In the Field. Prof. George Gmelch
for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s (ADF&G) Subsistence Division, which was cosponsoring the study.
There was much to learn in a short time. At the end of the third day, I wrote in my journal, “It is very, very interesting but I’m exhausted from trying to absorb all this new information; and I still haven’t gotten used to the long days. It’s light well after 10 PM, making it hard to sleep.” On my last day in Anchorage, I was taken to the Park Service’s warehouse to assemble gear for the field: Coleman stove, pots and pans, sleeping bag, dried foods, topographical maps, a shotgun (for protection from bears), and a bulky Zodiac inflatable boat with outboard engine, which I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to use, much less get onto an airplane.
As part of my final orientation, Schoenberg lectured me on the danger of bears and how to deal with them: wear bells, carry a whistle, and make lots of noise so they can hear you coming. “Always carry a gun outdoors and,” he warned, “keep it beside you at night. If you encounter a bear, stand tall and never run. Running provokes a chase instinct. If attacked, curl up in a ball and play dead. Whatever you do, don’t move.” Schoenberg drove home the seriousness of his lesson with a story of a young woman geologist who was attacked by a brown grizzly bear in the Brooks Range. She had played dead while the bear gnawed on her arms. “She lost both arms but she saved her life,” Schoenberg declared. I wondered if he really had needed to tell me that story.
MISTAKEN IDENTITY
With four bags of gear in tow, plus a Zodiac and outboard engine, and a little unnerved by all the bear talk, I boarded an Alaskan Airlines flight for Yakutat, the only settlement on a three hundred–mile stretch of southeastern Alaskan coastline. I was to spend a week there, getting acquainted with some of the Tlingit people before being flown by bush plane fifty miles down the coast to Dry Bay. I would also meet Tlingit elders to explain my research and obtain their approval.
Before the gathering took place, I began to wonder what was happening. People in Yakutat were decidedly cool. Few passersby returned my greetings. In one case, while walking along the dirt road from the village to the pier, a man walking toward me swung over to the other side of the road about thirty yards before we passed. When I passed, he turned his head and looked off into the distance. When I entered Flo’s, the local café, the patrons lowered their voices. And when new customers came in, they took the tables farthest from mine. “Damn,” I thought, “what have I done?” Mentally, I reviewed my first few days in the village, searching for anything that might explain this icy reception. I remembered jotting down some notes to myself while sitting in the café a couple of days before, mainly a list of things I needed to do. Perhaps that had aroused suspicion. I thought about how it might have been perceived: an unknown man walking around the village at all times of the day, then taking notes in the café.
I was no stranger to this situation. I’d been the object of suspicion before, first as a graduate student in the Mexican highlands in an anthropology field-training program. Sharon and I had arrived in the village of San Antonio Acuamanala in the middle of a fiesta, and a crowd had gathered, watching curiously as we unloaded our gear. During the next few days, we were asked many questions about our religion. It seemed to take a long time before people warmed up to us and talked willingly. Later, we learned from Cecilia Sanchez, the village nurse, that a week before our arrival a small plane had flown over the village, dropping leaflets promoting Seventh Day Adventism. In this remote Catholic village, we had been mistaken for Protestant missionaries. It is common for locals, especially in remote places, to slot strangers into one of the few cognitive categories they have for outsiders, such as missionary or government official.
Who was I being mistaken for? The next morning I went to the U.S. Forest Service office to get some aerial photographs of Dry Bay. As soon as I explained who I was and what I wanted, the woman at the desk burst out laughing. “Everyone thinks you’re with the IRS,” she explained. “They think you’re here looking for unreported fishing income!”
MEETING THE VILLAGE COUNCIL
When the village council meeting took place, John Chapman, the head of Glacier Bay National Park, was there to introduce me. Park Service officials had already had one meeting with the council, but the Tlingit elders had not yet met “the researcher.” I explained to them how I would go about doing the assignment. Like most anthropologists, I would live among the people in Dry Bay and observe and participate in the activities that took place there; I would write up my observations and the things people told me in field notes that would later be used to write a “report.” In addition to participant observation, I said, I planned to survey and complete an inventory of all summer fish camps. A Tlingit elder spoke and suggested that Native fishermen might be less than eager to participate in the study. I had already been told about the tension and a few nasty incidents between non-Native and Tlingit fishermen, and I could appreciate his skepticism that an outsider (and a non-Native) could understand the Tlingit point of view.
The Tlingit, the largest and best-known of the southeastern Alaska Native cultures, have traditionally been a maritime people, living by fishing, hunting, and gathering shellfish in the tidal zone. By the time the Russians first made contact with them in 1741, they were one of the most sophisticated of foraging societies in the world, with an elaborate material culture, social organization, and cosmology. To the outside world, the Tlingit are perhaps best known for the “potlatch” and for elaborately carved commemorative and funerary poles (popularly called “totem poles”). Today, they live in twenty-five villages and towns scattered along four hundred miles of Alaskan coast from Yakutat to Ketchikan. Many still fish and hunt for subsistence, and some are commercial fishermen as well. Others hold wage jobs, and some are college-educated professionals.
Although the village elders seemed cool toward the research, they did give us their approval. Perhaps naïvely, I remained enthusiastic. I was excited by the prospect of working in the Alaskan wilderness and comparing how different people—the Tlingit and non-Natives—fished and used resources. Before leaving Yakutat for my field site, I thought it would be a good idea to try out the Zodiac, especially since two experienced Alaskans were available—Kathryn Cohen, the ADF&G resource specialist, who was in Yakutat to finalize my research plans, and Judy Ramos, a young Tlingit woman who had been hired as my research assistant. Perfect companions for an exploratory trip on the nearby Situk River.
We set off in the early afternoon on a bright and sunny day. But we hadn’t gotten far downstream when the Zodiac’s engine struck a gravel bar, breaking its shear pin and leaving us without propulsion. At first we tried to paddle back upstream, but the current was too swift, so we beached the boat and tried bushwhacking our way upriver through the dense undergrowth, which included thickets of heavily spined Devil’s Club. This didn’t work, forcing us to turn back. Our only alternative then seemed to be to float down the river to the ocean and find a fisherman who could take us back to Yakutat. We had no idea of how long this would take, and not having anticipated any of this misfortune, I had neglected to bring along food or warm clothing. Nor had Kathryn or Judy come prepared, as we had planned to be on the river for only an hour or so. All through that afternoon and evening we floated down the Situk. By midnight—now twelve hours on the river—all of us were hungry and cold, and there was still no sign of the ocean.
In the semidarkness (at 59° north latitude the sky does not get really dark in midsummer), we startled a moose and her calf. They came crashing through the brush along the riverbank, scaring us witless. Not long after that we came to the first of several logjams and, while trying to pull the Zodiac over it, I fell into the river. Not wanting to risk hypothermia, we stopped to make a fire, using gasoline from the outboard engine in order to dry my clothes. All night long we wondered, “Where in the world is the ocean?”
Privately, I beat myself up for having been so ill-prepared. After all, as a Boy Scout, indeed an Eagle Scout, hadn’t I internalized the mantra “Be Prepared”? During the night I also wondered what Judy Ramos’s Tlingit relatives were thinking back in Yakutat when she didn’t return home from going on the river with her new white male supervisor. And I thought often of the warning that Clarence Summers, the Yakutat-based ranger, had given me about being careful and prudent. He liked to say, “Small mistakes that are inconsequential in the lower 48 can be fatal in the north.” Tougher than myself, Kathryn