December 3, 2010

Roots

Written by: Carolyn Crosby, CITC Reading/Math Teacher, Susitna Elementary School

For the last two years, I have had the pleasure of sharing a classroom with Moses Dirks, a Resource Teacher for English Language Learners. Moses is at Susitna three half-days a week (he has four other schools). I have enjoyed listening to his stories, so I asked if I could interview him to learn about his Roots. The following is a paraphrasing of my chat with Moses.

“I was born on Atka and lived in the mid-Aleutians for most of my life. I was one of the few people born there who was delivered by a midwife. My childhood was very pleasant; there was not much outside contact and this kept us pure with our culture and close to our language.

“When I went to school, I couldn’t speak English. It was a one-room schoolhouse with Kindergarten – Grade Three on one side of the room and Grades 4 – 7 on the other side. We had a language barrier with the BIA teachers. It is ironic that I am now a Resource Teacher as I came from a non-English speaking place. I can feel for the youngsters I work with because I had to learn English too.

“After 7^th grade we were shipped out to the Wrangell Institute in Ketchikan, and then Mt. Edgecombe, near Sitka. I was there for three years and then was able to return to Adak for my senior year, after the Molly Hootch Case. When we were sent ‘out’ to school, we were separated from our families and our roots. We had to diversify and change and were forced into a different way of thinking. After nine months of the school year, I was excited to go home, especially after the Molly Hootch Case.”

“We were a hunter/gatherer society for subsistence. I went on my first sea hunt with the elders when I was about six or seven years old. The youngsters observed and learned and did not say anything; then we imitated what went on. We salted, dried, and smoked the fish and other sea mammals, and we hunted reindeer as a supplemental food source. My mother and sisters did all the cooking and I used to watch my mother butcher animals. I learned how to butcher birds because she taught me. My sisters did household chores and gathered edible roots and beach grass to make the tightly woven baskets the Aleuts are known for – they split the grass and laid it in the sun to cure. Plants were used for dyeing the grasses and later colored threads were used. I was the middle child of seven children – I had four brothers and two sisters.

“After I graduated from high school, I started teaching Aleut and developing a bilingual education program. There was nothing else for me to do in the village. I went for literacy training and was at the University of Connecticut for a short time with an anthropologist who was studying the Aleut. I became his ‘live specimen’ and he would brag about me to his friends. He was famous for the discovery of continuous living of the Aleuts for more than eight thousand years.

“I was working full-time and taking classes at UAF and earned my B.A. in Aleut Language and History with a minor in Linguistics. I was a para-professional for a long time, but did not like the way some of the teachers were treating my people. I received my MAT at Alaska Pacific University in Elementary Education. I wasn’t really interested in getting a Master’s degree, just in taking classes. Halfway through the year, they told me I was in the Master’s program. I met my wife in Nome when I worked there for a short time.

“I did most of my linguistic training in Oslo, Norway. I have always been interested in languages. I was helping a linguist who knew my family as he collected language data for the development of an Aleut dictionary. I also visited Eastern Russia to do some work there, near the Kamchatka Peninsula.”

Near the end of our chat, Moses treated me with folklore about a Song Sparrow and a Winter Wren who were eating a beached whale. They ate so much that the wren was too fat to get back out of the blowhole, and when the sparrow tried to help him, he had his limbs and neck broken. The moral of the story is that you should not try to hoard things – you should share and not be greedy.

Moses said he has had a good and happy life and I feel very fortunate that he was willing to share his story with me.

This is a story of Roots as told to me by Moses Dirks.