The Walrus Tooth Pendant

     I seem to have contracted a cold or some other bug, so I can't say I did much today.  I woke up this morning sore and sniffly, so I decided to postpone my trip to the botanical gardens and try to get rid of this thing pronto.  I did make it downtown for a little shopping later on, though.  An older gentleman in one of the shops I visited, after I told him I was a writer, proceeded to tell me his life story, and that his son wants to become a writer, but he's been a bum academically, and now they're not sure if he'll get into UAA.  I'm not much into souvenirs, but I did buy a Little Diomede Island seal pendant carved from a walrus tooth, because it reminded me of those curious creatures always playing around my kayak in the Bay.

     Little Diomede Island lies halfway between Nome and Siberia and has only one Inupiat village.  Its neighbor, Big Diomede Island, is 2.2 miles away and belongs to Russia, and it lies behind the International Dateline.  Big Diomede Island also used to have an Inuit population, but the USSR moved them to the mainland to keep them from making contact with the Americans.  Many of these people had relatives on the other island.  Little Diomede Islanders who ventured too close to Big Diomede were sometimes captured, interrogated and interned.  Nowadays Diomede Islanders are known for their unique ivory carvings, which they sell to traders in Fairbanks and Anchorage.

    Alaska has a strong Native presence.  The formation of corporations that invest tribal money into industry has helped keep people here much more sovereign and prosperous than Natives in the Lower-Forty Eight.  The same problems still exist: alcoholism, poverty, and unemployment, but it seems tempered here.  Many reservations in the Lower-Forty Eight are microcosms of third-world conditions, borders arbitrarily drawn and forgotten; they are the leftovers of imperialism at its very very worst.  It is only now that we are starting to come out of it, and there seems an impossible amount of work to do.  Not here.

 Yupik dance practice at UAA

     Hopefully I'll feel a bit better tomorrow.  It's so irritating to be sick on a trip like this, because you feel obligated to make the most of your time here, but forcing yourself out in the cold isn't great for you either.  Good thing I brought some of my loose-leaf tea collection from down south; I plan to drink a lot of it.