TO LIVE AND DIE IN WALES, ALASKA and The Ethics of Outsiders Writing about Rural Alaska

TO LIVE AND DIE IN WALES, ALASKA

A young man tries to make his way in a village still reeling from the flu of 1918
by Tony Hopfinger

Synopsis - Anchorage freelance writer, Tony Hopfinger, published an article about a young man whom he befriended over a number of visits to Wales, Alaska. The young man later committed suicide. This post calls attention to this important piece published in an award winning Canadian journal, The Walrus, in November 2007. It also delves into the ethics of 'outsiders' (non-Natives and/or non-villagers) writing about the problems of a particular village. I've divided this into five parts: The Article, Background to this Post, The Ethics of Outsiders Writing about Rural Alaska, a Conclusion of sorts, and Final Notes


The Article
In this article, Tony Hopfinger tries to understand the suicide of Mike Weyapuk by looking at the what life was like for Mike. He reviews Mike's family situation, issues of isolation and lack of employment and their effects on the people in this village of 150 or so an hour flight (about $350 r/t) from Nome. He also goes back to the 1918 influenza epidemic that nearly wiped out this once major village and forever changed it. His article doesn't look for or name villains or angels, but tells a very matter of fact tale of what he thinks led to Mike shooting himself up on the hill. It begins

For years Mike Weyapuk sat on his bunk, cradling his sunburst Gibson guitar. He stared out at the frozen Bering Strait and dreamed of the day he would leave his village to start a metal band. He thought about moving to Seattle or Chicago, but nowhere too far south; he’d heard about an Eskimo who went to Arizona and almost melted. When he arrived in the big city and stepped onstage, he would play fast and hard and angry and sad, the history of his people aching in every power chord.

You can read the first page of the article here. [It appears that The Walrus has now made the whole story available at this link, which moots my issues at the end of the post.]


Background to this post

• Anyone who lives in Alaska knows about stereotyping and condescension. Once you get off the plane in the Lower 48, when people find out you're from Alaska they want to know about living in a dark icebox all year. You don't live in an igloo do you? Even college educated people ask stupid questions about Alaska, and have the nerve to think we're the ignorant ones. So we know what it is like for others to have totally inaccurate stories about us. Yet that doesn't stop urban (yes, I know New Yorkers might find it amusing for someone living in a place with a population of 270,000 to call that urban) Alaskans from similarly stereotyping rural Alaska.
• I lived in Thailand for three years, long ago. In a small provincial capital where my Thai was better than their English. I learned to see what is invisible to the tourist - the ties of friendship and loyalty, the bonds to the land and to ancestors, how Buddhism has been internalized by the Thais who are more or less successful in their acting out its wisdoms, and how my own society looks from those eyes. This experience has helped me see these things in rural Alaska too.
• I've read Harold Napoleon's book Yuuyaraq (it's the 11th book, at the bottom of the table in the link) and even talked with Harold. It's hard to describe the book without reinforcing all the worst stereotypes non-Natives have about Alaska Natives. But actually reading his story has a profound effect on most people I've met who've read it.

Flash forward to more recent background.

• Last July my wife and I were invited by Joe and Catherine Senungetuk to visit Wales, Alaska where he grew up for a writing workshop. I've posted about that trip. But there was a lot I didn't post. Our workshop participants were half visitors from outside of Wales and half local Wales residents. As we talked about our writing we told stories about our lives and in some cases the stories were not happy ones. But there was an understanding that what was said at the workshop did not get shared. The audio recorders were shut down.
• While I was at the corruption trials this summer and fall I ran into Tony Hopfinger whom I hadn't seen for few years. He's an Alaska freelance writer, formerly a newspaper reporter, and his work has appeared in Newsweek, The Seattle Times, Christian Science Monitor, and other publications. He'd seen my blog posts on Wales in the summer and told me about this article he wrote. How he was a little nervous and wanted to get to Wales before it came out in print. He'd spent a lot of time visiting Wales and Mike Weyapuk in particular. He felt he had an obligation to tell Mike's story, but knew some people in Wales would be upset. Tony gave me a copy of the article when it came out in a Canadian literary journal, The Walrus.

The Ethics of Outsiders Writing about Rural Alaska
An aside on language first. In cross-cultural discussions, it's important to clarify our words. I don't talk about 'white' writers here, because the issue is not restricted simply to 'whites.' It is really about non-Natives. But what about non-Natives who grew up in rural Alaska, like Seth Kantner who not only grew up in rural Alaska, but did so living a subsistence lifestyle using traditional tools? His book Ordinary Wolves [I didn't like any of the links I saw, and even this NPR piece starts out with the stereotypical "Ooooh eeeee. He grew up in a half buried arctic igloo made of sod. He had no electricity, no plumbing..." but you get to hear Kantner himself] writes about that life and about changes in rural Alaska. So, 'outsider', seems an appropriate term. I mean it to include people who have a different way of seeing the world from people who grew up in rural Alaska. It includes those who live in rural Alaska temporarily as government officials, teachers, medical personnel - people who get an intimate glimpse of rural Alaska life through their jobs, but with the glasses of an Outsider. Which is not to say some can't cross the line.

I also don't intend to use the term Alaska Native as though there were a single Alaska Native culture. There are many different Alaska Native languages, and since the article is focused on the village of Wales, I'm basically writing about their Inuit culture. There are many common issues that rural - particularly off road - villages have, even if they are from different language groups.



What are the ethical issues that come up when outsiders write about Alaska Natives?

1. They write their own preconceived stories about rural Alaska instead of the stories of actual rural Alaskans. When they see things, they interpret them using their own cultural norms when they write, reinforcing the stereotypes outsiders have. It’s natural for people in new places to contrast them to what is familiar. But it isn’t usually accurate reporting. Often the outsider sees the tangible different negatives (honey buckets, small houses, dental problems), but can’t see the invisible positives (the intimate connection to the land, the personal generosity, the respect for elders.)

2. Even academics bring their cultural biases with them and see what they are looking for, interpreting behaviors and conditions in terms of what they would mean in Anchorage or Chicago, but not in terms of what they mean in Bethel or Wales.

In other cases, they gather stories from local informants and then write them up with their own names on them and for there own benefit - academic promotion and tenure, book contracts, etc. Or they gather statistics that support the decision that the government agency or corporation they work for wants made.

Alaska Natives are so tired of ‘experts’ stealing their stories or misinterpreting what they see, and bringing harm to the people they are researching, that the Alaska Federation of Natives developed Guidelines for Research. Those guidelines offer the following principles:

1. Advise Native people who are to be affected by the study of the purpose, goals and timeframe of the research, the data gathering techniques, the positive and negative implications and impacts of the research
2. Obtain informed consent of the appropriate governing body.
3. Fund the support of a Native Research Committee appointed by the local community to assess and monitor the research project and ensure compliance with the expressed wishes of Native people.
4. Protect the sacred knowledge and cultural/intellectual property of Native people.
5. Hire and train Native people to assist in the study.
6. Use Native languages whenever English is the second language.
7. Guarantee confidentiality of surveys and sensitive material.
8. Include Native viewpoints in the final study.
9. Acknowledge the contributions of Native resource people.
10. Inform the Native Research Committee in a summary and in nontechnical language of the major findings of the study.
11. Provide copies of the study to the local people.

3. Basic violations of confidences. Rural Alaska villages are small. You don’t need to name names for people to figure out who you might be talking about when you mention 'a woman with three kids who lives next to the washateria.' This issue of invading the privacy of individuals also extends to the whole community. Not wanting their less flattering stories (true or false) shared with the world isn’t a negative Alaska Native trait. Every self-respecting community is sensitive about what is said about them. Often people need to work through an issue on their own before they are ready to have it shared with the world.


Why should outsiders or others write about rural Alaska issues?

There are legitimate reasons to address real and deadly serious problems in rural Alaska. There is no question that rural Alaska faces a myriad of problems, just as urban Alaska does. Is the role of the outside writer to ignore them and defer to locals to solve their own problems? This is a reasonable question to raise. Are people - particularly children - being seriously harmed while the people harming them are protected by some sort of cultural “it’s none of your business” card? Responding to this is complex. Some aspects to consider:

1. Outsiders carry significant responsibility for the problems in rural Alaska. Alaska Natives survived for at least 10,000 years without help from outsiders. They didn't come into Outsiders' territory, the Outsiders came to theirs. Thus outsiders have some responsibility for cleaning up their mess. But many problems exist because outsiders tried to fix what they considered 'problems' in the first place. So it has to be done differently this time.

Cultural destruction first by the Russians and then Americans is real. Much non-Native rhetoric about rural Alaska still echoes those 19th Century stories of bringing civilization to 'primitive' Native Americans. “We’re here to help you poor, not-as-enlightened-as-us, people by assimilating you into the American way of life.”

However, as in the Lower 48, people came into Alaska Native communities mainly to exploit natural resources (furs, gold, whales, timber, fish, oil) or to fulfill their own spiritual needs by converting them to various forms of Christianity. The imports - religion, disease, wooden houses (in the treeless tundra), school books written for Lower 48 white kids, guns - displaced the self sufficient traditional ways of life that had served Alaska Natives for 10,000 years. The imported wisdoms, housing, tools, and expectations didn’t improve Arctic survival skills, but they did require a commodity hard to find in the tundra - cash.

Killing off the carriers of the oral traditions and skills, through diseases and Western schools where Native languages were forbidden, pushed many Alaska Natives into a no-man’s land in between cultures. Living the old ways was no longer possible, but neither were the new ones. While people in Wales have electricity, potato chips, and Pepsi, they still have to haul water from outside of town and they carry their toilet waste out in ‘honey’ buckets.

All this leaves people in the total cultural and personal disarray that Tony captures from his conversations with Mike. They need money to buy the products or a ticket to Nome, Anchorage, Seattle, that they are pressured to buy, but there are few decent cash paying jobs. Yet outsiders come to these villages and bemoan what they see as the terrible conditions and blame the residents for lacking motivation.


3. The issues are not unique to rural Alaska. Many village problems mirror the problems of rural America and urban America, but in those places they aren’t usually so publicly visible. Rural America is also losing its population to cities and can’t keep doctors and other professionals for long. In this context, Alaskan rural communities aren’t particularly inept as they are often portrayed.. Neither are alcohol, drugs, suicide, or teen pregnancy unique to rural Alaska. Yet much coverage of rural Alaska makes it sound like Alaska Natives are singularly incapable.

Rural Alaska does have a level of isolation not experienced elsewhere in the US where every town at least is connected to the road system. Wales, for example, is about an hour away from Nome by small plane - I think it cost us about $350 round-trip. I don’t recall any of the roads being paved and they don’t go far out of town. Most of the people in town are related. There’s a fancy school building with Outside teachers (which is not to judge them, I was an Outside teacher in rural Thailand), alcohol is illegal, but is available at tremendous markups. People still do hunt and fish and gather local greens and berries for a good part of their food. Subsistence has been made easier with motors and guns, but harder with restrictions on when and how things can be caught. And the introduction of manufactured goods requires cash that can't be hunted or gathered. Health care beyond first aid is in Nome or Anchorage.


4. Difficulty of honestly addressing all this. There aren't many outside writers who have the experience and understanding to write well on this (at least based on what I've seen.) The imposed Western culture’s story says that these problems are the personal weakness of the individuals who aren’t taking responsibility. The story chides Alaska Natives for not appreciating all the wonderful things the missionaries, teachers, government agents, small businesses have brought them.

The traditional wisdom has been devastated. The Inuit and other Alaska Native equivalents of ‘libraries’ and ‘museums’ of traditional culture were ‘burned’ and ‘looted’ when the 1918 epidemics killed off the generations who would normally have passed that wisdom on. And the missionaries followed through by often banning Native ways like dancing, drumming, and speaking Native languages.

Today's village children are the first or second generation that does not speak the ancestral languages. Instead, they are sucked away from their parents and grandparents by schools, television, video games, music into the invading, dominant Western culture. Think about all the families in non-Native America who put their kids into private religious schools of various denominations to protect them from losing their family and cultural values in public schools. Most villagers don't have this option. Alaska Natives have to fight huge battles just to have their kids study their own languages in their local schools. Only a few have won this right. And these aren't immigrants. They don't have a home to go back to. They are home.

5. Individually, most Alaska Natives are not living in despair, but rather have found ways to navigate successfully between the two cultures. They are doing overtime duty with their Western world responsibilities and their Native world responsibilities.

6. . Collectively Alaska Natives through various organizations such as regional,
urban, and village corporations , the Alaska Native Professional Association, or the Alaska Federation of Natives have many initiatives to restore cultural identity and pride and develop skills to make Alaska Native village communities economically, socially, and culturally healthy. Despite the media exposure these organizations get, most non-Native Alaskans have no idea of who they are or what they do.

So, outsiders who get involved in all this ought to respect the people they are involved with. This may not always be easy. Their styles of doing things are different and this takes adjusting to. Instead many outsiders interpret "quietly thinking" as having nothing to say and they interrupt before a person is ready to speak. And Alaska Natives don’t speak in a single voice. They - surprise , surprise - don't know which path leads to the best future and they fear taking one that will cause harm. Just like everyone else.

7. There is a real clash between American rights to free speech that writers have as US citizens and the values of respect, discretion, and compassion. The free speech rights of Americans are also abridged at times. Anti-gay demonstrators have been banned from protesting too close at funerals for American military. Writers should recognize this same sort of right of Alaska Natives to have their private lives respected. Just because one has the legal right to do something doesn't mean they should do it.

8. Outside writers may shy away from these stories because they have seen others burned for raising thorny topics, or understand their own lack of background. It would be helpful for Alaska Native organizations to do more work to help train Outside writers about rural Alaska. The Alaska Humanities Forum's Rural-Urban Rose Exchange sends urban teachers and students for week long exchanges in rural Alaska as one way of raising their understanding of rural Alaska. But only a few get this experience. It would be good to include journalists.

So, do Outsiders have the right to talk about the issues of rural Alaska they have gained from the confidences of Alaska Natives?

My short answer is yes, but with conditions.

• They need to have the permission of the person who confided. And of the other people who are brought into the limelight by their writing. Getting the permission of a whole community is not as easy. I don’t think one person can make that decision.

• If they are doing it for the right reason, and

• If they know what they are doing.

There are problems with my criteria. Most people assume they know what they are doing and that their motives are pure. Even when they aren’t. The AFN Guidelines for Research are more specific and thus easier to measure against.

If we look at the AFN research guidelines, I would say that numbers 1, 3, 5, and 10 tend to be more appropriate to formal research projects. The others, though, are also appropriate for outside writers coming into Native communities. Numbers 2, 4, and 7, and 9 all would be covered when getting consent. If consent isn't given in advance, then 11 - sharing the findings - would be necessary to get permission at the end.

Having talked at length about this with Tony, I believe that

• He had Mike’s permission.
• His intentions are sincere,
• And he mostly knows what he’s doing.

Mike Weyapuk talked to Tony knowing Tony was a writer. But simply introducing yourself as a writer isn't enough. Writers need to make clear the intention to write a story and that what the other person says may appear in print. It appears Mike understood this and saw Tony as his way to make a mark in the world, to not live his life in vain. Tony certainly believes that Mike would strongly support his decision to publish this story.

Tony is an outside writer who listened for Mike's story instead of imposing his own story on what he wrote. He wrote this to tell Mike’s story, to give his life a meaning beyond the small village of Wales. But I also read in Tony’s story a great frustration and anger at the destructive influence of the West on the people in this westernmost point of the North American continent and a desire to help other outsiders get past their stereotypes about rural Alaska.

He doesn’t blame any individuals for what happened to Mike, but rather helps readers feel and begin to grasp the unintended devastating consequences of Western culture’s imposition on rural Alaska. It’s a story that Harold Napoleon tells explicitly and Seth Kantner tells less directly. Tony tells it by painting the picture of one, bright young man, trapped in this cultural crevasse. The story isn't one way. Tony also reveals his own private struggle with depression. This self revelation, fits well in the context of the story, but also shows that Tony too is willing to expose his own vulnerable side.

While Tony probably had Mike’s approval for this story, he didn’t have the community approval. To tell Mike’s story, Tony, had to also include parts of other people’s stories. Ideally, Tony, using my criteria, should have gotten the approval of the respected elders of Wales. [I should make it very clear that my criteria are way above any journalistic standards I've ever seen, and what Tony did in all this far exceeded any journalistic standards I've ever seen. Discussing all this in the context of a piece that does it right, seems much better than in the context of one that does it wrong.] Having spent several days in a writing workshop with some of those elders in July myself, I believe Tony might well have gotten that approval. I think Tony knows this. When we first talked about this article (he told me about it because he'd seen my posts on Wales) he was planning on going to Wales to share the story with people before it was published. But as I understand it, he never worked out time or financing to do that. The AFN standards don't require approval by the community leaders of the final product, but it does require permission to do the research at the beginning. [But those are research, not journalistic standards.]

I think Tony’s intent is good. He didn’t write this for money. What little The Walrus paid him will never cover his time and expenses over five years of writing this. He worked hard to see Wales through Mike’s eyes, not his own. He brings the context of Wales’ history to bear on this story. His writing expresses not only Mike’s pain, but Tony’s too, and his hope that this story will help nudge, however slightly, the way urban Alaskans think about rural Alaskans.

One problem is that most Alaskans don’t know Tony's article even exists. A Barnes and Noble staffer told me they get three copies of each edition of The Walrus, but had none when I called this week. The UAA library has a copy. The Walrus website only lets you link to the first page or so of the article. I think it’s an important article, but I also think that any article like this one needs to be read in the context of the question I’ve raised - how can outsiders ethically write about Alaska Native villages?

One path through many cross cultural ethical dilemmas is to recognize that first, we are all human beings. Thus non-Native people should first behave as human beings with human beings, rather than dwell on “I’m White (Asian, Black) and you are Native." (There is also the pesky fact that many so called Alaska Natives have a parent or grandparent who is non-Native. Why should someone with a non-Native father and a Native mother automatically be labeled Native rather than non-Native?)

So first we are human beings working with other human beings. Those human beings have cultural variations that add to the richness of human experience. Just like we have learned to cherish cultural variations in food and music we can learn to appreciate cultural variations in other areas. I think Tony took this approach. He and Mike, from one perspective, were two young men who had a number of things in common - like electric guitars - about which they talked and on which they based a friendship.

For non-Native Outsiders going into Native communities, I think the most appropriate role is to listen. They should do their homework. Read what Alaska Natives have written. Attend the AFN annual conferences. Seek assistance from Alaska Native organizations. They need to prove to their hosts their recognition of their own ignorance of local ways and their intention to do no harm.

To the extent outsiders have access to resources that might be useful to rural Alaskans, they should offer them for inspection. The decision whether and how to use them belongs with the village residents themselves. This is an approach I think the dominant American culture might use around the world. Our modern technology is easy to see. But the culture of other peoples is like an iceberg - only the tip is visible. Rural Alaskan culture is more vulnerable than most overseas cultures which have sufficient population, territorial sovereignty, and thriving cultural institutions. But indigenous peoples around the world are often even more vulnerable than Alaska Native cultures.

[The rest is now moot, since the link to the Walrus now gives you access to the whole article.]

Final Note
While writing this, I thought it would be neat to be able to provide access to the whole article since it isn't easy to get. The managing editor of The Walrus said it would be fine if Tony, the author, approved. Tony has approved, but we haven't worked out the best way to do this. (And he asked me to mention that he got partial funding for this project through an artist grant he received from the Rasmuson Foundation. Tony also asked I include his email address so readers could contact him.)
But as I revised this post, I realized that I personally feel the need to get some sort of approval for this from the people of Wales. I will try to do that, and if that approval comes, I'll find a way to make the article accessible. Meanwhile you can read the first page of the article here. Since this is already publicly available I don't think I'm violating any obligation to the people of Wales.

I realize that some people will think I'm going way overboard in my caution and others will think I've violated the confidentiality of people in Wales by calling attention to this article. I'm making the call that this is an important article, written for the right reasons, and that overall, I estimate that its effect will be positive. Harold Napoleon also took a lot of heat for his article too. But I also respect the people of Wales and want to include them in the decision to make the whole article itself available.

(And if anyone read all the way to here, send me an email or leave a comment.)