mushing

the north american open sprint race .

pike's aviator greenhouse and sweets

 built in 2000.

hot licks ice cream

on a cold day.  Their ice cream is homemade and there is a huge line in warmer weather.  No waiting in the winter though. :)  You can visit their website Hot Licks

early morning

 in Soldotna, Alaska

the uaf library

The Elmer E. Rasmuson Library (often referred to as Rasmuson Library) is the largest research library in the U.S. state of Alaska, housing just over one million volumes. Located on the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus, it is named in honor of Elmer E. Rasmuson, who served on the University of Alaska Board of Regents from 1950 to 1969 and was the board chair from 1956 to 1968. He was a major supporter of expanding the library and moving it to its present location.  (Wikipedia)

UAF Film Archives

When you enter the library, you are on the fourth floor.  There are two floors above it and three below it.  I worked on the third floor in Oral History and on the second floor in the Film Archives.  I always thought it was weird going to work at 8 in the morning when it was dark and leaving around 2ish and it was dark again.  So I used to wear my sunglasses to make my mind think it was light out. :)  Of course when I opened the door it was dark.

The library always had some issues to deal with and they were placed in the deferred maintenance section of the budget which meant it wouldn't be addressed anytime soon.  At one point, they decided they had to do something about the flooding problem. Because some of the library was below ground level, this was a major problem. Offices and departments had to be moved to higher floors. Books and documents had to be shelved elsewhere. Work commenced and went on for months. About a million dollars later, people and books moved back. And the following spring, there was a flooding problem once again.

decision time

 sunset taken from the university.

After my attempts at working in Village failed, and I decided it was not worth spending any more of my life on, I headed in a different direction. I faced some pushback from my committee chair, but had support from another committee member, who told me that if necessary, he would take over as chair, but politically it would be better for the current chair to remain, so he and his wife, also a committee member, would work together to steer the next meeting in the way I wanted it to go. They did and I was able to proceed. 

Things did not run smoothly, though. I faced pushback along with some crazy behaviour on the part of supposedly mature tenured professors. I was finding satisfaction in teaching, and I felt I was good at this (my course evaluations backed this up), but other aspects of academic life were becoming less and less satisfactory and teaching is the least valued part of what is required. The thing is, I really should have known well before then. Well, the truth is, I did know, but I tried to rationalize this knowledge away.

When we went to Fairbanks to look for a place to live, the semester was over, but I called in at my new department anyway, and introduced myself to the two admin women in the office, one of whom gave me a tour. My heart felt increasingly heavy, and when we went back to the rental car, I got in and burst into tears, much to Bill’s surprise and dismay! ‘It’s horrible!’ I spluttered through my tears. He kept trying to assure me that it was just because it was new and it’d be better once I got used to it. Time would prove me right in the end. It was a horrible department. It was colonial and exploitative. I soon learned that focus was turning away from Alaska Native communities and towards Russia, because the former no longer wanted to play along, as I found out. Even on a personal level, the behaviour of some people was appalling. For example, when I told my advisor that I’d been given the name of my teacher’s sister, her response was, ‘Ooh, you’ll be able to get lots of information now!’ When she asked where I got my parka and I told her my teacher made it for me, she literally rubbed her hands together and said, ‘You’re definitely in now.’  I was repulsed. I later learned that both she and her husband had experience in being opposed by the Native people they were working with. In both cases, statements were made in books (before publication) that the Native people felt misrepresented them. Instead of fixing these mistakes, they opted to ignore the concerns and publish anyway. This was a lesson to me about what kind of work would be expected of me if I continued. I tried to thread the needle for a few years altogether, looking for a way to satisfy the committee while still remaining ethical, but I wasn’t having much luck.

There was some ridiculous stuff, too. I was doing an independent study with a guy Bill worked with and we were sitting in his office when he decided to start baring his soul. He was well aware of my feminist ideas, that gender was one of my main areas of interest, and that I was teaching the Gender in Cross Cultural Perspectives course, so when he started off with, ‘I probably shouldn’t say this to you...’ I was already thinking, ‘Yeah, probably not. Stop talking now.’ But he didn’t and proceeded to tell me that he felt that his job was far more important than his wife’s job. I was thinking that since he didn’t do very much, and what he did do was underwhelming, this was a delusional statement, but this was the same guy who was having a temper tantrum one day when Bill and I walked into the office—he was angry because he’d forgotten his email password, so couldn’t access it. This was somehow the fault of the tech people. So I wasn’t expecting much of an answer when I asked him why he thought he was so much more important than his wife. He replied that he got paid a lot and was proud of bringing home the bacon. He said he would sometimes think, ‘Wow, look at all that bacon.’ I burst out laughing in response and it took me a minute or two to be able to respond. When I did, it was to poke holes in his theory. I emailed Bill when I got home and was telling him about this episode and starting laughing all over again. From that day on, we called the guy Bacon Man. 

The same guy commented on how much ‘service’ I was doing—more than was usual for someone in my position. He was right about that and one of those projects was what finally brought things to a head. I was on the dean search committee and we were going through the normal procedures. We made our choice, which was not a person from inside the university. This angered some people in the communications department, where their head had applied—and not made the final three. Things got quite nasty. One member of the search committee got threats on her voicemail. We all got a nasty email from a professor in the communication department. This hit my last nerve and I replied, basically ripping him a new one. He apologized to all of us and to me personally, admitting that he should not have sent the email. Others on the committee thanked me for doing what I did. But I’d had enough. 

When that year was done, I went home to make sure, but I pretty much knew I was done. When the next academic year started, I informed my committee that I was withdrawing. They tried to talk me out of it and my chair had me in her office, reading a letter she wrote when she was a new anthropologist, expressing some of the same concerns I had. ‘See,’ she said, ‘We all go through this. Please reconsider.’ I told her that in spite of her misgivings, she decided to go ahead anyway and to ignore her concerns, but I couldn’t do that and I knew that if I went ahead and ‘got the piece of paper’ as some were encouraging me to do, I would feel ashamed of the degree. I am proud of the work I did as an undergrad and in my MA program. I would not be proud of this. So I walked. It was hard and I went through a tough time afterwards, even though I never doubted that it was the right thing to do. I’d spent most of my adult life up to that point in academia and I wasn’t sure what would be next. But I knew what I shouldn’t do and that was a start.

Adventures in Fieldwork Part 5

 Adventures in Fieldwork Part 5

Note: This essay is about my own culture shock and is not in any way intended to be disparaging towards the people in Village. The conditions there are complex and I am not being critical of the place or the people. My focus is on my own mindset and shortcomings in this situation.  Photo by Shari Burke.

the village late July sunset 

As I lay there fully dressed on top of the bed, I was thinking over everything that had happened to me in my degree program.  I was thinking of my last trip to Village.  I thought of what I would tell my advisor and my friends.  I realized I didn’t really care about any of that.  I had to be realistic. Now that I had a better understanding of the reality of Village life, I had to admit that doing extensive fieldwork, which would require me to live in Village for at least a year was probably not a good idea. Bringing our high-school-aged daughter to such a place was out of the question and I was not keen on being away from her and Bill for that long, even though I could’ve gone home for visits. Since there was no way I was going to sleep at all that night, I had plenty of time to think about the situation, the kind of work I wanted to do, my sense of ethics, and more. As I lay there fully dressed and on top of the covers, with my parka over me as a blanket, I listened as the son came home and was intercepted before he could enter his room and be instructed to sleep on the couch.  I heard people screaming down the streets on their snow machines.  I wanted to go home.  I really had no interest in fieldwork anymore.  I had changed my subject after the last trip from motherhood to language preservation thinking it would be less emotionally charged, but suddenly I knew that it was all emotionally charged. To my friends in Fairbanks I was Kuukpiaq.  To the people in Village, I was WHITE, which automatically made me suspicious. Could I overcome their suspicions? Maybe. Did I want to keep trying for even longer than the few years I’d already invested? I rather thought not. I watched the hands on my watch move closer to the time when I could get out of bed and leave.  I planned my strategy and what I was going to say.  

 As it turned out, most everyone was up and out early—there was a game. I got up as soon as they had left. Because I thought there might still be one person in the house, I pretended to call home and learn that someone was ill, so I could use that as my excuse for leaving without causing hard feelings. I called the airline to change my return ticket. I had a choice of a flight that was leaving in 2 hours or one that would be leaving in 12 hours.  The idea of 12 more hours there was not penetrating my brain, so I reserved a spot on the flight a mere two hours away.  Because I had no idea what the address was, I could not call a taxi, so I prepared to walk. I threw on clean clothes, brushed my teeth, wrote a note, left it with the gifts I’d brought, picked up my suitcase in one hand and my carry-on bag in the other and stepped out into the dark –25 F degree Village morning. Village is above the arctic circle and it was January, so there was not going to be any daylight for a long while. I began to walk toward the airport.  The streets were deserted. I could see the airport in the distance and it seemed to pull me toward it, but when I got to the gate that we had driven out of the night before, it was closed! My heart sank, but I doggedly kept on. I was determined to get to that airport.

 I put my suitcase down and looked around.  I spotted a road that seemed to go in the right direction, so I grabbed my suitcase and headed that way.  Suddenly there were headlights coming toward me.  “Please let it be a woman,” I repeated over and over as the headlights got closer.  The car stopped and an older woman rolled down her window.  “Where are you coming from?” she asked incredulously. She was apparently unaccustomed to seeing large white women hauling luggage down the street on foot in the dark and cold winter mornings.  “Back there somewhere,” I answered as I waved my hand in the direction I had come.  “Does this road take you to the airport terminal building?”  She invited me to hop in and I gratefully accepted.  I felt like hugging her, but settled for thanking her about a million times as she pulled up to the door of the terminal building. 

I went inside, checked in and called Bill.  He was still asleep, but woke up quickly as I told him in a quiet voice, lest I be overheard, that I would be home later that day.  I felt a bit silly, speaking in hushed tones hunched over the receiver with my hand cupped over my mouth and the phone, but it’s a small place where everyone knows everyone. It seemed a bit dramatic, but I was very tired and focused on getting out without hurt feelings. I knew the flight from Anchorage was already late, but I was not at all concerned about that.  I would have happily spent days in the Anchorage airport as long as I was out of Village.

I only had to spend three hours in Anchorage, and I did have to go buy a novel in one of those airport shops, because I’d foolishly brought only academic reading with me and given the small amount of sleep I’d gotten for the previous week or so, that wasn’t gonna cut it. The novel filled the time and I was soon stumbling off the plane and into the terminal in Fairbanks.  My husband greeted me with a rather wide-eyed look and explained that a friend had brought him because it was so cold (-45F) that the truck battery had frozen.  We walked up to the friend who had the same wide-eyed look about him as his mouth fell open.  I guess I was looking a little worse for wear.  

 Friend went to get his vehicle and we headed for home. On the way, I told them both what had happened. When I got to the end of the story, I said it out loud for the first time. ‘I won’t be going back to Village again,’  I stated. I watched our friend’s wide eyes in the rear view mirror as he slowly nodded.