Racing Toward Recovery. Lew Freedman
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spring camp and fish camp. I spent a lot of time with Nelson Jasper, John’s oldest brother, who was a captain in the National Guard. He was an outgoing guy and he taught me a lot, too. He taught me how to fix small engines and we did some boatbuilding, as well. Nelson and my brother Frank were the best of friends. They did a lot of hunting together and hung out a lot. That was one family that I really appreciated the guidance from, as well as my own.
Those lessons I learned as a boy are still important to me now. I think they rooted me in being independent and not dependent on anything or anybody else. They were teaching me to be able to take care of myself and confident in whatever I did. I have confidence in what I need to do and it came from those times. They also taught me that you had to work for what you needed. They had discipline. There was a sense of responsibility in providing for yourself and the family.
I come back to discipline. My father and Frankie had a lot of discipline. Not just to be able to get up in the morning, but to carry out all of their tasks in the right way. They were adapting to the environment and they took care of the fish and the meat. They took care of everything in providing food for the family.
Part of what I learned was to be respectful of the animals. They were our food, but in a way moose were presenting themselves to us to eat. Also part of the entire experience learning to hunt and to fish was sharing what you got. I was taught to share what you had, what you gather, and what you catch with others who needed food. That’s what we did and that’s what we do now. If we hunt a moose we share the meat. If we catch fish in the nets on the Kuskokwim River, we share the fish. There are always people who need food and there are Elders who fished and hunted for a lifetime who are no longer strong enough to work to get their food. It is our responsibility to make sure they have enough to eat.
That has always been the way of our people going back in time. The majority of the people in Akiak come from people who grew up in the Kuskokwim Mountains or Kilibuck Mountains. Maybe some were from as far away as Denali. When they hunted they covered great distances. They spread through areas like Rohn and Rainy Pass—which are now checkpoints on the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. Going back, my grandfather and great-grandfather were long-distance travelers. They hunted as far away as Nikolai. They were traveling by dog team.
Our Native language is Yupiaq and we continue to speak it, in addition to English. We still speak Yupiaq at home a lot of the time. When I was six years old I started school at the Bureau of Indian Affairs school in Akiak. Our school was grades kindergarten through eighth grade, but we did not have a high school then. It was about 1958 when I started school and there were no high schools in small Alaska Bush villages at that time. If you wanted to continue your education you had to go somewhere else.
When I was fifteen I was shipped out to the Wrangell Institute. That was a Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school in Wrangell, Alaska, in the southeast section of the state. They prepared us to go to either Mount Edgecumbe in Sitka or the Chemewa Indian School in Salem, Oregon. That was one of the hardest things we had to go through, being separated from our families if we wanted a high school education.
Everything about going to Wrangell was different from being in Akiak. It was a boarding school in another part of Alaska hundreds of miles away. We didn’t hunt and fish. We lived with other Alaska Natives. Akiak was a cold, dry climate and Wrangell was a wet, milder climate. When I got there it felt like a prison. I had to go there. My parents had no other options for me other than to send me out. It was a trust obligation of the federal government to educate us and the goal was to assimilate Alaska Natives into the mainstream of United States life. It was about being acculturated. They wanted to do away with our culture and replace it with the everyday culture of the rest of the country. It was a necessary thing to do if you wanted an education. You were taken from your family and sent to this new place. That is why it was so important later to have schools built locally in rural Alaska. You could stay home and still get an education. You could still be with your family.
I was fifteen years old and I had spent my whole life in Akiak. I was in a close family with all of those brothers and sisters and I had to say good-bye to them. I had grown up hunting, fishing, and berry picking and gathering and then I was by myself in Wrangell. Not completely by myself, though, because there were other kids at the school from villages who were just like me, who were in the same situation.
When we got to Wrangell, though, right from the beginning our joke was that we had been sent to prison. This was all to thoroughly prepare us for high school somewhere else. It was the next level of our education. We had a good math teacher and a good language arts teacher. Something else they did at the Wrangell Institute was to show us how to use a telephone. In those days there weren’t any telephones in the Alaska Bush, never mind cell phones. We didn’t have landlines in the Bush. We didn’t really know what a telephone looked like when we first got there.
Learning things was the good part, but there was a lot about being sent to Wrangell that was not much fun. Right away they gave us haircuts and cut our hair short, too. Then they sent us to showers to clean up. In the beginning it was all very unpleasant and a shock to us. We had to march around like soldiers, like little soldiers, divided into age groups and grade groups. We were supposed to march everywhere we went.
The worst thing about being in Wrangell was that we were not with our families. It was a completely different world. You are taken from a loving family with your mother, father, brothers, and sisters, doing things you have always done, to a completely different situation. You lived in a dormitory setting with running water and ate different food that was prepared differently from the way it was at home. We had to stand in line. We had to get haircuts and keep our hair short. The haircut was a big deal. We hated getting our hair cut and I didn’t like the haircut the way it looked.
They also inspected us. You had to get up at a certain time of day and make your bed. There were all these details and orders that we had to follow and if they weren’t just right under the rules we got yelled at. We were yelled at all of the time. They would go, “You!” And it was do this, do that. Go to bed, be quiet. It was a completely different environment from Yup'ik home life. It was different and we didn’t like it. What kept us boys going was that we had each other. We could talk to one another in Yupiaq, so we had our own language. We had each other and that helped us to survive.
Really, from the time we first started school, the United States government, through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, worked to wipe out our culture. At home we spoke Yupiaq, but when I entered elementary school in the BIA school I started learning to speak in English. It was not a bad thing to learn English, but they would not allow us to speak our native language at all. When we were not in the classroom, though, we spoke Yupiaq with our friends. We just kept speaking it when no one was around to tell us not to do it.
The goal was to make us into good little American boys. They had an assimilation process and that’s what they stuck to doing. We had to learn about Dick and Jane and that nuclear family even if our lives were completely different from the lives that Dick and Jane led. They were always clean—they didn’t get dirty from working outside—and they had a nice car. We didn’t have cars in Akiak. The teachers presented this to us as the ideal, the way we should be and the way we should aspire to be.
The same thing continued at the Wrangell Institute for a year. We looked at pictures of Dick and Jane and we knew we didn’t look like that or act like that. I’ll never forget an instructor teaching us what a “curb” was. We didn’t have paved streets in Akiak, never mind sidewalks with a curb. It seemed like a long year. I didn’t really want to be there. It was not something I had expected to do. There was some value in the curriculum. The math skills and working on the English language, I got something out of those. They helped me. That was definitely preparation for secondary education.
But there were also long periods of homesickness. You cried. I was a teenager in 1968. My family didn’t have a telephone in Akiak so I couldn’t talk to them. We never spoke. We communicated by letter only. We were completely cut off except by letter. They were far away. Wrangell was a hard place to be for a lot of kids and we lost out on parenting. They deprived us of our loving parents and our way of life. I missed hunting and fishing. It was different to have to follow all of those rules and regulations in boarding school and having to march around.