8. High School

Grades seventh through high school were taught by Bureau of Indian Affairs teachers to over six hundred students who were perhaps taken away from home for the first time. This unnatural gathering up of Alaska Natives was only the latest effort by the American government to civilize and educate the American native aborigines. The founders of Dartmouth would envy the sheer wealth involved.

The first reaction at Mt. Edgecumbe was the population explosion in my life. In a week I saw more people in a week than in my life. It was frightening. I developed xenophobic tendencies that still affect me.

The only work required of me was that I clean my room every Saturday, I couldn't believe how easy life had become. Discipline by the teachers was a thing of the past. Rigorous religious training was replaced by a secular invitation to personal wealth. A Bureau of Indian Affairs had become a teacher for life.

The numbers of students moving from class to class made me feel like I was in the opening scene of the movie, "Snake Pit". In the first student assembly I heard my first band music. I thought the music was great but could be greater if they eliminated all those drums. They were an ear sore. A student named Albert Frank sang a beautiful solo rendition of "Trees".

A great school spirit was ingrained in by the teachers. We learned to cheer wildly for the basketball team, we even voted for school colors and nickname. We settled for red and gold and "Braves". The Notre Dame fight song became our school song. Watching the Braves win basketball games became the most exciting part of my life. Then a giant player was introduced by Sitka High School l" ending perhaps for all time domination by the Braves.~ Mr. Osbakken was 6'6" tall and meant superiority for the "Wolves" whose colors were blue and white. The third high school in Sitka was Sheldon Jackson High School whose colors were blue and gold and whose team was called the "Warriors". With all those high schools in one town my intense school spirit became sated and I wondered if there than basketball, was anything more exciting in life. Saturday nights meant community singing where the student body sang such classics as, "A Spanish Cavalier", "Swannee", "Onward Christian Soldiers" and others. An annual entertainment put on by the faculty was the Minstrel Show where their faces were blackened, called each other such names as "Rastus", and tried talking with an almost unintelligible accent.

After finishing eighth grade I was invited to skip ninth grade which I turned down. My grades were very high through high school, the exception being Basic Electronics which I flunked. I felt sorry for those who came to Mt. Edgecumbe still speaking a broken English whose fault was not all theirs. They were thinking in Eskimo while trying to speak English. We were not given an introduction to the amenities of modern life. Many of us had never seen a toilet or urinal. It seemed we had come into a world of incredible opulence. Life was never better.

After finishing eighth grade several of us Catholics were sent to St. Pious X High School in Skagway to spend the summer. No reason was given. Perhaps they thought it would be easier for us to spend the summer in a Catholic environment. It was fine for me because by this time I was beginning to like change. Every Saturday night I would go to a Skagway establishment where the "Shooting of Dangerous Dan McGrew” was colorfully reenacted. I also went to Dyea where the fabled trail to the Klondike started. Living during that time was the legendary Soapy Smith. He got his name by auctioning bars of soap which had money in them.

After a summer at Skagway it was time to return to Mt. Edgecumbe. I turned down a chance to go to high school at Pious X.

My favorite teacher was the lovely Miss Pollard whom I had written home about. One afternoon she directed me to the office of the school Chaplain, the Reverend Mr. Day. There were tears in her eyes. Everything seemed strange.

Mr. Day told me that my brothers Lawrence, Stanley, and Henry had perished in the Bering Sea. I didn't hear a thing. He told me it was alright to cry which I couldn't. He sent me back to the dormitory where I laid in bed. The love I had for my brothers made it easier for me to accept their death because I would rather mourn them than they me. And yet, I never mourned them. The loss is too much for me to express, the pain great to define. The great camaraderie is gone. The bond and love we had for each other will echo through out eternity. The deaths that shook me are only an entrance into the meaning of life.

I placed the deaths of my brothers in the back of my mind. We had done and seen things that our ancestors had never even dreamed of. We became the first in our family to learn a written language. We were educated by a foreign race. We accepted Christianity without questioning it, with no resistance. Yet we never knew the shamanistic religion of our ancestors. We had traveled in airplanes and seen the coming of snowmobiles. Together we had stepped into the twentieth century unwittingly. Now it was left for me to go on alone. They left me - alone in Western Civilization.

So I was caught in a high school far from home. Knowing there was nothing I could do about it I decided to enjoy it and try my best.