Minuk: Ashes in the Pathway

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.