| Mary TallMountain, Koyukon Athabascan, was born in 1918 in Nulato, Territory of Alaska, and now lives in San Francisco. Her book of poems, There Is No Word for Goodbye, was published in 1982 by the Blue Cloud Quarterly Press. It was awarded a Pushcart Prize in 1982-83. Her stories and poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Calyx, and Shantih, among other journals, as well as in such anthologies as Earth Power Coming: Short Fiction in Native American Literature, edited by Simon Ortiz (Navajo Community College Press, 1983) and Songs from This Earth on Turtle's Back, edited by Joseph Bruchac (Greenfield Review Press, 1983). |
| You Can Go Home Again: A Sequence, by Mary TallMountain |
| The Yukon River1ay below us like a bent brown arm. Its vast curves snaked back on themselves heavy with silt hurtling south across the face of Alaska. Suddenly the sight was unbearable. I closed my eyes. There it was again, that sound I had been hearing for fifty years. At last I knew what it was. The river was speaking to me. |
| The bushplane hovered, careened, tilted sidewise and down, rattling fiercely. Dizzy, I looked across the pilot's hands and saw Nulato. Its roofs crouched shining in a long bend of the river. The little two-seater growled and bounced past the whitewashed crosses of Graveyard Hill. Everything dimmed before my quick tears. I thought of the day in 1924 when I had left Nulato. Again I heard the hoarse cry of the steamboat whistle, the shouts of the men guiding the Teddy T into the current. The familiar faces on the riverbank grew smaller. The huddled cabins with their chalk-white caribou antlers faded into the distance. Finally it was all hidden, and there was nothing but the river and the land and the great cloud shadows racing. |
Like the shadows, it was gone now. All except these rare quick clips of vision. Yet there was a knowledge in me that I had been close to this certain earth in another life, far beyond childhood, an existence as old as the river. Through enormous stretches of time the Athabascan-speaking Indians of the Yukon had been nomads. They hunted and fished in the mountains and marshes of the Kaiyuh, west of Fairbanks, near where the brown arm of the Yukon elbows southwest to pour its silt into Norton Sound. It had been a good life for the natives, that ancient nomadic life.
My scenario reads this way:
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| One day two natives were fishing the river close to the bank downriver near Kaltag. Hoh, one said. "What's that?" It was a piece of wood, floating. They scooped it up and stared at it. The flesh was fresh and white. How could a spruce tree break into pieces when it was young and healthy, they wondered. Look at the rough lines all along the heavier side. Maybe a bear. No, couldn't be. Those sure weren't tooth marks. Back at the fishcamp, they hung it where everybody could see it and wonder. Although they didn't know it then, the chip had been hewed for a fire by the axe of a white man. |
| Thus in the mid-1800s, Russians came down across the Diomedes and inland along the crooked brown arm. When they discovered the natives and found profit in trading furs, they build a redoubt. More Russians came, married native women, and built a kashim, a long log roundhouse where many families could live, sheltered against the violent sub-Arctic winters. |
| Another kind of violence came later when the redoubt was attacked from the north by Koyukuk Indians. The kashim was burned, and the people died within it. It was the beginning of the end of Russian trading at Nulato. The presence of traders had brought the nomads drifting in to live where they could barter. A cluster of log cabins had risen against the skyline of fir and spruce. They named it Nulato, "the place where we are tied together." |
Today Nulato is one of three weathered villages collectively called the Koyukon, in honor of the nearby merging of the Koyukuk and Yukon Rivers. The people are called the Koyukon Band. They share the river, the language, and the past. They are so remote from the modern culture of cities that Anglos call them "Strangers of the North." That is not a misnomer.
After fifty years I was returning to this aboriginal and reticent people. |
| After the Russians departed, Jesuit missionaries came to the Yukon. The eminent sociolinguist, Father Julius Jette, built a church and school, and the people learned to read and write English. Catechism was taught by the Sisters of St. Anne. The people concealed their medicine men and kept age-old beliefs, placating the "being who has no name," at the same time attending rituals of the Catholic liturgy. |
| In the twenties, the airplane diminished Alaska's immensities. Now, the journey from San Francisco to Nulato takes little more than a day and by 727 Jet to Anchorage, bushplane across the immense interior, and a smaller bushplane into the village. However, air travel is not an unmitigated blessing. Frequently, the natives charter a flight to buy liquor from a bootlegger and bring back a planeload. The violent oil conquest brought a reckless breed of people, and among them drug pushers, who penetrated Koyukon. Death and addiction followed the new availability of liquor and drugs. The list of drownings, murders, and suicides is appalling. |
| Family life has been transformed, but the women try to keep the old customs. They are remarkably deft. For ceremonies such as Stick Dance they make beautiful garments beaded with Alaskan flowers, rich scarlet fireweed, delicate bluebell, orange paintbrush. As a child I watched Mary Joe beading by kerosene lamplight, and the brilliant gleam of beads still stirs in my brain the echo of soft woman-talk. Before it fell into tatters I treasured a little parka of fawnskin trimmed with beaver and wolverine furs from the animals she had trapped. A pair of mittens of black velvet was attached, and I remember each detail of the tightly sewn beads and how her hands moved against the velvet. |
| Mary Joe Demoski was Athabascan and Russian, and the soldier Clem Stroupe was my Irish and Scots father. They had ten years together two children. The U.S. Army and the Catholic church would not let them marry. Mary Joe developed tuberculosis, as rampant and fatal as a plague. Doctor Randle ordered bed rest, and his wife Agnes took care of my little brother, Billy, and me. We were only two and three years old when we were told the Randles wanted us to be their children. Adoption of native children by Anglos was rare. Angrily, the village disputed the adoption, and the Anglos censured it. Relationships were embittered. Trying to yield to both factions, the village council said, "Girl go Outside with white doctor. Mary Joe keep Billy. Later he hunt and fish with his Uncle." The separation would be the first of a series of calamities afflicting me during the coming years. |
| Billy and I didn't think about the coming years. We were as free and happy as the storybook children Agnes introduced to us. Fierce winds growled at the windowpanes as we tumbled off the attic trapeze. When minus-50° weather subsided, we rode behind Uncle's curly-tailed dogs, our noses buried in the frostproof wolverine ruffs of our parkas, slitting our eyes against the spray of sleet thrown by the scurrying paws of the .malemutes. Around us always was the infinitely various land. We never imagined such joy would end. It was inevitable. |
| After my departure from Nulato, Billy went home to Mary Joe, and before she died he harbored the illness that would end his life at seventeen |
| We wrote to each other. Aunt had a big family. When hunting was poor, their life was hard. Some days he and Uncle trapped all day with only bread and tea to keep them going. Growing up with our cousins, he was a happy boy, in adversity as well as plenty. Reading was Billy's chief delight. Agnes had begun teaching us to read in primers, and Mary Joe took over from there. Letters from Billy and Mary Joe were my only Consolation. |
| Being ripped out of my childhood had devastated me, and the devastation began in Oregon. I refused to go to school because my schoolmates mocked my Indianness. I hid away in closets and bit my hands in mute rage. The Randles took me back to Alaska, where Doctor was assigned to Unalaska on the Aleutians. The beautiful country lured me into a deep sense of the earth, its touch, smell, its spirit. The treeless volcanic islands were ringed by jutting mountains. Hidden meadows in the back country were lush with wild orchis, iris, violets. At ten I wrote my first stqry, about two polar bears I had seen in the Seattle Zoo. Child Life printed it. Discipline came into my days, and at Agnes's urging I wrote regularly in a diary .My entries were always stories about people or about some simple philosophical discovery. That was the probable catalyst of the journal-keeping class I teach as part of spiritual search, a tool for personal growth and an asset for writers. My boxes of journals are piled high, each a chunk of my fragmented history. |
| Agnes was a teacher. My education lasted twelve hours a day. There was a lyric excellence in her that nurtured my early fascination with poems and stories. Literarily, I grew up with Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats; Dickens, Trollope, the Bronte sisters. A piercing memory returns. At Unalaska, Agnes and I walked along the narrow pebbled beach at night reciting poems to each other. Especially I loved Wordsworth. |
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair. |
We watched the moon swimming in a sea of stars. We did not suspect how swiftly our brief respite from reality would pass.
For at that early age, my life was dreadfully harmed. Betrayal by a trusted friend nearly destroyed my spirit, and I arrived too soon at the edge of a turbulent maturity .The story is familiar in these times. In the1920s no child dared to protest. I had turned twelve, and my blossoming creativity was crushed to fragments. Nothing came to me to write or think, beyond the anxiety of my days and nights. |
| Doctor was transferred to another hospital at Dillingham, just off the Bering Sea. A subtle beauty was hidden among the stunted trees and gentle mosses of a land apparently barren. In the two years we were there I tried to write a novel, Tundra Country. It was silly and premature, and I knew it, but I dreamed I would write a real novel some day. The story died ignominiously with other debris when we left the Territory. |
| I was fourteen then. Outside, I started high school, and my worry was relieved when I was able to cope with peers and make friends. I joined the glee club, and the old sense stirred again toward creation of beauty. It was short-lived. After my graduation at eighteen, Doctor died of a worn-out heart. Not long afterward I married Da1 Roberts. In 1945 Agnes came down with Parkinson's and diabetes, and became a walking ghost. She went to the Willamette River and walked her little fleshless body out into the water. In that year my second marriage failed, and I left the Northwest. In Reno I learned to be a legal secretary, as an apprentice working on divorces. |
| Strangely, I never got my own divorce. It seemed safer to have a husband somewhere in the background. I met Reuel Lynch, a jazz musician. He was Catholic, and before I realized, I was studying his faith. I found that Mary Joe had had her children baptized at birth. My careless life began to change. This discovery led me to an intensive, continuing study of Catholicism. But my destructive behavior had not really begun. A little later I went to San Francisco, where I worked in law offices. Living alone, I started on the road of the silent, secret drinker. |
| Calamities that had begun so early I could scarcely remember their details, that had buried themselves so deeply that healing would take years of therapy, slowly and insidiously worked their aftermath. Therapy was hush-hush in those days. I kept on working, in a conservative, money-oriented business world. My private life was a harsh and painful rebellion. I began to drink, first socially and then compulsively, secretly. I left jobs without reason and while on a job was entirely undependable. Into my forties I stumbled along, my work suffering; but then the hideous hangovers took hold, blackouts added to my guilt, and I had to resort to temporary agencies. Alcoholism had seized me completely. My behavior sloped into periods of heavy depression. |
| One day I went out in a haze to the corner for my morning stinger at the Brown Dog Bar, and I suddenly realized everything was darker than usual. Why was traffic heavy? Why was it all going west? It looked more like 5:00 P.M. than the usual 9:00 A.M. Then I knew. It was evening, and I didn't know where the day had gone. Of course I had no job to go to. My latest agency had found out. Disgusted, I went back to the apartment and took a good look at myself and my situation. It was then that I made up my mind to quit drinking, cold turkey. No tapering off would do it. I suffered all the physical and mental agonies there were in the book. I tried to take the days one at a time. I sweated out the insomniac nights when I would formerly have been at some local bar. The nights were the worst, but they gave me the blessed time of peace to think and to bolster up my firm intention to make a substantially useful life. And it worked. |
| Long-ignored stresses had done their work constructively. I had dreamed up a public stenography business and was building a comfortable if not lavish living. I thought I had beaten it at last. The energy of building something, working free, for myself, gave me a tremendous boost. However, I had forgotten the series of calamities. Resentment, frustra- tion, anger hidden for years exploded first in one radical cancer and ten years later in a second. I had inherited a strong survival instinct from tender my staunch mother and grandmother. Last year I came out of my latest surgical battle with a deep sense of new life and a surging spirit. |
| Shyly, tentatively, I had begun in the mid-l960s to make short poems. Small, but real. In 1962 the Friars Press editor, Franciscan Simon Scanlon, started printing them. Later he printed my stories. He still publishes my work. If he had not valued my ability, I might never have searched for help. I found a friend and tutor, Paula Gunn Allen, then teaching Indian Studies at San Francisco State University. She honed my unskilled talent into the great gift of wordsmithing. Together we worked for a year and a half. Every Tuesday night I took a week's writing to her, listened to her read it, then took it home and rewrote. Sometimes I worked a furious fifteen hours a day. She critiqued and guided in her gentle, perceptive way. |
| It became clear to me that this ability hadn't been given solely for my pleasure, and that I had an obligation to myself and my peers to use it constructively to rebuild, perhaps, some part of the world I live in. Paula and I never spoke these thoughts. They were conveyed to me in some subtle manner of our minds. In one of my quick clips of vision, Paula and I are caught changeless, sitting still and rapt, Indian women bound by the enduring thread of a common dream, a powerful purpose. |
| Everything came together, that summer. She told me, "This is all I can give you. The tools are in your hands. Go and write." She went home to Albuquerque, and I revisited Nulato for the first time in fifty years. Afterward I went to her in the desert, and we talked for days about my return to Nulato, dissecting my voluminous notes. When she took me to the airport, she asked, "What are you going to do about your father?" I had abandoned my dream of finding Clem after years of search and misinformation. I believed he was dead. Now I was going to Scottsdale, and Paula had remembered that the last rumor of Clem's where-abouts had placed him very close, in Phoenix. "Okay ," I said. |
| At Scottsdale I attended a Catholic Charismatic Retreat and a healing service. When I reached Clem's name in my prayer, I felt a shuddering shock. Paula's voice came to me, "Find Clem!" I went to the phone booth, and there was his name in the book at the top of the page where I couldn't miss it. Clement C. Stroupe. He had kept his phone unlisted until that year. |
| My dad was eighty-five. I lived with him for two years until his death in 1978. I learned much from him about how to forgive, to sharpen my perceptions of human beings, to love. He helped me erase some of the lingering bitterness, for which there was no room in his gentle and tender world. For hours we talked and wrote together about Alaska. He played his fiddle, the beautiful old hands dancing on the strings as he jigged with joy like a mischievous elf. |
| He told me about his life with Mary Joe, about his visit with her during her last illness, and he gave me her message. She said this: "Tell my girl I always love her. I wanted her to have the best life she could. With me she would catch TB, and there would be nothing for her here. I had a feeling she would be all right." |
| NOVEL IN PROGRESS Lidwynne's family camped on the river four miles north of Nulato. Mamma and Auntie Madeline's heads in bright bandannas bobbed. The glittering crescent blades of their tlaamases slashed straight along the bellies of immense fish. Pink strings of eggs slithered into squat tubs. Salmon dangled in crimson curtains between old silver-grey posts. Thin blue threads floated out of the smoke house. Away toward the meadow stood a row of brown weathered tents. West, where the land lifted toward the hills, bears came in summer to bumble in the bushes for ripe blueberries. When salmon were running, black bears lurnbered down to the water and hooked them out with thick sharp claws. They were small but fast and furious. The elder persons warned the children never to go away from camp alone. Bears might get them. Woodsman might. They called him nik'inli'een. Nobody knew anything about him except he had an animal's head, paws as big as dishpans, teeth like a saw, and he'd carry you off and you'd never be seen again. |
| It was the best part of my life. I was tough as a wet walrus hide. Outdoors most of the time. Some days on the trail and cold, the dogs and I were lost in the black, and my leader Moose always found the right trail no matter how deep buried. Then without warning that year when you were three, and as though a dark curtain dropped between us and reality, the beginning of your Mom's TB, the loss of you children, the animosity that bedeviled that village, slammed into our lives. Even the kids felt the mysterious spirits that hovered among us. The people talked of omens. I looked for meanings in the very shadows. All of it is written relentlessly in my memories. |
TallMountain Journal and Novel in Progress, June 1976
The river flowed past sometimes red, sometimes grey, and now, still getting rid of the glacial loess, was roily and full of silt. It pushed impatiently against the banks. Salmon have been seen at Holy Cross downriver, but still linger below till the river goes down. People are getting whitefish and sheefish. Summer coming on, they are friendly, and everybody laughs, sometimes self-consciously. |
| Across Mukluk Slough, Clem's old radio transmitter tower lies crooked after fifty years' decay, a black and rusty ruin. Cousin Elmer: Shy, beautiful piercing eyes. He mourned about his drinking and angrily said he must stop it and go out to Anchorage and support his wife and little girls. But, he growled, it was so hard to leave Nulato. He didn't see how he could live out there. He said, "When I knew you were coming my heart got tight." He pounded his chest. Sometimes he wept, staring out over the river. |
| Grey clouds brought rain from the north. It is so gentle I walk down to the river. It speaks softly to me. Swallows dive and soar from the mud nests under the eaves of the convent of Our Lady of the Snows. Now about fifteen of them swoop down at once, fly in a perfect oval low above the river, dart to the sky again. |
| Rain drummed on the iron roof all night. The island is closer than I remembered. It is overgrown with alder and willow and now a long sand spit has built over the years. Kids swim there in summer. I had seen it in my mind shadows far away and dusty blue. Mary Joe used to fish behind it. I wonder of she sometimes met Clem there... |
| Tassie Saunders made a picnic for us at Graveyard Hill. The old graves were peaceful in the hot sun. We forged our ways around and around through the scratching brush, reading the carved names on the white crosses, visiting people gone, and felt the loving, kind presences. We ate Spam and graham crackers high above the river beside the Demoski grave houses, and she said long ago, Koyukuk warriors attacked the Russian fort at Kaltag and massacred all but a little boy who escaped on snowshoes. In his old age, he was buried just across the river under a lonely spruce tree. |
| We knocked mosquitoes off each other and talked for several hours in the shadows of swaying rosebushes. In front of us a wild rose in full bloom trembled in the wind. We didn't find Mary Joe's grave. |
| I grieved awhile, then she said, "Your Mom is in there," and tapped a finger against my chest. At last I realized. It didn't matter where my mother was laid. I would have her always, in there. |
| Tassie has the blues. Her husband died last year; this is her first fish season without him. She hasn't been fishing or cut fish. Her mind dwells on death; she rushed to find her baby hawk, fearing he was dead somehow. I can't remember how many deaths she told: drowning of a little girl by two teenage boys; stabbing of an eighteen-year-old girl by an older boy; a man caught in a motor and chewed up by it, his body lost in the river; more stabbings; the death of a boy from sulfa pills with whisky; her grandpa's death by falling with a thud while driving dogs. He hit a hollow and-- "I guess his heart drop down," she adds. Then just a week ago, the GI drowned near Galena, found by my cousin Freddie Ben while setting nets 100 miles south at Kaltag, the GI swollen to the size of a log. All this within the space of just a few months. |
| Cousin Edna had a potlatch and brought out a skin scraper my Mom had used until her death; my hrandpa had made it. The handle was a warm smooth brown wood, silky with years of use. I held it in my hand and felt it. I knew it was designed exactly to her grip, my mother. She had used it, and now my hand held it. The only article I have touched that she used. |
| It didn't occur to Edna to offer it to me, though she must have seen the longing in my face. And I would not ask for it. I said secretly: Let it stay here. It belongs here and it will be here when I have joined Mom. I have far more than a scraper. I have her, I have Mom, her blood and her spirit. |
| I am immensely weary. Due to the constant daylight of the time of the Midnight Sun we go to bed at 2 or 2:30 in the morning, no earlier, and are up nevertheless by 7:00 A.M. So many people, so much talk, so many conflicting stories. My brain is exhausted. |
| Their language is atrocious. They talk very fast. Each has terrible discrepancies. And I suspect lies, to mollify me, because they know I'm searching for Mom and Billy's graves. They peer out the windows of the cabins. Nothing is hidden. (The Honey Bucket is the greatest leveler in the world!) The only relaxed people appear to be the Anglo teachers. The natives and their kids are easily hyped. It's culture shock. |
| Paula and Sister Anne Eveline say I've idealized the people too much. I agree. They aren't poor; they have too much, and they suffer from it. They drink and lie and steal, and they have lost my mother's grave. Cannot write, need aloneness, have got these notes together with tremendous difficulty. Weariness, disillusion, communication breakdowns. I think they resent my staying with Sister Anne. And probably they're saying that I'm a white woman. |
| Now I feel that I have done some strange unknown thing I came here to do and it's done and I must go on. A gale is blowing and the iver is filled with whitecaps. The trees back by the playfield are boiling with wind, and the three spruce trees by the greenhouse are bent nearly double by the lashing wind. Water dances on the tops of the brilliant blue oil-drums. Rows of young cabbages inside the fenced convent garden are whipping tender new leves. Hunched-over people hurry by on the river road. I hear the wind mourning where the swallows nest; and I remember the sound. |
| Mosquitoes are so sluggish they cloak our shoulders and heads. The river is like glass and there is no wind. The people look at me with eyes of the past. They watch every move of my hands on the china, the fork, the food. The rain is starting (the mosquitoes knew it would) and there is no sound but a dog far off stirring his mates into a wild wail in the half-night. |
| The cold pierces the walls, and the heat from the brittle iron stove does not last. The lovely chime of Father Baud's handwrought grandfather clock doesn't overcome the howling gale. The flung velvet of the island can't outweigh the dirt that blows in the road. The spirits in the graveyard can't show me where my mother lies, and I will not let them persuade me to return here. But I know who I am. Marginal person, misfit, mutant; nevertheless I am of this country, these people. I have used their strengths. I have wrestled to the earth their weaknesses that have echoed in me. |
| My roots are here, I feel them deep in my memories, in the hidden spaces of my blood. It doesn't matter where I live; I will see the rounded cabins set together. I will see the hill where my mother lies clean and shining under the roots of this ground. |
| Across the river a streak of red dirt turns copper all along the bank of the island, and the river burns with the lowering sun in bronze flames. A seagull wheels above, looking for salmon. I will fly out over Graveyard Hill at morning on one of Harold's bushplanes. |
| I recall with startling clarity and longing every detail of the land, the river, the people. I know now why my mother wanted to let me leave them. It was contained in her message to me. I understood; sometimes I almost agree with her. Yet Alaska mesmerizes my spirit, and I finger the thoughts like beads of prayer. I still feel the crush of the lost bed of wild violets in the Aleutian hills where one day I flung myself down in a rapture, knowing who I was, what the wild violets meant. Alaska is my talisman, my strength, my spirit's home. Despite loss and disillusion, I count myself rich, fertile, and magical. I tell you now. You can go home again. |
From I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers edited by Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright 1987 by the University of Nebraska Press. |
| Credit is due to Eliza Jones, linguist of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, for review and assistance in the use of the Athabascan language. |