I'm standing deep in snow on a moonlit night on an island in the middle of the Bering Sea, watching the people of this community, nearly all of them Siberian Yup'ik, await the arrival of walrus hunters who are bringing in one of the principal sources of food for the village. For the past few weeks, I've been a guest art teacher at the high school here, learning about the community's triumphs and struggles, so I'm feeling invested in the outcome of the hunt.
A student I'll call Molly walks up through the crunching snow, and we chat about the incoming hunters and the heavier-than-usual snowfall. Then she interjects an unexpected story. She recalls good times with her best friend, how her friend's dad used to push them around the house in suitcases, how they'd stare at each other and burst into laughter. Her eyes glisten as she falls into a reverie. She tells me her best friend's father was like a surrogate dad. He'd never let anybody in the village pick on her. The three of them were inseparable.
I noticed she was speaking in past tense. I asked, "What happened?"
After a long pause, she told me in a faltering voice that her best friend had killed himself, and his dad had died from a heart attack the following year.
This is not an uncommon story here. The community of Gambell is on Alaska's Saint Lawrence Island, which is closer to the Russian mainland than to the rest of Alaska. Winds routinely whip across the landscape at 40 knots, and planes must often wait a week for better weather in order to land.
When I first arrived, I set out to explore the village and soon found myself invited into the home of a man I'll call Robert. Inside Robert's house, I discovered living conditions that Americans might associate with developing nations. The house had almost no furniture. There were holes in the exterior walls with an outside temperature of 10 degrees Fahrenheit. There were two old mattresses on the floor, fewer than the number of people who needed to sleep on them. I later found this shortage of sleeping space to be widespread. Kids often showed up at school having not slept the night before, and the rule at the school was not to disturb sleeping kids for at least 20 minutes.
Robert's house had no running water, no counters or storage, and was strewn with cardboard boxes, clothing, and cheap plastic toys. Mixed into all of it were the tools of subsistence hunting, with bullets and tarps littering the floor. The house centerpiece was a television.
Robert was talkative and seemed to appreciate having company. He showed me his teenage son, sleeping in the corner on some cardboard boxes in a condemned portion of the house. The area was under a hole in the roof and covered in about an inch of snow.
I found myself in disbelief, trying to understand how history had created the situation in front of me.
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