---Article published on March, 23 2006
---By Kristen Inbody
---Kodiak Daily Mirror
In 1950, Loel Shuler saw a vanishing Alaska while traveling onboard the ship North Star II.
There was no evading the fact Western culture will ultimately absorb Alaska. Good or bad, it
is as inevitable as a steamroller, she wrote in her travel journal.
That journal has been published after more than 50 years of moldering, nearly forgotten, in a
desk drawer.
In Alaska in the Wake of the North Star, Shuler describes Native villages nearly untouched
by Western influence and a Point Barrow ugly with sudden wealth
When I was traveling the frozen north, I recognized that changes were happening. I did a good
deal of commenting on that fact, she said. I believe I knew it was a transitional moment.
But I did not begin to guess the speed and enormity of the changes that were coming.
Shuler said it’s stunning to see how fast Alaska Native culture changed after remaining static
for more than 1,000 years.
And then in less than 50 years it transformed into something so different it takes the breath away she said. It was going that way when I wrote about it, but who could have dreamed it would go so swiftly, so soon, and so far.
Shuler, 28 during the trip, yearned to see more of Alaska than her home in Sitka, which really
didn’t feel like Alaska anyway.
She leaped on her husband’s suggestion to travel aboard the North Star II on the ship’s annual
11,000-mile supply run to coastal communities, clear up to the northernmost point of North
America.
Shortly before departure, Shuler learned she would have a bit extra baggage on the trip. She
was pregnant with her first child, whom she nicknamed Stowaway.
The three-month, sometimes perilous trip brought her within two months of her due date.
The North Star II, run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, stopped at some of the most remote
destinations on earth, among them Little Diomede, a mere half-mile from the International
Dateline and a stone’s throw from Siberia.
Clearly one of the villages that most captivated the author was amazing King Island.
In Nome, King Islanders crowded into umiaks - skin boats - met the North Star for a ride back
to their village, to winter at the most alien and remote outpost in all of Alaska.
Shuler didn’t quite believe stories of the cliff-dwelling Eskimos and their houses stacked
and tied to rocks.
But when I was in person scaling the rocks of King Island, I could scarcely believe what my
eyes were seeing, she wrote.
Houses were built on stilts and stacked in mind-boggling fashion. Food was stored in an
elaborate cave system.
The way of life that so fascinated Shuler disappeared shortly after her trip when BIA closed
the village school, forcing relocation to Nome.
Shuler noted sadly, The people are gone.
The Cold War colors much of the trip. Shuler noted invasion fears in Kotzebue. Communists had
already infiltrated the community, residents told her.
Near the end, the ship reached Kodiak Island and Ouzinkie, where passengers were delighted to
finally see trees. However, Shuler was already focused on home, had seen remarkable sights,
and spends merely a few paragraphs on Kodiak Island.
Throughout her story, Shuler mourns the ravages of western diseases as one of the
white-introduced ills in the Native communities.
She met men who remember losing an entire village to smallpox. Another village had just lost every child younger than 2 to whooping cough. A Point Barrow nurse told her of the heartbreak
of sending newborns home to tuberculosis-ridden families.
The influence of money and the illicit use of Native women are other ills she saw as white
culture advanced.
It was discouraging to find in village after village the likableness of the Eskimos to be in
direct proportion to the smallness of its white population, she wrote.
The ship’s crew was itself an adventure. Many had sailed with the wooden North Star I when it
took Admiral Byrd on his Antarctic expeditions.
This story is in many ways as much theirs as it is mine or that of the people and villages of
coastal Alaska, she said. That ship, many of its remarkable crew, and some of the most
interesting and colorful of the villages no longer exist. All of us who are still around are
scarcely recognizable today by a description of us the.
The trip through the rapidly changing Alaska Territory helped Shuler understand the
colonization process and its effect on what’s happening now.
When you start looking at your experience of life from a point of history everything begins to fall into place in relation to everything else, she said. At the time I made the North Star trip I probably didn’t understand all this. Then it was more of an adventure.
Shuler said she hopes people take from her book the importance of encountering cultural
differences with an open mind and with respect.
More simply, people can be different and still be the same, she said.
In 1949, Shuler moved from Seattle to Mt. Edgecumbe across from Sitka. Shuler’s husband was a
doctor at the Alaska Native Service Hospital.
They later moved to Juneau and back to Sitka until Robert Shuler’s death. Now she lives on the Monterey Peninsula near her children.
For her next project, Shuler is working on Willy’s Dance, a personal history of the people
of King Island. When reached in California, she was entertaining William Willoya, the main
subject of the story.
I hadn’t seen him since he was 19 or 20. Now he is 68 and has had a remarkable life, she
said.
Willoya’s mother is mentioned in the book as a baby found mostly frozen at Teller Mission.
Left blind when her eyes froze, she went on to receive presidential commendation and was
revered as a wise woman. |
