Minuk: Ashes in the Pathway

A Yup’ik Eskimo village, Alaska – 1890
Author Kirkpatrick Hill
Illustrator Patrick Faricy
Originally Published © 2002 Pleasant Company
ISBN 1584855207
 

Prologue

When they are little girls, they are very carefully taught what their responsibilities as Yup’ik women would be when they are grown and have families of their own. When the girls bring food to the men’s house and wait for them to finish eating so they can take dishes away, one of the old men puts a stick across the doorway. That is the signal that they were going to be taught and no one can get up to leave. The girls sit on the floor, their legs stretched out, heads lowered and eyes down, and they listen carefully as the old men tell them about the behavior of good women.

They will be responsible for the food and the family. They have to prepare the food the men brought back, and gather berries and roots, and see it was all stored properly. They must eat very little themselves, and a woman could never eat by herself, save the best pieces for herself, or take food at any time but meals. During hungry times, a good woman has to feed her family before herself.

It is a woman’s job not only to see her family has enough good food, but also to see they have good clothes that are beautifully sewn and well-mended. She has to carefully tend to every skin and fur her husband brings home.

She has to get up early, as soon as she awakes, and must not sleep during the day. A good, modest woman who keeps her family well-clothed and well-fed will be praised in the men’s house, and her children will take care of her when she is old and can’t work anymore.

Minuk listens with her eyes on the floor, her heart nearly jumping out of her chest. She will be a good woman. She will sew so beautifully that people will take notice of her husband and children and will praise her craftsmanship. She will take good care of the food so she will be praised in the men’s house. There will never be too much food for Minuk to preserve, so her husband will never have to take another wife to do any work.

Minuk will be modest, and will follow all the rules for women very carefully so no one will find fault with her. She can hardly wait to grow up and become a woman. But she doesn’t know that being a good woman might mean something entirely different to women in other places. And that it might even mean something different to her when she grows up.

 

Spring 1890

They are all away at spring camp when the white people come. It’s a very big surprise when they get back to the village. The children are crazy with excitement. Everything the white people have and wear and eat amazes them. And the grown-ups are just as wide-eyed as the children are. Minuk wonders what their faces look like the first time Panruk and her see white people’s underwear, sit on chairs, and look through window glass. Minuk wonders how big the white peoples’ eyes are.

They go away to spring camp every year to fish and hunt ground squirrels and muskrats. They need the first to make warm parkas to wear, but most importantly, they need the squirrel and muskrat skins to trade for seal oil from the people at the mouth of the river. They need at least 600 skins, so they usually stay at camp for six weeks.

After the animals are snared, they have to be skinned and stretched. Even Minuk’s little brother, Maklak, works hard. There are thirteen in their family. There’s Mamma, Auntie Kakgar, and Auntie Nunagak, who are Grandma and Grandpa’s daughters. There’s Auntie Naya, their daughter-in-law. Auntie Kakgar is Panruk’s mother. Auntie Kakgar’s husband drowned a long time ago. Auntie Naya is a widow, too. She had been married to Grandma and Grandpa’s son, but he died before Minuk was born. Auntie Nunagak and Uncle Aparuk have one son, Taulan.

Minuk’s parents have one daughter, her, and two sons. Iraluq is older, and Maklak isn’t even five. In their family, all women are good. Mamma is always patient and gentle, and Panruk’s mother and the other aunties are the same.

Minuk is not like Panruk, who is as sweet and obedient as their mothers and aunts. Minuk wanted to know things. Why, how, and “what if.” The old men speak to them and caution them about modesty, and Minuk tells herself she must guard herself more carefully. She’s like Grandma who has opinions. Grandma even sometimes tells the men what she thinks. But Grandma is old, and old women, because they are wiser, can say things younger ones can’t.

In Yup’ik villages, men don’t live with women. They live in their own big house: the men’s house. But when they go away to spring camp, the whole family lives together in one house. It’s hard to get used to because when the women live alone, they’re easier in their ways. The rules about men’s tools and clothing and foods are so easy to break that when men come to live in the house, the women get nervous.

Minuk’s father is very strict, and he never breaks the rules. If anyone breaks a rule or acts frivolously, her father is stern. He’s widely respected in the men’s house for that. Maklak’s not like his father at all. He’s very merry-hearted. So much so that Grandpa used to say, “I can tell you weren’t meant to be a shaman!” People always watch the serious boys to see if they look like they might become shamans. But they never watch the laughing ones like Maklak.

Minuk thinks her father is disappointed that Maklak is so happy-go-lucky. Their other brother, Iraluq, and their cousin, Taulan, are not quiet or solemn either, and sometimes they break the rules. Minuk’s father wishes his family was more serious, like Uncle Aparuk. He’s very quiet and hardly says anything at all. Minuk never knows what Uncle Aparuk is thinking.

They have good luck at spring camp, and soon the cache, which is used for storage, is full of dried fish, ground squirrel and muskrat skins, and bird skins. When the snow is gone on the hills, they’re happy because it’s time to put everything into their boat and go back to the Kuskokwim River.

Going home takes five days. It takes longer to go home by water than it does by dogsled, which is how they travel on the hard crust of the snow. They know their village is near before they can see it. They smell wood smoke and hear children laughing and dogs barking. Most of the others returned from their camps before Minuk’s family. There are boats on the riverbank, and men sit on top of the men’s house, smoking their pipes, and children squat in the mud playing.

The children on land stumble over each other in the rush to get down to the riverbank to meet Minuk’s family. They’re so excited that Minuk and her family can hardly understand what they’re saying. Kass’aqs, white people, have built a house in their village. They rafted the logs down from Kolmakov as soon as the ice moved off the river and had put up a house fast, in just a few weeks. A man, his wife, and their little boy are staying in the house. They’re missionaries, and they can speak Yup’ik.

Minuk looks at her uncle and father and grandfather to see what they think of the news. They look up from the boat quickly to see if they can see the missionaries’ house, but they don’t say anything. But Minuk sees her father’s jaw harden, the way it did when he isn’t pleased.

Panruk and Minuk want to go see the log house right away, but first, they help unload the boat and get settled into their house. They quickly carry the wooden bowls and water buckets to the house and run back for another load. Other children help them unload things, chattering about the missionaries all the while.

They know about missionaries because the Russians first came to Alaska when Grandpa was a little boy. They sent priests to baptize the people along the Kuskokwim River. Some of the older people have been baptized and have Russian names. Grandma has a silver cross she keeps in her sewing kit and a little picture of a lady with a circle around her head. She was given a Russian name, too, but she’s forgotten it by now.

After the Russians sold Alaska to the United States, there weren’t many priests left. So, no priests have visited since Minuk was little. But she remembers the priest because he was so tall and thin. He wore a long black robe.

Minuk had never seen a log house built in the Russian style, although most grown-ups have seen them. The Russians long ago built a fort and trading post upriver from them at Kolmakov, and there are log houses in the mouth of the river as well. They sometimes see Russian or half-Russian men when they come up the river to trade, and the Americans who come after them, but they have never seen a kass’aq woman or kass’aq child.

 

Butterflies

After they bring everything from the boat into the house, Panruk and Maklak and Minuk go with the other children to see the new log house. It’s at the end of the village, tall and square and strong-looking. It’s built right onto the ground, not partly buried, like their houses. It’s also not rounded like a beaver’s house. The roof comes to a point as if they’re putting the fingertips of their hands together. The house is made of bare wood with its spruce logs laid sideways. It has sod only on the roof, not covering the logs, like their houses. There’s no little passageway to get into the house, just a tall wooden door right in front.

They stand far off and stare at the house for a while, then warily skit around it to see what the back looks like. A very thin, tall little house with a door stands behind the big house. The strangest thing of all is a line that stretches from the house to a spruce tree. The line is a rope made of something white, not walrus thongs or seal-hide cords, and on the rope is hanging a pair of blue cloth pants and a sort of pink butterfly. The butterfly has lacings in the middle of it instead of a body, and strings hang down on the outside of the wing parts. None of the children know what it is.

Minuk frowns and tries to think of what it could be. But before she can imagine anything, a woman’s face appears in the back window. She smiles and waves. The other children squeal and scamper away as fast as hairs. Panruk wants to run too, but Minuk holds fast to her parka.

Minuk has been schooled many times for being too bold for a girl, and many times for asking too many questions. She’s glad none of the grown-ups are there to see her now. In a second, the white woman disappears from the window and comes around the corner of the house. She asks them in Yup’ik to come inside.

She introduces herself as Mrs. Hoff. Minuk explains that Panruk is her aunt’s daughter. Minuk was born about twelve summers ago, just when Panruk was starting to walk.

Mrs. Hoff leads them into the house. Panruk, taking Minuk’s hand, looks inside the door with her. It’s much bigger inside this house than the house they live in. But it’s filled with so many things that it seems crowded. There are chairs and tables and a big metal box, which Minuk knows is a stove for cooking. Cloth hangs around the windows, and shelves are filled with tin cans and boxes with pictures on them. The floor is made of wooden planks, just like the floor in the men’s house. There’s a big thick cloth on the floor.

Minuk can tell that Mrs. Hoff isn’t very old, because her hair isn’t yet white. Her teeth are good and long, not worn down. She has braids, just like them, but they are brown and shiny and fastened around on the top of her head. She’s not wearing a parka, but that seems to be okay because the house is so hot that little beads of sweat have formed on Panruk’s upper lip. Instead, Mrs. Hoff is wearing a pretty cloth dress with pink flowers on it, and on her feet are little black boots with lots of buttons on them. She doesn’t have any tattoo lines on her chin or any nose beads, but there are beads hanging from her ears. Her eyes are blue, the same color as blueberries before they become ripe. They had seen blue eyes before on Russian traders, but still, eyes that color make Minuk feel funny.

Mrs. Hoff instructs the girls to sit on the chairs around the long table. Panruk looks uncertain, so Minuk sits down to show her that she shouldn’t be afraid. But, Minuk sits so close to the front edge of the chair that it tips forward and she falls down. Panruk starts to laugh and covers her mouth quickly with her hand. Minuk can see it’s necessary to sit far back on the chair to keep it balanced. When Panruk sits down as well, they’re sitting properly.

Mrs. Hoff puts two tin mugs on the table and pours some tea into them. She puts a bowl of sugar on the table with two metal spoons. They had never seen spoons that weren’t carved from wood. The girls are happy to put sugar in their tea. They don’t get sugar often, but they know it tastes good.

Mrs. Hoff speaks Yup’ik a little strangely, and some words are hard to understand, but they can always tell what she means. She explains she’ll be there for the whole summer and winter, too. Probably for many, many years. When Minuk asks Mrs. Hoff what the thing trying to fly away from the rope is outside, she chuckles. This is her corset. She makes a wrapping motion with her hands around her middle to show them where it would go, but they still don’t understand.

Mrs. Hoff gets up and goes to another room and grabs one of the butterflies, a yellow one. It has hard sticks sewn inside the cloth. Mrs. Hoff says it’s whalebone. She wraps it around her middle, over her dress, and shows them how it must be laced up the front. She explains it must be pulled very tight. Minuk asks what it is for. Mrs. Hoff looks startled, as if she thought she made it plain what it was by showing them where it went. She explains it’s to make your waist small. Minuk puts her hand out to touch her waist, and instead of soft flesh under her dress she feels a hard shell.

Minuk can hardly believe such a thing. Imagine it rubbing against your skin! Imagine how hard the whalebone sticks dig into your stomach and chest! Panruk suddenly says she doesn’t wear anything under her clothes. Mrs. Hoff pinches her lips together, claiming she knows.

Minuk asks if her husband also wears a corset. Mrs. Hoff looks shocked and exclaims that men never wear corsets. Minuk thinks it’s unfair to make the women wear those tight corsets and let the men go free. But Mrs. Hoff looks as though she doesn’t want to talk about it anymore, so Minuk gets up and touches a clear shiny stuff in the windows. It’s covered with a little mist from the tea kettle. The clear stuff is hard and cold and Minuk’s hand leaves a pattern in the mist.

Mrs. Hoff explains it’s window glass. She says it was very hard to get it here in one piece all the way up the Kuskokwim River. It’s very easily broken. She picks up a cloth and wipes the mist and handprint away until they can see through the glass as if it wasn’t there at all. Minuk explains they put windows on the top of their houses, and use seal intestines to make a window. Nodding her head, Mrs. Hoff says she knows. Minuk says that bear intestines are even better because they let in more light but don’t tear so easily. Maybe if this glass gets broken, they can use bear intestines.

Just then, a little kass’aq boy wearing cloth pants and Eskimo boots and a store shirt comes into the room. He’s younger than Minuk, but she can’t tell how much younger. He doesn’t have blue eyes; his are brown, the same color as marten fur. Panruk and Minuk are shocked to see him reach up to one of the shelves and take a cracker for himself from one of the boxes. It embarrasses them so they lower their eyes to the floor so they won’t see Mrs. Hoff’s shame. In the Yup’ik way no one could ever take food without asking the mother, for she is responsible for the food and must see there’s enough for everyone.

But Mrs. Hoff isn’t embarrassed, and doesn’t even seem to notice the bad behavior of her son. She introduces Panruk and her younger cousin Minuk to her son in Yup’ik. Then, she explains to the girls that this is her son, David.

David shakes hands with the girls very seriously and greets them and Yup’ik. He speaks their language perfectly, even better than Mrs. Hoff. He asks them if they have any brothers, and they explain that they have two older brothers, and one not yet in the men’s house. Minuk sees David is just like them. He wants children to play with, just as they do. Minuk wonders if kass’aq boys like to play the same games that Yup’ik boys play.

Mrs. Hoff opens one of the doors in the big stove and puts two sticks of wood inside. They have never seen fire in a box. It looks like a very good idea. Their mothers cook in a passageway of their house, which is very narrow, so it’s easy to fall into the fire and burn themself, or have sparks make smudges on the edge of their parka. The smoke in Mrs. Hoff’s stove goes from the stove up into the pipe, so there’s no smoke in the room. She has pans covered with white cloth sitting on the table by the stove. She takes a cloth off the pans and lightly touches the top of the stuff inside them with her finger. Then, she opens the other door in the stove and puts the pans inside on a little shelf. She says the bread will be ready in half an hour. When Minuk comments that they don’t eat bread, all she says is that she knows.

The girls rush all the way home, afraid they’ve been gone too long and would get a scolding for not doing their chores. When they get home, they see that Mamma covered the floor with dry grass and spread the grass mats over that. They covered the sleeping benches with caribou skins and had aired out the rabbit-skin and muskrat-skin blankets. The girls tell the grown-ups about what they’d seen at the new house. They stop working for a minute to listen to them. Aunt Naya had seen glass once long ago when she went to the Russian store at Kolmakov. She saw chairs there, too. When Grandma had gone to the Russian Mission, the priest had given them some white man’s bread, which is soft, not like the crackers the men sometimes bring back from the trading post. But none of them had heard about corsets. They can’t imagine wearing anything like that. How simply awful.

 

The Village

In other years, the first thing Panruk and Minuk did when they got back from spring camp was to get their dolls out and repair their clothes. But this year, they’d almost forgotten about their dolls. So, after they tell Momma and Grandma and the aunts about the Hoffs, they take their dolls out of the fish-skin bags where they’d spent the fall and winter. They’re like little dear friends they’d not seen for a long time. Minuk thinks it must be hard to be a grown-up and not play.

Their grandfather had carved their dolls from driftwood. Minuk’s has tiny lines for tattoos on the chin and little black eyes with a straight mouth. She can tell the doll is a good woman. They’re not allowed to play with their dolls in the winter. People believe if girls play with their dolls before spring, the weather would punish them. Winter would come again before spring even begins.

Mamma and the aunts had helped the girls sew tiny boots and mittens and caribou pants and beautiful parkas. Last year, Minuk made a qaspeq, a parka cover, for her doll out of red calico cloth. Panruk can sew even better than Minuk, and she made a fish-skin parka for her doll. Minuk isn’t good enough at sewing yet to use fish skin, which is delicate.

Grandma also made them tiny dishes of clay and little vole-skin blankets and rabbit-fur robes. Everything they have for their dolls is so little and perfect that their world became real to the girls.

Because Maklak is a boy, he doesn’t get to play with dolls, but he likes to sit near to them and play with the little sled and dogs their uncle carved for him.

In their village, there’s five women’s houses and one men’s house. A woman’s house is called an ena, and is built partially underground. The houses look like beaver houses, with the wood framework covered in grass and sod. The small passageway that leads into the house is where they cook. Then, there’s one short step that leads into the big room. They put it one step higher so the cold doesn’t come in. In the summer, they use an entrance on the side of the house. The big room has a firepit, and above that is the seal-gut window that they open to let out smoke. They have a seal-oil lamp made of clay, and to use it, they set fire to a piece of oil-soaked moss in the lamp.

Their house isn’t very big compared to other houses. Uliggaq’s house has ten women, and Cakayak’s house has fifteen.

The men’s house is called the qasgiq. It’s much bigger than the women’s houses because it holds all of the village men. When visitors come to the village, the men will stay there, too. Sometimes, everyone from two villages—men, women, and children—crowd into the house for festivities and ceremonies. There are three tiers of wide benches all around the inside.

The village is very proud of their men’s house because it’s the biggest one along the whole Kuskokwim River. They say the benches were very old, and were brought from another men’s house along the Yukon River. Their men defeated another village in a war, and so they brought the benches home to remember their victory. Their men dance that story at every big festival in the men’s house, and the war cries are so fierce and terrible that the children hide their faces.

Each man has his own place in the house. The oldest nearest to the door, and the youngest under the benches. There’s a wooden floor in the qasgiq, even over the firepit. When it’s time to light a fire, the men remove the boards, and when there’s a dance, they put the floorboards back.

In the men’s house, the men make sleds and carve wooden trays, bowls, and boat paddles. They make snowshoes, tools, and weapons, and tan the big skins the women can’t handle. Maklak will go live there starting next year.

The women cook for the men in their enas and take the food to the men’s house in wooden trays and bowls. Panruk and Minuk usually bring the food because Mamma and the aunts are always busy. They sit on the floor, with their heads down, and wait for the men to finish before taking the bowls away. If the girls look really quickly when they walk into the men’s house, they can sometimes see what the men are doing, but that’s the only chance they get. They’re to keep their eyes down at all times and not look at any men or boys. Minuk wants to look out of the corners of her eyes, but she’s afraid she’d disgrace herself.

Every day, the men make a sweat bath in the qasgiq. First, they make a fire in the firepit, and then they take off the smoke-hole cover so the sparks that fly up don’t damage the house. After the thick smoke is gone, the men take their clothes off. Each man has a little bundle of spruce shavings to bite on because the air is so hot and dry, it’d singe their lungs if they didn’t filter it. Sweat pours down the men’s bodies, and their skin turns bright pink.

There are a lot of things boys can do that girls can’t that Minuk is jealous of, but not the sweat bath. Minuk never wanted to bake herself each day like that.

The night after Panruk and Minuk go to the kass’aq house, Iraluq and Taulan come to their ena to tell them what happened in the qasgiq that day. Mr. Hoff, the missionary, had gone for the first time to the men’s house to speak with them. Some of the men didn’t think the missionary should be there, and they thought what he said was foolish. Mr. Hoff says his religion has a god who was the boss of everything and loves everyone. Mr. Hoff told the men the Yup’ik were heathens who don’t believe what Mr. Hoff believes. Heathens can’t go to heaven. And if the Yup’ik don’t go to heaven, they’ll go to hell, where people are roasted in a fire that lasts forever.

Minuk sucks in her breath when Taulan says this. She looks hard to see if Taulan is joking, but he isn’t. Taulan continues that Mr. Hoff says he’s come to teach them about his religion so they won’t be heathens anymore. The men in the qasgiq interrupted Mr. Hoff, saying they already have a good place to go after they die, so why do they need Mr. Hoff’s heaven? If there’s a god in charge of the world, why do bad things happen?

After Mr. Hoff left, the old men instructed everyone to be courteous to Mr. Hoff. He should be treated politely. They don’t need to believe what he says or follow his rules, but they must be polite. They said Mr. Hoff has already proved that he’s hardworking, and he’s willing to help others. He learned their language, and they must remember that their Yup’ik ways are strange to him as well.

Minuk tells Taulan and Iraluq what they saw in the log house. When she tells them about Mrs. Hoff’s corsets, they laugh so hard that Grandma has to frown at them to keep them quiet.

 

Mr. Hoff

It isn’t long before all the other children lose fear of the Hoffs. Many of them visit every few days. First, Mrs. Hoff teaches them that it is very rude to just walk into a house. If they want to visit, they must knock on the door with their knuckles, and then wait until she answers the door and asks them to come in. They like it when Mr. Hoff is there, too. He’s a kind man, with brown eyes and a gentle smile. If he’s there, he gets a piece of boiled sugar for them.

Sometimes, Mrs. Hoff answers the door with her hair messy and face red, and says she’s too busy to have visitors. Soon, after the Berry Festival at the end of summer, they’ll start a school. They built the school downriver in Bethel, and two of their students have been sent far away to a school in Maryland in America. Some other boys have become church helpers, and Mr. Hoff sent them to live in other Yup’ik villages to teach about Mr. Hoff’s religion. He says he needs them to help him keep an eye on things to ensure nobody breaks church rules or goes back to their former ways of living.

When Minuk asks if girls can be helpers, too, Mr. Hoff says the Bible says women aren’t allowed to speak in church. Minuk isn’t surprised because it’s the same way in the men’s house.

All summer, boats come from the mission in Bethel with boxes of things for the school. The Hoffs don’t even unpack the boxes. They say they’ll take everything out when the new schoolroom is built.

As hard as they worked, one day a week, the Hoffs don’t work at all. They put on clean clothes and just sit. David looks out the window and waves at the Yup’ik children. Minuk feels sorry for him because she knows he wants to be outside.

Mr. Hoff wants the village to follow that rule as well. When they become members of his church, they’ll have to rest one day, too. It says so in the Bible. Mr. Hoff says the Bible is their rulebook.

People are polite to Mr. Hoff about that rule, but it bothers everyone to see the Hoffs sitting for a whole day. In the Yup’ik way, they all work very hard, and they only take a day off in the winter, not in the summer when there’s so much work to be done.

The children like to look at everything in the Hoffs’ house. They always look in the mirror first because they’d never seen themselves in a mirror before. Sometimes, the boys will try to make faces in the mirror at themselves. Minuk stands on a stool to look at her feet, too. Her boots look different in the mirror than when she looks down from the top.

Minuk enjoys looking at the cans on the shelves. The pictures on the outside show the contents, and there’s writing that tells what it is. Mr. Hoff explains putting the words on the paper is called writing and then saying it back again is reading. There is no Yup’ik equivalent of the words reading and writing. Mr. Hoff shows Minuk a book he calls McGuffey’s Reader, and explains that it’s the English language, but he’s saying the words in Yup’ik. Each mark makes a sound, and multiple sounds together forms a word.

Sometimes, Mrs. Hoff gives them magazines to look at. Panruk and Minuk sit and whisper in awe about what they see. Tall houses, people dressed like the Hoffs, and the insides of houses. Pictures, cloth, plants, lamps. Every table is covered with something. Mrs. Hoff explains where she comes from, people think that’s beautiful.

Minuk had never thought of making a house beautiful. In Yup’ik custom, they decorate everything. They paint, carve, and sew ordinary things, like buckets, belts, earrings, bowls, and dance masks. But their houses are plain.

There are pictures of animals Minuk has never seen, like cows, horses, and pigs. The Hoffs explain that keeping cows and pigs allows them to not have to hunt for food; their food is always right there. Mr. Hoff suggests that the Yup’ik can keep animals like that, too. It’s one of his favorite ideas for civilizing the village.

The children also see pictures of the telephone and bicycle. Maklak especially loves the idea of a bicycle, and he tries to convince Grandpa to make him one. Whenever the children leave the Hoffs, their mind is dizzy with new ideas about the world around them. Nothing was as they thought it was.

 

Summer

Summer is the Yup’ik’s busiest time of year. The sun never sets completely in summer, so they can work all day and night, if needed. Grandma gets everyone up early in the morning while the birds are sleeping, and they don’t stop until late at night, when the low sun makes the trees look yellow.

But as hard as they work during the day, there’s always time to play ball down by the river. They make balls of woven grass filled with caribou fur. Sometimes they play tag, hide and go seek, or blindman’s bluff. Even the grown-ups play until they are limp from laughing.

Mr. Hoff grumbles about their games, and he won’t let David come play. He says nobody gets much sleep in the summer. But it doesn’t matter to the village. They get their work done and have a good time.

The flowers have blossomed, and the woods and creek banks are filled with flowers. Minuk wishes she could take the color of the deep pink ones home with her and keep them all winter long. The mosquitoes are thick, and the little fast ones with white stripes make a mean zinging noise. The children don’t pay any attention to the mosquitoes; if they let them annoy them, they’d go into a frenzy.

The men put up nets and fish traps. They fish all year long, and if they work hard enough, they’ll have enough fish to last all winter. Women and girls clean and split the fish and hang them on racks to dry. They hang fish eggs in their pouches to dry, and Grandma chops the king salmon tails into pieces to boil with fish eggs. Grandma dries the backbones for dog food—and for herself, but she wouldn’t admit to it. She likes to boil and dip them in seal oil. The aunts scrape the salmon skins and Panruk and Minuk roll them and store them in the cache. They’ll be used for raincoats and boots for wet snow and rainy weather. Fish heads are placed in grass bags and buried. After being fermented, they’ll be eaten.

David likes to tag along and see what the women are all doing. Although he wishes he could try some fish, he says his father says eating spoiled fish is disgusting. Everyone knows the spoiled fish smell terrible, but it is the most delicious thing to eat.

Everyone worries about rain in the summer. If there’s too much, it’ll ruin the drying fish. If the rain raises the river, driftwood will catch in their nets. The shaman from the next village comes over to do a special dance and song to keep the sun shining. In the men’s house, the shaman puts his hands into his parka and thrashes them around. Panruk hides her face in her hands along with some of the other children. He sings while drummers drum, and then his eyes roll back into his head and he says words no one understands. When he’s done, he says that the weather will stay good for many more days.

When Mr. Hoff finds out that a shaman came, he rushes to the riverbank where the shaman is getting into his canoe to leave. Mr. Hoff raises his Bible above his head with both hands and prays loudly to his god to protect their village from the messenger of the devil. The shaman doesn’t seem to notice Mr. Hoff, but as he pushes his canoe off, he makes a rude gesture to him.

Everyone is embarrassed by Mr. Hoff’s bad manners, so they bend their heads and lower their eyes, leaving Mr. Hoff alone on the riverbank.

 

Trading

After the salmon fishing ends, Minuk’s father and grandfather and uncle load up their canoes and go to Bethel. They meet with the lower-river people who have bags of seal oil and other things to trade. Minuk’s village has furs because they live in the woods, and the lower-river people have sea animals because they live near the ocean. Each needs what the other has, so they’re happy to trade with each other.

Panruk and Minuk are sent to count the furs into bundles. Each bundle of fur is enough for one man’s parka: forty-five ground squirrel skins or thirty-three muskrat skins. Sometimes they have caribou, beaver, and otter skins, too. One bundle of parka furs for a small bag of seal oil, and two bundles and one set of caribou legs for a large bag of seal oil.

Iraluq and Taulan will be going along, as well as Maklak for the first time. Sometimes, Minuk’s father and grandfather come home with the stomach of a whale filled with the oil and blubber of the seal or the white whale. They save that for winter festivals. They also trade for seal skins and walrus skins for boot bottoms. And any furs leftover are taken to the American trading post.

While the men are off trading, the women will do the last of the summer work. They’ll make bundles of dry grass to weave into baskets and socks and mats. They dig up little roots and pick cotton grass for fire-starters. They collect pieces of driftwood for torches and moss for wicks for lamps. They pick Labrador tea leaves as well. Grandma and Mamma and the aunts are always so proud when they fill the cache with the good things for winter. Sometimes, Grandma climbs up and opens the door just to look around, smiling.

When summer jobs are finished, they’ll begin to mend all clothes and sew new ones. Only food is more important than good clothes. Yup’ik children are taught how to take good care of their clothes. They beat the snow and frost off outdoor clothes and dry them on racks near doors. When clothes get wet, they let them freeze, and then beat the frost out of them. Grandma must be shown bloodstains or grease on clothes right away so they can be rubbed out with snow. She always says that dirty clothes don’t keep you warm.

But even with the best care, everyone in the family needs at least two sets of clothes a year—summer clothes and winter clothes. Skins are soaked in urine to get the fat off, and then stretched and scraped and dried and softened by twisting and rubbing. Sinew is prepared and twisted, and needles are made, and knives are sharpened so they can cut the skins. Panruk and Minuk were both given a sewing kit and a woman’s knife, an uluaq, when they were little. Sewing is a very complicated art.

When the men return from trading, Iraluq and Taulan come to their house to tell them about the news from downriver. They say the Yup’ik people from the lower river look different. Their legs are shorter and their faces are broader. They also say that everyone is afraid of the American soldiers. The United States Army has built a fort at St. Michael, and they send soldiers to villages. When the soldiers came to Bethel, the people sent the big boys to hide. They’re all afraid the soldiers will take the big boys into the army.

Minuk wouldn’t want to run and hide. She’d want to see the soldiers. There’s so much of the world she wants to see.

 

Pockets

In the middle of summer, Panruk and Minuk are sent every day to the tundra to check on the berries. Some years there’s lots of berries, and some years there aren’t. Some years they’re big and sweet, and other years small and sour. They can never tell until they’re ripe.

First, the salmonberries are ripe, and Grandma uses them to make akutaq. Akutaq is rich and oily, and it melts on the tongue. Next, the blueberries are ripe, and then the bright glossy red cranberries, and then the high-bush cranberries. All the women in the village go to pick berries from early in the morning until late at night.

Sometimes it’s drizzling and foggy while they pick. They can hardly see each other over the wet tundra. But they don’t care—they want akutaq all winter long, so they keep picking.

Every night, Mamma sews berries into fish-skin bags to go into the cache. But they leave out just enough to bring to the men’s house, and the children set aside some extra for Mrs. Hoff. She’ll need lots of berries for the ten boys who are coming to the Hoffs’ school.

That summer, the Hoffs hire a lot of people from Bethel to work for them. Mr. Hoff sends boats up and down the river, and he buys rafts of firewood for their stove and spruce logs for lumber. He hires men to cut boards from the lumber using long saws. Mr. Hoff takes pictures of the workmen with something called a Kodak. It’s a box that makes a picture, just from him taking the film into another room and washing it with special water. He says he wants “before” and “after” pictures. He’s going to bring them back to his church in Maryland.

Mrs. Hoff hires women from the village to help her. She teaches them how to bake bread and clean her way, scrubbing wooden floors and washing dishes and steel pots. Everything the Hoffs wear must be washed in soap and water, boiled, and then scrubbed up and down the scrub board. The Hoffs must use as much water in one day as the village uses the whole summer.

After hanging the clothes to dry in the sun, Mrs. Hoff irons them. She heats the iron on the big stove and presses the cloth to make it smooth. She tries to teach the women from the village, but it’s no use. They don’t like the hot, heavy iron, and just don’t see the use of taking the wrinkles out of clothes.

Mrs. Hoff is busy getting the boys ready for school. No Yup’ik family would send their sons to school, so all the attendees will be orphan boys. Kasruq, the orphan who lives in the men’s house, will be going. Orphans in the village have a hard life because no women bring them food. They’re left to eat the scraps of the others. Their clothes are castoffs they mend themselves. And they have to take orders from everyone. Kasruq is a little older than Iraluq, and nobody really pays attention to him. But Mr. Hoff does because he wants Kasruq to come to his school. Minuk thinks it must feel good to Kasruq to have Mr. Hoff’s attention.

Mrs. Hoff orders cloth pants, shirts, and boots to be sent on the mission boat with the rest of the supplies for the orphan boys. She buys bundles of skins to make a parka for each boy, and she hires Cakayak’s grandma and Uliggaq’s grandma and Minuk’s grandma to sew the parkas. They’re the best sewers in the village. Mrs. Hoff asks Minuk and Panruk if they’d like to help as well.

Mrs. Hoff makes the girls take baths in the galvanized tubs and wash their hair with soap. She hates lice. She also hates the smells of the caribou skins, dried fish, and rotten fish heads. She says it gives her a headache. She gives them all cloth dresses because it gets so hot inside that their summer parkas are too heavy. The Hoffs always have a fire going, except in the hottest month. They’re provided long shirts to wear under their dresses, and short pants made of white cloth. The aprons on top all have tiny pockets, a little bag sewn onto the apron. They can put almost anything in their pocket to carry it around easily.

When the girls leave at the end of the day, they put back on their regular clothes. Although Minuk misses her parka throughout the day, she wishes she had the pocket. Minuk asks Grandma why they don’t have pockets on their clothes, but she doesn’t say anything.

Mrs. Hoff often has Minuk go back to wash her hands. She says dirty hands can cause sickness. But the Yup’ik always tell their children that the dirt makes a path for the diseases to leave them. Grandma says to keep their hands clean while at the Hoffs’, but to rub their hands in dirt when they come back home.

 

Questions

One day, amidst the goods that arrive by boat, Mrs. Hoff receives a sewing machine. Mr. Hoff removes it from its box and puts it together, and all the children gather around Mrs. Hoff to watch her use it. It’s black and shiny, with a board at the bottom called a treadle that she uses to move the needle up and down. It’s very noisy, and Panruk and Grandma cover their ears. While Mrs. Hoff pumps, she pushes material through the needle to the back so there’s a straight seam, with every stitch the same size.

Mrs. Hoff says she can make a cotton dress in just a few hours with the sewing machine. But some pieces, like hemming, are still completed by hand. They use cotton thread, which is easier to use than caribou sinew, but it’s not as strong, and sometimes the seams come apart or the thread rots. Sometimes, the needle on the sewing machine breaks, and Mrs. Hoff gets cross, and her face gets all red and the hair comes out of her braids. In some ways, Minuk thinks that the Yup’ik way of sewing is better.

When they sew, Mrs. Hoff talks to them about how they’re heathens and what they must do to become civilized. They came to live with the Yup’ik to teach them right from wrong. Minuk asks what heaven is like. She answers that the Bible doesn’t really say, but she’s sure it’s better than hell. Minuk cannot believe that Mrs. Hoff is telling them to try to go somewhere that she doesn’t even know. Minuk continues asking if there’s singing in heaven, if it’s white man’s singing or Yup’ik singing. Mrs. Hoff answers the questions, but Minuk stops asking questions when Grandma and the other women give her looks.

In the Yup’ik way, it’s bad to hurt somebody’s mind, confuse them, or contradict them. Mrs. Hoff is uncomfortable with Minuk’s questions, so Minuk is hurting her mind. Sometimes though, the questions just pop out. Mrs. Hoff does say they can all get English names after they’re baptized. In Yup’ik, boys and girls are not named differently. They are given the name of the last person in the village who died, no matter whether a man or woman. The family of the dead treats the baby as if he or she is a relative, the dead one born again. Mrs. Hoff says that’s a heathen belief.

Minuk was named for Teksik’s baby girl who died, so Teksik sewed her beautiful beaver mitts and her husband made earrings. It would make people very unhappy to have to believe in Mrs. Hoff’s way—that relatives are gone forever and don’t come back. Minuk likes the Hoffs, but she doesn’t understand their ideas.

When Minuk leaves the Hoffs, she sees Grandpa sitting on the men’s house. He’s one of the only people who isn’t bothered by Minuk’s questions. Minuk tells him that Mrs. Hoff said only people who believe in their religion can go to heaven, and the rest go to hell. So that implies that everyone who died in their village went to hell. But that doesn’t seem fair. If their god wants everyone to go to heaven, why didn’t he come to people and tell them what he wanted in Yup’ik? Why did he wait so long to tell people about heaven?

Grandpa simply answers that he doesn’t know.

Minuk and Panruk go to help Mrs. Hoff each day except Sunday. They begin to learn a little English from listening to David and Mr. Hoff and Mrs. Hoff. There’s lots of phrases they say often, like “Merciful heavens!” and “Goodness gracious” and “By jingo!” David explains the expressions to the girls. He’s also pleased to speak English to the girls so they learn faster. Minuk thinks teaching them English makes him feel very grown-up.

 

Lessons

When it’s time for summer to end, yellow leaves on the birch and cottonwood trees appear and berry leaves turn scarlet. Now, it’s time for the Berry Festival.

The men clean the qasgiq and prepare it for the festival. Women bring bowls of berries mixed with seal oil into the men’s house. Young girls line up in their best clothes to do the berry dance to begin the festival. Two old men drum for the girls as they dance joyfully because they’d gotten so many berries and the summer fishing was so prosperous. They don’t move their feet as they dance, as the men do, but they bend their knees in rhythm to the drums and twist the top parts of their bodies to show how they pick the berries and how their mothers make akutaq from the berries in the winter.

The women bring in platters of fish and willow grouse, and they all eat everything and have a good time. That is the end of summer.

Now, the wind blows the leaves off the trees and bushes, men set their blackfish traps in the water, and they store the hundreds of fish into fish-skin bags and store them in the cache. The whitefish are gathered from the lakes and buried in deep holes so they can be eaten frozen. The whitefish oil is carefully saved, as it’s even more well-liked than seal oil.

The boys would soon arrive from all the villages to attend the Hoffs’ school. Minuk wants to see what it looks like, but even Grandpa doesn’t know. People are worried the orphan boys coming to the school will be bad providers because they’ll be eating the Hoffs’ food and won’t be learning in the men’s house.

Every day, the men in the men’s house talk about the things they must know to survive and live their lives properly, just as they talk to the girls. Boys have to be quiet in the men’s house, and they must listen hard and memorize what they are told. Knowledge is like a seed that grows larger and blossoms over the years.

Boys are taught things about fishing, hunting, how to make tools, and how to take care of themselves on the river. They’re ridiculed for lying down too much, and they shouldn’t be sick because if they are, they won’t be ready for whatever the day brings. Boys cannot drink water, and must instead dip a feather into water and squeeze it into their mouths. If they drink too much, their flesh won’t be firm, and when food is short, they’ll grow thin rapidly.

They must remove the snow from the ena passageways and keep the water holes clear of ice. They must remove trash and refuse. And they must always be thinking about animals because the animals in the spirit world know what men do and what they think of them.

In the Yup’ik way, everything a man does must be good for the whole village, not just for themselves. In this way, they can all survive the hard times. And this is the Yup’ik way of school, which is very different from the missionaries’ school.

 

Panruk

One day, Panruk says she isn’t feeling well, so Minuk goes to the Hoffs’ without her. When Minuk comes back, Grandma has lowered a grass mat that hangs over the bench against the back wall. Panruk is behind it. Panruk has become a woman.

Of course, Minuk knew it would happen eventually to Panruk, just as someday it will happen to Minuk. But having it actually happen is different. There’ll now be so many things they cannot do together. Minuk sits beside Panruk and holds her hand. Panruk looks content, not afraid or sad. She has always accepted everything and questioned nothing.

When a young girl first menstruates, there’s rules so strict that no one would dare break them. For ten days, Panruk cannot sit down or walk around. She can lie down when she’s tired, but she cannot sit. Then, she can sit in a dark corner of the house dressed in an old parka. She can only drink water once in the morning and once in the evening, but she must suck it from a feather. After another ten days, Panruk can stand up.

Grandma goes to the passageway and gets a handful of ashes, which are thrown behind Panruk. Grandma says the ashes fall on Panruk’s pathway and cut off her past. She cannot become a child again.

Panruk bathes and dresses in a new qaspeq with a hood and belt, which she must wear always. She must now be completely covered with special fish-skin mittens without thumbs and boots, even in the summer. Panruk must also give away her doll and everything else she owned as a girl, even her lovely earrings which Grandpa made her, as well as her sewing kit. Grandma and the aunts have gifts of needles and needle cases ready to give to the girls to celebrate the end of their childhood.

Panruk gives her doll to Minuk, but it makes Minuk very sad to think that Panruk and her would never play together again. Minuk has played sometimes with Cakayak and Uliggaq, but neither of them are very good at pretending.

Last of all, Panruk is tattooed. Most tattoos are three lines fanning out under the bottom lip down to the bottom of the chin. Grandpa says women at the mouth of the river have different tattoos, and Minuk wishes she could see them.

Grandma prepares a long string coated with soot and makes a hole in the skin under Panruk’s lip, and then she draws the string through the top layer of skin to make a dark line. Panruk says it doesn’t hurt much, but it takes a long time.

Minuk doesn’t think she’ll be as brave as Panruk is. Why don’t boys have to endure traditions like this? But then, they are not unclean, like women.

When Panruk is allowed outside again, she can’t look off into the distance. She can only take short glances so she doesn’t go blind in old age. She cannot drink while stooping over, cannot eat birds that fly south in the winter, and cannot handle the soil.

For a year, she’ll have restrictions on hunting eggs, picking berries, going in a boat, or cooking or preparing skins. If there’s bad weather or poor hunting and fishing, she’ll be blamed for not following the rules. For the rest of her life, men must not breathe in her bad air or have direct eye contact with her. She’ll have to be careful with men’s clothing and not leave her own clothing lying around.

When Panruk can walk again, they visit the Hoffs. Mrs. Hoff hems quietly as Panruk tells her the Yup’ik way of becoming a woman. Mrs. Hoff says their ways are superstitions and that she doesn’t approve of them. She says when she became a woman, she simply had her hair put on top of her head for the first time. And she had to put away her short skirts and put on long skirts and the corset. Then she smiles and says her head ached for weeks from the pins. And she kept tripping on the long skirts. And she hated the corsets. But she got used to it. Girls must endure so much.

Qanrilaq’s family speaks to Grandpa about Panruk. They ask Panruk if she has objection to Qanrilaq as a husband, and Panruk lowers and shakes her head. Minuk also has an objection to Qanrilaq. He was mean to them when they were little girls. He threw rocks at them and bothered them. His mean, little eyes tormented them. As a grown-up, he doesn’t laugh or smile or joke with the other boys and men.

Eventually, Panruk agrees to Qanrilaq as a husband. The women in his family start making new clothes for Panruk, who puts them on and brings a meal to Qanrilaq in the qasgiq so he becomes her husband. When Minuk tells Grandpa that he was mean to them, Grandpa says he remembers. If he’s still mean, Panruk can throw him away. Panruk doesn’t need to stay with someone she’s not suited to. What Minuk worries about is if Panruk will ever think to complain. Perhaps she’ll be so good and sweet that she won’t hold herself valuable.

 

School

David gets very sick before the snow comes. Minuk takes him breakfast that his mother made, but he doesn’t want to eat. Minuk stays to talk to him. He takes his job of teaching Minuk English very seriously, and he asks her to tell him the names of everything on his breakfast tray.

After David was sick for a week, Grandma and the other women say they should call for the shaman from the next village. Mrs. Hoff gets very upset at this. Shamans are evil and they should have nothing to do with them. Cakayak’s grandmother ensures her that the shaman can help David. The shaman will pull out the evil spirits that make him sick. Mrs. Hoff says they have enough medicine there to help him.

The women, shrugging, silently agree to not talk to Mrs. Hoff again about shamans. The same way they don’t talk to her about names. They just do whatever they want without telling her.

The Hoffs do have lots of medicine. Some Yup’ik have been going to them for cough medicine because it feels good. Grandpa feels that maybe if the Hoffs are right about medicine, they may be right about other things, too.

By late fall, the workers have finished the big schoolroom and the room where the boys will live. Mr. Hoff uses paint to cover the inside of the classroom. The classroom is beautiful when it’s finished, and the walls are so white that it hurts the eyes when the sun shines into the school.

One wall is made of slate which can be written on, and there’s a clock with numbers. Mr. Hoff tells Minuk how it divides the day into parts. It tells them how to split their day. Minuk feels tight all over when he explains it to her. She doesn’t think she likes the clock at all.

On the wall is a sign that reads “God is Love.” Minuk asks Mr. Hoff why his god makes people burn in hell if he’s also love. Mr. Hoff answers that it’s the punishment for not believing. Minuk responds that burning someone doesn’t seem to be love. Then, she states that in Yup’ik, they are taught to be kind to animals, plants, and trees. Mr. Hoff says there’s nothing about that written in the Bible. In fact, there’s many things about life which aren’t explained in the Bible. But they must have faith and believe that everything is for the best.

What Minuk sees of faith is that it’s not asking hard questions or looking at things too closely. It’s hard to believe things people are supposed to believe, so they need help from other people. That’s why people want others to believe what they believe, and why they don’t want them to ask questions. And the more people that believe something, the easier it is to make others believe it, too. And if you want to believe, you have to pretend a little. You must agree in your mind not to see what really is.

That’s how both Mr. Hoff and the Yup’ik elders have faith.

 

Boots

The boys come to school in the big mission boat just before the river freezes for the winter. They don’t look happy. Minuk thinks some of them would be happier learning in the men’s house. Mrs. Hoff cuts their hair very short, saying keeping hair long to prevent illness is a heathen superstition. It’s the rule in their religion that women have long hair and men have short hair. When Minuk asks Mrs. Hoff why this is, she gives Minuk the same look that grown-ups give her when she asks questions. She says it’s not your god, but everyone’s God. And she doesn’t recall the reason. She should ask Mr. Hoff.

Whenever Minuk asks questions to Grandma or Mamma in the village, they always answer the same way: “I don’t know,” or “It’s always been done this way.” Those answers never please Minuk. Having a question with no answer is like having a mosquito bite with no itch relief.

The boys are given white shirts with blue pants with suspenders. They look very different dressed in white man’s clothes with their hair clipped short. Kasruq doesn’t look like himself at all. The day Mr. and Mrs. Hoff pass out the boots is not a good one. Everything about white people is loud—voices, saws, cooking, metal pots, and the clatter of metal dishpans and slop buckets. But the boots are the noisiest of all. Ten boys with ten pairs of boots stomping on wooden floors! Everyone sewing in the big front room are disturbed all day.

At the end of the day, the boys run upstairs to their room and the noise on the stairs is so loud Grandma bursts into tears. She says she cannot come back to work at the Hoffs’ anymore. Mrs. Hoff tries to tell the boys to walk more quietly, but Grandma leaves anyway. At the end of the day, each boy has blisters on his feet.

When the boys don’t do what Mr. Hoff wants, he whips them with a wide, leather strap. In the Yup’ik way, you don’t punish a child. You talk to them and explain why his behavior is bad. They’re all dismayed by Mr. Hoff’s bad behavior.

The boys spend all day indoors, even though they were raised to be outside every day. They wash themselves each morning and once a week, take a bath in the galvanized tub. One boy gets a rash from the yellow soap and the youngest one cries bitterly when he gets soap in his eyes.

Mr. Hoff begins to teach the boys English and how to read. Minuk stands outside the schoolroom door and listens to him whenever she can. She memorizes the letters he shows the boys and all the words on the big board. She writes them with a stick in the snow when she leaves the Hoffs’.

One day, Minuk asks Mr. Hoff if he’ll teach her how to read. He answers that he can’t because it’d be a bad idea. Minuk asks if reading is just for boys, and he responds no. But if she learned to read, she might think herself above the boy who will marry her. Perhaps a young man wouldn’t want to marry a woman who can read. It says in the Bible that men must be the head of the family.

Minuk nods her head and leaves the room. But she’s determined to learn to read anyway. Once she knew the marks meant something, she couldn’t bear not knowing what they said. She’ll teach herself, and it’ll be her secret.

When the days grow colder, there’s less and less daylight. This is the time of rest for the Yup’ik. Some wood must be chopped for the men’s house, and water must be brought in, and dogs fed, and there’s sewing. But besides that, there’s not much else to do. Men do the woodworking in the qasgiq and play games. Girls play storyknives, making pictures in clean, fresh snow. Minuk particularly enjoys telling stories to go along with pictures. The day Mr. Hoff tells her she shouldn’t learn to read, Minuk makes a story about a girl who has a secret magic power. She keeps the magic in her fish-skin bag around her neck. When people are gone, she takes out the magic and sees things far away and knows things that happened a long time ago. She becomes so wise, people think she is a shaman.

The girls like that story a lot and they ask for it often.

 

Speeches

Before the river freezes over completely, Panruk takes the clothes Qanrilaq’s family made for her and brings them to the men’s house and leaves them in a pile at his feet. That’s the sign that she doesn’t want to be married to him anymore. Taulan and Iraluq seem happy she has done this, and Minuk is, too. Grandma seems glad as well. Later, Panruk tells Minuk that Qanrilaq said he would kill all their baby girls. In the Yup’ik way, it’s custom to kill baby girls if times are hard or more children are not wanted. It’s up to the husband to decide which children live. Grandpa had kept all his girls. Panruk wants to keep all her girls, too.

When Mr. Hoff hears that Panruk has thrown Qanrilaq away, he comes to their house to speak to them. He explains why he is there and Grandma responds that in the Yup’ik way, it’s foolish to stay with someone incompatible. Mr. Hoff insists it’s contrary to the law of God. Grandma pretends as if she hasn’t heard him. She says she had another husband before Panruk’s grandfather, and she threw him away.

Mr. Hoff’s mouth is set in a stubborn line, and it’s hard to believe it’s the same person who is normally so cheerful and easy-going. He insists it’s a heathen practice, and it jeopardizes Panruk’s chance to spend eternity in heaven.

Minuk can see he cares a lot about Panruk, and she feels sorry for him. She gets up and brings him a tray with dried fish and seal oil. He shakes his head no, and Grandma’s mouth tightens. It’s rude for a guest to refuse food. He asks Grandma if there’s a reason Panruk dislikes Qanrilaq. Was he abusive?

Grandma responds that they don’t interfere between a man and a woman. It’s private. Mr. Hoff leaves, and Grandma says nothing more about it.

With Mr. Hoff, there’s no in-between ways. It’s all or nothing. He had a hard time getting people to listen to him in the summer when they were so busy, but now in the winter, he asks to speak to everyone in the men’s house once a week. Nobody wants to listen to Mr. Hoff, but it’s the Yup’ik belief that everyone has a right to speak.

After speaking to Grandma and Panruk and Qanrilaq, Mr. Hoff asks to speak to the men again. After he’s done, an elder stands up and explains that he once saw a terrible smallpox epidemic the Russians brought which killed more than half the people along the Kuskokwim and Yukon rivers. The white people brought the illness, so he doesn’t want their missionaries or any of their ways.

Mr. Hoff says that stone axes were good enough for the Eskimos long before Russians brought steel axes. Now, they use steel axes and wouldn’t go back to stone axes. The superstitions of the shaman and Yup’ik way of life are like stone axes, and the way of life Mr. Hoff offers is like steel axes.

Grandpa then stands up and says he’s also worried about sickness, but the Hoffs have medicine. Maybe they can have both beliefs: the Yup’ik and shamans for luck in hunting and fishing, and Mr. Hoff’s for medicine and power over sickness.

Mr. Hoff jumps up and says that’s not possible. They must give up their shamans and heathen superstitions. Minuk’s father is holding himself tightly. He says for all he cares, the white man can take back their steel axes. Since they’d come, the Yup’ik had had sickness, famine, bad fish runs, poor hunting, and few berries. The animal spirits don’t like white men. The men around the qasgiq nod their heads. Cakayak’s father speaks up to ask why they need Mr. Hoff’s religion when the Russian priests baptized many of them in the old days. Mr. Hoff explains the Russian priests didn’t actually teach them how to be civilized.

Everyone feels ashamed for Mr. Hoff then. They like the Russian priests because they didn’t try to change anyone.

Mr. Hoff explains that living off the land is bad. They should herd animals that don’t need to be hunted, and dig in the ground for coal to sell. Husbands and wives shouldn’t separate, and orphans should be treated the same as other children. Girl babies shouldn’t be killed. Men should live with their wives and families.

The men explain that if men don’t live together, they might work just for themselves and their own family. They might teach only their own children. They work together to raise their children. Being selfish is the worst thing a Yup’ik can be.

Mr. Hoff continues that the shamans are the worst of all. Anyone who calls on a shaman for help is calling for the devil. Grandpa tries to explain that a shaman simply smoothes the pathway for the animals to come to them. A missionary cannot do it because a missionary has no relationship with the animals.

The men are always courteous when they talk to Mr. Hoff. But Mr. Hoff is not courteous. He sometimes is very bad-tempered. Minuk feels like her grandfather. She wants to learn and see exciting things, and she’s glad to have things like calico and sugar. But she likes their Yup’ik ways, too, and she certainly doesn’t like the idea of hell.

 

Miss Oakes

Mrs. Hoff was very tired by the time winter came. It was her job to wash and iron, since nobody else would do it. She had to oversee David while he hauled water and did his schoolwork. She had to ensure the helpers cleaned the house the right way. Sew, write letters to the missions, order supplies, supervise the work the boys did at school. Teach singing, and do the cooking and baking for ten boys and her family.

Yup’ik women don’t cook very much in the winter. They eat mostly frozen or dried fish, seal oil, and frozen berries. Every now and then Grandma will boil fish eggs into soup or a rabbit or ptarmigan, but it’s infrequent. It doesn’t take much time to fix meals.

Mrs. Hoff, on the other hand, is always cooking. She cooks three big meals a day for everyone. Some boys like some of the kass’aq food, like bread and jam, but nobody likes cooked mush. Minuk tries some one day, and she agrees that it’s horrible. Mrs. Hoff cooks some Eskimo food for the boys, too, instead of serving it frozen or raw. Minuk isn’t sure if they think it’s heathen or not. Mrs. Hoff never cooks anything whole. She cleans everything, and removes the feathers, heads, feet, fins, and skin. So cooking takes a lot of time.

Before the ice closes, three new people arrive on the mission boat: a teacher, a nurse, and Helper Jack. Mr. Hoff explains that Miss Oakes will take over teaching while he travels to other villages. Miss Oakes is very heavy and tall. Her smile scrunches up her eyes into little fat rolls above her cheeks, and her hair is the color of salmonberries. Her waist sticks out with rolls of fat, and it looks very soft, so she must not be wearing a corset.

The nurse is Miss Danfort, who knows a little Yup’ik from living in Bethel. Because their village is in the middle, people from both upriver and downriver will be able to see her easily when they’re sick. She’s not fat or thin, and her eyes and skin seem without color. There’s deep lines around her mouth and eyes, and she has white in her hair. She’s a kass’angyarr—an old white person.

Mrs. Hoff gives Grandma and the other women the task of making winter clothes for Miss Oakes. Miss Danfort already has winter clothes from when she was living in Bethel. It takes more than forty-five skins to make Miss Oakes a muskrat parka. The women complain that the boots they make for her are ugly because her feet are so big.

Minuk helps Miss Oakes paint her room. She tries out her English, and at first, Miss Oakes scrunches up her face whenever she doesn’t understand a word, but after Minuk repeats it, she always nods her head in understanding. Miss Oakes likes to make her room beautiful with pictures and cloth, just like Mrs. Hoff.

Miss Oakes helps Mrs. Hoff with some of the cooking, too. She has a lot of energy and Mrs. Hoff is often tired. Miss Oakes makes a lot of sweet things, like pancakes rolled into tubes, cookies, and rice cooked with milk and sugar. She likes cooking for the boys, and the boys like her food better than Mrs. Hoff’s.

 

Helper Jack

Helper Jack is a nice young man who dresses in the Eskimo way. He’s clean and neat and has short hair. After staying in our village a few days, he decides to go on to Kulkaromute to work with the people there. Helper Jack has learned to read and write in Mr. Hoff’s Bethel school, and every day he reads the Bible to himself. The young men of the village are very interested in him, and he visits them each day. They ask him why he’s given up the Yup’ik ways to take on the new ways.

Helper Jack says he no longer believes that shamans do what they say they do. The same as Mr. Hoff believes, Helper Jack now thinks they use trickery to make people believe they’ve been on the moon or have gone to the villages of the animal souls. He says these are fear tactics. Taulan and Iraluq laugh, and ask if he doesn’t think that hell is a story to make people afraid, too. The boys argue back and forth like that all the time that Helper Jack was with them.

Then, Helper Jack goes by dog team to Kulkaromute, and nobody knows if we’ll see him again.

Miss Danfort has a room next to Miss Oakes’ which is used as a clinic. She has a little bed, but nothing to make the room look pretty the way Mrs. Hoff and Miss Oakes do. Minuk sees that all kass’aq women are not the same.

Minuk visits Miss Danfort in her room while she’s putting away medicine. She has so many questions to ask, but the first thing that pops out of her mouth is “Corset?” Minuk points to Miss Danfort’s waist to show she wants to know if she’s wearing one. Miss Danfort says that she’s not wearing a corset. She says it’s not good for one’s health, having the organs pushed around like that. No wonder women have fainting spells and need smelling salts. She’s talking so fast that Minuk can’t understand her at all.

Minuk asks her to slow down. Miss Danfort slowly and loudly explains what fainting spells and smelling salts are to Minuk. Minuk can tell that Miss Danfort, like Grandma, has a lot of opinions.

Miss Danfort comments that Minuk must learn languages very easily. She’s very good at English. Minuk says that English words are very short, and Yup’ik words are very long. Despite that, Miss Danfort and Mr. Hoff both agree that Minuk is very bright and smart. Minuk is very proud of that.

Miss Danfort brought with her a stereoscope. She puts cards of pictures, called stereographs, inside the stereoscope, and when you look through it, the pictures look real, as if one can touch them. They’re not flat like magazines or photographs. Nothing the Hoffs brought has caused as much excitement as the stereoscope and the stereographs. Only one person can look at a time, but all the women in the village crowd into the living room and talk excitedly until it’s their turn. Even the men come, even the ones who seldom leave the men’s house at all. Of course, Minuk’s father and his friends don’t come.

There are stereographs of circuses and zoo animals and historic buildings. Minuk looks at them all, but the one she looks at over and over again shows a big flood called the Johnstown Flood, which happened just a year ago. There were hundreds of people left behind by the floodwaters, and their bodies flung about like driftwood.

Miss Oakes is getting along fine in the classroom. The boys speak enough English by now to understand her simple commands, and although she can’t speak Yup’ik, David translates for her when Mrs. Hoff is busy. Minuk thinks the boys like Miss Oakes’ teaching better than Mr. Hoffs’. Miss Oakes is jolly, and she laughs a lot more.

At home, Mamma is making new clothes for Minuk to wear for winter celebrations. She can hardly wait to wear them. On these clothes, Mamma has tried to add something new to her parka. She likes to try different patterns and designs. She puts together the two colors of the muskrat and the caribou. They look like layers in the sky when the sun is setting. Tassels of wolverine tails hang down the back and shoulders of the parka. The cuffs of the parka sleeves are trimmed with wolverine fur. Minuk’s new parka shows what a good hunter her father is; it shows off her mother’s sewing skills, too. In Yup’ik beliefs, all of the animals will be brought to the hunter whose wife is a good sewer. They want to be used by a sewer that is skillful, not one who will do a bad job with their skins.

 

A Time for Drumming

In Yup’ik language, the darkest part of winter is called Cauyarvik, “a time for drumming.” That’s because they hold their most important festivals then, and during a festival there’s always dancing and singing to drums. Sometimes the whole village travels to Kalskag or Avaucharak for the big weeklong festival.

People are very busy during the months before Cauyarvik, making new clothes and dance costumes, practicing dances and songs, and preparing the food and gifts. They’re so busy that few of them can help Mrs. Hoff as much as she wants, and she complains to Mr. Hoff about the unreliability of the villagers.

Sometimes, people prepare for years for their gifts. When they gave a feast for Panruk’s father, Grandma made twenty-seven pairs of fish-skin boots with woven grass socks, twenty fish-skin bags, twenty-one fish-skin coats, twenty-three grass baskets, and twenty-one grass fish bags. And others in their family made just as many gifts.

Mr. Hoff speaks about this custom in the qasgiq. He is dismayed by how many things are given away, and how much food is distributed. He hopes they will not be so foolish in their village as the other Yup’ik villages are. He says big feasts waste food, and it’s wrong not to save as much food as possible for the hungry times. He knows some people who have given everything they had to others, until they had nothing left. Those people are content because they show so much generosity, but they should have taken pride instead in saving.

The old men tell Mr. Hoff he must understand that in the Yup’ik way, the more you give, the more would come back. Giving and sharing is an important part of Yup’ik life.

The Mask Dance is held every year during Cauyarvik. The children love this festival best because the masks and animal carvings are so wonderful. A shaman is in charge of the Mask Dance because he’s the only one who can speak to the animals in the spirit world and ask them to come back next year. It’s the Yup’ik belief that animals and people are equal partners in the universe, and people must treat all animals with great respect. In return, the animals will respect the Yup’ik and will provide themselves as food.

But we should have known that Mr. Hoff hated shaman so much that there would be trouble.

For the Mask Dance, they all dress in their best clothes. Minuk wears her caribou teeth belt. Grandpa wears his labrets, ivory buttons that fit into the holes pierced at the corner of his mouth. Iraluq and Taulan wear their short dance parkas and fancy long gloves. Mamma wears her new parka along with her long beaded earrings. Minuk’s proud of her family because they are dressed so beautifully.

After the men go into the qasgiq, Mr. Hoff asks the women to stand in front of the men’s house while he takes pictures of them with his Kodak. They’re laughing so hard that it takes Mr. Hoff five exposures to get a picture where no one is moving. Minuk can hardly wait to see those pictures.

The animal carvings are hung all around the center of the men’s house where they can watch the dances the men do for them. They are beautiful, one for each kind of animal and fish. The special masks the men wear are just as wonderfully carved.

Minuk and Panruk sit, holding their breath. The dance is the men do shows perfectly how each animal moves, and the calls the men make to imitate them are so real. Mr. Hoff has never seen the Mask Dance, so he and David come to watch. David comes to sit with Panruk and Minuk. Minuk can tell he likes the dances as well because he holds his breath, too.

Everyone must be very quiet while the dances are being performed. It’s believed that the spirits are in the qasgiq, and they’ll take fright if there’s too much noise.

But in the middle of the ceremony, Mr. Hoff suddenly jumps to his feet and shouts at the shaman. He says the shaman is the devil’s helper and the festival is the worst sort of heathenism. The men stand up and quietly tell Mr. Hoff to leave. Minuk’s father and some of his friends go to Mr. Hoff and take him by the arms and lead him out of the men’s house. David looks at the girls frightened, and then gets to his feet and follows his father.

The villagers were already upset that Mr. Hoff tried to interfere with Panruk and Qanrilaq, and he had not understood the giving and sharing at their festivals. But his interference in the Mask Dance was far worse. He might have ruined the hunting and fishing for the next year with his loud interruption. Mr. Hoff has gone too far.

Later, Mr. Hoff tries to speak to the men again but when he comes, everyone gets up to leave. They no longer accept his presence in the men’s house. Minuk feels sorry for Mr. Hoff. He wants to help them very much, but he’s so loud and rude that no one wants to listen to him anymore.

Minuk goes outside to the bank with her Grandpa to watch the northern lights. In Yup’ik legend, the northern lights are spirits of dead boys playing ball, and when the lights shift back and forth, that’s the boy who catches the ball, stumbles and throws it into the sky again. When the lights are deep red, it predicts that there’s to be a terrible battle, in which the ground will be covered with blood. Grandma once said she saw the lights with all the colors of the rainbow. But most nights, the lights are pale green, pink, or white. Grandpa likes to show them off along with the stars to Minuk. But today, he gets to his feet early and says that he wants to talk to all of the women.

Grandpa says that the men have decided that they will not allow the women to work for the Hoffs anymore. He thinks it’s good to learn new ways but not all of the men agree. Mr. Hoff has abused their hospitality by interfering with the Mask Dance. They won’t be interfered with anymore. Kasruq, the orphan, is also leaving the school.

Grandma is fond of Mrs. Hoff. She thinks of her like a young woman who is sometimes foolish. Minuk knows that Grandma will be sad. And Minuk will miss going to the Hoffs’ house very much. She’ll miss David and jolly Miss Oakes, and she’ll miss joking with the boys in the morning when she dishes their oatmeal. She’ll miss her dress with the white apron and the pocket, and she’ll miss the soap. She might not even be able to see the photographs Mr. Hoff took of all the women before the Mask Dance. She’ll miss talking to Miss Danfort and learning her opinions. And she’ll be sorry to not know what the boys are learning. Perhaps, Minuk will even forget how to speak English.

Why did Mr. Hoff have to do this? Why couldn’t he hold his tongue, as Yup’ik people do? Why did he have to have such bad manners?

 

Miss Danfort

A few days after the men tell Mr. Hoff that he’s no longer welcome and the village women will no longer work for his wife, Miss Danfort sends David to the men’s house with a message for Minuk’s grandfather: will he please let her speak to him about something important?

Grandpa goes to the clinic, for he’s courteous and won’t make Miss Danfort wait. He reports back and says that Miss Danfort asks if Minuk will work for her. She says Minuk can speak and understand enough English to help her. Miss Danfort says her job is to cure diseases, not to civilize people or change their beliefs. She is a member of the Hoffs’ church, but she’s not doing church business in her clinic. She only wants people to become more healthy.

Minuk’s breath stops in her throat. She waits with everyone else to hear what Grandpa will say. He continues to say that white men have good medicine. He says they can cure many things which have yet to be cured by a shaman. He says Yup’ik women can become shamans, so it’s not against customs for Minuk to work for the nurse and learn what she knows. Therefore, all of the men in the qasgiq have agreed that Minuk may work for the nurse.

Minuk drops her head to show acceptance, but she wants to laugh and cry and shout all at the same time. She is so pleased that Miss Danfort has asked for her, and please she’ll be learning something new and speaking English, and peeking in the schoolroom to learn enough to finish a book.

Miss Danfort has a big, thick book called the United States Dispensatory, which lists all the medicines and what they’re used for. Minuk wishes she could read it. People come from every village along the river to see her. The visitors often stay in Grandma’s house or in the qasgiq. Some people even think that she knows more than the shaman.

Mrs. Hoff is still very angry about what happened in the men’s house. She says that they shouldn’t let anyone come to the clinic who isn’t a member of the church. Her demands go nowhere, though, because people still come to visit Miss Danfort.

Miss Danfort brought with her a big box of eyeglasses. Minuk loves to look through them. Some of them make everything look smudged while others make everything look far away, and some are in-between. Mr. Hoff wears eyeglasses to read with, and so does Miss Oakes. But no one in the village has ever had any eyeglasses.

Pretty soon, all the old people in the village are wearing eyeglasses, and they’re pleased that they can see well enough again to sew or do fine carving. Maklak thinks eyeglasses are the most interesting, so he wants a pair badly. He goes to Miss Danfort and tells her in great seriousness that he can’t see anything anymore and needs glasses.

Miss Danfort gives him a pair. He wears them for a whole day, proud as anything. He peers at everybody like some funny kind of owl, until he finds out that the wires hurt the backs of his ears, the glasses slip down his nose, and the nose pieces pinch. He brings them back to Miss Danfort and says he can see again. Miss Danfort explains that one has to really need glasses to ignore the discomfort.

Grandma has a blue film growing over her eyes, which makes it hard for her to see in bright sunlight. Miss Danfort says it is a cataract and a doctor can take it off. She recommends that in summer, Grandma goes to the doctor at the Nulato hospital up along the Yukon River. Grandma smiles and nods. But Minuk knows that when summer comes, Grandma will never go all the way to the hospital.

When someone comes to see her, Miss Danfort listens to the sound of their chest and taps on it with her fingers. She says she can tell if someone has tuberculosis. If they’re sick, the taps sound like a thick sound on the person’s chest. All the chest taps sound the same to Minuk, so she knows she wouldn’t be a very good nurse.

A lot of people come with toothaches. Miss Danfort uses a pair of forceps to grab the bad tooth and twists and tips it until the tooth comes out. Minuk hates helping her pull out teeth because it makes a horrible sucking sound. It must hurt terribly, because the people who are having teeth taken out pull so hard on the armrests of the chair that the arms get wobbly and Mr. Hoff has to nail them down every few days.

Miss Danfort also helps sew the scalp of a man who cut his head badly. There is so much blood. She helps Teksik deliver her new baby, because the baby was turned around backwards and wouldn’t come out. Miss Danfort turns the baby around with long pincer-like things, and the baby comes out fine.

Then, the shaman from Kalskag accidentally shoots himself with a gun, and asks to be brought to Miss Danfort. He says the shaman in another village caused the accident to happen with his spells and magic. By the way Miss Danfort scoffs, Minuk can tell that she doesn’t approve of shamans anymore than Mr. Hoff. But she helps the shaman who was shot regardless. The accident had broken the bone and left a hole filled with splinters of bone and shreds of cloth. Miss Danfort cleans the wounds with boiling water and antiseptic, and takes out all of the splinters of bone and cloth. Then she puts the ends of the bones together. Minuk is busy boiling bandages and handing Miss Danfort what she needs, so she doesn’t watch. But she feels queasy nonetheless.

Mr. and Mrs. Hoff are happier than Minuk has ever seen when the shaman came to the clinic. Mr. Hoff says it means the shaman can’t pretend anymore to have power. He thinks this is the end of shamanism.

 

Mellgar

One lovely bright afternoon, a messenger comes to Mr. Hoff from Kulkaromute. Miss Danfort and Minuk watch outside the window. They know it’s a very serious message because the man doesn’t take his dogs out of the harness before he comes to see Mr. Hoff. Mr. Hoff bows his head and covers his face with his hands. The man hands Mr. Hoff a fish-skin bag, gets on his sled, and moves on to the men’s house.

Mr. Hoff comes inside, and tells everyone that Helper Jack has been killed by the people of Kulkaromute. Everyone just stands and stares at him while Mr. Hoff rubs his face. Minuk is very sorry because Helper Jack had been such a nice young man.

After Helper Jack was killed, the people of Kulkaromute gathered everything in the village that had come from the mission: tea bags, the Bible, needles and pins, and a little hat Mrs. Hoff made for one of the babies. They put everything into the fish-skin bag onto the sled. Everything was brought back to the Hoffs’. The messenger said people didn’t want anything to do with the mission anymore, because the mission people interfered with the Yup’ik way. The grown-ups talk so fast that Minuk can hardly understand what they’re saying. But it seems like Mr. and Mrs. Hoff blame the shaman of Kulkaromute for Helper Jack’s death.

When Minuk goes home, she sees the grown-ups are all on their knees in the big front room, praying.

One cold night, Grandma and Mamma and the aunts and Panruk and Minuk are all sewing around the oil lamp when Grandma speaks. She says that another boy in the village, Mellgar, has asked for her. Minuk doesn’t say anything, so Grandma says that if she likes Mellgar, his aunt will begin sewing for her.

Minuk thinks very hard. When she becomes a woman, Mellgar would be her husband. He would hunt for her, and she would take the meat he brings home. She’d cook for him in the men’s house, help him with his sled and dogs, and one day they would have children together. Minuk would be a good woman, and he would be proud of her.

Mellgar is not like Panruk’s husband. Mellgar laughs a lot. Even when his face is serious, his eyes look, to Minuk, like they are laughing. And when the young men play their games on the river, Mellgar is one of the liveliest ones. Minuk looks at Maklak, who is having a hard time not saying anything. He likes Mellgar the best because Mellgar pays attention to him. When Maklak throws snowballs at him, Mellgar throws them back and chases him around the water hole. Mellgar and Maklak are a lot alike. She is sure he wouldn’t kill their first baby girl.

So, Minuk looks at her family, and says yes.

The days grow longer again, and soon it’s time to go to the spring camp. While everyone is getting ready to go, Yup’ik men come across the portage from the village along the Yukon River. They say there are many white people on the Yukon River now, and they brought a lot of trading goods with them. They want wood to fuel their steamboats, so the people along the Yukon are cutting wood for them. They also brought horses. Minuk would love to see those horses.

One of the men says that there’s been a lot of sickness along the lower Yukon. Terrible coughs and fevers. Many people have died. When Miss Danfort hears what the men say, she says it is an epidemic. They had diphtheria and whooping cough and chickenpox last year, but now it is influenza, which is very bad. There isn’t any medicine for influenza. Patients feel sick and ache all over. They have high fevers and bad coughs. Their lungs are affected and they can’t breathe. They can die very quickly.

Mellgar’s family leave for their spring camp after the Yukon men go on to Kolmakov. Minuk is very glad of this because when Mellgar is in the village, Minuk always tries to look at him without looking, and Grandma and the aunts tease her that her head is not where it should be. But he is very nice to look at, and Minuk is pleased he will be her husband. Once, he even gave Minuk one of his small, secret smiles.

Cakayak’s mother becomes very ill after Mellgar’s family leaves, and in just a few short days, she dies of influenza. Miss Danfort thinks the Yukon men had brought the sickness with them. Her body is carried to the men’s house and put on a bench in a seated position. Her head is down as if she’s thinking. The women and children come into the men’s house to grieve for Cakayak’s mother. Panruk and Maklak and Minuk cling to each other and cry, each thinking how it would be if it was their own mother.

No one in the village can work that day or use any sharp knives or axes. This is because Cakayak’s mother’s soul is in the village for one day, and it would be angry if it cut itself on sharp things. Also, the name soul would be coming on the trail to inhabit the body of a new baby, so it’s important not to cut the trail of a name soul.

The next day, Cakayak’s father and uncle build a square box of planks, decorated with beautiful designs. The body of Cakayak’s mother is lifted through the smoke hole of the men’s house, and placed into the square box. The family carries it to the graveyard with everyone following. The grave box is set on four poles and her tin tea kettle and sewing kit are set on a pole in front so they can go on with her to her new life.

The next day, Grandpa and Father and Uncle Aparuk and Taulan and Iraluq pack the sled with everything they need for spring camp. It’s unusually cold for this time of year but the trails are hard so they will have easy going. Their two dogs are happy to be put in the harness because they bark and lunge on their lines. They’re eager for such a long run.

When it’s time to go, Minuk goes to say goodbye to Miss Danfort and to everyone at the Hoffs’. They say they hope they’ll have a good trail and the hunting will be good. Miss Danfort takes Minuk aside and gives her a copy of the first book of McGuffey’s Reader. She said she kidnapped it from the schoolroom. Minuk can practice while she’s gone. Minuk thought that nobody knew about her reading, but all along Miss Danfort knew. Minuk whispers that she cannot practice. Her father will be angry. Miss Danfort looks at her uncomfortably and then says she understands. When Minuk comes back, she can start again. With her memory, she won’t forget any of her English.

 

Sickness

Their camp is so deep in the snow that they can’t see the house, just the cache standing tall on its four legs. Taulan and Iraluq take the wooden shovels and throw themselves into clearing the snow from the front of the house. They bring most of the bundles from the sled into the house and store the rest in the cache. Grandma lights moss in the stone lamp and they’re at camp once again. It’s always good to get back to camp and be just by themselves. Even Father seems happy as they sit by the fire roasting their dinner.

But that night, Mamma begins to cough. She calls Minuk to bring her water. She says she hurts all over. Of course, they had been on the trail a long time, and perhaps she aches from walking deep in the snow. A cough is an ordinary thing.

But Mamma isn’t better by morning. And even though Grandma covers her with a big blanket, Mamma still says she is cold. Grandpa makes a fire in the house, but Mamma’s cough has become tight and painful and her face is red with fever. Before long, she doesn’t know anybody, and she cries out and talks wildly in her sleep.

Grandpa had wanted Minuk to work with Miss Danfort so she would learn things to help other people. But Minuk has only learned that nothing can be done about this illness. She sits by Grandpa’s side on the bench and holds his hand.

Mamma thrashes around so wildly that she’s in danger falling off the bench, so they move her in caribou robes to the floor. They do everything they can to make her comfortable. She dies, with her hair all tangled and matted with sweat.

Grandpa goes outside to look for boards to make a grave box for Mamma. Iraluq begins to weep. Maklak, like Minuk, is stony still.

The next day, Grandpa gets sick. And then Iraluq and Auntie Naya. They lay on the ground and cry out for more water. They cough and choke, and when Minuk thumps their chests with two fingers, she hears nothing. But when she puts her ear down, she can hear the crackling noise of ragged breathing.

Auntie Naya dies in a few days, but Grandpa and Iraluq live longer. They see such terrible things in their sleep, and they cry out in horror. Minuk’s glad when they fall silent.

Taulan pulls them out of the house by the feet, and puts their bodies under the sled rack. Then, Auntie Nanagak and Auntie Kakgar begin to cough, and then Maklak begins. One by one, the others get sick and die. Grandma, Father, and all the aunties, and then Taulan as well. Only Uncle Aparuk, Maklak, Panruk, and Minuk are still alive.

And then, Uncle Aparuk gets sick. He’s so noisy and talkative in his fever that they hardly recognize him. He laughs and stares wildly at the wall, and tells them one story after another from his childhood. Why couldn’t he have talked like this before? Uncle Aparuk and Maklak are so thin that their skin seems shriveled on their faces and arms. Minuk and Panruk go from one to the other, spooning fish broth down their throats, trying to keep them warm, keep water down, and wiping their faces when they run with sweat.

Then, Panruk gets sick, and Minuk takes care of her, too. She’s almost better when Minuk starts to cough and feels pain in her bones that seem impossible to bear. No one in their family told him how bad it hurt. Her skin aches, and now Minuk knows why they died so quickly. It was because they hurt so badly that they wanted to die.

When Minuk comes to, Maklak is taking care of her. He has gotten better. The house is quiet except for the crackle of wood in the fire pit. Who was cooking? Minuk lifts herself up to look around the room. There is Uncle Aparuk on a bench by the door. When Minuk asks where Panruk is, Maklak doesn’t look at her or say anything.

It’s impossible to believe that that room is so quiet. There’s no singing or talking or working, no stories, no sounds of sewing or cooking or carving or eating. No sounds of illness or fever. Just the popping of the fire.

Minuk asks if it is just him, her, and Uncle Aparuk left? Maklak says that Uncle Aparuk is dead. Maklak just couldn’t move him out of the house.

Maklak is weak and Minuk is exhausted, but they must move his body anyway. It is their belief that dead cannot stay inside the house with the living. Together, they pull Uncle Aparuk’s body out and under the sled rack with the others. They cover them all with the seal skin tarp.

Minuk tries to remember their faces, but she can see nothing, just the mound under the sled rack. She can’t even build grave boxes for them, and she can’t flex their knees and put them in the proper position. She doesn’t know what will happen to their spirits or name souls, but she’s too tired to think of what she has to do.

When they get back in the house, Minuk sleeps for a long time, maybe days. She wakes only when Maklak makes her drink water and spoons fish broth into her mouth. He wipes Minuk’s face the way he saw Panruk and her do for the others.

One morning, Minuk wakes and feels stronger. Her eyes are clear and she can see across the room. Maklak is by her bench, sleeping on the floor, his body rolled into a ball the way he slept when he was a baby. He had brought both dogs into the house, and they look at Minuk and thump their tails when she sits up. Grandma’s lamp burns on her bench, and clothes and tools are scattered. The pot Maklak was cooking in is crusted with grease.

Just then, Maklak sits up and begs her to stay awake. Nodding her head, Minuk says she will stay awake. She’s better. Maklak says he brought the dogs in to keep him company. It was too lonesome. Minuk compliments her little brother for taking such good care of her. But the praise doesn’t make him look proud.

Maklak gets up to get Minuk bite to eat. He brings over dried fish he cut into little pieces and puts seal oil on it. Then, he goes outside with a wooden bucket and brings it back with snow to fill the kettle. Minuk’s legs are not too shaky as she squats by the fire to blow on it to make the flames brighter. But blowing is hard.

Maklak has brought in a pile of wood to keep the fire going. She looks at him with gratitude. They all thought he was just a baby, but he kept the fire going to make broth, he chopped the fish, he brought seal oil from the cache, and he kept the lamp burning. And he’s barely five years old.

Even though she’s tired, Minuk finishes cleaning up. She washes herself and even her hair. Every day, Minuk grows stronger. She cleans the house and folds the clothing. She scrubs the pot with sand and puts away Grandma’s sewing. But the whole time, her throat aches as she thinks about her family under the sled rack. It is her responsibility to see that things are done correctly.

Minuk tells her brother that they must go to Mellgar’s camp to get help with the grave boxes as soon as she is strong enough. The thought of Mellgar makes Maklak feel better.

When the day comes that Minuk is well enough, they put on their heaviest winter clothes and put the harnesses on the dogs. They put enough food for two days in a bag in case they get lost and Minuk grabs some blackfish for the dogs. Minuk puts Maklak in the sled so he doesn’t have to run alongside her.

They drive away with their eyes straight ahead, not turning to look at the mound under the sled rack. But at the last minute, they both turn to look as if they cannot help it. And just then, Minuk sees her family. Grandma is waving in front of the ena. Maklak is little, peeking out of Mamma’s parka. Mamma and the aunties have their arms around each other. The boys laugh and shove each other. Father and Uncle Aparuk are quiet, smoking their pipes, watching, and Grandpa has a kind look on his face. And Panruk is in the front, smiling goodbye.

Minuk feels a stab of pain and she puts her foot on the brake to stop the sled. She bends over the handlebars, unable to move for a minute. Maklak keeps his eyes straight ahead and shakes the sled with an impatient jerk. It’s time to keep going.

They travel all day over the trail that was blown free of deep snow. It’s easy going, but it’s very cold. The dogs have no trouble pulling the sled because they had been fed by Maklak while everyone was sick. But Minuk tires so easily that she has to stop them often.

Late in the evening, when the full moon is high overhead, they reach Mellgar’s camp. There is no smoke coming from the house and no people moving about. Minuk knows what she’ll see. When she peeks her head inside the house, she can see them all lying dead on the benches and by the floor. By the door is Mellgar’s body. His auntie’s body is with him.

Minuk climbs on top of the house and knocks in the poles that hold the roof the way the elders told her they had done long ago during the smallpox epidemic. The sod around the poles and the grass and snow falls on top of the people in the house while tears run down Minuk’s face and freeze her eyelashes.

Maklak is sorry his friend Mellgar is gone, so he stays in the sled with his head down and doesn’t watch Minuk. Minuk knows they must go back to camp and bury their family, too. There’s no one to help with the grave boxes. But Maklak says he doesn’t want to go back to camp. He wants to go home.

They spend their night in the cache, and by morning, the cold weather has broken. They feed the dogs and take some fish from the cache, and proceed to go back towards their village. But by afternoon it begins to snow again. The wet snow makes overflow on the creeks, so they have to be careful not to get wet or they’ll freeze their feet. They take their time crossing creeks and lakes and don’t take chances. Minuk walks in front of the dogs to break the trail because the snow is so deep.

At night, Minuk makes the snow house the way Grandpa showed them, and they put Grandma’s oil lamp inside so they’re as warm as they can be. They only travel part of the day because they don’t really want to go back to the village. They don’t really want to begin a life in their house without their family, and they don’t want to see the men’s house without Grandpa, their father, Uncle Aparuk, Iralaq, Taulan, and Mellgar. While they struggle through the deep snow, they don’t have to think about the things that happened and they don’t have to look at all the ways their lives would be different.

 

Going On

They can see the light in the Hoffs’ house when they come around the bend in the river. Maklak and Minuk stop to stare at the school. They can’t seem to decide what to do next. The village dogs are barking, and in a few minutes Teksik comes out of her ena. She screams a little when she sees us. She strokes Maklak’s face and cries with them.

Maklak and Minuk tell Teksik that the rest of their family and Mellgar’s family are dead. Teksik’s husband and some other men come from the qasgiq and take the sled and dogs away. Teksik gives them fish and boiled water for tea while they tell her what happened.

Teksik is happy that Minuk didn’t die. The glad way Teksik looks at Minuk reminds her of the way Mamma smiled sometimes, and that makes Minuk want to cry. Maklak falls asleep before he’s had anything to eat. He must have been very tired.

Teksik says that after they left, the influenza epidemic struck the village. Most of them have died. Everyone thought that maybe Mellgar and Minuk’s families had escaped because they left the village early. All the babies in the village are gone. Even Cakayak’s baby brother with the spiky hair and Teksik’s baby girl. And many, many old people. Two boys in the school died, and Miss Danfort is also very sick.

Kasruq, the village orphan, is still alive. He came to Teksik’s to say that he and Teksik’s husband will go to Minuk’s camp to bury their family. Minuk knows that Kasruq will be the one to ask for her now. When he comes back from the camp, he says nothing about what he found, but he brings all of Minuk’s mother’s clothes and all the other things Minuk had put in bags. He looks at her sympathetically to show her that he’s sorry for her loss. Minuk knows that he once lost everyone as well.

The spring leaves are starting to peek out, and the water in the river is running free of ice before Miss Danfort is on her feet again. The soldiers at St. Michael are sent along the river to make coffins and bury the dead. In all eight villages above Minuk’s village, only sixty people are left alive. Below Minuk’s village, it’s much the same.

No one has been able to hunt or fish during the epidemic, so the soldiers bring food to the survivors: pilot bread, corned beef, bacon and beans, canned milk, sugar, and tea. Minuk’s village eats nothing but white people’s food all spring.

The Hoffs are getting ready to move into another village closer to the mouth of the river. They were not successful in our part of the country, and after Helper Jack’s death, they have no heart to keep trying. They want to go to a bigger place, since our village is now so small.

Mrs. Hoff said that Mr. Hoff didn’t know whether they should leave or go. He stood the Bible up on its spine and let it fall over and open by itself. It landed on a page that read, “a King of Assyria turned back, and stayed not there in the land.” So, they decided that meant they should leave the village. Minuk thinks it’s like the way a shaman would see what spirits want to do by looking at the insides of a fish. But Mr. Hoff would have said that was a heathen superstition.

Mr. Hoff gives them a copy of the picture he took of all the village women the night of the Mask Dance. They can hardly bear to look at it, with all the laughing and happy faces now gone. Three of the boys at school had shown themselves to be very likely helpers, so they’re going with the Hoffs. The rest will go back to their villages. Miss Oakes is going to a Bethel school to teach. Miss Danfort is going back to Maryland to try to get her strength back.

Before she leaves, Miss Danfort tells Minuk that she wants her to come with her. Minuk’s clever, and not only at learning languages. She learns everything very quickly. Minuk should go to school, and Miss Danfort is willing to pay to send Minuk to the same school she went to.

Minuk imagines going to Maryland. She’d see the telephone and the bicycle and wear high-buttoned shoes. Would she have to wear corsets? There’d be steamboats and trains, cows and pigs, and houses crowded with things. For a minute, it sounds wonderful to be in a place without sickness or sadness or memories or hunger. Then, she laughs. How could she leave? There’s so much to do at home.

All the girls and women who were left in the village have been very busy, sewing for those whose mothers or aunties or Grandma’s had died. They’ve been weaving the grass bags and mats and baskets for summer fishing. They had to put their heads together to try to remember how to do the things that needed to be done. They wish they had all listened harder and learned more.

But the village is also surprised to see how those who had been quiet and unassuming before the sickness stepped forward. Teksik’s husband is often the one who stands in the men’s house and talks to everyone about what they must do. He says that the elders used to say that the smallpox epidemic was terrible, and those who were left had to carry on and show the Yup’ik ways to the young. Now, they must do the same. When he talks, Minuk can see Grandpa sitting on one of the benches, nodding his head in agreement. She can feel how he’d smile and praise everyone and would expect them never to be discouraged.

So of course, Minuk cannot go to Maryland with Miss Danfort. She must stay here, and be a good woman.

 

Then and Now: Yup’ik, Alaska

Discusses a girl’s life in Alaska in the 1890s in a Yup’ik tribe. Topics include:

  • Yup’ik are a part of a larger family of Eskimo cultures that stretch from Siberia to Greenland
  • Where Minuk’s people lived in the forest country of western Alaska
  • How the village would’ve used all the plants and animals available throughout the changing seasons
  • Temperate summers and freezing winters (sometimes colder than -50° Fahrenheit) forced them to wear specialized clothing
  • Women made all clothing, and they were so skilled their stitches were nearly invisible—it would take until girls were adults before they mastered the art of sewing
  • In the late 1700s, European explorers came to Alaska bringing deadly diseases
    • The first smallpox epidemic hit in 1838, and killed more than half the Yup’ik along the Kuskokwim River
    • Continuing waves of influenza, measles, and smallpox spread and wiped out entire families and villages
  • By 1910, the Kuskokwim Yup’ik had reduced from about 4,000 to 500
    • Villages were abandoned and traditions were lost
  • Missionaries urged Yup’ik to become Christian and adopt American medicine, education, dress, food, and manners
  • Now, the Yup’ik population has grown again
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