Kwethluk: Two Years on the Bad River
________
The new memoir by John Fairweather
ELDER WISDOM
I didn’t know then if Grandmother Michael’s advice meant that we should return someday. . . .
RIBBON GIRLS
Her daughter, Marla, one of the ribbon girls who’d performed the nativity scene. . . .
FIFTY BELOW
Probably too far south for polar bears. And too many people around for the others.
LAST CHILD
Learning the village life would no longer matter as much as shuffling papers and taking orders, no matter the human costs.
WELCOME
Ascending from the green and purple speckled tundra, rusted ramshackle tin roofs surrounded by a puzzle of ponds and lakes . . . swooped to meet us.
HOLIDAY TRAVEL
Noon, but already a sliver of sun had grazed the eastern horizon and disappeared.
BEWARE OF BEARS
That’s when I decided to act on my own. I’d read about con-fronting bears in the wild, and one method suggested backing up slowly to the nearest place of perceived safety.
LOLA'S GREETING
“Porcupine mixed with tundra vegetables,” Lola said, her eyes twinkling. “Your first Eskimo food.”
CHILDREN AT PLAY
Anyway, outside the sky had cleared and the cobalt blue and the happy squeals of children playing invited us for a walk about the village.
Kwethluk: Two Years on the Bad River
________
The new memoir by John Fairweather
Kwethluk: six hundred miles from the nearest highway, fifty-below winters, generator electricity, no running water (except in the school and teacher housing), no doctors, no dentists, no veterinarians, no restaurants, no malls nor movie theaters. Here, we’d begin our teaching assignments for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, white people —kass’aqs— working for those who in another time and place had helped to kill Crazy Horse and Geronimo for their lands. But this time, to paraphrase the BIA’s official mission, we’d come with a cavalry of books to save the natives from themselves.
About the Author
John Fairweather graduated from his hometown University of Alabama in 1974. He lived in Mexico and Alaskan Eskimo villages before settling in Tampa, Florida, where he is a retired high school English teacher who adores his wife Beth, their daughters Mariah and Shiloh, his granddaughter, Sophie, and his grandson, Oliver. He is the author of Border Crossings, a novel set in 1970s Mexico.
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