Gwich’in settlements and White communities. As Clara Childs Mackenzie suggests, in its early years especially, Arctic Village was the most distant and remote of Gwich’in villages, making it all the more challenging to get there (1985: 112).
Thus, when researcher and anthropologist Robert McKennan traveled to the village in 1933, for example, only nine people were present upon his arrival, and the village was comprised of about a dozen cabins (Mishler and Simeone 2006: 168–69). Katherine Peter notes that throughout this period into the late 1930s, there was still constant movement between Arctic Village and neighboring Gwich’in settlements including Fort Yukon, Chalkyitsik, and Venetie. For the most part, the Gwich’in remained largely nomadic to this point, having little if any interaction with the outside world short of the ongoing trading activities at Fort Yukon. Increasingly, this began to change, as the men went out to hunt more frequently on their own while the women stayed at the village to care for their children, who began to attend school more consistently (Peter 1992: 91).
Indeed, the population of Arctic Village fluctuated considerably throughout the early years as seminomadism persisted, dropping to negligible numbers around World War I before beginning to climb steadily after World War II and the creation of the Venetie Reservation in which Arctic Village and the Village of Venetie are situated (see Dinero 2003b: 145). The reservation, created in 1943 to promote social and economic development in the Native sector via “a fixed, limited, and protected land base” (Hosley 1966: 206), fostered internal stability and also drew external pressures that encouraged further settlement. Between 1950 and 1960, the permanent village population more than doubled. With settlement, temporary tentlike shelters were replaced by log cabins (Hadleigh-West 1963: 311). Yet, as “traditional” nomadism declined, the community maintained a significant degree of residential mobility.
Illustration 1.1 Main Street, Arctic Village, Alaska (July 2011).
That said, settlement at the village cannot be viewed as entirely “voluntary” or in any way as a benign or benevolent process. Isaac Tritt Sr. noted that, due to a lack of reliable food supplies, life in Arctic Village was typically much more challenging and the population often smaller than in other communities—Venetie or Fort Yukon, for example—with easier access to these resources (1987a). Therefore, to fully understand the Nets’aii Gwich’in of Arctic Village in the early twenty-first century, it is important to realize that settlement in the early twentieth century occurred largely due to external economic and social forces acting on the community from outside of their control and, to a degree, of their full appreciation or comprehension.
As elder Sarah James put it in one of my earlier interviews with her (8 August 1999):
We were forced to settle here. The White people came with disease and change. They wanted to put Western education here. We were forced to settle in one place so there would be enough kids for a school. If we didn’t settle they would take our kids away, adopt them, send them to mission schools.
So we settled here. We have fish here year-round, so we can always have fish. This is a place where caribou are likely to pass, so that’s why we settled.
We supported the school getting started, but I still was sent to boarding school [because] half the time the school [in the village] was barely operating.
By being near the timberline, this is also a good trapping area. So they [i.e., the White men] also introduced us to trapping.
The Church was also a big part [of settlement]. They bring in used clothes. We had a bishop, Gordon. He flew a plane, and would bring in oranges. It was the only time we got [things like that] …
Before the White people, it was a time of plenty … [Now] there were a lot of people on the land, and it was harder to find food … Then they brought in the game warden. They put in regulations on game. If they get caught killing out of season, the head of the household, the husband, was arrested. Without a man who will provide for them? The game warden would look at the bones the dogs were chewing on; we had to hide the meat. We used piles of willows to hide it if the airplane came. As I was growing up, it made me feel like—well, what would you feel if you had to sneak around and your parents were a part of it?
To
