Seth Kantner's Changing Alaska

November 8, 2008

Photo: Seth Kantner

Days are getting short here, and the hangover from Tuesday’s party is fading. Caribou tracks on the ice are windblown, and dots in the distance mark far-flung gut piles and the black ravens hunched around them, pecking in the snow and sharing their own important news.

Strangely, it feels as if we are moving in two opposite directions: as an Alaskan I recognize this coming cold and dark, while as a citizen of America this spring-like feeling is unfamiliar.

I thank you, Barack Obama, for coming out of nowhere, a stranger from across the ice, and bringing this mood of springtime in November. It is revitalizing to hear high intellect again; your calm smile and positive attitude is encouraging and feels true; your common upbringing and young daughters—it feels like we are all Americans again. It’s a good thing to be reminded.

I was raised a white boy among Eskimos, and still live in an Eskimo town in an Eskimo region of Alaska. And I’m male, like the man you’re replacing, but whatever he did or didn’t do, he has never felt like my President. He belonged to a gang that didn’t and wouldn’t ever include my kind. To me it felt as if he were his family and friends’ President. Exxon-Mobil’s President. I felt endangered by him, not encouraged, certainly not led.

It’s an upside down thing, but I feel like this country just voted for my people.

My daughter, China, is eleven now. It’s been during the last eight of those years that she has asked the majority of her million questions: about caribou and caterpillars, moose and salmon, pollution and polls and democracy. With us she’s traveled on ice, rivers, overseas; with us she’s skinned bears and picked berries and discussed everything from the Dewey Decimal System to FDR (her favorite President.) It has been a privilege to be in her presence—every step of the way—but it has been hardest to explain our nation to her. Hardest to keep hopeful and to make twenty-first-century America sound like even a distant relative to the bright young America in her books.

Here at home, as far as caring for the tundra and mountains and rivers, I won’t say that I was near despair or near giving up because I don’t seem to know how to give up, but I will say we non-flag-waving patriots (hikers, hunters, land-lovers) sorely needed some sun, a break from the heavy brush. Bushes, that is.

Now, out on the ice, a few small bands of caribou still trickle through. Tiny black specks, almost imaginary, crossing the white and climbing the willowy bluffs up onto the tundra. They’ve had a tough go of it, migrating past this community. They came on into wind, gunfire, and gas-powered predation. They left their dead and wounded on the trail, and are marching now on toward their wintering grounds.