MINTO -- Peter John, chief of the Athabascan Indians, was dressed for a special occasion. Necklace of white porcupine quills and indigo beads. Moose skin jacket decorated with wolf fur and bright beadwork sewn in the shape of wildflowers. He held close to his wife, Elsie, and shuffled across the floor of the village's crowded gym to take his place next to the governor of Alaska .
Gov. Wally Hickel had arrived from Fairbanks with four state-chartered airplanes filled with state officials and visitors who had come to hear what Native villagers had to say about the controversial issue of wolf management.
As the two men sat side by side, it was hard not to see their differences. Hickel personifies the pioneer spirit of modern Alaska the visionary entrepreneur who came north to help bring civilization to the frontier and develop its riches. Peter John represents what was here before.
As he stepped to the microphone, the room fell silent.
"I'm 93 years old," he said, "and the things I live by is according to my great-great-grandfather." He talked with the long pauses of someone who is translating the words into English from another language .
"I don't know how to read and write. But the things that I lived through in my days is something that nobody right here in this room would understand. . . . I think a lot of you, you wouldn't understand nothin' about it."
Hickel and the other visitors were getting a dose of what people in this part of Alaska have been receiving for decades.
They were hearing Chief Peter John lay down the law the law of what it means to be Athabascan.
A LIFE OF CHANGE
Peter John grew up in a world that exists today mostly in his memory.
He has lived his life on the Minto Flats, a broad plain of lakes, bogs and spruce northwest of Fairbanks.
The village of Minto is a new one three or four rows of log cabins surrounded by forest. The whole community, about 200 people, moved here in 1971. Their old village, about 25 miles south, was being eaten away by erosion from the Tanana River.
The village is only 20 minutes from Fairbanks by air taxi. But when Peter John was born there was no Fairbanks, and no Anchorage, either. Only a few whites, mostly fur traders, ministers and explorers, had ventured this far inland.
The Athabascans hunted moose with bows and arrows, killed bears with spears and fashioned fish hooks from the talons of owls.
Peter John was 12 when he saw his first white man. Like other Native children in the region, he was sent off to Nenana for school at St. Mark's Mission, run by the Episcopal Church. He was scolded for speaking Athabascan, and it took five years to complete second or third grade. It was as far as he ever went in school.
In his lifetime, Peter John has seen the world change in a thousand ways. Electricity, snowmachines, television, health care and schools came to Minto and the other villages. So did alcoholism and despair, abuse and neglect.
Through the years, Peter and Elsie, like few others, continued living the old ways, moving from place to place through the seasons, hunting, trapping, fishing and gathering. John never used a snowmachine; he worked his traplines on snowshoes. He only worked one regular cash job in his life, as deckhand on a riverboat while a teen-ager.
Peter John is seen by many Interior Indians as one of the last links to the truly old ways, a sort of living encyclopedia of things Athabascan. His message: Value the land and keep control of it. Understand the white world, go to college if you can, but learn about your Indian heritage as well. Learn from the way your ancestors lived.
For several decades, he's been someone villagers turn to when they want to know the details of how to celebrate a traditional potlatch or how to make snowshoes from willow branches. He knows the natural world of Interior Alaska the wildlife, the plants, the landscape like few others. Perhaps above all, he knows the values passed down from his elders.
"Peter John had really good teachers," said Richard Frank, a longtime Minto village leader. "There were a lot of people up and down the river who could really help you understand the world. They're almost all gone now. He's sort of our last resort as far as knowledge of these things.
"I think he knows that a lot of us are really craving the things he can give us."
THE CHIEF'S TRADITION
In the early days of this century, Athabascan chiefs from different bands would meet and select a leader. But for much of this century, there was no single chief. The Athabascans live in more than 40 villages across an area nearly the size of California. Until recent years, they spoke more than a half-dozen dialects, some of them unintelligible to one another.
By the 1970s, there were new kinds of leaders Native corporation presidents and state legislators and heads of tribal agencies. The villages were changing fast. Some Athabascan leaders feared their people, especially the young, were losing contact with their heritage. They decided they again needed a "traditional chief," a sort of spiritual and cultural leader who embodied the old ways. They chose Andrew Isaac of Dot Lake. He remained chief for 19 years, until his death in 1991 at the age of 93.
No successor was chosen immediately, largely out of respect to Isaac, who was revered in villages from the Canadian border across the Interior. Then last spring, village leaders meeting in Fairbanks decided it was time to choose a new chief. Peter John, the chief of Minto since the 1930s, was selected.
The job of traditional chief carries no pay and no formal duties. What John does these days is basically what he's been doing in Minto for years giving guidance to people who ask for it, passing on history to people who want to know it.
But he's also talking more in public meetings, like Hickel's Wolf Summit last month and the Alaska Federation of Natives convention in Anchorage last October. More than 1,000 village delegates from around the state gave him a standing ovation as he introduced his wife, who is 83, and told how they'd been married 66 years no small achievement in a place where the average life expectancy for Natives as recently as the 1960s was under 50 years.
"We're talking about programs, health all these things is connected with me and my wife," he told the crowd. "We try and show you people that it could be done."
Then, abandoning the English with which he sometimes struggles, he began speaking in his native Lower Tanana dialect. At that moment, the old man disappeared. His body language became more forceful. His voice boomed. He sounded like a leader.
Only a few older Athabascans from his part of the Interior understood his words, but his passion stirred the convention hall.
"That's very important, what I just said," he told the crowd, switching back to English.
"It's this: Try and teach your children what our great-great-grandfathers used to live by."
'WHAT YOU WANT TO KNOW?'
I met Peter John in November. I was told that he spends a lot of time thinking about the villages these days, and that the things he has to say could be of value not only to Athabascans but other people as well.
So I walked up the street, into a biting north wind, and knocked on his door. No answer. I stepped into the arctic entryway and tapped on the inside door.
"C'min!"' shouted a raspy, impatient voice.
The room was dark and hot and smelled of moose hide. Peter John sat up on his knees on the living room floor. Elsie was in the kitchen. I stood in the open doorway and explained why I was there and asked if he had some time to talk.
"Well, you'd better get in here," he said, motioning impatiently to shut the door. There's even an Athabascan way to open the door, especially in winter. You enter first and talk later.
"What's the matter, ain't you never come visit an Indian's house before?" he snapped.
He told me to sit on the sofa. He stared at me, squinting with his bad eyes. I apologized for letting the cold air in.
"Newspaper huh," he barked. "Come to see the dumb old Indian."
Then he chuckled, and his voice softened.
"What you want to know anyway?"
Outsiders have been showing up asking Peter John questions for a long time. For some, he can be cantankerous and intimidating.
Take the people who wanted to build the pipeline. In the 1970s, a group of oil company executives and state officials went to Minto to talk about the proposed trans- Alaska oil pipeline, which would cross Native land. Their plane was two hours late. When they finally spoke with Minto's chief, Peter John needled them: "You invented the clock and here you can't even live by it!"
For researchers and other academics trying to learn about Indian ways, he's been a rich source of information.
When linguists at the Alaska Native Language Center at the University of Alaska began documenting the Lower Tanana dialect and compiling its first dictionary, Peter John was a primary source. He provided anthropologists with the Athabascan place names for hundreds of lakes, streams, river bends and other features of the Minto Flats.
Three winters ago, he and Elsie spent the winter in Fairbanks as guest lecturers for a Native studies class at the university.
Several scholars have lived with them for stretches of time through the years, and there's a treasure of taped interviews and transcripts stored away at the university archives in Fairbanks memories, Athabascan history, traditional stories and, increasingly in recent years, his views of the connections between traditional Indian values and Christianity. Researchers have relied heavily on information from him to reconstruct the history of the Minto Flats Indians and the values they lived by.
The stories of Peter John's life are amazing. He tells of the time he shot into a black bear den, missed, then killed the bear with an ax. Of the time he climbed into a tree to call a moose, climbed down to get his gun and shot the charging bull while hanging by one arm from a limb. Of shooting two ducks with one .22-caliber bullet. Of eating the bait out of his own traps to keep from starving.
NO QUICK ANSWERS
Peter John's health is relatively good these days. His eyesight is failing, and he sometimes has trouble hearing. Like many people his age, some days are better than others. Sometimes English, his second language , fails him and he appears to struggle to find words to express himself clearly especially on matters of feelings or spirituality.
An outsider coming to him seeking simple, pithy answers will be frustrated. He has few, and he can be a difficult teacher. It's not hard to see why some younger Natives, who have grown up with Air Jordan sneakers and Nintendo games, have had difficulty embracing some of the concepts he preaches.
"I can't tell you to live the way I live, because you wouldn't understand it," he said. "The school I went to, you wouldn't last very long."
Peter John told Hickel he wasn't able to read or write, but that's not true. He left the mission school unable to even write his name, but eventually taught himself to read by using a dictionary and reading anything he could get his hands on.
He has spent a lot of time reading the Bible. He's fascinated by the connections he sees between Christianity and traditional Athabascan beliefs.
"There's a lot of connections right there between the Bible and what the Athabascans live by," he said. Even before they had encountered white people, he said, the Athabascans were living by values not at all foreign to Christianity. "The thing is, how did the Athabascans know those things? That's something nobody knows."
He talks with passion about how God has affected his own life, and how the world is governed by one God who is understood and described differently by various cultures. He believes that Athabascan life, like any other, is a constant struggle between good and evil impulses.
For several years, he has been working extensively with Dave Krupa, an anthropologist from the University of Wisconsin who has recorded hours of conversation with Peter John about spirituality. The two of them are finishing a manuscript of John's religious views essentially him just talking and Krupa hopes to have the book published in the next year or two.
John insisted from the beginning, Krupa said, that the interviews be done in English, rather than Athabascan, so that what he said could be more easily digested by outsiders and younger Indians.
"He believes the world is in a severe crisis," Krupa said. "We've been blinded by greed. That's why people end up hurting each other . . .
"I think he thinks the white people have lost even more of their culture than the Natives have. He's said, 'I'm trying to point them back to their own culture; I want to produce something that will cause you to reflect on your own roots.' "'THIS IS THE WHITE MAN'S WORLD NOW'
In some regions of Alaska , it is considered rude and disrespectful to push too many questions on an elder. Peter John seems to welcome it. It's as if he's afraid time is running out to pass on the things he knows, and one of the reasons he's so cooperative with scholars is that he wants some of what he knows written down and read.
Athabascan culture, like that of all Alaska 's Native people, was oral. History and values were passed down in stories from generation to generation. They were never written until the latter part of this century, and even then only in bits and pieces. Alaska 's Indians lived in a hunter-gatherer society, and as the villages changed, from subsisting entirely off the land to a blend of cash and subsistence, there were fewer people who found value in the old ways.
Peter John seems frustrated that the details of Athabascan culture weren't written down sooner. "I think that's a reason we got problems today," he said. "There was no easy way for the kids to pick it up."
He's frustrated that more young people don't seem interested in learning the old ways. "It's here for the asking," he said. "I ain't selling it. Here for the asking, but not too many people want it."
It's not that John thinks people should return to living the old ways. "Nobody'd want that," he said. He appreciates modern conveniences. A color television sits in the living room of his three-room cabin. There's a tape recorder on top of the TV, next to his Bible, for recording his thoughts and memories.
"I'm not against the white people," he said. "My grandson is 22 years old. He's been trying to get into the college for two years. He finally made it, and I told him, 'I'm telling you, try and learn the white man's way.' . . . This is the white man's world now, and you can't pry them away from that."
But how can young Natives enter that world and still appreciate the values of Peter John's great-great-grandfather? He thinks it's possible, but it's something that takes a lifetime to learn and there are fewer and fewer elders who can teach it.
Younger Athabascan leaders are trying. Will Mayo, the president of the Tanana Chiefs Conference, the influential Athabascan-run social service and tribal agency, invited Peter and Elsie John to sit at his side as he delivered the keynote speech to the AFN convention last fall. Mayo brought down the house when he stripped off his sport coat and tie and donned beads and moose skin. It was a gesture meant to refute an earlier suggestion by one Native corporation president that Natives "put away the beads and feathers." With Peter and Elsie watching, Mayo sang a traditional Athabascan song and pleaded with Alaska Natives to remember the values of their elders.
"What he's trying to do, he's trying to understand Indian ways," Peter John said. "That's the hardest part of his life."
'WHAT WE LIVED BY'
Peter and Elsie John had 10 children; most died in the waves of infectious disease that tore through Alaska early this century tuberculosis, influenza, measles. An adopted son became one of the best trappers in the flats. He died from whiskey in the 1970s.
"We had a bunch of kids, but they all die off. No doctor or nurse. No kind of medicine. Now we just have three daughters. That's the toughest part of all life, losing our kids. And not only us, but all the people that you see around the village had the same kind of problem. We have to face that."
While he talked, Elsie sat in an easy chair and stared at the floor. She said little.
"That's the bravest woman right there," Peter John said.
He reached on a shelf and pulled down a thin, black hardback book. The title was "What We Lived By." Several years ago, a pair of medical students from New York serving an internship in Fairbanks spent part of a summer living with Peter and Elsie. They taped several hours of conversation, transcribed them, had several copies printed and sent them to Minto.
Here's what he says about his wife in the book:
"Money is plentiful today. But getting it is another question. A lot of times, my wife and me have nothing but we never cry about it. She went through a pretty tough life, maybe that's the reason a lot of people tell me, 'How's your wife put up with you?' If they know how brave she is and how strong she is, they would never say that.
"She never let go. She cut fish. She do everything. Make a fish trap in wintertime. All these things she done. Set snares, rabbit. She never talk about no good time but our living together. She shot a moose once, six mile.
"She not very strong, after all, she pretty near died three times, but that woman never give in. Never scared of nothing. Moose come right up to her, no shells. Big bull moose with horns. I run across that flat and he was going to charge . . . I shot him right there. That's how close.
"She never say that I can't do it, I can't make it. She never say that. We move where there was no trail, I had to walk ahead of dogs to get something for kids. Never complained. That's the kind of woman I've got."
'HE KNOWS FIRSTHAND'
Peter and Elsie spend most of their days in the cabin, except in summertime when they move back to Old Minto with other villagers for fish camp.
This time of year, a van comes by every weekday at 11:30 and takes them and other elders to the village community hall, where they have a government- subsidized lunch together with the village's children. Everyone calls it "senior grub."
Throughout the lunch hour, people come and go from the hall. Peter and Elsie John sit and talk with each other in their Athabascan dialect, a language their grandchildren cannot understand.
What is the role of Peter John in the modern Athabascan world?
Mitch Demientieff of Nenana, the chairman of the Tanana Chiefs Conference who has known John for many years, said that above all else, he reminds the Interior Indians where they came from.
"There's a real focus right now, more and more these days, on retaining the culture. A lot of people see the need to reaffirm our basic values.
"Peter John is someone who's worked very hard to preserve that knowledge and to pass it along. He knows the way people lived in the old days, he knows all that firsthand.
"We're running out of those kinds of people."