My trips to Arizona and Anaktuvuk Pass - the connection; on the home front, Jobe, a horse, and some kids

As regular followers of this blog know, I was recently in Arizona, where I journeyed to see my friend Vincent Craig just before he died, and then stayed for his funeral and to visit family. I traveled straight from Arizona to the Brooks Range Alaska village of Anaktuvuk Pass to attend the wedding of Nasuġraq Rainey Higbee to Ben Hopson III (B-III).

I have mentioned that there is tie between the people I gathered with in Arizona and those whom I joined in Anaktuvuk Pass.

You can see that connection right here, in the above photo. This is Velma Kee Craig, Vincent's daughter-in-law through his and Mariddie's oldest son, Dustinn. I took this photo inside the Fort Apache LDS church house during the lunch that was served to family and friends of Vincent right shortly after his burial.

Please note the necklace and earrings that Velma chose to wear to her father-in-law's funeral. Both were made by Nasuġraq Rainey Higbee, whose wedding I would photograph in Anaktuvuk.

The moment that she saw the necklace in an online ad posted by Rainey, Velma loved it and wanted it. "Sorry," Rainey informed her. "That necklace has already been bought."

She did not tell her that it was Dustinn who had bought it. Dustinn had sworn her to secrecy.

In the summer of 1981, two months after Margie, little Jacob, Caleb, Rex, baby Melanie and I rolled into Alaska, I found a job at the Tundra Times, a now defunct weekly newspaper that served the Alaska Native Eskimo, Indian and Aleut communities. I started as a reporter/photographer and then became editor/reporter/photographer for a short time.

Back then, each October during the Alaska Federation of Natives Convention, he Tundra Times would host a banquet. Entertainment would usually include at least one Native American act from Outside. In 1984, I suggested to those planning the banquet that they consider bringing Vincent Craig up to perform and that is just what they did.

Mariddie came with him and they stayed with us in our Wasilla house throughout the convention.

Vincent and Mariddie wanted to take a memento of Native Alaska back to Arizona and so they purchased a pair of mukluks - caribou, if I recall correctly - at one of the arts and crafts booths that are always set up at the convention. They were very pleased with those mukluks.

One night, as I drove them back to Wasilla from convention happenings in Anchorage, the Northern Lights climbed in a glowing green arc over the Talkeetna Mountains, and then divided into various curtains to shimmer, dance, and flash in different colors. Vincent and Mariddie were fascinated

"Dustinn would love this," Vincent said. "He would feel awe."

That's Dustinn above, with Velma and their four children, Chance, Ashlee, Tristan and Kraig. I took this picture in their home, approximately five hours before his father died.

As Dustinn grew, he would often look at those mukluks. He would touch them, smell them, feel the texture of the fur. He would wonder about the place they came from, the people who made them. He would feel a sense of awe and fascination. His dad would tell him they came from Alaska; he would tell him about his friend, me, who lived in Alaska, who had his own airplane that he flew all about his mysterious, northern, land.

After Dustinn became a filmmaker, the primary center of his work became centered on Arizona, primarily on his Apache people, but he also branched out elsewhere - into Northern Alaska. 

In the image above, he is showing me his "Freshwater Ice" film. It tells the story of how, when a loved one dies, Iñupiat people will sometimes venture out onto the salty sea ice to find a certain kind of clear, blue, coveted piece freshwater glacial ice that yields the purest, sweetest, drinking water to be found.

They will chop it up, bring it back to the village, melt it and this will be the drinking water that will quench the thirst of those who gather to bring comfort to the deceased's family.

It is beautiful. It was also a bit amazing to me, to sit in his living room in Mesa, Arizona, and to watch this film that he made, people with faces and voices from Arctic Alaska, all well-known to me.

Dustinn was also hired to teach a film-making workshop at Barrow's Ilisagvik College. One of his students was Nasuġraq Rainey Higbee and another was Iñupiat filmmaker Rachel Edwardson. The three were all about the same age and after class got to spend a good amount of time visiting. 

Dustinn later got to work with Rachel on a film in Point Hope. Here is a trailer showing some of Dustinn's Point Hope work.

They discovered that, as young Native artists working to make a life in Native society that for them was different even than it was for their parents, they faced similar challenges and had much in common. They all became good friends.

And here is Nasuġraq Rainey Hopson, who made the necklace and earrings that Velma Craig wore to her father-in-law's funeral in Arizona, on the evening of the day that she got married in Anaktuvuk Pass.

With her is her sister, Angela and her new brother-in-law, Byron Hopson.

I have a number of pictures and stories yet to post here from my trips to Arizona and Anaktuvuk. Now you will know how the two tie together.

In time, I intend to bring Rachel into this blog as well.

I don't know how to state this without sounding like I am bragging, but it is part of this story, part of this connection, so I have to say it. When I got to Rainey's home, she showed me her stack of the battered Uiñiq magazines that I made and she saved. She told me that she grew with my pictures, that my inspired her and that is why she kept the magazines, why she wanted me to come and photograph her wedding. That is why, after I made my final stop in Arizona at the home of Dustinn Craig to visit he and his mother, I got on an airplane and began the first of the four-leg that would take me to Anaktuvuk Pass.

Now, a little bit from the home front:

Yesterday, I had to go into town to take care of some business. I stopped at Jacob and Lavina's to visit Margie, who is babysitting Jobe. Jobe was asleep in his cradleboard.

Another view of Jobe.

Late in the evening, I took a ride on my bike. I had not gone far before I came upon this group of young people. The girl on the horse told me her name, but I was so certain that I would remember I did not bother to record it. I have forgotten. I do not know the name of the horse, either.

I should have lingered, spent a bit more time with them, learned a bit about that horse and how the girl feels about it and what the kids on the bikes think.

But I didn't. I just quickly stopped, told them what I was doing, got the name that I would forget and then pedaled quickly on.

Update, 11:35 AM Friday: AKponygirl left a comment and identified the horse-riding girl as Marcella. Thank you, Akponygirl!

Anaktuvuk Pass: remembering loved ones who have passed on

This is the post that I had planned to put up Tuesday morning, but I could not get online. 

I arrived in Anaktuvuk Pass on Memorial Day afternoon with several friends and relatives of Ben (B-III) Hopson the Third and Nasuġraq Rainey Higbee, who would wed the next day.

There was much good food in the house - caribou stew, caribou meat, fresh rolls and such and I had already fed myself a good sampling of it when I learned that the community was going to gather at the cemetery at 5:00 PM, to remember loved ones buried there and to feast in their honor.

When the time came, I joined several members of the wedding party and we walked over together.

When we arrived, I saw a group of people gathered just off the southern edge of the cemetery, the mountains of the Brooks Range rising behind, in front of and all around them. They were praying.

The man leading the prayer was Dr. James Nageak, an Iñupiaq hunter, scholar, retired university professor and Presbyterian preacher. That's James to the left, wearing the green coat.

He thanked the Lord for the lives lived by all those buried here, and for the beautiful land and the animals that had sustained them and that continue to sustain the people of Anaktuvuk Pass today.

After he finished, the Reverend Keith Johnston, right, who now serves as pastor for Anaktuvuk's Presbyterian "Chapel in the Mountains," read scripture.

Then the feasting began. Although I had already eaten, I ate again. I had more caribou soup, I had fish, wild berries, Eskimo donuts; I made certain to get some of the bowhead maktak that had been boiled into uunaalik, seen here just to the right of the spaghetti.

The spaghetti, by the way, is caribou spaghetti. It was superb.

Rachel Riley asked me how my shoulder was healing up. Rachel was in the Barrow High cafeteria on June 12, 2008, when I took my fall, shattered my shoulder, got loaded into a Lear Jet ambulance and was flown on a $37,000 + ambulance ride to Providence Hospital in Anchorage, where I went through two surgeries and had my natural bone replaced by an artificial, titantium, shoulder.

I told her that it had healed well and I was doing good, but that it would never be what it was before. For all it's technical medical wonder, this titanium just cannot match my natural bone. Yet, I am greatly thankful to have it.

Rachel then explained to Ada Lincoln exactly what she had saw that day when I fell off the rolling chair while taking a picture (and Rachel, by the way, is in the last frame that I shot just before the chair rolled out from under me).

A boy walks through the cemetery, looking at the graves of relatives and friends.

Raymond Paneak took me to the grave of his brother, George, who died on September 19, 2009, at the age of 60. George had been Mayor of the village and was an active leader in the Healthy Communities movement, a grass-roots effort to stem the harm and damage that the abuse of alcohol and drugs has caused in the Far North.

Freida Rulland, left, showed me the grave of her father and my friend, Paul Hugo. A good twenty-years ago plus, Paul took me to many places in these mountains, by snowmachine, eight-wheeled Argo, depending on the season, and on foot in search of caribou. 

We found a few, too.

He had also kept me as a house-guest in his home. We had eaten pancakes in the morning, caribou in the evening.

Although I of course knew that he had died, it none-the-less shocked me to see his name stenciled into the cross that marks his grave.

He passed away on October 9, 2009, at the age of 49.

I told Frieda and her sister that I would stop by and say "hi" to their mother, but my trip was short and I was busy every waking minute of it and I never got a chance.

I expect to be back in Anaktuvuk before too long, though, and I will then.

Freida's sister, Amanilla Hugo, stands to the far right.

Two little ones, growing up in Anaktuvuk Pass.