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stress and a widespread loss of cultural knowledge and tradition. I realized then that my friends and students were dying because they grew up as their parents and grandparents had, immersed in a constant struggle for survival. The substance abuse, the suicides, and the violence were symptoms of an indigenous culture battling to maintain cultural identity in the face of a new and often oppressive and soul-consuming way of living—a new paradigm that at once demanded adoption of our consumer culture and rejection of a traditional way of life that had worked so successfully for millennia.

Napoleon’s book helped me understand the continual tide of tragedies sweeping across the Yukon-Kuskokwim river deltas. What I didn’t understand was why, at the very least, Alaskan youth weren’t learning about the history of contact. Why didn’t we learn about the destruction and disease brought by the Russians, the whalers, the gold miners, or the missionaries? Why did our Alaskan history studies begin with the struggle for statehood?

As a student of history and as a teacher, I was worried about being condemned to relearn the lessons and repeat the horrors of another epidemic and famine. For years this simple question kicked around in my head: What if?

Then in 2003, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began tracking H5N1 (“bird flu”), and fears of a global pandemic became nightly headlines. Very quietly the Alaskan government began making plans and asking area hunters to bring in dead birds they found while afield. Plans for quarantine and protocol were posted online. Meetings were held. But no one mentioned the epidemics and famines of old.

Suddenly my hypothetical “What if?” turned into a more ominous “When?”

This book is my attempt to share the stories that I grew up with, and to pass along the knowledge of survival in the face of disease and famine provided to me by my friends, their families, and the elders. The ancient stories the elders tell are all about survival. They provide clues not just about how to survive the elements but about how to live on this planet as human beings. The stories and the knowledge contained in them will prove to be as powerful and important today as they were thousands of years ago.

In “Homemade Remedies,” Yup’ik elder Marie Nichols, from Kasigluk, reveals the importance of learning the ancient stories: “They also taught us how to live. One person can never erase what another has learned, can never steal what he knows … If a person has none of these teachings, he will be like someone lost in a blizzard. But the person who has the teachings will derive strength from them and use them like a walking stick to prevent himself from getting hurt.”

The process of writing this book has been magical. Perhaps that is the nature of working with ancient and powerful stories. They exist so that we may continue to exist.

Revisiting Edward Nelson’s work provided me with one of the most powerful and profound experiences I have had as a writer and researcher. Nelson wrote many ghastly descriptions of the villages destroyed by the 1880 plagues that struck southwestern Alaska, and the most haunting of all has continued to trouble my mind a full fourteen years after I first read it: “The total absence of the bodies of children in these villages gave rise to the suspicion that they had been eaten by the adults; but possibly this may have not been the case.”

I hold on to the hope that “possibly this may have not been the case,” just as I hope that this story isn’t a vision of what is to come, or a simple metaphor of what is happening right now in rural Alaska. I hope this story is a shared vision of what we can do to save a culture, and perhaps ourselves along the way.

We start by saving the children.

Don Rearden

Bear Valley, Alaska

May 13, 2010

Table of Contents

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Part I. The Bones of the Mammoth

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10