'GIVING AWAY' THE LEGEND IN PUBLISHING TRIBALTALE, FORT YUKON WRITER FACES CRITICISM
Run Date 9/19/1993 Day Sunday
Page J1 Section Arts
Dateline FORT YUKON
Illustrator PHOTO BY ERIK HILL
Story Byline By SANDI McDANIEL Daily News reporter

The Gwich'in elders called her "naa'in," which means brush woman, a person who moves outside society's circle, peering in from the underbrush. She was just 13 when her father died and she dropped out of school to care for five siblings in this bush village of 700 high on the Yukon River. Later she tried to go back, but found a paralyzing shyness had taken hold so ardently did she sequester herself during her teen years that sometimes when neighbors saw her, they asked how long she'd been away. As it will, solitude taught the young woman to love books, and when at 18 she further puzzled villagers by traipsing 12 miles north to live alone in her father's trapping cabin, she occupied her mind with tribal fables told her by her mother. One of them impressed her so much she scribbled it down. TX: In October, Velma Wallis' retelling of the story she calls "Two Old Women; An Alaska Legend of Betrayal, Courage and Survival" will go on sale in bookstores around the country. Published by Fairbanks-based Epicenter Press, her work has already captured a 1993 Western States Book Award for best creative non-fiction. The New York giant HarperCollins Publishers immediately snapped up paperback rights and will print a second wave of books next fall. Authors Tony Hillerman and Ursula Le Guin contributed jacket notes. Furthermore, translation rights have been sold to Chinese and Norwegian publishers and to a leading feminist firm in Sweden. In Seattle, Cine|Lit Representation is busy marketing the story to Hollywood. They're calling it "Dances With Wolves" meets "The Joy Luck Club" and have queried production companies headed by Robert Redford and Kevin Costner. In her two-room cabin near the confluence of the Yukon and Porcupine rivers two weeks ago, Wallis, 33, tittered as she scanned early reviews mailed to her from Seattle by Epicenter President Kent Sturgis. She was amused when one reviewer called her book "an octogenarian version of 'Thelma and Louise' triumphant." She smiled at a description of herself as "one of 13 siblings with their roots in the Athabaskan culture." Gee, she remarked, why didn't they just call her an Indian? "They have a hard time believing that there might be Indians today," she says. Wallis is Gwich'in, which is one of 11 Athabascan tribes archeologists say crossed into Alaska over the Bering land bridge during the ice age. In presenting one of her tribe's ancient stories to "foreigners," Wallis has opened a cultural door new even to many Alaskans. But she is discovering not everyone wants visitors. Selling your stories is kind of like selling your heritage to another nation, says Katherine Peter, 75, an elder who recently moved back to Fort Yukon from Fairbanks. Not that Peter is opposed to Wallis preserving one of the Gwich'in stories. As a translator, she worked extensively for the Alaska Native Language Center in Fairbanks doing just that. The old ways of passing Native stories to youngsters is mostly gone, she adds. Tribal elders realize that if stories aren't written down now, they may be lost forever. Still, keeping stories alive for your village is one thing. Telling them out of school is another. "It's kind of revealing, and people don't like to be revealed," says Wallis. When she gave an anxious first reading in the village this spring, she found most people receptive. But she perceived some villagers as dumbstruck by the material and later heard tremors of dissent. She heard at least one person complained anonymously to a newspaper that Wallis had no right to portray Gwich'in people the way she had. "I was stunned," says Wallis. She's studied the faces of villagers ever since. Wallis' editor, Lael Morgan, reports she had tremendous difficulty finding Native support for the book when trying to get it published. Morgan, who teaches at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, is Epicenter chairman of the board. The book was nearly scrapped when one Native leader said it made Athabascan people look bad. Will Mayo, president of Tanana Chiefs Conference, a non-profit organization representing Interior Indians, remembers Morgan giving him a copy of Wallis' manuscript a few years ago. He recalls his reaction was negative and wondered about the accuracy of its characterizations. "I did raise that question and thought it might be controversial," says Mayo. "Because it depicts a very unsavory situation, and I'm not sure that the Gwich'in people would appreciate that depiction. . . . I may have told them that it was not a good idea to publish it." NOT FOR OUTSIDERS "Two Old Women" is the legend of Sa' and Ch'idzigyaak, two elders of a starving Gwich'in tribe. Traditionally, the Gwich'in people were nomadic. In an especially harsh winter, the chief of this wandering band makes the decision to abandon the two elders for the welfare of the tribe. Their weakness, he says, will kill the others. The women are devastated when family members walk away, leaving them to die on the frozen plain. After overcoming anger, humiliation and fear, Sa' and Ch'idzigyaak collect the only items left them, a hatchet and a bundle of babiche raw moosehide and begin a journey together to survive the winter alone. In doing so, they discover strengths they did not realize they possessed. It is the abandonment of elders that is troubling to some. One Gwich'in friend told Wallis she never dreamed her ancestors capable of such a thing. And yet, the story of the two women is a common one, says Eliza Jones, 55, an Athabascan linguist and storyteller from Koyukuk. Sometimes the women are young orphan girls. "I think a lot of people don't like to publish those types of stories," says Jones. "Because they think there is so much negative published about our lives." Says Mayo of Wallis' book: "It either supports or rejects your preconceived notions of what aboriginal people are like. There will be a lot of people reading it who have no first idea what our people are like." At the UAF Chukchi Campus in Kotzebue, assistant professor of English and journalism John Creed says his Native students are often eager to write about their own culture, as long as their work won't be published. Some topics are taboo. One journalism student interested in ceremonial wolf killing said writing about the ritual in a news story would contaminate it. That it was not for outside consumption. Wallis noticed even in her own family a resentment about outsiders asking questions they considered personal. To assume tribal stories or customs were to be shared on a whim was considered arrogant. There is always an undercurrent of suspicion, says Peter, that whites will take over and profit from what belongs to Natives. Thus, Wallis says she understands a strong sense of ownership others may feel for the legend she has "given away." "I expect some people to resent me because I did something like this," she says. Nancy James, a former Fort Yukon mayor and tribal leader, expresses pride in Wallis. Better a Gwich'in person tell Gwich'in stories, she says. Others may simply be jealous of the writer, she says, of anyone who succeeds in the outside world. "We will not let our people go further than we perceive them to be." In the book's forward, Wallis qualifies her fable as just that: "Once set down on paper, some stories are readily accepted as history, yet they may not be truthful," she writes. Every culture has its lesson stories, says Wallis. Is Hansel and Gretel less horrifying? And what if abandonment, even cannibalism did occur in those ancient wandering tribes? "I was never ashamed that there were things we did to survive." HUNGRY FOR STORIES Anything Native sells. That's the word in the publishing industry, says Epicenter's Sturgis, who sites current back-to-earth trends and a national fascination with Native spirituality fed by popular New-Age concepts. Wallis' book will likely share shelf space with beads, feathers, flutes and sage. It is true, says storyteller Jones, that there is an intense interest in the mainstream about American aboriginal customs. "Part of the reason is a lot of the mainstream people feel there's something missing in their life," says Jones. "I think people are really hungry to go back to something spiritual, something they can feel good about. People are just hungry to hear our stories." Even before its release, "Two Old Women" has already surpassed the potential of all of Epicenter's 29 titles, which include "Best of Alaska; The Art of Jon Van Zyle" and "Byron Birdsall's Alaska and Other Exotic Places." Elizabeth Wales is a founder of Levant & Wales, the Seattle literary agency that auctioned the book's paperback rights. Five big East Coast firms made offers, she says. Wales believes the book will do well not only with women but with aging baby boomers, who demographers predict will change the way society views the elderly. "There is something about this story that is very strong and moves people," says Wales. "Every once in a while something comes across my desk, everything gets quiet, and I realize I've got something special in front of me." The writer's subsistence way of life and the way she became published also make her a marketing novelty. After her brother taught her to type, Wallis pecked away at her story on a borrowed computer at the UAF extension campus in Fort Yukon. She submitted it to Epicenter in 1989, but the company, founded only a year before, lacked the money to publish it. At one point, students in one of Morgan's writing classes believed so strongly in the story, they took up a collection to publish the book by vanity press. They raised $2,000 before Epicenter, which publishes northern non-fiction, grew large enough to buy the rights. Editors at HarperCollins, which published acclaimed Indian writer Louise Erdrich, also recognized the novelty value of an unknown Alaska Native writer. Not only is this a well-told, compelling story, says Peternelle Van Arsdale, associate editor at the New York firm, as far as she's concerned, Athabascan culture is fresh territory in Native publishing. She perceives Alaska Natives to be less assimilated than those in the Lower 48, and therefore, more interesting. "I think that's a geography and culture that is yet to be explored," she says. You don't usually think of two elderly women being the lead characters in an adventure story, she adds. "It's just such a remarkable thing to imagine for us New Yorkers a seemingly barren wasteland and how these two women survived." MOOSE MEAT AND SNOW MACHINES While gold leaves quietly drifted into the waters of the Yukon, Wallis nervously packed for an upcoming promotional tour in the Pacific Northwest. Eventually, she may travel to New York. She has insisted on taking her 15- month-old daughter, Laura, with her on tour. Her publisher offered to baby- sit. As she spoke of big, far-away cities, Wallis pacified her baby with dried salmon and tended a pot of slum gum soup (hamburger and vegetables) gurgling on the stove. Her rented cabin has no running water, but a word processor occupies one corner, covered by a worn sheet. The writer stores boxes of notes and unfinished stories in her fish cache. Despite her earlier shyness, Wallis is an outgoing woman with a toothy smile and silky black hair. Her sentences are chopped and monotonic. Some of the strapping girl remains as she hikes along the river, picking rosehip, Laura bobbing along behind in a backpack. The baby's father is a hunter and fisherman who lives in the neighboring village of Venetie Wallis calls him a caveman. She says she has temporarily put aside writing to be a full-time mom, and is happy if in one day she can complete a beaded sun catcher to sell to the Fairbanks tourists for $20 or $30. Says editor Morgan: "She is absolutely the least rattled of any author I have ever met who's going to get as much money as she is going to get." To date, Wallis has earned $5,500 from her book, but it's little compared to the royalties she is sure to rake in. The money, however, seems to make her uncomfortable she doesn't want people in her village to think she's getting "too big for her britches." Her motivation to write is more complicated than outside notions of success. Hers is a generation struggling between two worlds, she says, not knowing which to be loyal to. "We like to eat moose meat, but we like snow machines, too." When Wallis was a child, white school teachers and missionaries made her ashamed to speak her Native tongue she retains only a smattering. Now she says Natives are made to feel ashamed because they've lost their language. When she first understood that the stories her mother told her were the cultural history of her tribe, she was exalted. "I couldn't believe that we were actually a people with a history that we could be proud of. . . . All I saw were people drinking, and I thought 'Is this all we are?' " Writing was a way to be a storyteller like her mother, yet bridge the two cultures. Her fascination with the legend of the two old women may reflect her relationship with her father, a man she calls a stern disciplinarian and a male chauvinist. She says he died of diabetes aggravated by his alcoholism. Just before his death, she began to challenge him. Against tribal tradition, she believed women equal to men. She set about proving it by earning her General Education Degree and then working toward an associate's degree at the UAF extension campus. She was an oddity in her village, wanting to learn not only traditional male skills of beaver and muskrat trapping, but also how to use a computer and speak French. In her 20s, she found village jobs as a janitor, a museum director, a teacher and a ticket agent. Once she tried to leave. "When I was 16, I left Fort Yukon with no intention of coming back. I got as far as Fairbanks and said, 'OK, Fort Yukon isn't so bad.' " Wallis may be the kind of person who can stroll the slivers of paths in her village, seeing not the garbage but the flowers, yet she speaks frankly about the devastation of alcoholism on both her family and Fort Yukon. How she and her siblings grew up on pizza and wieners and welfare. And how she intends to keep writing, even if she gets "run out of town on a rail." Lately she's been thinking about stories she's heard of tribal infanticide of girl children and how Eskimos and Athabascans once slaughtered one another in bloody Indian wars. "Native people don't want these stories told," she says. "But I want to be a good storyteller. "What it comes down to is I wanted to write, and I wrote."