Minuk: Ashes in the Pathway

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.