Blog Entry #10: Wrapping Things Up

This is the final post for this blog!  All I have to do after this is the final for the class, then I should be ready to graduate from UAF.  It's been a long time coming but the idea of being finished with school is kind of hard to wrap my head around because I've basically been in school full time for the past 19 years, going all the way back to kindergarten.  No school?  Impossible to imagine!  But to the matter at hand.  As of last week, I've finished reading the book we used for this class, Last New Land: Stories of Alaska Past and Present.  I was actually a little wistful as I finished the book.  It isn't necessarily the kind of book I would usually pick up, but I really enjoyed reading it and will keep it on my book shelf.  My dad and his wife are both fascinated with Alaska (they do not live here) and for Christmas I actually am giving him a copy of this book and her Margaret Murie's Two in the Far North, which has an excerpt featured in our book.  So, thanks for the gift ideas, English 350!

Since we finished reading the book for class, this week's readings were just four poems.  I must admit that I would rather read a story than a poem, at least for an English class.  It's not that I dislike poetry- I like it fine- but I don't like dissecting poems for class.  More than once in English classes, I've been told by professors that my interpretation of poems is wrong, and that's kind of discouraging!  While I'm aware that stories can certainly have their fair share of allusions and metaphors and the like, poems seem to have them even more.  Guess I just like the meaning of readings to be straight forward!  Needless to say, the writings that I preferred from this class are stories or excerpts from novels rather than books.  My all time favorite is probably the excerpt from Margaret Murie's book, which I wrote about here.  I think I like it so much because it's written from a different point of view than normal.  Most books from adults are not written from the point of view of a kid, and the delighted, pondering way the narrator interpreted everything she experienced was enjoyable.

There are several things I have learned about Alaskan literature, with two in particular.  The first is that it focuses more on the setting than literature set in other locations.  Alaska was significant in every single piece we read, and I really do not think that's the case in many other literature samples.  For instance, although I do a lot of reading, I can't recall ever reading something set in Indiana or Oregon.  Surely I have read some books set there, but the setting was not so central to the story and therefore forgettable.  The other thing is that there are all different kinds of Alaskans!  That kind of goes without saying, but it was very interesting reading everything and seeing how each character, regardless of their backgrounds and differences, was undoubtedly Alaskan.

 Mother and baby moose in a garden, included because I love moose and think the picture is sweet!  Gardening in Alaska seems to be so much closer to nature than in other locations.  This photo is from AKRealEstateGuide.com and was taken by Valesa Linnean.

Blog Entry #9: Seasons in Alaska

This week's topic is seasons in Alaska.  I live in Fairbanks and it has always seemed to me that we only have two seasons: summer and winter.  The transition between the two is so brief, it reminds me of a Bugs Bunny cartoon where a huge pile of snow just wumps down on a blue summer day and it immediately becomes winter.  Then in the spring, we seem to go from seeing people trudging around in parkas to leaf buds on trees and frolicking in shorts within a week.  Maybe this is because our winters and our summers are both so unusual: the winters are so, so dark and so, so cold, while the surprisingly warm summer days stretch on forever, and this makes our short springs and autumns forgettable.  My own musings aside, the seasons is a subject incorporated into nearly all the pieces in our book, The Last New Land.  It's almost always relevant to the story.  I could probably choose 10 random writings and 9 of them would mention or at least imply the time of year since it's such a huge part of everyday life in Alaska.  For the purposes of this blog post, I chose three essays: two about the spring and one about the summer.  Winter is conspicuously absent, but everyone focuses on winter when they think of Alaska, so I decided to choose something different.

The first piece is an excerpt from Sidney Huntington's book Shadows on the Koyukuk and is called "The Flood."  Shadows on the Koyukuk is one of my favorite books, so I was quite pleased to find it in our book!  The book is about Sidney Huntington's life growing up in rural Alaska and this particular excerpt is set during the spring time around 1930.  Sidney lived in a cabin on the banks of the Yukon River with his father, younger brother, and another man, and break up (when the ice in the river begins to melt) that year caused a huge jam of ice chunks and a flood that destroyed their cabin and food cache, causing them to lose almost everything they owned and had worked so hard for.  Re-reading this piece made me think harder on my idea of Alaska only having two seasons.  Obviously, spring time and break up are a huge deal for people that live close to the land like Sidney Huntington, and a bad break up could be completely devastating to their livelihood and even their survival.  I live far away from any rivers and am pretty safe from roving chunks of ice and flooding, but that is not the case for many people, especially in the past when many set up their homes right by a river.


Photo of the damage break up can cause to homes along the Yukon River!  Taken from an article from Juneau Empire and photo from the Associated Press.

The next piece that made me think is an excerpt called "The Native Villages" from Art Davidson's book In the Wake of the Exxon Valdez.  The writing details the effects of the Exxon Valdez oil spill of March 1989 on a small coastal village called Chenega Bay.  To say the oil spill was devastating for the village is an understatement.  The people in the village depended heavily on the sea not only as a source of food, but to set the rhythm of their everyday lives.  When oil coated everything, there was no food to harvest, and in the process of attempting to do research and clean up, outsiders trampled sites of historical importance to the people in the village.  The oil spill occurred right at the beginning of spring, and instead of rejoicing in the return of fishing season, the people lost one of the most important things to them.  Even the first caught fish of the season, which was usually a cause for celebration, was shipped off to a laboratory to be examined.  While I get excited about spring simply because I'm tired of the snow, want to plant my garden, and want to spend my days outside, many people throughout Alaska (both now and in centuries past) welcome the arrival of spring because it means life has started all over again and they can once more harvest the food that sustains them throughout the year.

The final piece I looked at is Jean Anderson's short story "Skin." This one is a good example of how seasons in Alaska cannot help but be mentioned in stories and other writings.  While this one was less season oriented than the previous two, it is still important.  The story was about an Alaska Native woman who came to Fairbanks to purchase some nice rabbit furs to make a bunting for her soon to be born grandchild and encountered a man she used to know long ago.  The reader learns during the story that the woman is from a small village that apparently was home to many drunk people, and she appears to harbor some fear of drunks.  As she left the store where she purchased the skins, she thought that the drunks "shimmered like mirages" in the heat of the summer day and mentioned that "dry heat rose slowly from the cement like old wind."  I think Anderson chose to set this story in the summer instead of the winter because imagining the heat and bright light makes the drunk people seem all the more realistic and you can practically smell stale liquor and sweat.  It's just not the same in winter!  And after all, Fairbanks can get into the 90s in the summer, so it's easy to imagine the scene that the woman encountered.

Blog Entry #8: Contemporary Alaskan Writers

For this blog post, I will write about three of the modern Alaskan writers with pieces in our Alaska: The Last New Land book and how what they write reflects a modern version of Alaska.

The first author is Kim Rich, who wrote the book Johnny's Girl, an excerpt of which is called "Shattered Dreams" and begins on page 695 of The Last New Land.  The piece is about the Good Friday earthquake that hit southern Alaska in 1964.  I chose this story because my mother was in that earthquake.  Her father was a doctor for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and their family had been moved to Alaska 6 months earlier and settled in Anchorage.  My mother had just turned 11 years old when the earthquake struck.  The experience was so traumatic to her that she mentally blocked out most of what happened.  She and her sister were setting the table for dinner when the earthquake hit and the last thing she remembered was screaming while she watched the kitchen table shake so much that the juice from a bowl of beets spilled and trickled down the table leg.  When I was a little girl, the story of the earthquake utterly fascinated me and I begged her to tell me everything she knew and remembered about it over and over.  I guess I was a weird child because at bedtime I also begged her to tell me all about the Mount Saint Helens eruption and other disasters she experienced!

My own interests in the 1964 earthquake aside, I think this piece of writing is a good example of modern Alaska.  The earthquake devastated Anchorage, Valdez, and other towns in the area, and over a hundred people were killed while many, many buildings were destroyed.  If the earthquake had occurred 500 years earlier, the area would have been much less densely populated and there would not have been any large buildings, only homes of the Alaska Native people.  The earthquake undoubtedly would have terrified them, but it probably would have had much less of an impact on their lives and settlements since they would not have had much in the way of construction that could have been damaged.

 

 Earthquake damage of an Anchorage street.  Photo by the USGS and found on THIS website called Vibration Data.

The second writing is an excerpt from The Man Who Married a Bear by John Straley, which begins on page 702.  This piece is only a couple of pages long and confused me because there is no mention of either marriage or bears, but it is nonetheless a good example of modern Alaska.  It describes modern day Juneau and Anchorage, and states what I have heard many Alaskans complain:  that Anchorage and Juneau are not really Alaskan cities and have more in common with Washington, Oregon, and California than with Alaska.  I do agree that there is more disconnect than normal between these cities and smaller places in Alaska, perhaps because of the large populations, the number of people who are not Alaskans, and simply how metropolitan and commercial driven the two places are.  I am reluctant to call these locations un-Alaskan and think a person's actions and knowledge of Alaska are more indicative of their residence status.  As an example, my husband has lived in Alaska his entire life and grew up in Anchorage, but has never gone camping, fishing, hunting, lived in a dry cabin, gone on a snow machine, and has very little knowledge of Alaskan history or Alaska Native groups.  There are people who have only been here for a couple of months who probably have more of an Alaskan spirit than he does!

The final piece is the poem "Progress" by Karen Randley and is on page 705.  The poem is about the author's return visit to Fairbanks some time after she moved away.  She lived in Fairbanks for six years in the late 1970s.  In the poem, the woman implies that it was very difficult to live in Fairbanks the first time, and she left because she couldn't stand it anymore.  When she returned, Fairbanks has changed so much and was so un-Alaskan that she had to go home early.  I have lived in Fairbanks for 7 years now and must admit that this poem made me bristle up in defensiveness a bit.  The author writes that, "every corner had a shopping mall selling pistachio nuts and gourmet delites from the lower 48."  Aside from that being patently untrue- Fairbanks only has one shopping mall, the teeny tiny Bentley Mall which is more commonly known as "Bentley Hall" because it's so piddly compared to most malls- I just don't think her evaluation of Fairbanks is fair.  How "real Alaskan" of an experience someone has depends so much on what they want and do.  Plus, people have been hauling supplies to Alaska for centuries now since we cannot grow flour, sugar, and the like to sustain ourselves!  Bringing in food and delicacies from outside Alaska is hardly a new practice.

Blog Entry #7: Sharing of Culture

The writing prompt for this week is how different cultures in Alaska coexist and share traditions and values.  This is a very interesting subject to me because I've always been fascinated by anthropology, and it seems unlikely for people of multiple cultures to spend time together without some cultural interchange to occur.

The first thing that came to my mind is the many Alaska Native people who are Christians.  Many religious conversions occurred when Russian Orthodox (and later American) missionaries came to Alaska with the express goal of converting people. This was hardly a gentle process much of the time and in many cases wreaked havoc on traditional cultures with children being separated from parents and sent off to far away schools and forbade to speak their own language.  I cannot help but admit that I consider the presence and impact of the missionaries to have had overall a very negative influence and in general am quite opposed to missionary work anywhere.  It's also hardly an example of two cultures coexisting- more like one culture (the Christian one) steamrolling over the Alaska Native ones.  That being said, I find it unbelievably presumptuous and callous to imply that modern day Alaska Native people who are Christians are in any way taken advantage of by their religion, should not be Christian, or are somehow less Christian because of the painful history of Christianity in Alaska.  I think that Native Alaskan people today who are religious chose it on their own and are probably benefited by the loving community and hopefully the sense of spiritual peace that they get from their belief in Christianity.  This is I think a prime example of how different cultures have shared traditions and values in Alaska.

One of the most beautiful expressions of this sharing to me is the practice of Selaviq, the primarily Yup'ik version of a Russian Orthodox Christmas tradition that is practiced in Western Alaska.  Entire villages get in on the fun of Selaviq.  When night falls, people carry a large star around to different houses in the village and sing songs about the birth of Jesus.  The people in each house then invite the singers in, feed them and give out candy, then join them as they go to the next house.  For more information about Selaviq, check out this article from Alaska Magazine.  It would be foolish to say that the people participating in this now centuries old tradition are oppressed by their religion.  They have taken a Russin Orthodox tradition and made it their own, which I think is magnificent.  Religion aside, Selaviq sounds like a wonderful way to nurture peaceful and loving relationships within the community.

 Celebration of Selaviq in Unalaska.  Photo by PRI's the World and found on Flickr.

For an example from our readings, I immediately thought of the excerpt, "The Changing Times" from Frances Lackey Paul's book Katahnah.  The excerpt is a short one and details how a young married Tlingit couple who are from the same clan seek shelter with the chief of their clan.  In the traditional Tlingit culture, marrying someone from the same clan is taboo.  One must find a person from a different Tlingit clan to marry because it is considered incestuous to marry someone from the same clan.  A person is always the same clan as their mother and being in the same clan as someone does not necessarily mean that they are related genetically.  It is cultural incest rather than biological incest.  However, tradition was that if a couple from the same clan married, they would be put to death.  In the excerpt, the clan chief decides not to put the couple to death.  The chief of another clan argues with him that they should be killed because brothers and sisters should not marry, but the chief replies that the couple has no blood relationship and points out that if they killed the couple, it would bring them huge troubles from the white people.  He says, "Perhaps the law of the white man is better than our law.  We are willing to try the white man's way.  The young people will have a home in my house." (page 660). 

What sparked my interest with this story and why I think of it as an example of cultures mingling is certainly not the chief's line about the white people's laws perhaps being better.  Issues of murdering the couple aside, I would be extremely reluctant to ever say anything like that.  What interested me though is that the chief differentiated between the traditional Tlingit belief of what qualifies as incest and the white people's belief of what qualifies as incest, and that he seemed to believe that the white definition had some legitimacy when arguing with the other chief.  I think this is a prime example of one culture's beliefs infiltrating another.  If he did not really believe the white definition held water at all, he would not have used it as an arguing point and would have considered it ridiculous, like if someone said that it was incestuous for two people with curly hair to marry.

All in all, I find the sharing of cultural beliefs in Alaska to be a fascinating subject.  While I deeply lament the huge loss of culture Alaska Native groups have had to endure, I have a difficult time casting aspersions on adopted beliefs that lead to love and harmony within the community.

Blog Entry #6: Wilderness and Me

Here is another post about the Alaskan wilderness and how I interact with it.  Sad to say, as much as I admire the wilderness here, I do not have much to do with it.  My husband and I live in Fairbanks, a town of about 30,000 people, and it's completely possible to live here without having much interaction with the wilderness if this is how someone chooses to live.  As much as I admire the wilderness and find it beautiful, I am just not very rugged or outdoorsy.  We do like to roam around during the summer and pick blueberries, but that's pretty much it.  When I was a kid, I loved to go camping, and wanted to go as an adult, but then I started reading about bear maulings and chickened out!  I don't even really go hiking over uneven terrain because I'm so clumsy that I end up watching where I'm walking instead of looking at the lovely scenery!

All in all, it's definitely true that I don't interact much with Alaska's wilderness.  However, that does not mean I don't value it or have no interest in it.  I love to read books about Alaska from the warmth and safety of my living room, and am very much in favor of protecting the wilderness and wildlife here.  It seems to me that a lot of people romanticize and underestimate the power of natural Alaska, which is something I do not believe that I am guilty of.  While I find it amazing and beautiful, I know that it is very difficult to eke out an existence in secluded areas and that it can be very dangerous, even for people that do have a great deal of experience with the outdoors.

The fact that I've lived in Alaska for 7 years now probably makes my lack of experience with Alaska's wilderness rather surprising.  There are probably a lot of tourists who have only spent a week or so here that have experienced more than I have!  I chalk it up to: 1) I grew up in a family that greatly valued the indoors.  We moved around a lot, but always lived comfortably in suburbia.  Hiking trips and fishing and hunting were never, ever part of our lives, though I did go camping every year with aunts and uncles until I was about 10.  2) My aforementioned clumsiness and appreciation for comfort.  3)  My husband, who has lived in Alaska his entire life, has just about as much to do with the outdoors as me.  He certainly doesn't dislike it by any means and feels pretty much the same way about it as me, he just hasn't had much experience! 

So, there you have it.  I am basically an indoor creature, but with an appreciation for the outdoors.

 

The place that I mostly view Alaska's wilderness from- the inside of a cozy cabin!  Picture from Trip Advisor and taken by user ctimm1202.

Blog Entry #5: Alaska's Wilderness

When most people think of Alaska, the first thing that comes to mind is probably the great amount of wilderness in this state.  However, people have very different ideas of what qualifies as wilderness and what is and is not worth protecting.

For the people who live in Alaska, I suppose the boundaries of the wilderness depend on the individual.  Of course, there are legal considerations, but aside from that, whether or not a place qualifies as wilderness is more or less up to the person who observes it.  For instance, one person may consider the trails on the University of Alaska campus to be wilderness- after all, there are lots of trees, birds, and other animals there, as well as a natural lake- while others would scoff at this and believe that Denali National Park better meets the qualification of wilderness.  Still others would disregard the park as being wilderness since thousands of people visit every year, take tour buses through the park, camp, and hike around.  Perhaps they would only feel that a place 100 miles from any town and with no humans living nearby is really considered wilderness.  I suppose that I tend to have a more relaxed idea of what constitutes wilderness.  While there’s no danger of being eaten by a bear or starving to death at UAF, it seems pretty outdoorsy to me!  As a decidedly indoorsy person (who nonetheless finds the outdoors beautiful), any place with shelter too far away to run to before being trampled to death by a moose sounds like the wilderness.

Yes, I do believe that Alaskans should protect the wilderness here.  Not just the wilderness, but the environment in general.  On my midterm and in one of our class discussions, I even wrote that taking steps to protect Alaska’s environment (or at least being involved in it in a positive way) is one of my qualifications for what makes a “real” Alaskan.  I fear that if we decided to lift all protections set in place on our wilderness, it would be completely exploited and destroyed.  Natural resources, animals, trees, rivers, and lakes would be ruined.

Cronon’s essay discussed (in great, exhausting, hour plus of reading detail) the danger that arises when people consider themselves to be apart from the wilderness and end up viewing it as an extension of the comforts of civilization and a place to be revered only when it is unspoiled, with no other humanity around.  I do definitely agree that a false dichotomy can be constructed when people have this idea that the only wilderness is places far from human habitation and free of human influence, while disregarding the bits of wilderness that are much closer to home.  For instance, it would be a tragedy if the UAF trails or the forested area behind Creamer’s Migratory Waterfowl Refuge were disregarded and destroyed because they aren’t secluded enough.  At the same time though, I do not feel that setting out to protect the wilderness gets anything into trouble.  Protecting the wilderness is important, we just need to remember to protect the scraps of wilderness that are closer to home and less awe inspiring.

 Wilderness or not?  Creamer's Migratory Wildfowl Refuge in Fairbanks, AK.  Photo from Igougo's Alaska Journal: Road Trip from California to Alaska and taken by member "TwoIdiots"

Blog Entry #4: Hunting in Alaska

For this week's blog post I will explore the concept of natural resources in several excerpts from the book for our class, The Last New Land.  More specifically, I will examine how the resource of hunting wild animals for sport using a guide and a hunter is presented.  This seemed to be an obvious choice since every one of the readings this week dealt with hunting in one way or another!

The first piece is called "The Battle of the Giants" and comes from W. Douglas Burden's book Look to the Wilderness.  Determined to kill the moose with the largest antlers they can find, a guide sets out with a hunter on a multi-day hunting trip during moose mating season.  The pivotal moment occurs when the two men come across a stadium-like sprawl of land where hundreds of moose have congregated, and two huge bull moose fight for the privilege of mating with the females and the position of the dominant male.  The bulls are both aflame with the deep seated need to fight and be victorious over the other, and eventually one of them retreats.  After the truly impressive display, I found myself hoping the men would let the moose go without killing them, but they proceed to shoot one of the gigantic moose because they want his enormous antlers.  I must admit that I was repelled by their actions in killing the moose specifically because of his antlers.  The men seemed to be exactly like the moose- out to prove themselves and dominate another powerful creature.  This is surely an urge that most animals seem to possess, but it is unsettling.  It seems so prideful and shallow to kill a moose based on the size of its antlers and I find it very interesting that some people feel the need to conquer such creatures while others would spare such an impressive animal precisely because of its majesty.

The second piece is titled "Moose: Season of the Painted Leaves" and is excerpted from the book Shadows on the Tundra by Tom Walker.  Once again, the writing is about two men who set out to hunt a moose for sport, but this time it is from the point of view of the guide who has been hired by a man visiting Alaska and determined to bag a moose.  Walker describes the spectrum that the hunters he has guided seem to fall on, ranging from having a true reverence and love of nature-- to the point that one hunter cried when they shot their moose-- to solely being interested in slaughtering a wild animal in a show of swagger.  The says that the hunter he is working with this time falls somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, but after he has shot his moose and they begin to gut it, the hunter takes many photos of the carcass.  He intends to show the photos to people who are opposed to hunting in an attempt to make them think about the origins of all the animals they consume and to maybe get them to consider whether or not they should really consume animals that they could not handle slaughtering themselves.  I found this interesting because this is the very concept that made me decide to be a vegetarian.  As a completely tenderhearted animal lover who is fortunate enough to live in a time and place where consuming animals is not necessary to survival, part of why I decided going meatless was right for me is because I would never be able to handle--or even be present for--the killing of an animal, so probably shouldn't eat meat for the sake of not being a hypocrite.  Based on his giddiness and photo-happy behavior after he kills the moose, I'm not convinced that the hunter in question wasn't simply looking for excuses to be self righteous in his desire to dominate animals by killing them, but he does have a good point!

The final piece is the short story "Dall" by Pam Houston.  While this story provoked in me all manner of disbelief, thought, and flat out hostility towards the male guide because of blatant domestic abuse that I considered to be the central part of the story, I will instead focus on the hunting.  In this story, dall sheep are being hunted instead of moose, but once again, it is about two guides and the hunter who pays them for their services.  I found the hunter in this story pretty reprehensible as he seems to be the stereotypical inexperienced sport hunter who needs the guides to do everything for him, including telling him exactly when and where to shoot, proceeds to miss his targets, and then when he finally kills a sheep, wants to simply claim the antlers as his prize and leave the carcass to rot.  To his slight credit, the aforementioned despicable male guide does make the hunter haul away at least some of the meat, but the hunter's attitude combined with his ineptitude border on infuriating.

 Hunter with moose.  Photo by John Mackie and from akmoosehunting.com.

Blog Entry #3: Landscape and Personal Change

First of all, sorry this post is not very good!  I really struggled with what to write this week and put it off as long as possible.  Here I am though, with 2 1/2 hours left to post for the week, and I need to put something.

One of the guiding questions this week was, "Why is landscape such a prominent feature in Alaska writing?"  This is a very interesting question to me and I wondered about it a great deal as I read.  It's true that much written about Alaska deals with the landscape and environment, much more than writing set in other locations.  I think the reason for this is that Alaska has more wilderness than many places, and Alaska is well known around the world for this.  Only three states have a smaller population than Alaska, yet our state is by far the largest one in the country.  As a result, it's pretty difficult to live in Alaska (or spend a significant amount of time here), without having some exposure to the wild landscape.  Additionally, Alaska's landscape is probably the thing that draws people here the most.  Miners and fur seal hunters came here to take something from the environment, and tourists come here to see whales, bears, and pan for gold.  It is inevitable then that much of the writing about Alaska features the landscape prominently.

Something else that I thought about a lot during the readings was how Alaska's environment shapes people, even when the people are trying to change the environment.  An excellent example of this is the story Change by Charles J. Keim, which is one of the readings I have enjoyed most from our book.  The excerpt is about an elderly man named Arne who has lived in a small cabin in Alaska for the past 60 years.  He loves Alaska and is very unhappy when a family decides to homestead near his cabin.  The husband chops down trees, levels the ground, and plans to bring groups of tourists around to go fishing so he can earn extra money.  Arne considers the area where they homestead to belong to him, even though he does not legally own it, and he is very angry at the actions of the family.  When he sees that they draw clean, clear water from the creek to use, he diverts another creek so it pours muddy, silty water into their nice creek.  A power struggle of sorts ensues when Arne and the husband go back and forth, diverting the silty creek so it alternately contaminates and does not contaminate the clear creek.  During one of his diversion attempts, Arne slips and gets his feet stuck in the mud in the bottom of the creek.  He nearly drowns, but the very pregnant wife of the family saves him after putting her life in danger, which causes her to go into labor.  After this event, Arne forgives the family and takes the wife to his cabin to help her deliver her baby since her husband is away.

I think this story is a prime example of the environment changing people.  For over half a century, Arne has worked with the land and strives to protect it.  When the neighbors do things to the land that he disapproves with, he alters the environment by messing with the flow of the creek in an attempt to get them to leave.  The creek then almost drowns him, but he is saved by one of the neighbors.  This event changes his attitude towards the neighbors and their activities.  I am very curious about how he and the neighbors get along after that!

Gold Creek, located in Washington.  I looked for a picture of an Alaskan creek and this is in Washington, but I chose it anyway because it looks more like the creek I imagine from the story!  Photo from Wikipedia.

Blog Entry #2: The Work of John Haines

          John Haines was a well known poet and what I like to call a transplanted Alaskan, meaning he was born elsewhere (Virginia in his case), but moved to Alaska and embraced the Alaskan way of life.  Much of his poetry was about Alaska, but he also covered a great deal of other subjects, such as "Fourth of July at Santa Ynez" which is set in California, and "In the House of Wax" which is about historical figures.  For the purposes of this blog post however, I will focus on "The Tundra," which is a poem he contributed to the book we are using for our class.  Regardless of where his poems are set or the subject matter, one thing remains consistent: Haines used a great deal of visual imagery in his writing.  Two writings in particular from our main book this week stood out to me as being similarly laden with visual imagery, particularly that of light, dark, and colors.

          The first piece I will examine is "The Tundra."  As with his other poems, Haines used fantastic imagery in this one and did a wonderful job of helping the reader imagine the autumnal tundra that he described.  He wrote about darkness as well as light, color, and mirrors.  Haines started out by mentioning the autumn sun, and those two words are enough to evoke images of gold, orange, red, and dark yellow.  Later in the poem, he confirmed that the tundra is full of blood.  Whether he meant literally full of blood from the hunting of animals or if he meant the ground looked red because of the changing season and time of day is unknown, but the visual is powerful regardless.  With his line, "Frozen gut-piles shine with a dull, rosy light," the reader is able to visualize the mound of animal innards in an uncharacteristically beautiful way since we don't typically think of intestines and the like as being rosy or luminous.  The rosy light and the description of people laughing around campfires conveyed the approach of evening, and this is confirmed when, "the heavy tundra slowly rolls over and sinks in the darkness," and night fell.

This photograph, taken by Paul F. Gill and titled "Fall Color Alaska Tundra"

seems like it was almost taken to accompany Haines' poem, or else as if the poem was 

based on the photo because they go together so well!  You can see the tundra full of blood, which is beautiful in this case.  Photo is from Paul F. Gill's website.

          One of the writings that reminded me of John Haines' work was an excerpt from James Vance Marshall's novel, A River Ran Out of Eden.  The excerpt described the autumn night a young boy passed in a sod hut as a storm raged outside.  Like with Haines' poems, much of this story dealt with light, dark, and colors.  The boy sought refuge as the sky darkened, and found the inside of the hut to be pitch black before he quickly noticed the glowing red eyes of an animal that had taken shelter in the same place.  After his fear of the animal subsided somewhat, he found a candle, which cast light around the small room and revealed the animal to be a golden seal, "her fur like a field of sun-drenched corn."  Later in the story, he described her fur as "fine-spun gold."  Gold seems to capture people's imaginations and the reader can't help but wonder at the beauty of the seal.  The story continued in alternating light and darkness as the candles burned out and were replaced until eventually no more candles remained and all is dark.  In the end, it was the color of her fur that possibly saved her as the boy vowed to stop his father from killing her for her highly prized golden pelt.

Unfortunately, I could not find a photo of a golden seal to share, but this one does

look rather golden and her fur is so shiny it looks as if it is glowing!  Photo is from

the Alaska Department of Fish and Game website and depicts a harbor seal.

          The other writing that especially reminded me of Haines was an excerpt from the book One Man's Wilderness by Richard Proenneke and Sam Keith.  The excerpt was a journal that described the progress Proenneke made as he built a log cabin by himself in the Alaskan wilderness.  It did not lack at all for visual imagery or detailed descriptions.  Like Haines' work, right from the beginning it frequently mentioned light and color and the first paragraph ended with, "the peaks, awash in the warm yellow light, contrasted sharply with their slopes still in shadow."  He went into much detail as he described animals and the environment around him, such as a cock ptarmigan with "his neck and head shining a copper color in the sun" and his summer plumage "beginning to erase the white of winter."  Later on, he wrote that, "The spruce boughs are glistening with rain-drops.  The land had a bath last night."  All in all, I found the writing style charming and feel that I can imagine perfectly what his cabin and the surrounding area looked like.

Blog Entry #1: Landscape in Alaskan Literature

The concept of landscape in Alaskan literature is an interesting one.  As I did the readings for this week and last week out of the book The Last New Land: Stories of Alaska Past and Present, I kept the idea of landscape in my head and jotted down notes on each piece.  As I read, I noticed some trends among the various types of writing in regards to landscape.  Naturally, these trends are not true for each and every example, but in general they seem accurate.  For the purposes of this blog post, I will focus on fiction and oral stories.

The first genre I will discuss is fiction.  As I read through the book, it became immediately apparent to me that the fictional stories are chock full of descriptions of landscape.  A good example of this is the excerpt from Rex Beach's novel The Spoilers, which begins on page 70.  Entire paragraphs in this story are devoted to describing the surroundings and it seems that no detail is spared a mention.  For example, most of page 74 is taken up with the author's description of how the city of Nome appears.  I believe that great care is taken in presenting the landscape in fictional stories like this because they are written for outsiders.  The authors are telling stories to people who have probably never been to Alaska or at least are not particularly familiar with the landscape or time, so detailed descriptions are necessary to anchor the time and place in the reader's mind.

Photo of Nome, Alaska during the time described in Beach's novel.  Photo from this website, and originally from page 18-19 of a book called This Fabulous Century: 1900-1910.

In contrast to the great amount of effort expended in descriptions of landscapes in fictional stories is how landscape is presented in oral stories.  Now, oral stories can be very, very long and one story can take days to tell.  The oral stories presented in this book are all pretty short, but as I think back on oral stories I heard and read about in a previous Literature class, they seem to be very representative of Alaska Native oral stories as a whole and details do not seem to have been sacrificed for the sake of brevity.  That being said, landscape is not a concept that is focused on all that much in the oral stories in this book.  Certainly setting and surroundings are mentioned, but nowhere near to the same degree as in the fictional story I mentioned earlier.  For example, in the Tlingit Legend How Mosquitoes Came to Be on page 11 (which happens to be my favorite Alaska Native story), landscape is barely mentioned at all.  The storyteller mentions that the main character lies down on the ground, but does not specify where he lies down or give any details of the surroundings.  After he is taken back to the giant's home, the only detail that is mentioned is the fireplace.  Why is this?  Why doesn't landscape take as central a role in these stories?  After thinking about it for a bit, I came to the conclusion that it is because the oral stories were created by Native Alaskans for people of their own cultural group.  The stories were made in the same setting that they were told.  Everyone within the intended audience would be intimately familiar with the landscape around them since nature took such a gigantic role in their lives, therefore the listeners would not need much explanation of the surrounding landscape to understand the story.

This leads to the question of whether or not humans separate themselves from nature when they classify it as a resource.  In my opinion, it definitely can.  The first thing that comes to mind is people destroying the environment in the process of mining.  However,it is not always the case that people separate themselves from nature when they regard it as a resource.  An example of how this is the excerpt from James A. Michener's book Alaska, which begins on page 13.  The story is about a group of ancient people traveling over the Bering Land Bridge to Alaska.  To their alarm, there is very little food to be found as they make their journey and they desperately need to find something to eat so they don't all die.  Finally, the men are able to kill a mammoth after hunting it for several days, thereby guaranteeing they have food for the time being.  In this case, they are definitely using nature as a resource, but one can hardly say they are separated from nature since the entire course of their lives and whether they survive or not is dictated by nature

Welcome!

Hello and welcome to my blog!  I am a student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and this blog was created for my English 350 class, which is called Literature of Alaska and the Yukon Territory.  Throughout the upcoming semester, I will post my thoughts about the book Last New Land: Stories of Alaska Past and Present by Wayne Mergler, other readings, as well as any other assignments.  If you are curious, this website has more information about ENGL 350.  Enjoy reading and feel free to leave your feedback or thoughts in the comments section!