As geologists in Alaska`s southeastern panhandle had been predicting, early one morning a few weeks ago a cataclysmic rupture shattered the towering face of mighty Hubbard Glacier, allowing Russell Lake– a gigantic wall of water 30 miles long, 2 miles wide, and 85 feet high–to gush back to the sea. The roar shook the village of Yakutat, 25 miles away, and the Tlingit Indians, who have lived there for 600 years, slept a little better that night, knowing that the collapse of the ice dam has bought them a little time. But the next morning, the Indians awoke to face the threat of ruin posed by the new Ice Age that imperils their isolated town.
Yakutat`s Tlingits (pronounced klin-kits) belong to Alaska`s most numerous and famous native tribe. They are striving to maintain their precarious lifestyle in the wild and scenic place they love, surely one of the world`s most beautiful and unusual sites.
”The glacier probably will close up again by February,” says Fred Henry, 42, son of a Tlingit chief and manager of the Yakutat Lodge. The lodge caters to salmon fishermen from around the world who flock to the crystal-clear waters of the nearby Situk River during the four-month spawning run.
”The glacier may advance and break up two or three more times until it becomes so solid that the water can`t break through any more,” Henry says.
”When that happens, the lake will back up and destroy our fishing grounds. Then, we`re in deep trouble.”
”The glacier is just like a human being,” explains 75-year-old William Thomas, chief of the Eagle Clan. ”That`s why you talk to it, so you won`t fall off while you`re hunting seal. And why, if you laugh by the glacier, it gets mean-like.
”So you must talk to it,” Thomas believes. ”And when it`s heard enough, it will stop moving.”
Others are not so sure. At least 20 glaciers rimming the Gulf of Alaska between Yakutat and the oil port of Valdez are currently on the move. Hubbard Glacier, 92 miles long and North America`s third-largest, begins in Canada`s Yukon Territory and empties into Disenchantment Bay in Alaska.
Several months ago, nearby Valerie Glacier suddenly surged forward, giving Hubbard a shove. Then Hubbard, which normally inches forward at 100 feet a year, began to gallop seaward at an astonishing rate–as much as 50 feet a day.
This wouldn`t have mattered except for some peculiar geography. Disenchantment Bay, as it comes inland from the Pacific Ocean, narrows drastically at its neck and forms a sharp elbow bend that abruptly turns, from northeast to south, into a large arm of the ocean called Russell Fjord.
As the glacier surged, it pinched off that elbow, blocking the frigid saltwater fjord from its only outlet. Within days, landlocked Russell Fjord had become Russell Lake.
With nowhere else to go, freshwater from creeks and streams, and melt from the glacier, flowed into the new lake, raising its level four inches daily. The ever-increasing weight of the water strained against the glacier, and a titanic struggle between two of the greatest wilderness forces ensued.
When the ice dam finally collapsed in the dark of Oct. 8., the lake was 82 feet above sea level, only 25 feet from overflowing its banks and spilling over onto the Situk River valley. If that had happened, the silty lake would have flushed away the pristine salmon beds that are the economic lifeblood of the Tlingits, at best disrupting the economy for years, at worst destroying it.
Yakutat is a historic settlement of 450 people that sits on a flat, forested coastal plain dominated by 18,000-feet-high Mount St. Elias, which towers over the northeast horizon. Much of the town is perched on a thin finger that juts into Yakutat Bay near the mouth of the Situk. Yakutat is in no physical danger. Many Tlingits, in fact, went out to witness the incredible aftermath of the collapse of the massive ice dam.
At breakout, as much as four million cubic feet of water per second burst through the rapidly draining glacier–14 times the amount that moves over Niagara Falls each second. As dirty brownish meltwater poured out of the fjord and roared into blue Disenchantment Bay, huge icebergs scurried along at speeds faster than 25 miles an hour.
Unnoticed amid the ferocity, an estimated 30 trapped porpoises and seals, subjects of a highly publicized and fruitless $100,000 rescue attempt last summer, quietly slipped free in the ride of a lifetime.
Geologists stood by stupefied as Russell Lake emptied like a bathtub, dropping 5 feet each hour, exposing rotting vegetation and huge Western hemlock and Sitka spruce trees that had been swamped. Soon the fjord had reached sea level.
At least for a while.
”The reporters have all gone away now, but we feel that someone ought to care about the plight of this town,” says Fred Henry.
”It was funny last summer to watch the media circus over a few porpoises and seals, but it was also ridiculous. The animals didn`t want to be saved. The task was impossible. Besides, no one would pay attention to a cow drowning in the Mississippi. We eat seals here, and have for centuries. It`s not like they`re endangered.
”But when that lake forms again and backs up and washes away the Situk River, the salmon will go, and so will the livelihood of our commercial fishermen. Those fish are worth $2 million a year to us. We`ll also lose our airfield and jet service to Yakutat. We`ll be cut off. All we`d have are ocean freighters, just like in the old days. And tourists bring in $1 million a year. Without the salmon, they won`t come here.”
Henry dismissed a rumor that the Tlingits had sacrificed a dog in front of Hubbard Glacier to stop its advance. ”Nothing can stop the glacier. We desperately need government help to build a channel and divert the lake so the Situk River and the salmon spawning beds can be saved. Without a channel, we`re probably finished.
”This is a preventable disaster,” said Henry, citing the general opinion of the town. ”And no one is making any effort to do anything about it.” Already, the Tlingits have suffered their worst salmon season ever.
”I`m not sure we can directly attribute it to the glacier, but perhaps there was a connection,” says Jim Thomas, a Tlingit from Yakutat who works as administrative officer for the Nooksack tribe in western Washington state.
”Perhaps salmon can sense the activity in terms of temperature, as well as the tremendous rumbling that must go on within the waters as that monstrosity moved.”
Each year, luxury liners holding thousands of tourists ply the inside passage from Ketchikan to Glacier Bay along Tlingit territory, a 600-mile-long panhandle separated from the rest of the 49th state by the towering St. Elias mountains.
About 10,000 Tlingits live along these 13,000 miles of broken, glacial-etched coastline. The landscape is temperate, laced with a thousand islands and straits warmed by the Japan Current, teeming with fish and sea mammals, whipped by heavy winter rains, and blessed by forests and abundant wildlife, alpine peaks and fjords that rival Norway`s.
In the Yakutat area, glaciers have scored and polished mountains of naked rock, heaping at their feet vast moraines plowed and carved by rains and melting snows into fantastic forms. The glaciers, wrote naturalist John Burroughs 87 years ago, have created a vision of ”serene astronomic solitude and remoteness that always shakes the heart of the beholder.”
Yakutat is a community of small frame houses and a proud tradition. The main buildings are the cannery, courthouse, town hall and Mallott`s General Store. Over 20 years, the mud-clogged roads have been replaced by asphalt pavement. But no roads lead out of Yakutat: The road to the south leads to the harbor where fishing boats are docked; the northern road leads to the airport. There are three bars in town, as well as three churches and two lodges. Pickup trucks are common, as are satellite dishes for TV.
”The old ways, the customs, are being lost,” laments 85-year-old Susie Abraham as she slips a cup of tea into a microwave oven. ”This place where we live belongs to the great glacier. We are put here for a little while to enjoy God`s creation, then we go. But the great glacier stays.”
She can`t conceive of any other life: ”I know who I am because the river was here when I was growing up. If it is gone, there will be no place to train my children and grandchildren.”
By native standards, the Tlingits live quite well. For centuries, they served as middlemen among the 28 Northwest Coast tribes, and were renowned as shrewd businessmen and women. When the Alaskan tourist trade arose in the 1880s, Tlingit women became brisk traders in curios, sailing their schooners between Yakutat and the tourist center at Sitka, carrying native items in one direction and western goods in the other, turning profits at both ends.
Salmon mean everything to the Tlingits. Each spring, the fish swim from the ocean by the squirming, struggling masses, fighting their way to the region`s countless rivers to spawn and die in fresh water. Tlingits traditionally believed the salmon to be a race of immortal men who lived in shelters beneath the sea, and who changed into fish to offer themselves to Indians for food.
That was not the end, though. After Tlingit fishermen stripped the meat from the bones, they traditionally tossed back the bones into the river, believing they would wash out to sea to become men again, until the following season when they would return as salmon.
Today, the average Yakutat Tlingit earns $15,000 a year by working only four months during the intense salmon season. The Indians net and process as much as two million pounds of fish, a harvest that stems from a deep understanding of salmon that has been passed on for thousands of years. The Tlingits need every penny, too, because the necessities of life must be transported to the village from Outside, as Alaskans say. Even toilet paper must be flown in and costs $2.08 a roll. The largest town of any consequence is Juneau, about 220 miles to the South.
The natural abundance of their region has always made the Tlingits special. Their totem poles and other carvings remain prized for the caliber of their artistry.
Their technology and commerce resulted in a remarkable culture, a culture vitally concerned with rank, social status and profligate generosity. Family rank depended on accumulating wealth and giving it away. This was considered more important than bravery or success in war or hunting.
The Tlingits had the leisure time to accumulate wealth and devise ceremonies at which wealth could be lavishly displayed. Yakutat`s Tlingits formed the northernmost extension of a unique institution, the potlatch, that had no exact counterpart in any other culture. The practice of potlatches
(from whence comes our term ”potluck”) spanned the coast from Yakutat southward 1,400 miles to Cape Mendocino in Northern California.
All Tlingits belong to one of two huge clans, the Ravens or the Eagles. Because of the genetic dangers of in-breeding, it still is forbidden to marry a member of the same clan. Yet traditionally the men of each clan supported women and children of their opposites in the other clan. When a household faced an important task, the burying of a chief or erecting a totem pole, they honored their opposites by asking them to do it. The request amounted to a debt, and family honor required that all debts be liberally repaid. Thus arose the custom of the potlatch.
Potlatches were almost hysterical in their profligacy. Chiefs had limited power; each family was run by its head. And when the head of a family threw a potlatch, he gave away everything he owned: food, blankets, guns and ammunition, canoes, calico, even his slaves, captured Athabascans and Columbia River people from Oregon.
Guests were expected to gorge themselves on boiled deer meat and salmon, crackers, tea, sugar, and molasses until they got sick. Feasts lasted for days and demanded elaborate social etiquette that would have driven Miss Manners into a tizzy.
During a funeral potlatch, for example, the host stood at one end of the hall, his guests carefully lined up at the other end by order of rank. They tried to assuage the host`s grief with songs and intricate dances. But the movements of each dancer were intensely scrutinized, and the slightest miscue was noted and remembered. The strain on the dancers was so great that when one dancer died soon after a feast, it was said that ”the people`s looks killed him.”
When the next potlatch occurred, the former host recovered a portion of his wealth; and after a few more potlatches, he had caught up, at least for the time being. ”The greater the gift the more is due the giver, when those who have been his guests themselves give potlatches,” wrote naturalist George Bird Grinell in 1899.
When Europeans outlawed tribal warfare, though, potlatches became ugly parodies of themselves, the only outlet for aggression, the sole chance to shame a rival. Insults were hurled, dances turned violent, and potlatch-givers never were able to get out of debt. In 1895, potlatches themselves were outlawed by Christian missonaries as savage and heathen.
But in modern Yakutat, the traditional potlatch is making a comeback.
”We never heard about them when I was a kid because people were severely chastised for speaking their language and wearing native dress,” says Caroline Mallott Powell, who with her husband, Yakutat Mayor Larry Powell, runs Mallott`s General Store.
”But this has drastically changed,” she says. ”I think people realized what they almost lost. There`s a stronger hold on the culture now than there ever was. For example, we teach all the kids how to catch the salmon, how to smoke and can them. We`ve found that children who know who they are have better self-esteem and do better in school.
”So the potlatch has again become the biggest social event of the year. We try and outdo last year`s party. It`s a time for the giving of gifts, the telling of stories, remembrance of the dead, and the awarding of Tlingit names to those who need them. My sister, for example, had a baby girl and we`re thinking of giving her my mother`s Tlingit name, and this will be done very formally.
”But the potlatch is also a time for joking and dancing, and the fun goes on into the wee hours. People walk away with loads of gifts–just like coming from a Christmas party.”
It is perhaps the ultimate irony that Yakutat`s threatened Tlingits are among the major shareholders in the largest and most successful of the 13 native-run corporations created by the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971. The Tlingit company, Sealaska, based in Juneau, employs 2,000 people and has a net worth conservatively estimated at $500 million, ranging from land, timber and mineral interests to investments in a spectrum of businesses, canneries, construction companies, oil fields, even shopping centers.
None of this means anything to Hubbard Glacier. And it won`t mean anything to the Tlingits until 1991, at the earliest, when Sealaska is scheduled to become a publicly held corporation. After that, tribe members conceivably could sell stock to raise money. But board chairman Byron Mallott, 42, a Tlingit from Yakutat, doubts that Sealaska will be able to help his home town.
”We are a corporation with 16,000 native shareholders throughout Alaska. We`re a business corporation like IBM. The law says we can`t treat any individual different from the others. So we couldn`t target the people of Yakutat and do something special for them.
”Besides, I don`t think money is the issue in Yakutat. The people are much more worried about losing their culture. That`s where the anguish is. The people live in Yakutat because that`s where they want to live. It`s an incredibly beautiful place.
”Nobody is saying, come rescue us, come save us. We`ve lived through crises before,” Mallott says. ”We survive this one.”
Fred Henry recently took a reporter for a ride in his ancient skiff up the lovely Situk River. Soon, Henry nosed the skiff in the riverbank, and the two men fought their way through underbrush. After several hundred yards, they found themselves in a silent strand of tall Sitka spruce. Under the trees stood a concrete tomb. The name, ”Jim,” was outlined in stones on the top.
”Situk Jim was my great-granduncle,” Henry said. ”My Indian name is Situk Jim. I inherited that name.”
Then Henry pointed to other nearby graves.
”That`s my grandfather, Samson Harry, over there; and my great-grandfather, Situk Harry. They were brothers and they used to own this river. ”This is where I was born,” Henry said, ”and this is where I want to be buried. If the river goes, all this will be lost.”
