While looking for a shovel so I could dig with her she missed most of the low tide period suitable for finding clams. Coming in from clam digging, Wannah sat for a moment at her kitchen table while her husband, Dennis, paced and devoured leftovers. The love and duty of catching food for his family seemed to energize Dennis's wiry body into constant motion.
With bright spring sunlight piercing through the trees from the water they talked about the season. Was it time for goose eggs yet? That depended on the late snow and Wannah's birthday -- that's when you go.
Living from the land -- subsistence, the Alaska Native tradition -- is a hell of a lot of work. The differences from sport hunting and fishing are fundamental. Success really matters, as families committed to a subsistence lifestyle invest the time in food gathering that would be spent earning cash in mainstream society. Also, getting the amount of food needed to sustain a family requires long, intense hours of processing, teamwork, and efficient harvesting.
The sportsman's conventions of hook-and-line angling or fair chase hunting make sense only in the context of leisure, not subsistence. Dennis worked odd jobs for cash, but most of the time he was thinking about the beach for clams, chitons and octopus, the bay for salmon to cure in his smokehouse, the big garden and greenhouse out back for growing vegetables, the mountain behind the village to stalk deer, the wet ground all around to pick blueberries by the gallon.
A dedicated subsistence family such as Dennis and Wannah's harvests as many as seventy species of wild plants, animals, fish and invertebrates in a year, perhaps half a ton of food per person. Dennis learned the skills and the patterns of nature as he grew up in Tatitlek doing these things with his own family. Now five children are growing up at his side, helping him and Wannah in the woods and on the water.
What Larry and Gail Evanoff planted when they built the first cabin in the new village of Chenega in the 1980s now grows strongly in their grandchildren, Ray, Joey, Melonie, Toni Rae and Tyler -- who were aged six to fourteen when I was there in 2007.
The children know about the rest of the world, but they're completely of this place. They have cable TV and the Internet and they've been on plenty of trips, but in the Sound they learn Alutiiq, carving, hunting, and all their traditions. The whole family attends Heritage Week in Tatitlek and spirit camp at Nuchek. The children go to school in tiny, individualized classes and practice traditional dance. They roam the village, its beaches and woods, the way Wannah did as a girl.
Wannah said, "Their sense of living is language and culture and dance. That whole program they're in. And that's set them in this whole awesome attitude of being proud of their culture and life, and being who they are."
Wannah's first job, as a teenager, was on the Exxon Valdez oil spill, in 1989, and she worked the beaches during the summers through her youth. She got together with Dennis on oil spill work and they began their family with that income still coming in.
The spill had hit near the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Great Alaska Earthquake destroying the village and five years after villagers reestablished Chenega. A battle to save the Armin F. Koernig hatchery from approaching oil happened here, a chaotic invasion of workers and money, obliterating village stability and privacy.
Social workers and researchers intruded with intimate questions. Ignorant international journalists produced news pieces full of stereotypes. Exxon's splurge of spending that first summer brought 70,000 pounds of free groceries to the twenty households in the village, enough to fill every inch of storage space and send some off to relatives.
The outside interference reminded anthropologist Nancy Yaw Davis of what she'd seen in villages after the earthquake, but the flood of money also caused new, unfamiliar stresses, as subsistence stopped and many people began working long hours for wages they had never dreamed of. New resentment, conflict and loneliness. People stopped helping each other. Davis said some Native villagers blew their new income as fast as they could in order to restore the balance of financial equality that had always glued their communities together.
No one wanted to eat wild foods that first summer, with so much oil on everything: sea stars fell apart to the touch, brain-damaged seals swam right up to hunters. But confidence didn't return the next year, either. The advice of the experts seemed thin and changeable.
As the years passed, the oil became part of the landscape -- people knew which beaches to avoid -- but new oil spill science undercut that recovery of confidence with the discovery that certain long-lasting chemicals in the oil could affect health even when undetectable to human senses. Fifteen years after the oil spill, Chenegans could easily find oil by turning over rocks on many nearby islands. Some were afraid to dig clams.
Researchers led by James Fall of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game found a deep new awareness of contamination of all kinds in the villages touched by the spill, a sense that one must always be concerned about whether wild food was safe -- a new suspicion where they always used to say, "When the tide is out the table is set." Most believed the traditional way of life had not recovered from the oil. Fall's surveys showed harvests had not returned to pre-spill levels.
But Wannah said many Chenegans weren't digging clams or gathering much wild food because they never got used to it. Some grew up on store-bought food in Anchorage, followed by only five years living in the village before the oil spill disrupted the recovering subsistence tradition.
Wannah's mother, Gail Evanoff, posted a handmade diagram on the wall of her office in the village clinic showing Chenega's journey through time as a ride down a river: from the big sea of culture and identity in the past, through the narrow, rocky passage of the earthquake and tsunami that destroyed the old village, widening again with the tributaries of the land claims and the re-established village, and then back into dangerous rapids with the oil spill, lost subsistence, increased drugs and alcohol, but with a hopeful future ahead, a broad new sea, labeled "self-determination, sobriety, wellness."
Gail is a behavioral health counselor in the immaculate, well-lit clinic building, where Wannah works part time as a receptionist. Checking in patients isn't a difficult job in a community with only sixty or seventy residents. Old Chenega was a subsistence and commercial fishing community, but there are no fishing permits left in the village today and anyone can order groceries from the air services that fly from Anchorage to a big, modern airstrip built during the oil spill recovery process.
The sale of village lands to the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council brought the Chenega Corporation $34 million. It used that wealth to become spectacularly successful as a partner in contracts for military, security and intelligence services for the Department of Defense and other federal agencies. As a Native corporation, Chenega obtained the contracts through a provision put in federal law by Sen. Ted Stevens known as 8a which waives bidding requirements.
In 2008, with 3,200 employees all over the world and $700 million in revenues, the corporation had a standing offer of work for any its 167 shareholders, whom it had paid annual dividends of up to $30,000 each (or so I was told in the village; the corporation won't say how much it pays out). Lucrative jobs and other spending came as well from an organization set up to prevent and respond to future oil spills.
Newly affluent families moved away --to be closer to work in Valdez or elsewhere, or simply because they could--but kept their low-cost housing in Chenega for occasional visits. With those housing units unused, there wasn't room for anyone new to move in, and the population dropped to around forty, with the school endangered, since only schools with ten or more students get state funding.
Once a village's school closes, the community begins to die. But the Dennis and Wannah Zacher contributed five children, Sandy Angiak had her two, and the couple running the Armin F. Koernig Hatchery brought a family, too--so the school scraped by.
The fact remains, however, that while the village has the best of everything that money can buy, and plenty of good jobs doing not much, it doesn't have an economic reason to exist. The money and things all come from somewhere else.
In the old village everyone was poor, but elders recalled their sense of purpose working to gather their food and build their shelter as a community. Those needs are gone, taking along with them the meaning they provided--a man's feeling of use when his family's survival depends on his hunting skill.
Jim Fall's surveys show that Chenegans still harvest as much wild food as most coastal Native villages, but the villagers themselves kept telling me that few live a traditional subsistence way of life, the kind that is linked to the sea and guided by the elders.
An anonymous Native told Fall's researchers the oil spill had reduced the respect given elders because, "The culture is changing to a monetary system and more competition. Young people want money now." A Chenegan in the survey said the traditional way of life was lost forever: "It's never going to recover. It can't happen. Everybody's got a pocketful of money now. You can't go back."
TOMORROW: Chenega now
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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