Off the Beaten Track: Native Traditions of Giving

After living in Alaska for seven years, Leslie Hsu Oh returns to the Washington, D.C., area with a wealth of adventures from the Last Frontier. Her work appears in Cirque, First Alaskans Magazine, Fourth Genre (forthcoming), Kids These Days!, Rosebud Magazine, Stoneboat, and Under the Sun. “Between the Lines” was listed as a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2010. She received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Alaska Anchorage, where she currently teaches, and a master’s from Harvard University. Check out her web site (www.lesliehsuoh.com) or find her on Facebook. 

My four-year-old son runs down the hall wailing, “Jiĕ Jie [Older Sister in Mandarin] ate all the grapes and didn’t share any with me.” My seven-year-old tries to defend herself, but the evidence is bulging in her squirrel cheeks.

“Kyra, what happened?” I shake my head with disappointment. A year living in the Washington, D.C., area and already they had forgotten an important lesson they learned from Alaska Natives since birth.

When we lived in Alaska, we often relaxed on the benches facing seven 56x32-inch plasma screens in the Anchorage Museum’s Living Our Cultures, Sharing our Heritage: The First Peoples of Alaska exhibit and listened to Elders and youth speak about giving in 10 (Athabascan, Eyak, Haida, Iñupiaq, Tlingit, Tsimshian, Unangan, Sugpiaq, Yup’ik, and Saint Lawrence Island Yup’ik) approximately two-minute video vignettes looping across seven monitors.

Kyra and Ethan share their first harvest
of petrushki, also known as beach lovage,
with Auntie Rita, a renowned traditional healer
and member of the International Council
of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers.

It was my way of simulating the old days, when daily, children could gather at the foot of an Elder after dinner and listen to his or her stories. At a minimum, I hoped that my children could understand the importance of giving, unmarred by the Western expectation for something in return.

In the Yup’ik video, Alice Rearden (Cucuaq Aluskak) speaks about ella, or awareness. Growing up in Napakiak, her Elders taught her “that if you are out walking and see a piece of driftwood sticking out of the mud, you should pull it out and turn it over so that the muddy part can dry. That piece of wood is alive and aware, and it will feel gratitude for your kindness.”

Her features are delicate, but when she speaks, her voice is laced with the weight of more than 12 years of wisdom, gleaned from serving as lead translator for the Calista Elders Council. The video pans to a scene of fish hanging on a dry rack while Rearden says off screen: “We always grew up with that sense, of not putting yourself first or above others. Giving gifts to people, those kinds of, you know, unselfish gestures that you do for people—it will come back in turn.”

Kyra harvests petrushki on the coast of
Turnagain Arm, Alaska. She learns
not to take too much, so other people
and animals can harvest too.

Working with cultural anthropologist Ann Fienup-Riordan, Rearden, who is now 35, translates books such as Ellavut: Our Yup’ik World and Weather, the ninth in a series produced by the Calista Elders Council to document Yup’ik oral traditions. Yup’ik Elders explain that "those who are capable must help those less fortunate through sharing food and doing chores for them. We were admonished: ‘Even though an old woman wants to pay you, you do not receive it.’ When an elderly woman or man is given something or helped, she is extremely grateful and thanks you with enthusiasm. And they give the person who helped them something beneficial, thinking of something in their minds that will aid him positively in his life.

“Yup’ik discussions of the ethics of sharing describe its consequences in terms of its nonmaterial return—the grateful thoughts it elicits.…Today, sharing knowledge is as critical as sharing food in both the transfer and transformation of Yup’ik moral standards. Admonitions to act with compassion and restraint remain foundational not only in Yup’ik interpersonal interaction but in their relations
with their environment.”

In Anchorage, the sharing of subsistence foods has become the warp thread weaving together Native and non-Native communities. While dip-netting, I always collected fish heads from non-Native neighboring fishermen and delivered them to Elders whom I worked with in town. During holiday seasons, the post offices are bustling with ice boxes packed with subsistence foods that are being mailed to the Lower 48.

Every summer, we take the kids dip netting at the mouth of the Kenai River.
The kids help us clean, pack, freeze, and ship salmon to relatives in the Lower 48.

As a mother of three, Kyle (13), Kayla (11), and Christopher (4), Rearden trades ideas with me on how to teach our kids tuvqakiyaraq, the custom of sharing, in an urban setting. Rearden grew up “feeling shame to get more than someone else. Whenever I was asked to share, I always gave the other person a bigger piece. I would cut a candy in half and be ashamed to take the bigger piece.”

She raises her children, who were all born in Anchorage, with these ideas: “The more you give, the more you get back. If we are stingy, like if you don’t share your toys, then [they] will break right away. When you give, it will come back to you. Your selfless act is always rewarded. They see that I don’t hold back when it comes to helping in any situation. I hope they [her kids] watch me and observe what I do.”

Kyra thanks the salmon for giving up his life to feed us.

Because it is hard to keep traditions like tuvqakiyaraq in the city, Rearden goes out of her way to share food. She often hosts feasts where she cooks all day, serving her most precious subsistence foods, making sure her kids see that she is serving her last bag of salmonberries. She says, “it’s just enough for them to see. I am always talking to them and explaining the reasons behind sharing, the reason why it’s important to give to others and have compassion for others.”

With the holiday season upon us and this month being Native American Heritage Month, I take an apple out of the refrigerator and cut it in two. I present both pieces to Kyra.

Smiling mischievously at me, she snatches both pieces and presses them to her heart. Ethan starts to stomp his baby feet anxiously. “What will you give me in return?” she asks her pouting brother. Then, seeing the color drain from my face, she says, “I’m just kidding, Mom,” and deposits the largest piece in his little hands.

When We Were Young

That phrase started a lot of sentences, yes, when I was young. When my parents were young, they were nice to their siblings. When they were young, they never talked back to their parents. They didn’t have that many toys nor did they complain about it. They didn’t….they didn’t….they didn’t.

I’m exaggerating, of course, but that’s the kind of sage advice you try dredging up from your memory when you’re expecting your own kids and wondering what important things you’ll need to teach them.

So imagine my surprise when my kids, and a lot of others their age, seem to have a lot of things already figured out. Wanna know how to download an app? Ask my then-5-year-old, who had to teach me. Because I’d been writing a mystery novel, my then 8-year-old decided to try her hand at it. A few weeks later, she had about a whole series written plus several more outlined. “Mommy, it looks like I’m going to get published before you!” (Smirk.)

More recently, we had an enlightening coincidence. I was at work one day, stumped over how to use algorithms to check a colleague’s math. When I picked up my kids from summer camp afterwards, it turned out they had learned algorithms to solve the Rubik’s cube. Yes, algorithms. They also learned about robotics at a couple camps this summer, and surprisingly, it’s not a unique concept. The instructors themselves are getting younger in some cases.

Stab in the gut? Not at all.Totally impressive. I wanna be like these girls!

“How about we just pretend we’re sisters?” I ask them once in a while when I need to draw from the wisdom of their confident outlook.

“Sure,” they answer. “Do you want to be the middle one this time?”

“No, make me the youngest. You guys can take care of me.”

“No problem, Mom. It’s done.” They exchange a furtive glance, as if to ask, is she for real?

I am. For certain, today’s youth are inheriting a lot of our big scary problems—in technology, health, civil rights, the environment, the business world, ethics, you name it. No doubt about it—our generation and the one before us—have done some serious damage to the world. And yet something tells me my daughters’ generation will be the one that gets it right. They have the world at their fingertips, and all the know-how and confidence we may have lacked. This is the generation that will tackle these challenges, be courageous and do the right thing, and smart enough to find real solutions.

Remember Angela Zhang, and her awesome story from earlier this year? It still gives me shivers. In January, Angela was a 17-year-old high school student who had decided to use her free time to study, what else, cancer. She’d been reading the advanced medical literature since she was a high school freshman, and about the time she was a junior, she got the hang of it and was able to start working the puzzle out on her own. This past January, she won a $100,000 award from the national Siemens science contest for her research paper on the topic, which scientists say just may hold the cure to cancer! Check out her amazing story here. 

Closer to home, one of my neighbor’s kids, a 12-year-old also tackling the world’s problems in his spare time, invented a car sensor that sets off an alarm when it detects the car leaking carbon monoxide. Car makers are seriously looking into this technology, which oddly enough, has no counterpart in the car industry. Yet this amazing invention didn’t even take the top contest prizes, because despite its innovative safety function, it turns out other kids in this age group are making advances in more critical life sciences, in the study of diseases and cures, for example. Go figure. When I was 12, working on the yearbook at my junior high school was a pretty big deal. 

I’ve blogged about this little anecdote before a couple years ago, but I can’t help thinking about it again now. I once walked in on my daughters rapidly pounding the little pink keys on their toy laptops and asked them what they were up to. “Just reading up on all the ways we’re making the world a better place, Mom,” the little one immediately answered, not even pausing to look up or think about my question.

 
And no doubt, we’ll all be reading about their successes soon. Quite possibly in a field you and I have never heard of. Maybe one not yet invented. I, for one, can’t wait.