On the Monday after the Friday it happened, Larry received a package of home baked bread and treats from his mother. Later that day, he was pulled from class and told a tsunami had destroyed his village and killed his parents. He didn't believe it -- he'd never heard of a tsunami, and he had the care package as proof they were OK.
Later that afternoon, Larry heard the news again through a black telephone from his aunt and older sister in Cordova. They said not only his parents were gone, but also an aunt, uncle, his grandmother, and many others. He wanted to go home, but they insisted he stay at school. They were afraid he would drop out and never return.
Larry spent three days in the nurse's office crying and sleeping before the principal told him to snap out of it -- he had grieved enough. And Larry tried, but he couldn't stop thinking about his loss. "I thought at that point I had nowhere to go, nothing to do. I felt so damn alone."
Over the next years, many men from Chenega died, taking their own lives or succumbing to alcohol and its hazards outdoors in Alaska. Larry couldn't see much of a future for himself, either. After a summer commercial fishing with his uncles, he resisted going back to school in Wrangell.
But he was a promising student, a whiz at algebra, and finally his aunt and sister prevailed. He believes that decision probably saved his life, because at school that year he fell in love with his future wife, Gail, an Inupiaq from the Nome region, and she became his support. Gail was pretty, bright and articulate.
Larry said, "I could do math, but I couldn't do English. And she hated math. It was funny. In between classes we'd stop, we had five minutes, and we'd meet each other. 'And here are the papers for math.' 'And here are the papers for English.' And we had five minutes to explain. We got each other through."
After high school Larry and Gail planned to attend the University of Alaska in Fairbanks together, but Larry received a draft notice just before enrolling. After Army basic training, they married in Fairbanks, and Gail got pregnant with their first child, William. The boy was eight months old when Larry first saw him, when he returned from Vietnam with four bullet wounds.
They settled in Anchorage, had a daughter, Wannah, and Larry began working as an air traffic controller. But he knew he had to get back to Prince William Sound. He said, "That wasn't a question. One way or another I was going to get down here."
Chenega's villagers had dispersed. The government moved them to Tatitlek the summer of the earthquake, first to live in tents and then newly built houses that were much more modern than any they had owned before. But the two communities didn't mix.
Despite many family ties with Tatitlek, Chenegans continued to relate as a separate village. They didn't fit in with the land, either. Their traditional waters for fishing and hunting were much too far away to use, and they didn't know Tatitlek's area. The sea looks different there, with broader spaces and bigger sky than among the steep, narrow channels near Chenega.
Besides, food was scarce in the Sound's earthquake-shaken ecosystem. Chenega people drifted away from Tatitlek to Cordova, Anchorage, and beyond. The old village remained abandoned and the land it sat on was absorbed into Chugach National Forest.
Nick Kompkoff Sr., like Moses, held his people together in diaspora. During the tsunami he had saved one daughter, Carol Ann, while two more slipped away from his grasp; he had three sons who survived as well. The family settled in Tatitlek. After training in Sitka, Kompkoff became lay reader in the church. When they moved to Anchorage he got his high school diploma, helped start a parish and, in 1971, he became a priest.
Carol Ann remembers him as a powerful, assertive presence. Kompkoff involved himself in Native politics, keeping up the village's status as a federal tribe, and he gathered the survivors to meet annually, when they always talked about their desire to return and how they missed the old village.
Carol Ann said, "I seen him break down for his daughters, and all the things we lost, but I've also seen him stand up and fight for the people. If it wasn't for him, there wouldn't be a community."
As time passed, the job of reviving Chenega as a real village became more difficult. While Chenegans' emotional recovery slowly progressed, Alaska was being split up into state and private property. Although every adult in the village had fished commercially before the earthquake, the disaster destroyed that entire system a decade before limited entry fishing permits were finally distributed--most missed out.
The land was at risk as well as the fish. The 1958 act of Congress that made Alaska a state threatened all Alaska Natives' rights to their land by granting the state 103 million acres of federal land as its own -- about a third of the Alaska landmass -- with twenty-five years to choose whatever was most valuable.
While the Statehood Act vaguely directed the state to respect Native lands, it made no provision for what that meant. Since Natives wielded little power in state politics and commonly faced racial discrimination outside their own communities, scant hope existed for a fair settlement.
Driven by this danger, Natives created associations in various regions -- a Chugach Native Association in Cordova formed in 1965 -- and began filing claims with the U.S. Department of the Interior over vast swaths of Alaska. President Johnson's administration acknowledged the claims by freezing disposal of federal lands to the state or anyone else until the issue could be resolved.
But legal experts considered the Natives' position weak--the legal system itself was founded on a philosophy that did not recognize the rights of indigenous people. Meanwhile, the freeze created additional racial animosity among pro-development whites against newly activist Natives, including men like Nick Kompkoff, Sr.
A Chugach leader, Cecil Barnes, wrote to the Cordova Times in 1967 defending the claims and challenging centuries of mistreatment, including the loss of the Eyak village of Aleganik, which had been wiped off the map to make room for the railroad from Cordova to the Kennicott copper mines.
Native rights have always taken second place to the rights of God-fearing white Americans and large companies of one sort or another. Perhaps there have been reasons for this. Perhaps the reasons were bound up in the white man's culture and superior training which taught him how to protect himself and how to achieve his ends in a society which is essentially his.
In 1968, with the discovery of oil on Alaska's Arctic coast, Natives again found themselves in the way of a resource project of national interest, but this time the land freeze made them more difficult to brush aside.
The blundering of the oil industry ultimately forced settlement of Native land claims. Native groups, including the Chugach association, initially bargained away their claims to the pipeline's route in exchange for concessions on jobs, but pipeline builders broke these promises so swiftly and cavalierly that pro bono attorneys for the Natives easily won an injunction stopping the project, despite the weakness of their underlying case for controlling the land itself.
The companies also bulled ahead without regard to the environment, advancing the absurd plan of simply burying the hot pipeline in Alaska's permanently frozen ground, which liquefies when heated. Environmentalists sued to force a full environmental review. Faced with the prospect of long delays in court, Alaska's political leaders pursued new acts of Congress to give the Natives their lands and exempt the pipeline from environmental laws, decisions that proved among the most important in the state's history.
The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act passed at the end of 1971, allocating 44 million acres and $962.5 million to Native peoples' cultural regions and individual villages. At the time, Chenega was no longer a village and received nothing.
Nick Kompkoff Sr. led the community in demanding Chenega be recognized as a village corporation and allowed to select its lands. Gail Evanoff helped in many meetings. She represented Larry, who was busy with work and didn't have her verbal talent or college training.
The Native world had changed rapidly, as a new generation of college-educated young people took over leadership from elders who had traditionally guided village affairs. Only an agile and well-educated mind had any hope of comprehending the multidimensional snarl of law and regulation affecting Alaska Native land, tribes and corporations.
For Chenega, recognition required developing allies and making technical arguments. Elders helped prove their case by guiding tours of the lands they once used, but the fight had to be won in conference rooms full of business suits.
Chenega Corporation received 76,000 acres in southwestern Prince William Sound from within Chugach National Forest in the mid-1970s. Carol Ann Kompkoff remembered her pride when she realized her people had transformed from an excluded racial minority to powerful land owners.
"They no longer looked at me as, 'look at that brown-skinned girl,'" she said.
The change struck her particularly when she met a banker who in the old days had refused loans to her father and other Native fishermen. "There we were, the next generation. I was on the Chenega Corporation board of directors. And who was there to pick us up from the hotel? The banker. He was driving the van and catering to every little whim that we had. And I turned to the others in the van. I said, 'Look who's driving us around. The one who said 'no' to our parents.'"
But owning the land was not enough. Larry Evanoff became impatient to live on it.
TOMORROW: A new village.
Charles Wohlforth, a lifelong Alaska resident and former Daily News reporter, is author of "The Whale and the Supercomputer: On the Northern Front of Climate Change," and other books about Alaska. Learn more at www.fateofnature.com.
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