After my contract with UW ended, I was out of a job. I wasn't overly concerned about that, as I was good and done with UW and had an interesting gig ahead of me. I had taken a job working with the small Native village of Kivalina, Alaska. They were looking for a Wellness Coordinator to help create community support and projects primarily focused on youth and young adults but because of the small population, would no doubt affect and involve most of the villagers.
Kivalina is in the Arctic Circle, in an area known as the Northwest Arctic Borough and has a population of just under 500, many of those residents under the age of 18. Less that two square miles in its entirety, Kivalina is only accessible by bush plane. They struggle with many social problems-alcohol abuse, domestic violence, depression and other mental illness and lots and lots of sexual assault-something that Alaska has had a shockingly long and intense reputation around. No accountability for violent offenders and no escape for victims. However, the catalyst for a Wellness Coordinator was the staggering rate of suicide in the Borough and specifically in Kivalina. In the last nine months, three young adults committed suicide.
In January, I spent four days in Kivalina essentially on a working interview. Meeting with villagers, learning more about the current state of the village and how it got that way. I stayed in the only school in the village, a school that had been rated substandard over twenty years ago. The building smelled of backed up sewage, there were three working toilets out of six and none of the showers in the lockers rooms worked. This was the nicest building in town and the only building with plumbing.
I met many villagers-some welcoming, some suspicious-but I was always invited in and fed. All homes in Kivalina and HUD homes mostly building in the 70s or 80s and most all are ranked substandard as well. Holes in floors, broken windows, no plumbing. People literally shitting in buckets. Third world country conditions in the great America that we need to make great again. Amidst all of this, however, were all of these beautiful people! Mothers raising young children, often alone. Grandmothers and grandfathers wanting to spend time with the young people of their village. A Tribal Administrator that wanted something different for his village. And survivors. So many survivors of so many things.
A few villagers that captured my heart were the four young adult interns working with a newly formed project called Kivalina Food Sovereignty Project. The brainchild of my colleague and friend in this adventure, a UW PhD Anthropology student, it was a chance for young adults to invest in their community in a real way. The interns were all in their early 20's but had already lived the lives of someone two, even three times their age. Some of their experiences are ones that many will never have to endure. Their internship was to be five months long and would culminate with a trip to Seattle in May to present at the Indigenous Food Symposium at University of Washington. What an exciting prospect for young people who have never left the confines of Alaska. I remember how liberating it was to leave too.
I was intrigued by the opportunity to work with this village. My heart went out to them regarding their circumstances. I felt good about the opportunity to work with Native people, my people. I found it curious that life had brought me back to my home state almost twenty years to the day. I was up for the interesting adventure that this promised to be. The Tribal Administrator was too and offered me the job. I would spend two weeks on and two weeks of in Kivalina for one year.
About a month later I made my first trip out to Kivalina. The first couple of days I stayed under the radar but by the third day, word had gotten out that there was someone from "down below" staying in the village. I started getting long glances, propositions, questions like "are you wild?". Shit was starting to get real.
It was then that I started to struggle. I had left Alaska twenty years ago because of ten years of childhood abuse, paired with a rape that last year that I was there and numerous other sexual violations throughout junior high and while I was homeless. Like I said before, Alaska has had a shockingly long and intense reputation regarding sexual assault. Now I'm back in Alaska twenty years later and it is all too familiar and a little disconcerting in the ways that it was familiar. Suddenly I was a light sleeper again. Just like that I was on autopilot, looking for vulnerable places in the house that could either be broken into or that I could be cornered in. Surveying the house for all potential weapons and hiding them. Sleeping with a weapon. Triple and quadruple checking the lock on the front door and my bedroom door. Putting force into both doors to see what it would take to break them. Sleeping in the room closest to the front door.
My fifth night there it happened. I woke up at 3am to the sound of boots crunching on the snow. I was up like a shot, sitting in pitch black and completely still. I hear someone fumbling with the door, trying to break in. Oh fuck, they're in. Weapon in hand, I sit on the edge of the mattress in the dark. I hear my door knob jiggle. Yep, he's after me.
I'm up like a shot, light flipped on, phone in hand and foot wedged against the door as I beat on the inside of the door with my heavy Maglite flashlight yelling "who's that?!", being sure to cease from making noise to hear where he is headed. Texting other villagers that I know are safe and are up. I get responses right away and within minutes I had five people coming to my rescue. We found the intruder hiding in an empty bedroom in the dark, highly intoxicated. It was someone that I knew had been tracking me for three days.
The next morning or rather, four hours after the incident, I went to work. Another survival mode practice on autopilot. That day was a blur in a parallel universe-I was harassed and verbally abused by the Tribal President and blamed for the incident. When I asked for my money back for the lodging that I paid for that I was no longer going to use, I was denied and verbally abused some more. I was attempting to make travel arrangements to get the hell out of there but all airports were closed due to a heavy winter storm. Alaska State Troopers weren't able to come out to apprehend my intruder, not that they would have made much of a priority of it anyway. The stress was intense within that situation but that wasn't the only thing going on. A coworker was crying because the young child in her charge had eaten laundry soap and she wasn't sure if he was going to get flown out to a clinic in time to be saved. Another young woman left crying after finding out that her paycheck wasn't ready; she was crying because she owed her father money and she knew he was going to beat her up if she didn't have it for him. I just wanted out but I was stuck.
I spent the next two days riding out the storm by taking copious amounts of NyQuil and sleeping. I spent some time with my rescuers who were so kind to come to my aid and take me in for two days while I waited to depart. I left Sunday afternoon to get to Anchorage for the red eye and was back in Seattle 430am on Monday with another layer of trauma compliments, once again, of the last frontier.
As the shock started to fade, I felt a range of emotions-violation, humiliation, anxiety, depression. That wasn't the hardest part. The hardest part was the deep full circle that this experience was. Sexual violence, violation of space, verbal abuse, victim blaming, Alaska. Almost twenty years to the day. There is a lesson here but I do not understand it.
It took me almost three months and an intense four-day depression crash to understand this lesson. If I were to be truthful however, it is a lesson that has been waiting for me to understand for twenty years. This most recent experience in Alaska was an opportunity, a fork in the road. A do-over. It was the gift of strength in self to decide not to carry trauma in the same old, tired and hurtful ways I had carried it my whole life. It was the universe, in it's strange yet straightforward way, giving me agency to not define myself by my trauma. To no longer carry the shame that had become second skin. An opportunity to forgive myself for the sins of others and be happy. I decided to give that gig a shot.
A few months later and I feel different. Different in the way that I process, the way I carry myself, the way I live in my body and in the world. It's a new way of living for me and I still have a lot to learn but so far I like the road I'm traveling.
Last night I came across the GoFundMe for the young adult interns with the Kivalina Food Sovereignty Project. They are raising money for their trip to Seattle next week for the symposium. They were short of their goal by a bit and without question, I covered the difference which, in an ironic twist was the same amount that I got ripped off for. But I was proud to be in a position in my life to support the hopes, dreams and hard work of these young folks and proud of them for pushing against all odds to find a bigger and brighter world out there besides the pain and trauma that they are so intimately acquainted with.
It took twenty years, a trip to Kivalina, Alaska and four young Inupiaq men and women for me to realize that it was okay to be happy.
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