Authors: Stan Jones
NELDA QIVITS WAS WATCHING the
World’s Funniest
Animal Videos
when she heard the outer door of her
kunnichuk
open and slam, then a knock on the inner door.
“Come in!” she yelled, not getting out of her chair in front of the TV.
The inner door opened and there was that pretty Nathan Active, the
naluaqmiiyaaq
boy with winter in his eyes. This time he was carrying some caribou—a hindquarter and a backstrap, it looked like. He had never brought her caribou before, just money.
“
Arigaa
, Nathan, good to see you,” she said as she hobbled over to take the backstrap. The tender meat along the spine was the best part of a caribou, in her opinion. Her stomach rumbled a little in anticipation. But she would have to wait, she saw. The meat was frozen hard. With a sigh, she laid it on her drain board to thaw.
“You could put that hindquarter in my freezer out there, ah? Then you sit down and I’ll make us some sourdock tea.”
Nathan put away the meat, stepped into the cabin, and shut the inner door. Then he sat at her little dining table, his eyes wandering between her tea making and a video about a wild crow that had adopted a kitten in some
naluaqmiut
town Outside.
“I hear on Kay-Chuck, you find that Robert Kelly, then you’re trapped up in Shaman Pass in our blizzard last week, ah?”
“Yes, we were stormbound five days,” he said. “I was with Calvin Maiyumerak and Whyborn Sivula and Alan Long. We had a good tent and a stove, so it wasn’t too bad.”
“Is that where you get the caribou, Shaman Pass?” She sat down across from him and sipped from one of the mugs.
“I didn’t get it, Alan and Whyborn did, just before the storm hit. So we had plenty to eat, and there was still lots left when it was over. Alan gave me some.”
“What you guys do up there in your tent all that time?”
“Ate and slept a lot, played cribbage. Alan and Whyborn told some old stories. Calvin showed us a lot of string tricks with his hands. And he sang a lot.”
“Calvin sang?”
Nathan lifted his eyebrows in the Eskimo yes, which she liked. He was trying.
“What he sing? You mean gospel?”
“No, songs that he made up. He sang about how we found Natchiq and Robert Kelly, and he sang about how we lost them and my snowmachine in Angatquq Gorge. He made it all funny, somehow.”
She shook her head in wonder. She had not known any of this about Calvin Maiyumerak. “He sound like a real old-time Eskimo, that guy.”
“I guess,” Nathan said.
“It was fun for you?”
Nathan paused like he needed to think this over, then looked at her with a surprised expression. “Yes, it was fun,” he said.
“No problem with
quiyuk
now?”
He shook his head and his smile got bigger.
That knot over his brows was gone, she saw now. Not like the other times, when he came in to tell her about the bullet dream.
“
Arigaa!
Then you had good dreams up there?”
He smiled. “No bullet dream. But I dreamed I was a ptarmigan flying through Shaman Pass. Was that a good dream?”
“Were you happy?”
Nathan’s face opened up in a huge, relaxed smile. “Very happy.”
“Then it was a good dream.”
He took a sip of the sourdock tea and stood up. “I should go now. Lucy and I have to tell my grandfather a story.”
“Your
ataata
Jacob?”
Nathan lifted his eyebrows.
“
Arigaa,
” she said. “He’ll like that.”
The Real Natchiq
THE CHARACTER NATCHIQ IN this story is based on a real Eskimo prophet and social reformer who lived in Northwest Alaska in the nineteenth century.
His name was Maniilaq and Natchiq’s life is drawn from his, the greatest difference being that Maniilaq was not murdered in the Brooks Range. Instead, he reached Canada, as far as can be determined, and his descendants reportedly live there today.
Natchiq’s teachings and prophecies, as related in this story, are borrowed from the teachings and prophecies of Maniilaq, as set down in oral histories recorded by Eskimo elders who, as children, saw Maniilaq in the flesh. Maniilaq opposed the
angatquqs
, advocated better treatment of women, and tried to prepare the Inupiat for the waves of change about to wash over them.
Where he got his ideas and his information, no one knows, though it is possible he came into contact with Westerners— whalers or traders—in his travels through various coastal villages, and transformed what he saw and heard into the things he told the Inupiat of his day. As with Natchiq in this story, however, Maniilaq never explained the origin of his ideas, other than to say they came from his source of intelligence in the sky.
Relatively little has been written about this mysterious and fascinating figure, and much of what there is tends to exist in the shadow world of “gray literature”—material either out of print or never published, available only to the specialist or the determined or lucky generalist. However, at least two books that deal with Maniilaq in greater or lesser detail are in print, according to an Internet search at the time of this writing:
Maniilaq, Prophet From The Edge of Nowhere,
Onjinjinkta Publishing
The Kotzebue Basin,
Alaska Geographic Society
In addition, a useful chapter on Maniilaq can be found in
Tomorrow Is Growing Old,
an excellent history of the Quakers in Alaska (Barclay Press). That book, regrettably, is out of print and so falls into the category of gray literature. But it may be available in libraries or used bookstores.
In addition, an Internet search for the word “Maniilaq” may turn up useful information as more gray literature makes its way into the light.
Maniilaq’s legacy of concern for the well-being of his people lives on today in the form of the Maniilaq Association, an Inupiat-controlled nonprofit corporation set up in the 1970s to provide human services in Northwest Alaska.
And Shaman Pass? There is indeed a real place in the Brooks Range where the wind is said to blow so hard it kills caribou. That place is called Howard Pass.
—Stan Jones
Anchorage
June 2002