Rivers of Life

Summer 2023, FORUM Magazine

Renewal and remembrance,
Old ways, forgotten in new times,
We reach back to learn.

A DECADE OR SO AGO, I moved to the frontier with my husband, Brian, to work at the University of Alaska Anchorage. We didn’t quite know what to expect or how to prepare ourselves. Anchorage, Alaska was a big move from upstate New York, 4,500 miles away, a leap of faith, especially for Brian. He had lived in one community in upstate New York his entire life, but me? I had lived all over and called no place home. I flew to Anchorage and two months later, Brian loaded whatever furnishings fit in a U-Haul van, drove across the country to Bellingham, Washington, got on a ferry for three-and-a-half days, and then drove another two long days to get to Anchorage, and to me. Ironically, this “frontier” is the biggest city that we’ve ever lived in. I didn’t know why, but I felt like I was home almost as soon as I landed here. 

The first year, especially, we were both charmed by all that was new. There might be moose outside our door, leaning up a snowbank with their oh-so-long legs to reach the upper branches of a tree or leisurely stepping down the street, while cars waited patiently for them to cross. Night lasted well into the morning during the time of the winter solstice, and we were shocked that people commuted by bicycle through that darkness and snow and ice, even when it was below zero degrees. The roads stayed snow-packed during the winter, rarely down to the blacktop, and the periodic hoar frost was an odd delight, misty fog encasing tree branches and turning the world glistening white. 

I became obsessed with picking raspberries, blueberries, and cranberries that blanketed the hillside in the late summer. The inescapable light in the summer months, which at its peak at summer solstice barely had the birds quiet for an hour before they started chirping again, proved to be more of a problem for me than the winter darkness. I had just finished my first academic year at UAA, and I was still wonderous about being in Alaska when I read about the opportunity for the Educator Cross-Cultural Immersion program (ECCI), sponsored by the Alaska Humanities Forum. I had read about the challenges for Alaska Native students, and I wanted to be able to respond in a way that would support them in their education. Thankfully, I was one of a group of faculty chosen to spend a week in one of several Alaska Native villages and to participate in a course in which I’d learn about this very special place that already meant so much to me; to learn about Alaska Native history and culture and to better understand our Alaska Native students at the university. 

Each village in the immersion program brought a different experience, as I later found out. There were culture camps all over the state, and some were more focused on Alaska Native art or customs. Mine was to participate in Fish Camp, a week-long program intended to preserve and teach culture to young Native people, as well as to outsiders. More traditionally, fish camps were for families who traveled together for the specific purpose of fishing for subsistence. 

A four-seater plane flew me into Haines, the closest town to Klukwan, where I was headed, a Tlingit village in Southeast Alaska, situated on the bank of the Chilkat River. After a commercial flight to Juneau, getting on a small plane, we flew so close to the earth that I was awestruck by the different shades and textures of water in the rivers, streams, and creeks—names unknown to me, but resplendent in browns, silty grays, frothy, turquoise, churned, spilling, smooth. So many that I wondered if this Native language, which I soon found out was Tlingit, had more capacity for describing water in all of its facets, far beyond what I had adequate description for. I began writing in haiku long before I arrived; I was moved to document the journey in this way.

I was picked up in an SUV by my host at a small, boxy, non-descript building that serves as the airfield office. I and one other participant in the program, a tall, burly, bearded man, younger than me, were picked up by our host, the Klukwan Tribal Council President. She had a ready smile, brown hair pulled back in a loose ponytail, and eyeglasses. She made us immediately comfortable—what had I expected? She could have been my sister, a cousin, a friend, and we hopped into her SUV for the twenty or so mile trip to Klukwan.

I was disappointed at first to learn that I’d be staying in a conventional wood-framed house and surprised to find that I had a large, comfortable bedroom that faced the river. It didn’t feel different, not the cultural separation I had been anticipating. Then I realized that I was relieved, having heard from a friend, assigned to a village where she was sleeping in a tent; the mosquitoes were said to be numerous and thirsty. The one road of Klukwan had more wood-framed homes up and down the road; most were smaller, none that stood out from the others. A community garden offered up greens and other vegetables halfway down the road, in front of the village hall. That my bedroom faced the river gave me a glorious place to begin and end my day, a silent and dreamy space to journal and reflect on my experiences.

Mornings were slow in the village, meals often communal in Fish Camp for the village nurse from the health center, a nephew of our host, other youth attending fish camp. The village ordinarily seemed to have a communal dinner once a week. We had salmon salad every day for lunch, half regular salmon, half smoked, from their home-canned cache of the previous year, and on pilot bread—a large, round, hard cracker that serves as bread for a village that lacks easy access to a grocery store. Afternoons we walked down the one road to the river for whatever the next lesson was for Fish Camp. We were a mix of adults and youth and only about half a dozen of us. Everyone but the two of us who had flown in was from Haines or Klukwan. We learned about cleaning salmon, cutting, brining, smoking, canning—not fish catching—one of the village men checked the nets and brought them in. I vacuumed in the morning for my host—we had been urged to make ourselves useful—and she told me, with a laugh, that I could stay forever.

I met ten-year-old David, skinny, all bones and legs and elbows, dark-eyed, soon after arriving, a nephew of my host. David was there each day bright and early. He arrived from a few doors down looking like he rolled out of bed and pulled t-shirt and jeans on in a hurry, anxious not to miss any of the action. He attached himself to me and was my constant companion for a week, tagging along after me everywhere, followed by the village dogs. Back and forth, up and down the one dirt road. Towards the end of my stay, David and I were smoking salmon in the smokehouse by the river. By then the smell of salmon was constant with me, redolent in my clothing, boots, ever-present in my nose, not unpleasantly. The smoking added another layer to the sensory buildup, stinging my eyes as well; one of my jobs was to take turns watching the temperature in the smokehouse and keeping a low fire smoldering.

David was curious about my life outside of his village.

“Where is your smokehouse?” he wondered to me.

“I don’t have one,” I replied.

He looked at me, incredulous.

“Well, where is your river?”

“I guess I don’t have a river either.”

David looked at me with sorrow in his eyes. To not have a smokehouse is bad enough, but to not have a river was unimaginable.

I appreciated how his life was grounded by the river. What was I grounded by, my rootless self, a nomad of sorts, not really belonging anywhere that I called home in the same way that David did? “I bet this is really different for you,” my host suggested one day as we were talking. But in one way it wasn’t. Although I now live in an urban area, and thousands of miles away from any family, I grew up in a small town in Delaware. Being in Klukwan had a similar feeling to my childhood - timeless days, slow pace of life, the knowing of everyone in town and everything that was happening. It seemed as though I was related to the whole town of New Castle as a child, with four grandparents who each had 10 or 11 brothers and sisters, most of them still living in town.

That memory also connected me to the river that I knew as a child. I hadn’t thought about it in years, the smell of it, musky and noxious, yet somehow fresh at the same time, the dampness on my bare arms from the hot moist air, cooled by the breeze, the sounds of the lapping waves, the ships far out in the distance. The Delaware River was larger than the Chilkat River that runs alongside Klukwan, but New Castle, on the river with a sign, “William Penn landed here,” was also small at the time. My river was no meandering stream, but rather a shipping channel that ran north and east into Philadelphia. A park of sorts ran alongside with a winding trail around the banks of the river. My house was several blocks away, and if there was an “out of bounds” rule assumed by my mother, I ignored it in favor of running to the river where my friends were, where my older sister was with her friends. We weren’t in the river, after all, but on the huge slabs of rock, stacked and jumbled, that the water licked at different levels depending on the tide.

The separation of moving far away from this place and these loved people happened when I was eight years old, and the similarities of lifestyle and connection to extended family are long gone for me now, though there were yearly visits. But in conversation with my mother before she passed away last year, I became more conscious of my family’s history with the river. My great-great-grandfather was a Civil War prisoner at Fort Delaware on Pea Patch Island in the middle of the Delaware River, and the woman who became my great-great-grandmother was a young immigrant from Ireland and the prison cook when they met and fell in love. Many years later, but before there was a bridge over the river, my grandfather worked on the ferry that went across. He was an engineer of sorts, kept the diesel engine running below deck, or sometimes he worked on a second ferry with a much cleaner steam engine. My mother used to walk to the river with her father’s dinner, packed by my grandmother in a brown wicker basket, and ready for his short break to eat while the ferry passengers and cars lined up, waiting patiently or not, for him to finish refueling himself. For the men in my family, the wharf was a place to fish, to catch Maryland blue crabs, an everyday social meetup to visit and smoke, to be in the open air and perhaps connected to something big and limitless. The gifts and the dangers of the river were a part of the life of the town, as is the Chilkat River in Klukwan.

I’ve always dreamt of rivers. Once, long before coming to Alaska, I walked upriver in a dream, crowded by big animals coming downriver toward me, brushing against me, knocking me off balance. My therapist suggested the big animals symbolized my daughter, then in the throes of being a difficult teenager. In another dream, an Algonquin Indian came again downriver and passed, from his large brown hand to my much smaller white one, something symbolizing health, how to be healthy. Why specifically Algonquin I do not know, but the Algonquins populated the east coast at one time in small villages, dependent on hunting and fishing. Perhaps I learned about them in school. What passed hand to hand, in any case, was a warm and intimate communication, a feeling that all would be well, an important message in my dreams of struggling, always upstream. Those dreams had a parallel in my life during those years; a single mother, never enough money, spending my days supporting others’ lives as a social worker and my nights raising my two children.

I didn’t cross a river to get to David’s village, but my trip to Klukwan became a bridge to my past. The first few days that I was in the village, I kept falling asleep, unable to keep myself awake without the electronic stimulation that I was used to (we were urged to leave our phones and laptops at home), the important things happening that I must attend to. It was late summer and a busy time around the river to harvest salmon in gill nets, to put up food for the winter months, but being busy in the village was still pretty slow for me.

The village lifestyle and family ties were in danger of being lost here, as our host confided to me. The Native residents of Klukwan, with about 90 residents, and losing population still, wonder how their subsistence way of life will survive. At the end of the week, when I say goodbye to David, my gaze lingers on him. What will his life be like by the time he reaches adulthood, I wonder? Will he still have his smokehouse? His river? How will he adapt to a world where traditional ways of life may be vulnerable to dying out?

The river was ever-present in Klukwan, something I saw each morning from my bedroom window. I took delight in noting the changes each day in the light, the cloud formations, the reflections on the water. For this Native village, the importance of the river is clear and close. For thousands of years, Indigenous people have been subsisting on land and river. The river of my childhood was important for commerce, beginning with the original colonies in the 1700s, but only for the past few hundreds of years. The men of Klukwan fish on the river and hang out by the riverbed carving or smoking, similar to how the men in my family fished and hung by the river.

I miss having a river after all, and I understand the sorrow in David’s eyes for my loss. I was taken away from my river, moved with mother and step-father away from all else that I knew when I was just a little younger than David. The Chilkat River gives his life a daily rhythm, a heartbeat, that once I had too. I had an initial regret that I am not as connected as ten-year-old David to the soul of this earth. But though life has brought me far from the Delaware River, I never completely lost that connection. I find that I am grounded, after all, in Alaska, as well as in the land and the river of my childhood. It seems I have a foundation that is reliable and sturdy, something to draw on and continue to be nurtured by. In my life now, no river by my side, I turn more immediately to mountains, truing myself daily by their changing countenance. My time in Klukwan opened into a new window of spiritual growth and to standing tall on the shoulders of my ancestors. I returned to Anchorage, thankful for the opportunity given to me by the Alaska Humanities Forum. I was gifted with a greater appreciation of a way of life for Alaska Natives and this new home for me and a window into the lives of Alaska Native students in rural Alaska that I would not otherwise have understood.

Our life is close by our food,
Our drumbeat close by our hearts
An ancient village, Klukwan
— Haiku written in Klukwan, August, 2010. ■

Judy Owens-Manley has a Ph.D. and master’s in social work and is currently enrolled in a low-residency MFA/Creative Writing program. She is a retired university administrator and professor, now engaged in board service with the Alaska Humanities Forum and the Alaska Women’s Hall of Fame.