7. Mt. Edgecumbe

After we finished seventh grade Mr. Collins decided that Henry and I would go to Mt. Edgecumbe for eighth grade and high school.

The X-rays taken in the North Star showed that Henry had TB. He would not go to Mt. Edgecumbe with me. He was very disconsolate. We would be separated for the first time.

I was to travel on the North Star all the way to Mt. Edgecumbe. Henry and I bid each other a very hard farewell, never to see each other again.

The trip to Mt. Edgecumbe turned out to be a 24-day boat ride which I really enjoyed. I was going where I would be without the comfort of the Mission Church and without my brothers. I knew it would be a very lonely journey and I felt I was going into Western Civilization alone.

I had already accepted my existence in Western Civilization. It happened sometime in my years at Holy Cross. My earliest recollections and awarenesses had imbued on my soul the only thing I knew. My immediate family was an Eskimo world. The food, the language, the special bond, and the air itself was Eskimo. A sacred joy was there. Then at Pilgrim Springs and Holy Cross I saw a different people with white faces and a different language I began to learn the English language. It could even be written. The color, panoply, and power of the Catholic Church was arrayed in the visitations of the Bishop. Then one day I was thinking I was no longer in the Eskimo world. The people, the language, the fastness, the airplanes, and the Church were something else and I was learning to become a part of it. Then it occurred to me that I was part of another culture. King Arthur and The Round Table were more real to me than the Oomiak. I became filled with guilt and asked God's forgiveness for what I had become. I had become an unwilling and unwitting co-perpetrator to all the murders that been done in the name of the king, to the crimes that had been done for the good of the state, to all the wars. The serenity of life and the struggles for existence that are Eskimo were now gone from my life and left to my grandfather who lived only a hundred am years ago. In the (sudden) knowledge of all this, I was overwhelmed.

When I disembarked at Mt. Edgecumbe I staggered and veered on the dock almost falling down. I had developed sea legs during the violent storm that the North Star had encountered in the Gulf of Alaska where movement of the vessel was estimated at four knots in seven hours.

We picked up ten other students at Gambell and Savoonga on St. Lawrence Island. The eleven of us were to become fast in the maelstrom that was Mt. Edgecumbe High School.

During the War a Naval Base was built directly across Sitka and in 1947 was converted into a boarding high school for Alaska 1‘ Natives: Thlingits, Aleuts, Haidas, Eskimos, Tshimpsians and Athabaskans from Pt. Barrow to Ketchikan were shipped and flown in every fall and in the spring the exodus was as dramatic.