Blood Will Tell (20 page)

"It's not that I don't want him to go." He raked a hand through his hair.

"Then what?" He met her eyes straight on. "I don't want him to be hurt."

"Hurt?" She straightened slowly, staring at him. "What are you talking about? He'll be in the convention center, everybody brings their kids and lets them run around, it--"

"I don't mean that." He struggled to find the right words. He could see Kate getting angry and that didn't help. "Johnny was born in Alaska, Kate. He was raised here, he's lived here all his life."

"So?"

"So he's white."

Kate folded her arms across her chest, Her chin came out. "So?" "Oh hell," Jack said, knowing he was getting himself in deeper with every word and unable to stop digging the hole. "I just--I don't want you taking him down there and have people be mean to him because he's white." His lips pressed together. "I know what that's like."

"Good," she said.

"What?" Jack said, startled.

"First and foremost, Jack, you can't keep Johnny from being hurt. Being hurt is a part of life, it's one of the ways we learn." She waved a hand to forestall him. "All right, all right, sorry, didn't mean to lecture you on parenting. I said it was good that you know what it's like to be discriminated against because of the color of your skin. Not many white people do. Don't expect any sympathy from me because my cousin Martin called you a gussuk once. If I'd gone into Nordstrom's alone, Alana would have looked right through me." She waved her hand again. "All right, all right, I didn't mean to start a lecture on the racial inequalities inherent in American society, either." She took a deep breath and fixed a determined smile on her face.

"Look, Jack. Sure, Johnny can go over to Brad's and play Nintendo all day long and not be hurt except by Brad whipping his butt at Master Blaster. But like you said, he was born and raised in this state. He's as much of an Alaskan as any of us. Don't you think it's time he started learning something about its history and culture and the people that were here before his were?" He was silent, and she added, "Ignorance is the mother of fear and the grandmother of hate. You don't want Johnny to be a hater, Jack."

Johnny clattered down the stairs, shrugging into a jean jacket, pink cheeks scrubbed clean, blond hair slicked back, big blue eyes full of innocent enthusiasm. Kate waited, looking at Jack.

He sighed, and said to Johnny, "Did you call Brad, tell him you're not coming?"

The Kodiak Island Dancers were on stage as they entered the Egan Convention Center that morning. Kate stood in the back of the room, Mutt on one side and Johnny on the other, and watched Johnny watch them.

At first he was disappointed, although he tried to hide it. The costumes, leggings and tunics, were brightly colored and decorated but nobody had on war bonnets made of eagle feathers or carried tomahawks or long rifles. Most of the women were older and some frankly tubby. The men were younger, with one boy who might be his own age. A couple of older men stood in back, beating with sticks on skin drums in thin frames and chanting. The beat was monotonous and the chanting monotone and nothing like on TNT when they were fixing to scalp Randolph Scott, and the dancing looked to his eyes like simple shuffling and stamping.

The drums beat out a rhythm, the old men chanted, the dancers' feet echoed both. Johnny fidgeted and looked up at Kate quickly to see if she'd noticed. She pretended she hadn't. He shoved his hands in his pockets and prepared to wait it out, if not with enjoyment, then at least with polite acceptance. He'd been well brought up, Kate thought approvingly.

The song continued. As his ears grew accustomed to it, the chanting seemed to change, not in tempo but in tone, rising up, falling down, rising up again. Or maybe it had been doing that all along and he'd only just begun to hear it. The beating of the drums, which had seemed so monotonous, now took on the sound of a heartbeat, a deep, steady, reassuring throb that seemed to beat up through the soles of his shoes.

The chanting went up above the beat, below it, swirled around it, now joyous, now mournful, sometimes a little teasing, maybe even a little mischievous. He couldn't tell where one voice ended and another began, they melded together so perfectly. The dancers moved as one, pulsing with the heartbeat of the drums.

One toe started to tap in time with the drumbeats. His head started to nod in the same rhythm.

Kate smiled to herself. "So what did you think?" she said when the dance ended and the dancers, back to being individuals again, smiled and bowed modestly in acceptance of the applause and left the stage.

"Huh?" Johnny looked up at her. His head and foot stilled. "Oh. It was okay, I guess." He was silent for a moment. "I suppose only people who are dancers get to do that?"

"Everybody's a dancer, Johnny," she said.

"Everybody?"

"Everybody."

"Even you?"

"Even me." She squeezed his shoulder. "Even you, if you want. Someday when I'm in town I'll take you to a Spirit Days, or maybe your dad'll bring you out to the homestead when there's a potlatch. You can learn."

"You mean with everybody watching?" He was horrified. "Couldn't you teach me when we're alone sometime?"

She shook her head. "That's not the way. Dancing is for everybody, all at the same time. We make a circle. We dance. We dance together." She could see that he didn't understand, but he'd come far enough for one day, and a ship in full sail was bearing down on them at ten o'clock.

"Look," she said with forced cheerfulness, all the apprehension that the discoveries of the previous night had generated back in the blink of an eye. "Here comes my grandmother."

Johnny followed her gaze. "She's old, isn't she?"

Kate looked at her grandmother and saw the gray hair, the wrinkled skin, the slow movements of age through his eyes. Ekaterina still looked tired, too. "I guess she is."

"How old? Fifty?"

"More like eighty. Probably more."

"Wow."

Kate wanted to talk to her grandmother about what she had found in Dischner's office that morning but of course the minute Ekaterina joined them a crowd formed. "Great party last night, Ekaterina," someone said.

"You sure do clean up nice, Shugak," someone else said, "I never would have believed it." This remark was directed to Kate, or she hoped so. At least she thought she did. For the next fifteen minutes Ekaterina accepted thanks on her appearance, her granddaughter's appearance, the disk jockey's play list, the rare roast beef, the caribou sausage, the open bar and most especially on the fresh fruit platters. The only complaint was that the party hadn't lasted long enough.

Ekaterina rubbed her rheumatic ky elbow. "You look tired, emaa," Kate said. "You want to sit down?"

Ekaterina shook her head. "I'll be sitting down long enough when the panel starts."

A half hour later people began to assemble at the table on stage, and Kate accompanied her grandmother to the head of the room. More people came into the room and took seats in the audience. The chairman, he of

"big brown mama" fame, introduced the panelists. Olga Shapsnikoff was the representative from the Aleut Corporation. Kate vaguely remembered dancing with the CIRI representative the night before. The other four were from Sealaska, Calista, Chugachmiut and the Bristol Bay Native Corporation. Ekaterina Moonin Shugak of Niniltna was introduced as the moderator and got by far the most applause.

The chairman said, "Ladies and gentlemen, elders, friends, family and guests. The issue is subsistence."

More people drifted in from the hall. The conversation and muted laughter didn't die but it definitely slowed. Kate was watching Ekaterina with a frown on her face. Her grandmother had dropped into her chair as if her legs were no longer capable of holding her up. Kate thought she saw the sheen of sweat on her forehead, but that could have been the heat from the lights illuminating the stage. As the chairman finished his introduction in preparation for turning the podium over to Ekaterina, Kate slipped around behind the stage and climbed up to crouch behind her grandmother. "Emaa? Are you all right?"

"No, I'm not," said her grandmother calmly. The other panelists looked at them. "Ladies and gentlemen, elders, forgive me," she said into the microphone. "I'm a little tired this morning." She smiled. "Too much partying last night, I guess." Laughter echoed from various parts of the room at those words coming from this dignified elder. "I'm going to let my granddaughter moderate this panel."

"What! Emaa!"

"You all know my granddaughter, I think, Kate Shugak. She fishes subsistence, she has fished commercial and she guides sports fishermen, so I'm sure you'll agree there is none better qualified to speak to this issue."

Kate's whisper was panicked. "No! Emaa! Olga can do it! Emaa!"

Ekaterina put one hand over the microphone. "I'm going to go back to the hotel for a nap. Come to the hotel for lunch, and you can tell me how the panel went. Thank you, Katya."

The next thing Kate knew she was standing at the podium, blinking in the glare of the stage lights. Ekaterina's broad back disappeared out through the double doors at the back of the room. Her grandmother couldn't be all that tired or she couldn't have moved that fast, Kate thought. The crowd waited, expectant, and she dredged up a smile. Her heart was beating uncomfortably high up in her throat. She looked down at the podium and there was a list, thank God, of the speakers and their order. "Ah, ladies and gentlemen, elders, friends, family and guests, as the chairman said, the issue is subsistence. Our first speaker is Olga Shapsnikoff, from Unalaska, representing the Aleut Corporation."

Olga stood and Kate walked around her to the moderator's seat. "Is Ekaterina all right?" Olga whispered.

"Just tired," Kate whispered back. And determined to thrust her granddaughter into the convention spotlight, she thought, fuming. Damn emaa, and damn her determination to drag Kate into tribal affairs.

On the plus side, Kate's resentment was more than enough to march her back to the moderator's chair without falling flat on her face.

As Olga spoke, Kate's eyes became accustomed to the light. Mutt had flopped down next to the stage. Kate looked for Johnny. He grinned up at her from the front row of the Raven's seat section, next to the boy his own age who had been on stage with the Kodiak Island Dancers. They were taking turns scribbling on a pad of paper. Tic-tac-toe, it looked like, and without a Nintendo, too. Wonders never ceased.

She brought her attention back to the podium, wondering what in the hell she was going to say when it came the moderator's turn to sum up what had gone before. She saw Axenia in the crowd, in her eyes an easily read resentment at Kate's presence on the dais. Lew Mathisen had a proprietary hand on her elbow, Harvey Meganack stood nearby, and across the aisle Billy Mike and his family took up two entire rows. Dandy was the only Mike standing, at the back of the room, his arm around a young and nubile dancer in traditional dress who was giggling at whatever he was whispering in her ear. Cindy Sovalik sent Kate a regal nod from the Arctic Slope Regional section. She thought she saw Martha Barnes standing in the back, but it was so far away she couldn't be sure.

Few of the speakers were professional orators but all were Alaska Natives and as such vitally interested in the issue of preference for rural subsistence hunting and fishing, as was their audience. Olga spoke concisely for five minutes and concluded by saying flatly, "There will be no compromise on rural subsistence," and the crowd broke into spontaneous applause, long enough for her to sit down and for the CIRI man--what was his name? Kate had forgotten the list of panelists on the podium--to take her place.

The CIRI man, an Aleut from Seldovia, said, also flatly, "The federal government is doing a far better job of protecting Native subsistence than the state government is," and this time the applause was accompanied by yells of approval. He condemned the Isaac Walton League's efforts on behalf of urban and Outside sports fishermen to more yells of approval, and called for the Alaska legislature to pass a constitutional amendment for rural preference in hunting and fishing.

The representative of Chugachmiut, an Eyak from Cordova and a Baptist seminarian who had graduated with a distinction in oratory, said that subsistence was not a part time occupation, it had to be lived. How were the people along the Yukon River supposed to feed their children if they couldn't fish for salmon or hunt for caribou except at the pleasure of the state? "The governor says the state will fly in fish from other areas." He snorted. "So people who have been self-sufficient for ten thousand years turn into welfare recipients." He looked around the room.

"What kind of sense does that make?"

"None!" came the reply.

The Sealaska representative, a Tsimshian from Metlakatla, called subsistence the most basic ingredient of the Native community and condemned state inaction on the issue. The Calista representative, a genial Yupik from Akulurak, grinned and promised not to be as long-winded as some of the politicians who'd been there the day before.

He sobered, to warn of oil company interest in sinking exploratory wells in Norton Sound, and of the threat this posed to marine life in the Bering Sea. "We don't already have enough problems with the giant trawlers from Korea and Taiwan and Russia and Poland and, yes, the United States," he asked, "all of them ripping up the bottom of the North Pacific Ocean and causing the Yukon-Kuskokwim River chum stocks to crash?"

Kate was of the opinion that mounting a couple of ten inch cannons on the foredeck of a Coast Guard cutter and sending it out to blow the trawlers out of the water would be one place to start solving that particular problem, but she knew better than to say so here. This crowd was upset enough to take her seriously. The man from Akulurak closed by saying, "The oil companies promise us they'll take every precaution to see that no harm comes to the environment from oil spills, but they don't want to talk about how they hired a known drunk to run the RPetco Anchorage onto Bligh Reef. We can't trust the oil companies to take care of us. We have to take care of ourselves."