27 Yuuyaraq: The Way of the Human Being, Part 2: Shared Trauma

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in the Survivors of the Great Death

Not all the survivors of the Great Death suffered from posttraumatic stress disorder, but a great many did. This may explain the great thirst for liquor that whalers and other Westerners found in the Eskimos along the Bering Sea and the Arctic. It was reported by whalers and the officers of the early revenue cutters that the Eskimos craved the liquor, trading all they had for it and almost starving themselves as long as they had molasses with which to make rum.

Like the Vietnam veteran or victims and witnesses of other violent and traumatic events, these Eskimos found in liquor a narcotic which numbed their troubled minds. The reports of the whalers, the revenue cutters, and other observers confirm that the Eskimos quickly became addicted to alcohol.

The only explanation for this type of behavior is that for some reason these Eskimos were psychologically predisposed to seek relief through the narcotic effects of alcohol. And although in the case of the St. Lawrence Islanders this behavior was reported in the mid-nineteenth century, it must be remembered that they had already begun to see their world crumbling as a result of interaction with Western sailors and diseases much earlier than the Yup’ik, Inupiaq, and Athabascan people who were located farther away from established sea lanes. The St. Lawrence story was only a precursor for the tragedy that would unfold on the mainland at the turn of the century.

Judging from the abrupt changes the Yup’ik and other Native people accepted at the turn of the century, literally without a fight, one can assume that they were not themselves. No people anywhere will voluntarily discard their culture, beliefs, customs, and traditions unless they are under a great deal of stress, physically, psychologically, or spiritually. Yet for some reason, the Yup’ik people did exactly that, overnight in the span of their cultural history. There may have been pockets of resistance, but they were insignificant.

With the Yup’ik people and most Alaska Native tribes, the case can be made that resistance collapsed because of mass death, resulting from famine, illness, and the trauma that accompanied these. The case can also be made that many of the survivors of the Great Death suffered from posttraumatic stress disorder, and that it was in this condition that they surrendered and allowed their old cultures to pass away.

The survivors had been beaten by an unseen great evil (mass death) that had been unleashed in their villages, killing over half the men, women, and little children. They had witnessed the violent collapse of their world, of Yuuyaraq. Having barely escaped the grip of death, the survivors were shaken to the core. They staggered, dazed, confused, brutalized, and scarred, into the new world, refugees in their own land, a remnant of an ancient and proud people. The world looked the same, yet everything had changed. But the memories would remain, memories of the spirit world, the way life used to be, and memories of the horrors they had witnessed and lived through.

We who are alive today cannot begin to imagine the fear, the horror, the confusion and the desperation that gripped the villages of our forebears following the Great Death. But we have learned, through the experience of Vietnam veterans infected by PTSD, that the cries of horror and despair do not end unless they are expunged from the soul. Yes, the Yup’ik survivors cried, they wailed, and they fought with all they had, but they were not heard. They had been alone in a collapsed and dying world and many of them carried the memory, the heartbreak, the guilt, and the shame, silently with them into the grave.

But we hear them today. They cry in the hearts of their children, their grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. They cry in the hearts of the children who have inherited the symptoms of their disease of silent despairing loneliness, heartbreak, confusion, and guilt. And tragically, because the children do not understand why they feel this way, they blame themselves for this legacy from their grandparents, the survivors of the Great Death who suffered from what we now call posttraumatic stress disorder.

The Children and Grandchildren of the Survivors

At the time of the Great Death, there were white people in some of the villages, mostly missionaries and traders, but they were few in number. They witnessed the Great Death, and in many cases they did the best they could to help the Native people. Yet it would be these same people who would take advantage of the demoralized condition of the survivors to change them, to civilize them, to attempt to remake them. They, and the men and women who would follow them, had no understanding of or respect for the old cultures. They considered them satanic, and made it their mission from God to wipe them out. They considered the survivors savages and used derogatory adjectives in describing them in their letters and diaries. And because of what they had just lived through, and because of their disoriented and weakened condition, the survivors allowed these newcomers to take over their lives.

What followed was an attempt at cultural genocide. The priests and missionaries impressed on the survivors that their spirit world was of the devil and was evil. They heaped scorn on the medicine men and women and told the people they were servants of the devil. They told the survivors that their feasts, songs, dances, and masks were evil and had to be abandoned on pain of condemnation and hellfire. Many villages followed these edicts. The dances and feasts disappeared.

The priests and missionaries forbade parents from teaching their children about Yuuyaraq and about the spirit world. They forbade the parents and children from practicing old customs and rituals based on Yuuyaraq, calling them taboo. Again, the survivors obeyed and their children grew up ignorant about themselves and about their history. If the children asked about the old culture, they were told by their parents not to ask such questions, as if they were ashamed or hiding something. From listening to the priest and observing the behavior of their parents, the children would come to believe that there was something wrong with their people, some dark secret to be ashamed of.

In the schoolhouse, the children were forbidden to speak in Yup’ik. The survivors did not protest even when it was learned that the schoolteachers were washing the mouths of their children with soap for speaking their mother tongue. In the schoolhouse, the children came to believe that to be Yup’ik was shameful and that to become like white people was not only desirable but essential. The children began to look down at their own people and began to see the observances of their people as quaint, shameful, and funny. That the survivors allowed all this is testimony to the degree of their individual and collective depression, especially in regard to the treatment of their children.

Had Nelson made similar decrees during the time he was visiting these same villages (1870-1875), he would have been killed. Yet after the Great Death, some villages were ruled autocratically by a single priest.

The survivors were stoic and seemed able to live under the most miserable and unbearable of conditions. They were quiet, even deferential. They did not discuss personal problems with others. If they were hurt, they kept it to themselves. If they were angry, they kept it to themselves. They were lauded as being so respectful that they avoided eye-to-eye contact with others. They were passive. Very few exhibited their emotions or discussed them.

The survivors did as they were told. They were not fighters or protesters. They almost lost everything: their cultures, their languages, their spiritual beliefs, their songs, their dances, their feasts, their lands, their independence, their pride–all their inheritances. This was their way of coping with life after the cataclysm of the Great Death. The survivors had gone into themselves and receded with their tattered lives and unbearable emotions into a deep silence. It was in this condition that they raised their children, who then learned to be like their parents– passive, silent, not expressing emotions, keeping things to themselves, and not asking too many questions.

The survivors told their children about kindness, forgiveness, and sharing, yet they were unwilling to face and discuss the problems and unpleasantness in the family or the village. They did not teach their children about Yuuyaraq, the spirit world, or about the old culture because it was too painful to do so. Besides, the priest said it was wrong. Those who told stories told only the harmless ones.

This would become part of the persona of the survivors and their descendents. Without meaning to, the survivors drove the experience of the Great Death and the resultant trauma and emotions deep into the souls of their children, who became psychologically and emotionally handicapped and who passed these symptoms on to their children and grandchildren.

The survivors’ children are the grandparents of the present day Eskimo, Indian, and Aleut. It is these traits, these symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder, which are handicapping the present generation of Alaska Native people. Several generations of suppressed emotions, confusion, and feelings of inferiority and powerlessness now permeate even the very young.

An Anomaly

Since the early 1960s, Native people have seen their material lives improve. They are no longer hungry, they are well clothed, and they now live in comparatively warm, comfortable homes. This has largely been achieved by the anti-poverty programs which were instituted in the years before and after the Great Society. Being by and large unemployed in the cash economy, Native people benefited greatly from the civil rights and anti-poverty programs of the 1960s and 1970s.

Yet, as their physical lives have improved, the quality of their lives has deteriorated (see graph). Since the 1960s there has been a dramatic rise in alcohol abuse, alcoholism, and associated violent behaviors, which have upset family and village life and resulted in physical and psychological injury, death, and imprisonment. Something self-destructive, violent, frustrated, and angry has been set loose from within the Alaska Native people. And it is the young that are dying, going to prison, and maiming themselves. Their families, their friends, their villages say they cannot understand why. Every suicide leaves a stunned family and village. Every violent crime and every alcohol-related death elicits the same reaction. The alcohol-related nightmare has now become an epidemic. No one seems to know why.

One thing we do know–the primary cause of the epidemic is not physical deprivation. Native people have never had it so good in terms of food, clothing, and shelter. We can also state that it isn’t because the federal and state governments have ignored the problem. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on Alaska Natives to improve their lives, their health, and their education. Hundreds of millions have been spent just trying to combat alcoholism and alcohol abuse among them. Local option laws have been passed that prohibit the importation, the sale, and even the possession of alcohol. Yet the carnage goes on.

The numbers are shocking. According to Matthew Berman:

From 1977 to 1988, the last year for which complete data are available, 1,789 Native Americans died violently in Alaska.These figures include 394 deaths by suicides, 257 by homicides, and 1,138 by accident out of a total population of only 64,000 (1980 Census), representing a claim of about 3 percent of the native population over a twelve-year period (Berman 1991).

The numbers of incidents of domestic violence, imprisonments, alcohol affected children, and deaths from disease attributable to alcohol are equally shocking. Yet the numbers are misleading because they do not measure the true extent of the damage being done to the Native people. The numbers cannot quantify the heartbreak, discouragement, confusion, hopelessness, and grief.

The numbers cannot measure the trauma. It is like repeating the Great Death all over again, and like then, the Alaska Natives blame themselves and do not know or understand why. And like the first Great Death, a whole generation of Alaska Natives is being born into trauma, just like their grandparents and parents. It is history repeating itself in a tragic, heartbreaking way. It is a deadly cycle that began in the changing of the times for the Yupiit and the other tribes of Alaska Natives.

Why?

We now know that our ancestors were besieged by ship-borne diseases like smallpox, measles, chicken pox, and colds that culminated in the Great Death, the influenza epidemic at the turn of the century. Not knowing of microbes, they attributed these diseases to evil spirits and to their own weaknesses. They blamed themselves and their way of life, and abandoned themselves and their way of life as a result. But that did not end the suffering. Famine, poverty, confusion, polio, tuberculosis, and spiritual depression followed, ending in the death of the old cultures around the 1950s.

The present epidemic is a little harder to explain, but certainly it was born out of the Great Death itself, and the disease is one of the soul and the psyche of this present generation of Alaska Native people. It is an inherited disease, passed from parent to child. But it has been passed down unintentionally, unknowingly, and innocently. Nevertheless, it is deadly and unless treated, it will give birth to another generation of infected souls.

The cry of the survivors of the Great Death was why. That same cry is now heard from the confused, shocked, and heartbroken hearts of today’s Alaska Native people.

A Generation Turns on Itself

Many of today’s generation of Alaska Natives have turned on themselves. They blame themselves for being unemployed, for being second-class citizens, for not being successful as success is portrayed to them by the world they live in. They measure themselves by the standards of the television America and the textbook America, and they have failed. For this they blame themselves. There is no one to tell them that they are not to blame that there is nothing wrong with them, that they are loved. Sometimes they don’t even know who they are, or what they are.

This, of course, does not describe all young Alaska Native people. But it describes the suicides, the alcohol abusers, the ones in prison, the ones with nothing to do in the villages. These are the numbers we hear in reports. They are living human beings- Eskimos, Aleuts, and Indians–the ones we pay no attention to until they become numbers. Chances are that their parents also were alcohol abusers, if not alcoholics. Chances are that they were disappointed, emotionally hurt, heartbroken children. Chances are they saw physical, verbal, and psychological violence in the home.

Chances are that they were not given enough attention and thought themselves unloved and unwanted. Chances are they were hungry, were dirty, were tired, and were unsuccessful in school. Chances are they yearned for happiness and a normal home but were denied it. And now, chances are they no longer communicate with others -not their parents, not their relatives, not their friends, or anyone else.

By the time such children are grown, they are deeply depressed in their souls. They have become demoralized, discouraged, and do not think very much of themselves. Deep in their hearts they are hurt, angry, frustrated and confused. They never talk. They have turned inward.

These are the ones who, when they drink alcohol, quickly become addicted to it, psychologically first, and then physically. When under the influence, they begin to vent their anger, hurt, frustration, and confusion, seemingly out of the clear blue sky. And sadly, their outbursts are directed at themselves and those closest to them: their parents, their brothers and sisters, their friends, and members of their villages. The most tragic events are those involving a blacked-out male Eskimo, Aleut, or Indian, who, while completely out of control, vents his deadly emotions in violence and mad acts resulting in dismemberment and death, thereby leaving even more traumatized victims and witnesses.

So what causes this? Is it the young man’s or young woman’s fault? Or is it the fault of parents who may have been abusers and alcoholics? Or is it the fault of grandparents who did not raise their children right because they themselves were traumatized by the Great Death and felt guilty about the subsequent loss of culture, language, and independence? Whose fault is it?

Certainly the dead will be buried, the suicides buried, the assaulter and abuser jailed and charged with the appropriate crime and put away in prison for a few years or a lifetime. But there are only so many prison cells. Can we seriously be thinking of putting everyone into prison? And do we keep burying the other victims of the Great Death until not a one is left? Is this to be our way of life until the end, burying the victims of the victims?

When will all this end? How will it end? How can we end it? When can we end it? Or do we even want to end it? Have we become so callous, so hard-hearted, our spiritual senses so dulled, that we are no longer moved by all this? Is it to be as Darwin put it, the survival of the fittest? My answer at least is this: We who are also the survivors of the Great Death must end it. We must activate all our energies and resources to end it. And we must do it soon because as time goes by it will become harder and harder.

Every human life is sacred. Every Yup’ik, Inupiaq, Athabascan, Aleut, Eyak, Chugiak, Tlingit, Haida, Koniag, and Tshimsian life is sacred. We are not so many that we can endlessly absorb the trauma each tragic death inflicts on our physical and psychic body. We are too few. The question is how to stop the epidemic.

Beginnings

If we were to look at the experience of the various tribes as the experience of individuals, and if they were exhibiting the symptoms we have described and which are now so well documented, we would have to spend some time just talking to them. We would have them truthfully tell their life stories, leaving nothing out, to see what was causing these disturbances in their lives. So it is in this way that we must begin to treat this particular syndrome of the various Alaska Native villages, beginning at the personal and familial levels.

The living elders must tell all they know, tell their experiences, because theirs are the experiences of the whole village, whether the whole village is aware of them or not. The very oldest are the most important because they will be able to tell their remembrances to the whole village. They must relate the old beliefs of their people, no matter the subject. They must also relate the experiences of the epidemics, no matter how painful, because these haunt not only them, but their children and grandchildren as well. They must tell why they gave everything up, why they discarded the old ways, the old beliefs, why they allowed the culture to die. They must explain how and why they gave up governing themselves, why they allowed school teachers to wash their children’s mouths with soap, why they gave up so much land. The elders must speak of all that hurts them and haunts them. They owe this to their children and to their children’s children because without knowing why the descendants feel the same as their elders do.

The one fear I have is that the first survivors of the Great Death- the ones who lived in the old world, were nurtured by it, and who loved it–are now almost all gone. They are the ones in whom was born the disease that afflicts Alaska Natives today. They are the ones who felt the full brunt of the fatal wounding of their world. They are the ones who saw it, were horrified by it, and whose hearts were broken. Hearing them, we will recognize the emotions in our hearts, emotions we have long attributed to a weakness within ourselves. We would at least mourn with them, mourn together the passing of our old world. Then they and we would not be alone any more.

The children of these survivors must also speak. They are now grandparents, even great-grandparents. They must speak of their childhoods, their world, what they saw, what they perceived, what they thought, how they felt. They too must share with us their life stories, leaving nothing out, the good and the bad, because their experiences are ours, and we are their seed. We also love them.

Then the parents of this new generation must speak together, as a group, to the rest of the villages. They too must relate their life stories, their experiences, their sorrows. They must turn their hearts to their children who so love them, who so long to know them. Their experiences are ours. We are shaped by them. Then we, their children, must speak to our parents, to our grandparents if we still have them, and to our own children. We, too, must tell our story to our people, because our experience is theirs too. We must tell our feelings, our anger, our frustrations, and ask questions of our parents.

We must do this because we don’t know each other anymore; we have become like strangers to each other. The old do not know or understand the young, and the young do not know or understand the old. Parents do not know their children, and the children do not know their parents. As a result of this silence, a gulf has grown between those who love and care for each other the most. It is so very sad. I have been in homes where members of the same household do not even speak to each other. I wondered how they could even stand to be in the same house together like this.

And out of this will grow more hurt, misunderstanding, and unfulfilled love. Even in the family, while surrounded by those one loves the most, a person can become isolated, a stranger even to those who love him and are closest to him. Needless to say, there will be tension, stress, and frayed nerves.

Only communication, honest communication from the heart, will break this down, because inability to share one’s heart and feelings is the most deadly legacy of the Great Death. It was born out of the survivors’ inability to face and speak about what they had seen and lived through. The memory was too painful, the reality too hard, the results too hard to hear.

Without knowing it, the survivors began to deal with the difficulties of life by trying to ignore them, by denying them, by not talking about them. This is the way they raised their children and their children raised us the same way. Holding things in has become a trait among our families and our people. The results have been tragic.

Over the many years of suppressed emotions, of not communicating from the heart, Native people and Native families grew apart. Somewhere along the line, something had to give. The body of the Alaska Native family, village, and tribe, being unable to withstand the stresses built up from within, began breaking down.

We have seen this breakdown since the latter 1960s. Alcohol abuse has become rampant. Violence directed at self and at others in the home has erupted. The intensity and the level of self-destruction of the Alaska Native are appalling. The only way it will end is if the built-up stresses, misunderstandings, and questions are released and satisfied by truthful dialogue from the heart. It is only through this heart-to-heart dialogue, no matter how painful or embarrassing the subject, that the deadly stresses born of trauma on top of trauma can be released. Then slowly, we can all go home again, be alone and lonesome no more, be a family and a village again.

It is time we bury the old culture, mourn those who died with it, mourn with those who survived it. It is time we buried our many dead who have died in this long night of our suffering, then go forward, lost no more. We have been wandering in a daze for the last 100 years, rocked by a succession of traumatic changes and inundations. Now we have to stop, look at ourselves, and as the New Alaska Natives we are, press on together-not alone–free of the past that haunted and disabled us, free of the ghosts that haunted our hearts, free to become what we were intended to be by God.