Chapter 4 #2
“The ones who came here with the governor.” Tlákwsháa reached for a sprig of dried hemlock gum, placed it between his teeth, and began to chew slowly.
“Soldiers came here with the governor?” He hadn’t heard anything about that, just that the clan was moving to a different location.
The elder merely nodded. “Navy men. On boats. We need to leave before summer.”
Alexei’s fingers curled at his sides. “But why?”
“The government needs this land.” The elder’s words were muffled slightly by the gum, but his tone remained even as he wrapped a strip of leather cord around the box and cinched it tight.
It didn’t make sense. The government had plenty of land.
More than they knew what to do with. Alexei’s gaze flickered to the nearest totem pole.
Its carvings told the story of the clan’s lineage, and it had stood there long before any American official had set foot in Alaska.
And somehow Simon Caldwell thought he had the right to take this land?
“I find it hard to believe that they need this land right here when there is so much other land.” Land that didn’t have totem poles or longhouses. Land that hadn’t been home to a clan of people for several centuries.
“It’s the island they want.” Tlákwsháa reached for the Chilkat blanket. “The governor asked the village of Kasaan to leave too.”
He had? It had been over a year since Alexei had visited the small Haida village on the opposite side of Prince of Wales Island. He’d had no idea any of this was going on. “Why do they want the village?”
The old man shrugged. “Do you think the new governor told us anything? If I had to guess, it’s the cannery. I think they want to expand it and increase the number of fish they take out of the bays and streams every summer, but I do not know for certain.”
Alexei looked around again, at the longhouses with their sturdy walls and elaborately carved beams, each one of which had taken over a year to build.
Smoke still curled from the roofs, but fishing nets hung where they had been left to dry, and wooden racks that held salmon during salmon season didn’t even hold a single fish.
He didn’t like any of this. This was the very island Preston Caldwell had been trying to get his hands on last summer.
The former governor, Milton Trent, had been only minutes away from signing an order leasing the island to the Alaska Commercial Company.
Had the secretary of the interior and two senators not barged into that meeting, the Caldwells’ company would have had full control of the island.
And now that Preston’s brother, Simon, was the governor, they were trying once again to remove all natives from the island? Even though Secretary Gray had told them no? Had they found some way to bring the secretary of the interior on board with their plan?
And was it really to expand their fishing operations? Or was there something more going on?
“I don’t think you should leave this easily,” Alexei muttered.
The man paused his packing. “Do you think I want navy ships to come here and fire cannonballs into our village like they did in Angoon?”
Alexei winced. The bombardment of Angoon haunted the tribes of southeast Alaska.
Several years ago, the navy had rained cannon fire on Angoon after a dispute in which a man had died and the government had refused to compensate the village.
While no one had been killed, the village had burned, and the food stores the clan had saved for winter had been destroyed.
The clan had survived, but barely, and only by relying on help from other Tlingit villages.
“Do you think I want to watch our homes burned and our food stores destroyed?” Tlákwsháa pulled the Chilkat blanket into his lap, smoothing a ripple in its fringe. “We will leave.”
“But where will you go? Did you sign a treaty giving you land somewhere else?”
The elder stiffened, his hands tightening around the blanket.
“Your government won’t offer us a treaty.
They say we have no right to the land. And even if they did offer, we wouldn’t take it.
The other elders and I have seen what your American treaties did to the tribes to our south.
And if we were to sign a treaty, we would have to leave our home and go somewhere far away, never to return.
Your government says we will be paid for our troubles, but maybe we will and maybe we won’t. ”
Alexei couldn’t argue. The Russians had maintained a good relationship with the tribes of Alaska, viewing them as equal trading partners and often intermarrying.
But the US government had a far different Indian policy, and the tribes of Alaska were well aware of how the Americans had treated other tribes in the past. But unlike its treatment of the tribes from other regions in the United States, the government didn’t even acknowledge that the native Alaskans had any right to the land.
The government’s official position was that since the United States had purchased the land from Russia, the Alaskan Indians had no claim to any of it.
“It’s not my government,” Alexei muttered.
Tlákwsháa’s gaze held steady, his teeth working slowly on the hemlock gum. “Isn’t it? You live here. You follow its laws, register your ships, submit yourself to its regulations. It is your government, and it is your country, but it is not mine.”
Alexei’s chest tightened. “Russia was my country.”
Tlákwsháa finally set the folded blanket atop the cedar box and looked him full in the face. “Then maybe you should consider returning to Russia.”
“I can’t do that.”
Tlákwsháa studied him for a long moment, his cloudy eyes once again seeming to see too much. “If it is your country, why not?”
Alexei opened his mouth, then closed it.
How could he explain? He had been a boy when Russia sold Alaska.
And his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had lived in Alaska for nearly a century before that.
He had no ties to Russia, not when his family had built a life here.
Even if the government did not belong to him, the land did.
“Perhaps I don’t consider myself American or Russian,” he rasped. “Perhaps I consider myself Alaskan.”
Tlákwsháa placed the folded blanket in another box. “One day, you will have to decide where you stand too, as an Alaskan. Now I need to pack.”
The elder shifted on the mat, showing Alexei his back. It was just as well. There wasn’t anything more he could say, and certainly not anything he could do.
He turned back to the small boat he’d sailed down from Sitka for the sole purpose of checking on Klawock. He’d send a letter to the secretary of the interior the moment he returned to Sitka.
The wind off the water pummeled his face as he retraced his steps to his boat.
The ocean was awful choppy for sailing, but he didn’t care.
He’d sailed rougher seas, and he needed to get back to Sitka and start asking questions, because he fully intended to find out why the governor had given an order to clear this island. Then he would put a stop to it.