Chief Paul Theodore, by Tara Goedjen

Tara is exploring human adaptation through a series of interviews with people who have seen that adaptation at work. This is the first of those interviews…

Chief Paul Theodore lives in Wasilla, Alaska. Woods surround his home, where nearby a chimney smokes from the adjacent log cabin. A dog barks next to a pale, salmon-colored smokehouse. I park my car at the base of the driveway, which is covered with snow. Around the “No Trespassing” sign are tall pine trees, their needles dusted with whiteness that gleams under the hazy sun. I have forgotten my gloves, so while waiting for someone to answer the door, I keep my hands moving in the bitter cold (it’s around 2 degrees). When Chief Paul invites me inside, I see he’s wearing light blue moccasins adorned with beads. His flannel shirt and jeans are nondescript, yet accentuate his intricate necklace—a red flower in the center of tiny blue and white beads—made by the daughter of another Chief. I know this from a conversation we had before today, November 14, 2009, the date of this interview.

Chief Paul: How should we begin?

Tara Goedjen: Begin any way you wish.

CP: Okay. Start here:

Den’iana people in Kalahe.
Indian people, fishtail people.

Knikatnu translates into hill, ocean, lake. That’s Knik. That’s where we live. Knikatnu, that’s where we’re from. Knikatnu Den’iani Kalahee. Knikatnu. Fishtail people clan.

TG: Fishtail people, that’s beautiful.

CP: Yalida. Translates to: How are you? Nta. Translates to: I’m fine.

TG: Yalida?

CP: Nta. So what you want to start with? Something good? Bad? Evil? Happy?

TG: Maybe both.

CP: Okay. This big country we own…we manage big country, all the Susitna Valley, Anchorage, Talkeetna mountains, all around, as far as you can see. This country had many chiefs. The main ones is Chief Stephan, Chief Wasilla, Chief Talkeetna. Chief Eklutna is how Eklutna got named. They were all brothers and half-brothers. Eklutna, Talkeetna, Wasilla. That’s my grandfather, Chief Wasilla…How’s this going?

TG: It’s going fine.

CP: They had lots of people. Had many warriors. They lived off the land, they took care of the land, they protected the land. Many hard times, many good times. Prior to Americans, we were here. Even before the water flooded the earth. They tell us stories where we had to go and get away from the water. Our people were sharing with other tribes throughout Alaska. We have three different Athabaskan language: South, Middle, that’s ours, and then Northern Athabaskan. Have to have translators between each tribes so don’t war. Keeping the peace.

TG: How was it like during those times?

CP: From around the state they came [the other tribes]. And traded with us. And they respected each other. Visiting each other’s places. People from Northway and Den’iana, all around the state, came to visit with our chiefs. Held potlatches and gatherings.

They depended on the chiefs for everything. Their words was law. You can’t go against Chief. You can’t do anything without Chief. He had spiritual visions, he had spiritual powers, he had spiritual insight on everything. How the animals were, everything. And he know everybody else around him, he know about everybody else in the whole country, all the way to Canada.

TG: You mentioned spiritual powers?

CP: Hunters asked them [the Chiefs] to give signs of where to find game. They called them [the game]. They had special songs for calling moose or whatever they had that needed calling. It was a man’s world.

TG: And the women?

CP: Many women saved whole tribes. Old women. They used their brains. They didn’t use it for nothing foolish.

TG: Can you think of a specific story?

CP: My mother cooked and helped a lot of people eat. Both white and native. She shared her knowledge with them. Her mother and her grandmother did the same. And they stuck with it. They cried and fought and did much for our people. My mother got the subsistence for this area and Cook Inlet. Fishing permits. She used her wisdom and knowledge and trickery to do some things and it was really good for me to see [her example]. A lot of things are physical strength and some are not.

TG: And what comes to mind when you say that?

CP: Well, Jim Pete’s mother saved the people in Susitna Station. They [the village of Susitna Station] left Jim Pete’s mother and another old woman in the mountain village in the wintertime, because they were ready to die. And then [the younger villagers] walked all the way down the mountains to their village. But there was no food there, and they started to starve.

This is a story I’ve heard before, and it’s one that’s hardly imaginable. I think of my own grandparents, and how walking in snow alone would be enough trouble…not to mention hauling caribou or fishing on a river’s icy slope.

CP: So them two old ladies were up there in the mountains, they saw some caribou, so they put out their caribou snares and they caught them, they killed them and smoked their hides. They saw moose, they killed moose. They got salmon out of the creek. They [the old women] were ready to die, and yet they just started getting food.

Middle of winter, they didn’t know what to do, so they decide to walk back to village. They pack meat on their back, [walk through] six, seven feet snow, they walk, they take the meat and food, all the way down, about 150 miles, and then they walk into the village. They find them all starving to death, ready to die, no food in the house, sleeping in bed, the whole village. So those two old ladies start cooking and save the whole village. They used their traditional ways to save them.

TG: What year was that?

CP: It was in the late 1800s.

TG: Did you know Jim Pete?

CP: Yea. He was the last Chief of Susitna Station.

TG: Could you speak more about chiefs?

CP: Chiefs were chosen when they were young. The children were observed by certain Elders. They [the Elders] would point a child out and tell his parents, because they know that he had special qualities. And so they took care of him, and the rest of them [the children of the village] were not treated the same.

The young fella was trained from birth, his whole life, in different ways, about everything, about the land and beliefs and everything. Everything in life that pertained to life. The Elders and Chiefs and other Chiefs, they treated him with respect and then he was nurtured along by his mother.

The other part is that they [the chosen children] were also trained harshly. In very physically, emotionally strenuous tests. And true to life.

Different ways to make them hardened for the future that they had to do. Otherwise they couldn’t be leaders.

Chief Paul pauses as the door opens. Two women walk through the door and hold out a heavily bundled toddler. “Baby Chuck, Baby Chuck,” Chief Paul says, passing me the child, who starts to squirm. “He wants his jacket off,” he says. It’s clear Baby Chuck prefers Chief Paul to me (though later he becomes interested in my computer). “I saved him,” Chief Paul tells me. “Ever since then his mother takes him over here all the time.” I look up and see Baby Chuck’s picture among the framed photographs of all the old Chiefs, the elders who filled his own childhood.

TG: Did you experience any of those tests?

CP: Sure. Stick your head in a bear’s cave. Put porcupine’s guts on your feet and put you out in the woods and see if a bear would eat you, and if you came back at nightfall, and you still didn’t get eaten, by bear or a wolf, then you were okay.

Make you chop wood, carry water. Be nice but don’t take no crap off of anybody. You couldn’t be passive. Couldn’t be lazy. Got to get up early and work hard. Cut fish, salt fish, carry moose, pack your weight, learn how to skin. Learn which parts are good, which part of each animal to use.

Hang your head overboard on a ship…Kinda like what in our modern day would be physical abuse. Toughen you up. This life nowadays is tender on kids. Little tenderfoots can’t even go out and walk barefoot on the snow. You’d get out there, look at the stars, crying, your feet up in the air. Tests of endurance. Never eat foods for awhile, a lot of fasting, different kind of ways. You either see the devil or you see yourself.

You had to listen really hard. Remember everything about the land. All the songs. All the stories. Had to have pretty much a photographic memory about everything. Every place, every detail, cause your life depended on it.

These people now, they can’t even go out and find an animal…and you used to have to track it for days sometime. Somewhere along the way there’s something. Something that was lost.

TG: What do you think was lost?

CP: Maybe honor. We respected the bears because it was like our own relative. I think people come back as animals or in different forms, maybe. And kids…they were physically fit, they could walk many miles a day. They could haul water, everything. They trapped and hunted and helped with the daily chores in life. Took care of their grandfathers and grandmothers until they died. They had responsibility, weren’t just watching TV.

The kids learned from each other. Quietly competed against each other by seeing who was stronger in their own way. Lots of young girls were good skinners. They learned those things from their mothers. And they knew every part of the animal to stay, for sewing, for fur. They took care of it [the animal] after it was brought home.

TG: So in Alaska’s climate, the animals were central to life.

CP: And [they gave us] humor. Everybody gave everyone a name after an animal by the way they acted. Some [people] were slow, they called them porcupine. Some were busy, they called them beaver. Some could see long ways, they called them Eagle eyes.

And they knew when the birds came, migrated, they waited for the exact day and then they’d walk outside. They didn’t need guns, all they did was walk outside and holler, “Heeeeeeeeey!” and the voice waves, the vibrations, would reach up and knock the birds out of the sky and then they’d club them.

They depended on the animals and the fish and everything for food and clothing. Ducks and geese and all of the animals, they know them. They knew how to work with copper and make weapons and bones, and any kind of thing they make, they make their own stuff.

TG: They were creative.

CP: Yea, for instance, they didn’t have boats for the longest time. They couldn’t figure out how to make canoe, the bow was giving them trouble. Then one guy invented it. A guy from the interior, who shot a duck. And he saw the breast of the duck as he was eating it. And he saw that he could make it [the bow] that way. That’s how they made the bow of the canoe.

They made their own nets, their own fishing poles, their own spears, bear spears. Their own knives and tanning tools out of stones, arrowheads out of stones. Everything. Clothes, their tents, everything, their own thread, everything.

At this point I’m reminded of how I’m challenged by a needle and spool of thread, the kind conveniently provided in those hotel kits. There’s no way I’d walk outside in the snow barefoot, or survive in the woods without a jar of peanut butter and a can of bear spray inside my microfiber sleeping bag.

TG: And these ways were passed down from family to family.

CP: Yea, by words. How do you say it? We don’t have a book, we just show. Then we do, so we know it inside. We pass our stories down to each other. So we can live off the land. White mans couldn’t move around without us. They couldn’t do anything without us.

Berries, fruit, certain times of the year, we picked ‘em. We stored it, we put it away. We had different foods—sheep way up in the mountain—had to have people go up there, for sheep, caribou hunting. We knew where to get the game and we knew when to go there, the best time to harvest them. We had certain rites we did. We had storytellers, medicine woman healing sickness, and medicine mans. We didn’t just say people were Elders, we chose Elders. Just cause you’re an old person doesn’t mean you’re Elder.

TG: This way of life that you’re describing, how much of it did you experience?

CP: We lived off the land and then we had some modern tools. Guns and knives, but they weren’t that good. We did trapping, so we had traps. Nets, we have nets now. Back then they just speared [fish]. We made dog sled and snowshoes from root. We had beaver clothes and beaver mittens, sealskin slippers. We had flour and rice and canned milk and stuff like that, but we get it only in the summer, and then [in the summer] we had to buy for winter. We fished for the cannery, we travel in the boat, we use gas motor, and then we go travel the land, and sometimes we row.

A lot of the laws were written against us. We couldn’t use our food that were here, they made laws to put us in jail if we hunted. They made seasons and put bag limits and everything. Like they’re doing today.

TG: Some with good intentions, to protect the environment.

CP: Yea. In the last 30 years they destroyed everything. White man technology. Oil fields. Boats. Cars. Equipments. They destroy the land and all of the fish in the ocean. Seals, game, everything, whales, all gone. In my lifetime.

TG: How did we lose this harmony with the land?

CP: Used to be, you only did what was a necessity. We knew how much food it took for every family so we only harvested what was needed. We counted the fish and knew how many for each person, and how many moose we needed to get through the winter. Now sportsmans are over-harvesting. Mining companies [are] destroying the resources. Oil companies drilling too much.

I think that the state’s laws are too one-sided. We all own these resources but the white mans take all the resources for themselves. White mans was raping and destroying the land, yet our people had it for thousands of years and lived off of it and never had much problem.

TG: So how do we reconnect with the earth?

CP: I think that we go over to the edge. We look down and [we see] it’s pretty far down and the rest is no good in the future. What we have is here now, and that’s all we have left. So we have to use the laws to protect the people that are on the land, the people that are here, and yet share what little we have with the others to exist.

But the people, the state, the federal government, the native tribes, have got to look at the earth and say what is valuable, and what it is we won’t touch, and what it is we’ll try and help each other with to make it easier for all.

Those on the regulation side in Washington D.C. have too much power over our resources here. There should be tribal members to help make decisions in high places, but they must have traditional trainings before they do. They must have the power to protect the people and the land. Our people here lived off the land. There were no sad songs, they were all happy. Nowadays it’s all sad songs, and not happy.

TG: So create more happiness, more connection, what would you say to someone?

CP: To one person? I’d say get involved with helping somebody. Don’t be sitting down and being passive. Become an activist to make things right. A good example, that guy Pete Seeger, saving the rivers in the states down there. I think most of it is [that we need] to stop extinctions of animals, species, people. Because once we’re gone we’re gone for good.

TG: So together we need to find creative solutions to continue to co-exist.

CP. Yea, that’s how you protect your country. By working together. That’s what we did for thousands and thousands of years. Otherwise we wouldn’t still be here. Just like now, we had borders with other people, other tribes. We teased each other so we wouldn’t kill each other. We used humor to dissipate anger. And we used translators to keep the peace so we wouldn’t fight, though sometimes it didn’t work. We used every bit of wisdom and knowledge to save the people. My family, all the chiefs, we all did the same.

At the end of the interview, Chief Paul gives me a necklace that he’s made. Three silver crosses tied to beads the color of bone. A necklace he has blessed, that I hope will carry some of the magic of his people, his stories—and if not that, at least it will hold the memory of our day together.