September 27, 2010

Sharing

Written by: Dustin Madden, Science Teacher, Bartlett High School

(Note: the name has been changed to protect the identity of the person in this story)

Melford. Someone reading an old National Geographic article about Alaska Natives definitely wouldn’t picture this guy in their head: he’s about 6 feet tall, has skin the color of a Saltine, and is often downright boisterous. Yet when you catch him in his quiet moments—between the parties, between the competitive softball games, between the dirty jokes told amongst friends—when you see him outside of the context of the Nome social structure, his Yup’ik heritage and values often shine through.

In October of 2005, I went to Nome to spend time with my family. I walked off the plane a different person than when I had originally left my home five years prior to attend college in California. I had entered the Land of the Midnight Sun at the tail end of its brilliance, and my memories of the many winters I had spent there during my youth had faded as surely as daylight in the fall. Though I wasn’t planning on it, I would end up spending my first winter at home since I was eighteen.

Winter in Nome was hard on me—after living in the year-round sunshine of California, immersing myself in the dynamic intellectual and social life of a university campus, and after having traveled all over the United States and several countries, spending winter at home felt foreign to me. The darkness and the cold that I had barely noticed growing up began to feel stifling, like the heavy blankets I heaped upon myself at night. The lack of stimulation felt as real to me as the icy winds, finding the uncovered portions of me and whisking away my energy.

During one of these blustery Nome days I was walking the streets with Melford. When we passed under the glow cast by the streetlight, I noticed he had on a pair of beautiful sealskin mittens. They were well crafted, down to the wolverine fur trim—a design perfected through hundreds of years of R & D by the First Alaskans. I couldn’t help but to openly admire them. I asked Melford where he had gotten the mittens, and he replied that he had made them. I was shocked; I’ve known Melford since I was in the fifth grade, and I had never seen him make anything before, much less a pair of mittens such as these.

Then suddenly my ogling was interrupted-- Melford offered the mittens to me. At first I didn’t think he was serious, so I declined to take them. Yet he persisted. I think he must have sensed the winter-time funk that I was in, because he was so sincere in wanting me to have them that I finally had no choice other than to accept the mittens. I thought of all of the time and effort he must have put into making them. Scraping the seal hide, sending it in to get tanned, cutting, sewing; it would have taken him weeks to make this first pair. Contrasting this effort with the ease with which Melford gave away the mittens really made an impact on me; this single act of kindness pierced through my funk and reminded me that though Nome has its problems, I can learn a lot from the traditional values practiced by some of its people.

This is a story about the cultural value of sharing as I experienced it in Nome, Alaska in 2005.