Between Memory and Land: Learning and Healing from The Great Death

Winter 2024-25, FORUM Magazine

GROWING UP, I often heard stories of “The Great Death,” a haunting term for the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1919 that devastated Alaska Native communities. The Spanish Flu struck villages so ferociously that entire families disappeared within days. One story that I have heard repeated among my extended family and the communities of the Lake Iliamna region tells of someone coming home to find a mother and her baby, both gone from this plane of existence, the child still at the mother’s breast.

For years, I thought the story of the mother and her baby was a story of an unknown person from an unnamed village. It is said stories about this time were not shared often or in detail because the immense grief the people experienced was too hurtful to revisit. It wasn’t until recently while reading fellow Igiugig resident and Igiugig Village Council President AlexAnna Salmon’s thesis Igyararmiunguunga: Qallemciq Nunaka Man’i Kuicaraami-llu (“I Belong to Igiugig”: The Story of My Home on the Kvichak River), that I realized that I was more deeply connected to this story than I ever would have thought.

My home village is Igyaraq–Igiugig. Igiugig is located in Southwestern Alaska on the Kvichak River and Lake Iliamna but the ancestral homelands of our once nomadic people stretch across a much broader land base. Half of my maternal lineage can be traced back to old village sites just a few miles downriver from current-day Igiugig–my grandfather’s family once lived, played, and harvested at the village of Qinuyang¹. Qinuyang did not survive the Great Death that struck the world and left Indigenous peoples–their families, homes, and villages–devastated. Qinuyang was once a thriving Yup’ik village of about two hundred residents, nestled on the Kvichak River between two tributaries, overlooking where the Kvichak expands into several waterways and islands that once supported all five species of salmon. This particular location once had a wide open view of this expanse of the river where caribou, moose, and bears would traverse, making it a perfect spot for nomadic people who lived in a deep relationship with their environment. Only three individuals of Qinuyang survived the Spanish Flu: my Ap’a, my grandfather, Nick Nowatak; Anuska “Blind Gramma” or Naruya Kasylie; and Andrew “Quliaq” Evon².

When AlexAnna wrote her thesis, published in 2008, she spoke with my mother, Betsy Hostetter, who shared what she knew about my Ap’a’s early life. She said, “He just told me [he was born] near Peck’s Creek. He was really quiet about that place. Every time we’d try talking to him about it, he wouldn’t tell us. Too hard, he said. But I heard stories about what had happened. My dad went hunting, he was just a little kid, going out for a day and coming back and finding his mom and them dead. He had a younger brother. They said his younger brother was nursing on his mom.”

There are moments in time when one experiences a monumental shift in perspective, this realization that the mother and baby in the story of the Great Death are my great-grandmother and great-uncle was one of those for me. I have been on a journey to reconnect to the Yup’ik pieces of myself and this moment manifested my connection to Qinuyang more solidly.

The story of Qinuyang is not unique. Countless other villages across Alaska experienced devastating loss through the Great Death. Harold Napoleon writes unabashedly about this in Yuuyaraq: The Way of the Human Being, describing the profound impacts on the Yup’ik people. Napoleon writes of how the Great Death made the Yup’ik people more vulnerable to colonization. We can see slivers of this when the Yup’ik people established more permanent settlements–surrendering to the pressures of Westernization to establish more permanent roots to survive. This shift brought with it a new concept of "land ownership"—a foreign idea imposed by Western colonization. This new system stripped them of their ability to move freely across the land and locked them into a new way of life that diminished their ancestral ways. Furthermore, as AlexAnna Salmon has shed light on in her work with Igiugig Village Council when land ownership was calculated under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA), the amount of acreage allocated to individuals, villages, and regions was based on populations that had not yet recovered from the devastation of the Great Death. As a result, the Yup’ik people of the region own significantly less than they would have if their populations were restored and are dealing with access to their traditional territories–and thus their way of life–often being hindered by repercussions of this land ownership mentality.

Traditional harvesting practices such as moose hunting are regulated by another imposed Western colonization concept of “resource management” under state and federal jurisdiction. Igiugig is located near both State and Federal lands and thus hunters must be conscious of these lines, if a moose roams beyond Federal lands while State lands are not open for the season yet, then it cannot be harvested.

Such impactful consequences of the Spanish Flu and Western colonization on Alaska Native communities are wounds that are still being explored and analyzed, generation by generation. True and whole histories, such as the story of Qinuyang and my Grandfather, and their implications on our lives today must have their light shed on them. The consequences of those events–such as how it has affected our relationship with the lands, skies, and waters around us–reverberate through time. What remains powerful is the strength and resilience of the people. Today, many Indigenous people, including myself, are reconnecting with our traditions, languages, and ways of life, reclaiming what was once threatened or lost. To truly do this, the land is integral. It not only nourishes us but everything around us. From the slow-growing sphagnum moss incubating the salmonberries to the clear waters of the Kvichak River providing a vessel for the sockeye salmon to return home–this land, in all its vastness and beauty, must be protected and remain in or be returned to the hands of people who have stewarded it for millennia.

Moving forward, we must hold in our hearts the realities of the past—honoring those who were lost and acknowledging the sacrifices that came with adaptation and survival—while preparing for a brighter future. In doing so, we ensure that our connection to the land, our cultures, and our stories continues to thrive. By remembering and embracing where we come from and advocating for our presence on our traditional homelands, we create a path forward rooted in healing, justice, and the knowledge that our future can and will be different—one where our ways of life, our languages, and our stories endure for generations to come. ■

¹ Qinuyang is also the name for another separate village in Southwestern Alaska, South Naknek; the Qinuyang being referred to here is what was, “Old Igiugig.”

² Although there were only three survivors of Qinuyang at the time the Spanish Flu swept through the village, many people of present-day Igiugig are descendents of the people of Qasgivik, which was another village site on the other side of the Kvichak River from Qinuyang. The two sites had overlapping relatives and thus many more people in the region have connections to these places.

April Tan'gerpak Hostetter is Yup'ik from the Lake Iliamna region and currently resides in Igiugig, Alaska. In her work, she advocates for cultural revitalization, environmental stewardship, and Indigenous sovereignty, striving to weave together traditional knowledge with contemporary initiatives to uplift and advocate for the people, lands, skies, waters, and other-than-human relatives. April is a 2024 FORUM Writing Fellow.