expenditures they would require. As Gypsy Margaret Boswell told us after the research, “The Gorgios [non-Gypsies] doesn’t want sites being built. . . . They just want us to disappear.”
EPILOGUE
Government policy toward Gypsies at the national level has swung back and forth, alternatively punitive and somewhat “positive,” depending upon the party in power. In 1994, the Conservative government of John Major released all local authorities from their statutory duty (under the Caravan Sites Act of 1968) to provide serviced campsites for Gypsies and Travellers. Not surprisingly, this resulted in a further shortage of authorized places for families to camp. In response, more families began purchasing land in order to build their own private sites. In late 2015, in an ironic move after years of discouraging nomadism, the Conservatives mandated that in order for Gypsies or Travellers to be legally eligible to apply for planning permission to develop their own private sites, they must first prove to local authorities that they lived “a nomadic lifestyle.”
Public attitudes have not softened either. In 2003, the Guardian newspaper reported the following incident.
Imagine an English village building an effigy of a car, with caricatures of black people in the windows and the number plate “N1GGER,” and burning it in a public ceremony. Then imagine one of Britain’s most socially conscious MPs [member of Parliament] appearing to suggest that black people were partly to blame for the way they had been portrayed.
It is, or so we should hope, unimaginable. But something very much like it happened last week. The good burghers of Firle, in Sussex, built a mock caravan, painted a Gypsy family in the windows, added the number plate “P1KEY” [a derogatory name for Gypsies which derives from the turnpike roads they travelled] and the words “Do As You Likey Driveways Ltd—guaranteed to rip you off”, then metaphorically purged themselves of this community by incinerating it.13
During a discussion of the problems posed by an unauthorized Gypsy camp in 2007, an official with the South Cambridgeshire District asserted that the council would “never get rid of the bastards,” adding, “If I had cancer, I’d strap a big bomb around myself and go in tomorrow.”14 More than thirty-five years after our research, it seems that the more things change, the more they have stayed the same—especially when politics is involved.
4
Applying Anthropology in
an Alaskan National Park
This chapter describes fieldwork conducted for the National Park Service (NPS) on the activities of commercial fishers and hunters in a rugged wilderness area that had been added to Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park. Before I (George) discuss the research, which was undertaken to help the Park Service develop a management plan, a little background is necessary. Glacier Bay is a world-famous region where tidewater glaciers spill from high mountains, filling the bay with icebergs. It has long been a favorite destination of cruise ships bringing tourists who thrill to the sound and sight of calving glacial ice. The new wilderness area being added to the park was located over the mountains on a remote stretch of southeast Alaska’s outer coast that is inaccessible except by bush plane or, with great difficulty, by boat. Called “Glacier Bay National Preserve,” the park’s new area is locally known as Dry Bay.1
Dry Bay was used seasonally by fifty to sixty salmon fishermen, both Tlingit and non-Natives.2 A few hunting guides also flew clients into the area to hunt moose, bear, and mountain goat. When this remote region was ceded to the NPS, which then took responsibility for its protection, little was known about it. Nor did managing commercial fishermen and hunters fit with the Park Service’s standard mission of protecting nature—wildlife, flora, and water resources.
Anticipating difficulties, based on an ongoing conflict between Tlingit and non-Native fishermen, the NPS had tried to swap the Dry Bay area to the state of Alaska for a different wilderness parcel. When the state declined, the NPS was forced to undertake the research for which I was awarded the contract, aided by the support of an anthropologist-friend in the Park Service. Unlike my previous fieldwork in Ireland and England, each of which had lasted over a year, this research, typical of many applied projects, was to be completed in one summer.
LEARNING THE ROPES
I first flew to the Park Service’s Alaska Headquarters in Anchorage to be briefed for a few days and outfitted for living in the bush. There I received a cram course on subsistence issues, Alaskan Native cultures, and NPS policies. My primary mentor was Ken Schoenberg, a short bespectacled archaeologist with years of experience working in the Alaskan bush. My other teacher, Kathryn Cohen, was a petite, no-nonsense resource specialist for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s (ADF&G) Subsistence Division, which was cosponsoring the study.
There was much to learn in a short time. At the end of the third day, I wrote in my journal, “It is very, very interesting but I’m exhausted from trying to absorb all this new information; and I still haven’t gotten used to the long days. It’s light well after 10 PM, making it hard to sleep.” On my last day in Anchorage, I was taken to the Park Service’s warehouse to assemble gear for the field: Coleman stove, pots and pans, sleeping bag, dried foods, topographical maps, a shotgun (for protection from bears), and a bulky Zodiac inflatable boat with outboard engine, which I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to use, much less get onto an airplane.
As part of my final orientation, Schoenberg lectured me on the danger of bears and how to deal with them: wear bells, carry a whistle, and make lots of noise so they can hear you coming. “Always carry a gun outdoors and,” he warned, “keep it beside you at night. If you encounter a bear, stand tall and never run. Running provokes a chase instinct. If attacked, curl up in a ball and play dead. Whatever you do, don’t move.” Schoenberg drove home the seriousness of his lesson with a story of a young woman geologist who was attacked by a brown grizzly bear in the Brooks Range. She had played dead while the bear gnawed on her arms. “She lost both arms but she saved her life,” Schoenberg declared. I wondered if he really had needed to tell me that story.
MISTAKEN IDENTITY
With four bags of gear in tow, plus a Zodiac and outboard engine, and a little unnerved by all the bear talk, I boarded an Alaskan Airlines flight for Yakutat, the only settlement on a three hundred–mile stretch of southeastern Alaskan coastline. I was to spend a week there, getting acquainted with some of the Tlingit people before being flown by bush plane fifty miles down the coast to Dry Bay. I would also meet Tlingit elders to explain my research and obtain their approval.
Before the gathering took place, I began to wonder what was happening. People in Yakutat were decidedly cool. Few passersby returned my greetings. In one case, while walking along the dirt road from the village to the pier, a man walking toward me swung over to the other side of the road about thirty yards before we passed. When I passed, he turned his head and looked off into the distance. When I entered Flo’s, the local café, the patrons lowered their voices. And when new customers came in, they took the tables farthest from mine. “Damn,” I thought, “what have I done?” Mentally, I reviewed my first few days in the village, searching for anything that might explain this icy reception. I remembered jotting down some notes to myself while sitting in the café a couple of days before, mainly a list of things I needed to do. Perhaps that had aroused suspicion. I thought about how it might have been perceived: an unknown man walking around the village at all times of the day, then taking notes in the café.
I was no stranger to this situation. I’d been the object of suspicion before, first as a graduate student in the Mexican highlands in an anthropology field-training program. Sharon and I had arrived in the village of San Antonio Acuamanala in the middle of a fiesta, and a crowd had gathered, watching curiously as we unloaded our gear. During the next few days, we were asked many questions about our religion.
