Counting the Inuit in 1990
The last census of the 20th century in Bush Alaska (Part I)
In 1990, the US Census Bureau relied on a temporary workforce to count the mostly indigenous residents of Bush Alaska. The Bush is a catch-all designation, referring to all parts of the sprawling 49th state inaccessible by road. (Alaska accounts for 16% of the landmass of the United States, with less than 3/4 of a million inhabitants in 2024.) The Bush accounts for roughly 80% of the state geographically, although 40% of the state’s population live in Anchorage, with thousands in Fairbanks, Juneau, the Mat-Su borough, and elsewhere on the road system. Access to remote communities is by air. Regional hubs with modern runways serve smaller and mostly indigenous communities by jet and by bush plane, sometimes landing with floats or skis, when tires aren’t optimal.
Within the Bush, some roads are seasonal, usable only when the ground is frozen. Thirty-five years ago access was considerably easier in the winter months, when ice roads made travel by snow-machine, dog-team, or truck more predictable, and native populations could be found at home in their villages, rather than away at fish camp or other seasonal settlements that supported the subsistence life-style of hunting, foraging, and putting food by for the long winter. So, in Alaska, the decennial census started in late January, instead of April. I don’t know if this is still the practice.
The 2020 census reported just over 133,000 Native Alaskans - people who self-identified as Alaska Native or American Indian, representing 15.7% of the state’s population. In a very quick current aside, note that Greenland is about 25% larger than Alaska in area, with a population of around 56,000 people, 88% of whom identify as indigenous Greenlandic Inuit, known as Kalaallit.
The Native populations of Alaska belong to three distinct groups: Inuit is the correct name for the people still often referred to as Eskimo, who tend to live in the far North of North America, in the the arctic and in the southwestern regions of the state (the Yukon and Kuskokwim river deltas and watersheds). The Athabascan people who live in the interior, between the Brooks Range in the north and the Alaska Range (includes Denali), which is the very tail end of the Rockies; and the Aleuts, who live primarily in the Aleutian Island chain which curves like a longbow, extending southwest and then curving north for 1100 miles off the southwest tip of the Gulf of Alaska, across the shallow Bering Sea.
In 1990 I was one of hundreds of Alaskans hired from outside the Bush to work alongside indigenous local residents in remote communities, to deliver a detailed count of village residents. In those days, government funding at every level was allocated based on population, so it was in a community’s best interest for everyone to be counted, and yet there were plenty of good reasons for misunderstanding and distrust. Many of us who were hired as “team leaders” traveled to remote unfamiliar places in harsh weather, with limited amenities and minimal training. It was gig work of a kind, and we were humans engaged in physically delivering data from one geographic location to another, closer to the center of power.
The pay was good, and came with what seemed like a generous per diem. We were instructed to work alongside a local enumerator, a village resident who’d serve as a go-between or guide as we walked the village from door to door with paper forms and pencils in hand, often in sub-zero temperatures. The enumerator would be fluent in English as well as the local language, and would be able to translate for the elders where necessary. None of this data collection was digital, and we didn’t have mobile phones yet. Sometimes, there’d be a person to meet us at the landing strip, but nothing was guaranteed, and every reception was different. This would be my first winter in Alaska, and my first job. I was eager for an adventure in my new home and I almost believed I was ready for anything.
There was a Crooked Creek, and it flowed a crooked mile
After an orientation session in Anchorage, for the final phase of our training as new team leaders, we’d learn the art of enumeration in the real world, on a group trip to Crooked Creek, a tiny remote Yup’ik village. Crooked Creek sits on the banks of the lower Kuskokwim, which runs southwest into Kuskokwim Bay on the Bering Sea, after flowing broad and flat for 700 miles from up in the Alaska Range. It’s the longest free-flowing river in the US, the longest river system entirely contained in one US state, and the 9th largest river in the US overall.
The population of Crooked Creek has continued to dwindle since I was there; the 2020 census counted 57 residents, and currently Google Maps shows 18; severe flooding destroyed much of the village in 2023, and it seems they haven’t recovered. Even in 1990 there were fewer than 200 people there, small enough for a handful of outsiders learning the task of census enumeration.
In early February the days were short and cold and dark. From Anchorage, we took a packed plane direct to Aniak, 50 miles down river from Crooked Creek. We stopped in at the Aniak Lodge to warm up with a 25 cent cup of coffee, temperatures registering in the -30F range. It was the coldest place I’d ever been. I was wearing vintage L.L. Bean goose-down snow pants inherited from a dead man, my father-in-law I’d never met, and I looked like the puffy michelin tire guy. And, I was warm enough. Eventually, six of us left Aniak on a DeHavilland Twin Otter, a 10-seater with two pilots, a 20 minute flight above lightly wooded hills and many bends of the river. When we arrived it was still light.
Evelyn and Dennis welcomed us to the Crooked Creek Roadhouse (and Lodge). They'd just come back from Hawaii. Evelyn was part-Athabascan, part Inuit, part French Canadian; her husband was an Irishman from Chicago. The five of us, from Anchorage and the Mat-Su mostly, and our trainer, a feisty Montana lady who lived in Galena. They feed us spaghetti, with warm garlic bread, and real blueberry pie for dessert, and a full hot breakfast the next morning, to follow the fat full moon over the mighty Kuskokwim. Warm beds, full bellies, and we sit around a warm table under a double shelf of African violets thriving under lights. Maybe I can do this.
Two days later we’re heading home: taking the Twin Otter milk-run, first to Aniak, then Kalskag, then Bethel, on the treeless tundra of the Lower Kuskokwim. The country is flat, bleak, and seems featureless, temperatures have stayed in the negative double digits, never above -20F. A Yugoslavian cab driver at the Bethel airport blares bouzouki music from his taxi as we go into town for a bite of lunch.
A week later and I’m back at the airport, fighting and failing to keep a cold from becoming a flu. Meantime, Mt Redoubt, an active volcano to the southeast of Anchorage is erupting again, wreaking havoc with air travel. Nevertheless, I’m back out to Aniak, and then we’re stalled there on account of snow. My destination is meant to be Emmonak, in the Yukon Delta, west and north of here. Instead, I’m having dinner of ribeye steak and salad at the Aniak Lodge, where we’re stranded. I’m sick, and feeling sicker as night falls, feverish, headachy, and badly rested.
By the Bering Sea, Part 1
Emmonak is a populous Yup'ik community of more than 600 souls, the last permanent settlement on the Yukon River before it empties into the Bering Sea. After a couple of flights, and a wait in St Mary’s, I find myself in Emmonak before the day fades fast into darkness. Sunrise the next morning comes around 9:30 am, the life-giving sun is an ovoid oblong hot-pink disk, rising suspiciously over the mythic Yukon, flattened and shimmering like an alien egg in brittle -40F air.
I’m staying with a non-native family, a rumpled electrician who works for the telco, a man whose glasses are held together with electric tape. Picture a passel of kids, an arctic branch of the Micawber family in a chaotic frozen homestead: unchanged diapers, semi-thawing overfull honey bucket, parents packing up to move on, out of Emmonak, the children running the asylum. I quickly decide to find a more tranquil lodging solution, and eventually I meet L., an agreeable schoolteacher in her 30s, who invites me to stay in her well-heated spare bedroom, in brick-built teacher lodging with flush toilets and hot running water. I start to feel human again. The restaurant in Emmonak is run by an Albanian who's been here for 8 years, but I’m giving L. cash for groceries, and mostly we’re eating together.
The city of Emmonak has a proper website these days, and a big gym that doubles as a cultural center, where the elders come to dance and beat the ceremonial drums, share stories, celebrate heritage, and where kids play basketball all winter long. I remember a gym, but it wasn’t that one.
Teddy is meant to be my guide in Emmonak, his role as local enumerator is to help me find my way into homes and protect me from the ferocious yapping sled dogs, and lend some credibility to my task by explaining my presence and the value of the census. Or by translating from English to Yup’ik, and back. Teddy has a hard time getting started in the morning, and daylight doesn’t even come till almost 10am.
Most of the locals lived in Section 8 prefab homes. These homes are heated by fuel, and built with arctic entries: low-ceiling, fully enclosed cold rooms with a chest freezer or two, or a broken-down appliance, or sometimes strewn with fully frozen cadavers of game, from the family’s subsistence harvest. I almost trip over a frozen seal and laugh at my own stunned surprise. Tabletops covered by checked oilcloth tablecloths, and for the centerpiece a big Litre of Diet Coke, a jar of rancid seal oil, and a box of Pilot crackers, bread and butter of the arctic.
Even thirty-five years ago the disconnect was huge between the traditional ways of the elders, and the desperate path of the young. Most households had television, coca-cola, and booze. A handful of the schoolteachers, like my temporary room-mate L, were committed to helping the kids learn enough to get by in the late 20th, and maybe even escape a life of alcoholism, glue-sniffing, meth, suicide, hunting accidents, and early deaths. Teddy’s path. Glue-sniffing, because it was cheaper than booze. He was a skinny guy who wore a thin jacket and skinny black jeans. He had a wife and a small son called Teddy Jr. When he was sober, young Teddy was his pride and joy. When he was crazy drunk and high on crack, he started up his pickup truck, revved the engine, jammed it into reverse, and ran over his young son who was playing in the dusk in the snow. He never heard the screams, the shrieks, until it was over and far too late.
In the summers, L was building a homestead on Kodiak Island. She was kind, a bit standoffish. School teachers made good money in Bush Alaska, and had nothing to spend it on. I wonder if Amazon has changed that. I wonder if the Yup’ik kids are on Instagram and TikTok. Probably. Some of the teachers really hated the place, and its native people. Others came and didn’t know how to leave the immensity and terrifying beauty of the solitude they found there.
Like Jim, a man I met who had a computer with satellite Internet access. In 1990. He was a school teacher from Outside who’d never left. I believe he was also a ham radio operator, but he was definitely reading newsgroups, and getting news from sources I’d never seen or heard of. An intelligent man who knew too much, and smelled of sadness. In retrospect, L was probably gay, though things were a lot less open then. It was she who introduced me to Listerine as a morning mouthwash, an odd habit I’ve kept up for the last 30 years.
Into the Arctic, and off to the Brooks Range
Mid-March now after a short break, and I’m heading back out to the Bush, to the village of Kobuk, on the Kobuk River, at the edge of the Brooks Range, near the Gates of the Arctic National Park. The Iditarod had begun on March 3, and when our Alaska Airlines flight landed in Nome on March 15 because of low visibility and stormy skies, Susan Butcher had already won the race, clinching her fourth and final first place finish in the race that she owned for a few short years. Martin Buser, a schoolteacher, and our neighbor in Big Lake, was crossing the finish line on Front St in 10th place. After that, there were no more dog teams for a while.
At 8:57pm, as we were settling in for the night when the sirens went off. We thought it was another musher arriving, but it was a house on fire. Later we learned that several teams had left the White Mountain checkpoint and then turned back because of whiteout blizzard conditions, driving wet snow, and gale force southerly winds coming off the Bering Sea. A couple of us stranded census workers were boarding at the home of an amiable old missionary named Mr Everett Bachelder, proprietor of the TLC Bookstore. That TLC stands for True Love in Christ. A cheerful white-bearded Connecticut Yankee, and forty year resident of Nome, this humble servant and prayerful fellow cooked us a fine omelette for breakfast, accompanied by homemade bread and fresh strawberries.
At the time, Nome’s population was 40% white, and in March it was full of press, and dog-sled wannabes, Iditarod groupies, and Russian sailors in fine fur hats, selling them for US dollars. The historic gold mining town featured old wooden structures, an invisible beach, Bilbo’s Books (seems to be gone now), a variety of restaurants, and an abundance of bars and souvenir shops. The temperatures were balmy, hovering around 32F, which made it a great day for exploring Nome, though still a little windy for that flight to Kotzebue.
In Nome, I found a pale blue t-shirt that read: “Alaska: Land of fast women and beautiful dogs” - I thought the shirt said it all, and I was proud to wear it. By evening on March 16, I’d made it into Kotzebue, where temperatures had reached a new high for the date, and I’m lodging in the lap of luxury at the Nullagvik Hotel. On to Kobuk in the morning.
Hog River Gary represents
In the city offices of Kobuk, the approved lodging consists of a heated room, a mattress, a pot I can use to heat liquid on the stove, though even that seems improbable, definitely no other plumbing. There’s an outhouse in the central square by the city offices, with a large snow drift blown up against it, that’s keeping the door well-shut, and it’s a roughly 100 feet walk outdoors from my bed. I’m going to need to find a five gallon bucket somewhere.
The local school teacher in Kobuk is a former nun called Ruth Decker, who befriends me, sets me up with the bucket I’m looking for, and allows me to become her dinner guest for the next few nights. She feeds me well - turbot, caribou, and other bush delicacies—the treats that people who live alone save for company and other special occasions. Ruth has a half-finished home in Kenai, and 3 staked acres on a mountainside just north of Day’s Harbor.
One bright and sunny day, I’m heading out the door of my lodging. A fur-clad white man emerges from alongside his small plane. He greets me with a smile. “Hi, I’m Hog River Gary, you folks missed me last time. I run a trapline with my wife and baby on the Hogatza River east of here. I’d like to be counted. ” And so it goes. My local enumerator, Minnie, keeps her own schedule and her own counsel, but Kobuk is small, and she’s helpful when I need it most.
I pass the spring equinox in Kobuk, waiting for a snowmobile ride to take me up to Zeke’s place. Dahl Creek Zeke’s a skinny old sourdough who lives a ways upriver, about 600 feet up above the village. Big views of the mountains from here, I catch a ride on the back of Ruth’s little snowmobile, but we end up walking down at sunset after the snowmobile runs out of gas. When we stop, 5 ptarmigan fly up out of the snow, “hey ptarmigan” says Kevin, the only words he says the whole way down. Darkness falls, and I’m back at Ruth’s cabin for dinner, and then, the aurora borealis, the northern lights come out and dance for us and guide my short walk home.
These memories are 35 years old. Almost inconceivable all that’s changed since then, in terms of climate, and climate change, also how we used collect and manage human data, by human hand.
So many experiences have shaped my understanding of the world, and my place in it, as I’ve bounced and bungled my way through time and space in many varied latitudes.
In Part II, Bering Sea beachfront, I’ll revisit the Aleutian chain.
Oh my goodness! What an amazing experience and an incredible adventure. It may have been 30 years ago but you brought it to life and I felt like I was there with you! Fascinating!
What an incredible experience, Havi!! And so very different from being on the frontlines at Yahoo! You've had a fascinating and varied work-life, and you write about it beautifully. Thanks for sharing!