Barrow Whalers football season opener part 1 of 5: Pregame - the whalers suit up, discuss strategy, pysch themselves up then venture out into a cold, stiff, Arctic wind

After suiting up on the morning of the first game of the season, the Barrow Whalers football team walks to the far end of the building to gather for a pre-game meeting.

They listen as coach Brian Houston, a member of the coaching staff headed by Mark Voss, discusses strategy and attitude.

Coach Bob Cambell demonstrates blocking technique.

Afterward, Jessie Sanchez, who is also a long-time member of the Barrow Eskimo Dancers, gets a little one-on-one time from Campbell.

After the meetings, they return to the changing room, where Ben Jones gets his ankles taped.

Darius Samuelu gets his wrists taped.

Ready for grid-iron combat.

Before they head to the bus for the three mile drive to Cathy Parker field, the players join together for a team prayer.

They listen as Coach Voss gives them some final words of encouragement. He tells them that there have been signs that their opponents, the JV team of South Anchorage, a high school with six times the number of students of Barrow High, does not consider them to be a real football team and does not hold them with much respect.

"They will respect you when this game is over," he says.

As the players enter the bus, they shout out their battle cries.

Then, as instructed by Coach Voss, they ride in silence to the field, each going into his own head and soul to pyschologically ready themselves for the game.

Cathy Parker Field, named for the Florida woman who was so impressed when she learned how Barrow Whalers had started a team four years ago but had to play on a hard, gravelly surface atop permafrost, that she raised the money necessary to purchase astro-turf and to build Barrow a real field.

The unusually warm weather that Barrow had enjoyed just two days before was gone now. The temperature was in the mid-30's and the wind blew hard from the north, right off the Chukchi Sea, at over 30 mph. As the team did their warmups, Coach Houston gave Ben Jones a little help to stretch and limber up his muscles.

The cheerleaders arrived. Soon, it would be game time.

I am going to do something a little different with this series of five posts that I pulled the pictures into late last night and early this morning before going to bed. I will post them all this morning, but before I continue I am going to go to Pepe's, eat some breakfast and take care of a few tasks.

View images as slide show

note: the slide show also has images not included in the above narrative.

Slide Show, ten images: the Barrow Whalers football at practice

View the 10 image Barrow Whalers football practice slide show

In my last post, I wrote that today I would post images from yesterday's Barrow Whalers football game, the season opener, but I have changed my mind. I did prepare a selection of images from that game to post, but I was lacking some fundamental information that I can only get by talking to a coach, maybe a player or two and it is Sunday and I do not want to bother anybody by tracking them down at their homes.

Plus, I am feeling kind of lazy myself and don't really want to do any tracking.

So, instead, for today, I am just going to run this 10 image slide show of the Whalers at practice the day before the game. Perhaps tomorrow I will post the game.

It had been my intent to include a photo essay in the Uiñiq magazine that I completed several months back but which, for a succession of odd reasons, took a tremendous amount of time to get printed, mailed and then delivered and so only recently reached most readers. 

Before I had the chance to shoot that essay, I took my bad fall, shattered my shoulder, went through my two surgeries, lost my right shoulder and got a titanium one. So, when the 2008 football season started up less than two months later, I was in no condition to stand on the sidelines and try to shoot football.

By the 2009 season, my shoulder was still quite fragile but I could handle my big cameras again and had been thinking about it, but then my wife broke her knee for the second time in 7 months and I found myself unable to do much of anything but to help care for her.

Football was out. 

I still feel a little badly about that, because last year was the whalers 4th season and the final year that any players from the original team, one that has become a bit of a legend, would be with the team.

This year, the Barrow Whalers football team is in what is commonly called a "rebuilding season" in the sport - this means that the older, experienced players that made the team into the legend that it has become have moved on to be replaced by a largely younger group with less experience.

Yet, I have discovered that there is enthusiasm and fire in these boys and so this year I have set out to finally do my Barrow Whalers football essay - too late to capture any of the first squad of players, but then they were widely documented nationally by ESPN and others and may well be the subject of a future movie, so perhaps there was not much that I could have added to their story, anyway.

While the majority population of Barrow remains Iñupiat and Barrow is definitely an Iñupiat town, it is also a cosmopolitan community with residents whose roots and origins reach around the world. So too, as Coach Mark Voss told me, is the composition of the team and coaching staff cosmopolitan - Iñupiat, Samoan, Tongan, Hawaiian, White, African American, Filipino, Latino...

Should I pull this off as I hope, I think it will prove to be an interesting essay. While my take yesterday does do a functional job of covering the game, it is not what I would have hoped it would be. Yesterday, I learned that when it comes to photographing football, a game that I had not shot a single frame on since the fall of '92 when Caleb played his final year at Wasilla High, I am out of practice and need to sharpen my skills.

So I will attend more practice sessions this week to take many pictures. My only real purpose will be to hone my skills for future game times and to better get to know the players and coaching staff, so that hopefully I can produce the kind of essay that I envision.

To see the ten image slide show from the practice the day before the first came, click on the photo or on either of the links above and below this text.

View the 10 image Barrow Whalers practice slide show

Aarigaa - a good place to warm up after a cold football game; Dustinn is now back in Arizona

Not only was the air at the football game very cool and moist with the occasional raindrop flying through it, but the wind was stiff, strong and steady. I wasn't dressed warm enough and was thoroughly chilled pretty by the end of it.

So I went to Aarigaa Java to get a beverage that would warm me.

This isn't that picture, though. This is from yesterday, when Dustinn took me there, where we found Thelma, always ready, at 40 above or 40 below to keep her good customers from Barrow warm and awake.

And this is where I said goodbye to Dustinn - in front of Roy Ahmaogak's bungalow, where I am staying. Dustinn wanted a picture of him with the Ilisagvik College van that he used to drive his Media Camp students around.

Here it is Dustinn.

Here is Thelma again, today, handing me a warmup after the football game. I am not in a vehicle but on foot.

This is all I am going to post today. Perhaps by Sunday morning or hopefully early afternoon at the latest, I can get a post up on today's season opener for the Barrow Whalers football team.

For now, I won't say who won or lost. If you are from Barrow or any Slope village, you already know. If you don't know, I might as well keep you in suspense until I can show you a few scenes from the game.

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I leave my family and cool and rainy weather behind and drop into sweltering, hot, Barrow where I find Dustinn Craig, teaching young people how to make movies

During my very brief stay at home, I took a number of pictures of my family that I intended to post so that I could let readers know a little bit about what we experienced in our short times together. Included among these were my son Rex with his special new friend, an adventurous young woman by the name of Ama from the San Francisco Bay area who has been out hiking, camping, and kayaking around Alaska.

Unfortunately, I forgot to transfer them into my laptop. This one, final, family image that I took was still in my pocket camera, which I put in my pocket before I left and so it came to Barrow with me.

As you can see, it is of Jobe, studying his dad as he shaves.

I often wonder how it is that Jacob ever learned to shave in the first place.

He sure as hell didn't learn it from me.

I haven't shaved in 92 years - well, maybe its been a little less than that, but not much.

Not long after I boarded the jet that would take me from Anchorage to Barrow, I heard someone call my name from a seat just a few rows behind me. I turned. It was Qaaiyan. For those of you who have read Gift of the Whale, Qaaiyan was the boy making coffee with a pick ax from freshwater ice that he had learned to find on the salty, frozen, sea. 

He was with Jamie and their new baby, Aagluaq. The "g" is supposed to have a dot over it but if there is a way to do that in this program, I do not know it.

For those of who have seen my latest Uiñiq magazine, Jamie is the girl taking the accidental dive, braids flying, off the blanket toss during the Point Hope Nalukatak.

As for Aagluaq, dotted "g," this is my first photograph.

Oh, wait - I think I also posted the picture of Jamie in the Point Lay series I put up on this blog in June of last year. Give me just a moment and I will go check for certain and I will find a link. Oh, heck - I am certain. She's there. I don't need to check, I just need to find the link.

So give me just a moment and I will go find it...

I found it, here it is.

Shortly after we departed Anchorage, the pilot spoke on the intercom to tell us what kind of weather conditions awaited us on our journey. He said it was 80 degrees in Fairbanks, which is not at all that unusual in the summer and it can significantly hotter than that, but when he said it was 70 degrees in Barrow, I wondered if I had heard him right.

It's not that this never happens in Barrow, but it doesn't happen that often. I know - some of you read "70 degrees" and laugh, but let me assure you that in Barrow, 70 degrees is hotter than it is anywhere else that I have ever been. 

When I arrived in Barrow, I found it simply sweltering. Roy Ahmaogak picked me up and brought me home. There, in his parent's living room, I found a a visitor, young Katilynn, desperately trying to cool herself in front of an electric fan. And if you look closely at the background, you will see a hand-fan in motion as well.

I should note that, as of today, it is much cooler: 43 degrees. It is raining and most people would probably consider it cold.

I hope it isn't raining during tomorrow's afternoon football game - the season opener. I plan to be there, taking pictures and I don't want to get my cameras all wet.

I was most happy that this trip to Barrow coincided with a visit by the Apache-Navajo filmmaker Dustinn Craig, the son of my late and special friend, Vincent Craig. I am also proud to call Dustinn my special friend. We were together at the moment of his dad's death and we share some things.

Dustinn was finishing up a two-week Media Camp where he had been teaching filmmaking to a group of young people from high school to college age who had gathered at Ilisagvik College from various Arctic Slope communities.

I dropped in a little more one hour before the students were to show their movies to the public. Most of the movies were finished and ready to be shown, but Gabe Tegoseak, the tall guy in the back, was still finishing up the editing on his - with Dustinn's help, to be certain that it would barely be ready to show.

Gabe's movie starred Gabe himself and it was a take off on a popular TV show about a guy who goes out into wild places to survive only off of what he can take from nature.

Speaking with a perfect Australian-Iñupiaq accent, Gabe leads viewers on a hilarious Iñupiaq survival adventure that begins in the local grocery store and progresses to the tundra, where he eats caribou poop that looks strangely like candy, drinks what appears to be a wildly-squirting fountain of yellow liquid created by his own kidneys and wrestles a dangerous creature from Iñupiaq lore that strangely looks and acts like a kitty cat with a sock on its head.

At least, there is a sock on its head for a few moments.

Damnit. I hate it when people give away the ending or the good parts of a movie and now I just did it myself.

Also pictured are student filmmakers Chris Ross, sitting next to Dustinn, and Joey Atkins. Chris created a dreamlike horror tribute inspired by the work of Alfred Hitchcock and Joey presented a soul-stealing wraith whose fearsomeness was accentuated by the special effects he worked into his film.

Both films were damned frightening, with some humor thrown in.

At points early in the process, these students had felt overwhelmed by the process they faced, but they got through that, had fun and created some good work which I hope is soon online.

Onscreen is Dominque Rose Nayukok of Atqasuk. She created a movie in which she used stills to tell the story of her home village. Unfortunately, her travel schedule had taken her back to Atqasuk earlier in the day, but we got to meet her onscreen.

Agnes Akokok and Lavisa Ahvakana of Wainwright both love to Eskimo dance and so they made Eskimo dance the subject of their movie. Each took their turns onscreen to narrate the action.

Each time that Lavisa appeared onscreen, offscreen she got to feeling a little shy and bashful. She did a good job, though - one that I would say has earned her the right to hold her head high.

As Gabe stands laughing in the background, the audience laughs at his survival film. This kid ought to be on TV performing his antics every week. I think he would be loved, far and wide.

Afterwards, Gabe asked Dustinn if he would help him record some of his own guitar playing and singing, so Dustinn did. April Phillip, who, among her other filmmaking activities played the main character/victim in Chris's Alfred Hitchcock tribute, helped out.

I shot this through the very dust-coated window of the class van as Dustinn drove April and I back into Barrow from Ilisagvik college, located at the old Naval Arctic Research Labratory three miles north of town. It was a beautiful, warm, night and many people were out on the beach, the Chukchi Sea of the Arctic Ocean behind them.

View images as slide show

On the day that her brother was honored, Daisy Stevens sponsored a Gwich'in naming ceremony for three of her grandchildren

Up until this, the day that her late Uncle Jonathon Solomon was honored at the Gwich'in Gathering, this young lady was known only as Amara Stevens. On this day, she was given her Gwich'in name - Dee'iideek'it - which means she has taken over where her uncle left off. The naming ceremony was sponsored for her, her step brother and a cousin by their grandmother, Daisy Stevens, Jonathon's youngest sister.

Amara was being born on July 19, 2006, even as I took this picture during the burial procession for Jonathon Solomon, Traditional Chief of the Gwich'in.  "Jonathon met her before anyone of us while he was on his journey," Daisy says.

That's Amara's Uncle Jonathon at the left, doing part of the work that he has now left for Dee'iideek'it to take over. It was when I learned that Jonathon would receive a day of honor at the gathering that I decided I must be there. I suspect that in the career of every photojournalist, there are a handful of images capturing moments so exceptionally special that they stay with him always, images that define the world for him as he saw it.

In my case, this would include images such as Kunuk raising his harpoon and then thrusting it into the very first bowhead that I ever witnessed give itself to his people; there would be Malik, who in his life was said to be the most successful harpooner alive, reaching his hand out to touch the snout of a gray whale stuck in the ice, a whale whose life he worked so hard to save, a whale that he communicated with; the five moments of birth of my own children, each of whose first breath I captured; the moment that my own father took his final breath.

And then there is what I consider to be the extremely special image that Jonathan is the subject of, although he cannot be seen in it. The eagle can be seen, though, the one that came to his grave, the one that took away the pain and tears that flowed there and replaced them with smiles, warmth and hope.

That moment was so extraordinary and wonderful that when I learned that a day of this year's gathering was to be devoted to Jonathon's honor I knew I had to come.

It had been and still is my intent to take the images that I took on this day of Jonathon's honor, mix them up with others that I took of Jonathon as a living man, tell what I could of the life he led and the battles that he led against seemingly impossible odds to protect the way of life of his people and the animals and fish they depend upon, particularly the Porcupine caribou.

Once again, even as happened to me with the unfinished tribute that I set out to make to my friend, Vincent Craig, my unfinished story on the General Assembly of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference that recently took place in Nuuk, Greenland, I find that the pace and demands of life has overwhelmed me. My short time at home is already over and even as I finish this post, I am 850 miles away from my wife, children, grandchildren and cats.

It will take time and thought to tell this story right and I do not have that time right now. So I am going to save it for later - months later, when it is dark and I hopefully have more time for putting stories together.*

I wish that I had documented the full ceremony when Amara became Dee'iideek'it, but I didn't and I have only myself to blame. The ceremony was scheduled to begin at 7:00 PM and I had told myself that I had better be there right at 7:00, despite "Indian Time."

"Indian Time" is something that everybody jokingly and affectionately refers to mean that nothing will ever start at the set time, but will start later, when everybody is gathered and comfortable about starting. Up until this, the third evening of the gathering, every event that I had attended had started on "Indian time" - anywhere from 20 minutes to more than hour after the scheduled time.

On this evening, I was still in the final download of pictures that I had taken earlier in the day as the clock approached seven. I thought about stopping and bolting over, but decided to let the download finish.

"This will start on Indian time," I said. The card finished the download at 7:07 and I headed straight over to the school, only to find that this event had started right on time.

Two of the three naming ceremonies had already been completed, Amara's and that of Isaiah Horace, who was given the name K'aiiheenjik, which means that he is a great, strong warrior and he is in the Bible - Samson. Jonathon's son, David, stands behind K'aiiheenjik and Dee'iideek'it, holding the rifle that the boy was given along with his name.

This Dylan Coppock, the third of Daisy's grandchildren to be given a Gwich'in name on this day. He listens intently as the Rev. Trimble Gilbert of Arctic Village, Second Traditional Chief of the Tanana Chiefs Conference, explains to him the importance of his new name, Ditsii ta'i"i. This means he is following in his grandfather's trail.

Simon Francis Sr, Traditional Chief of Fort Yukon looks on from the left. Behind Gilbert is Ditsii ta'i"i's grandparents, Kevenne and Gatherine Gottlieb and his father, Matt, son of Daisy.

Along with his name, Trimble Gilbert gives Ditsii ta'i"i a blessing.

Chief Simon presents him with gifts.

Ditsii ta'i"i speaks a few brief words of appreciation to the crowd.

His father places the gift of special necklace around his neck.

Dee"iideek'it applauds her step-brother.

Ditsii ta'i"i receives a hug from his grandfather.

Kenneth Frank of Arctic Village, who came to sing and drum, presents the boy with a rifle.

All three of those who received their Gwich'in names. Katherine Gottlieb, who in 2004 received a MacArthur "Genius Award" for her work in Native health care, whispers in her grandson's ear.

Ditsii ta'i"ii displays his new rifle.

K'aiiheenjik and his Uncle David - who you will read more about when I tell the bigger story of Jonathon Solomon, his life, burial and the eagle.

Matt presented a special chief's necklace to Chief Simon.

Gottlieb gives a priest's sash to Rev. Gilbert to honor him for his role in the naming ceremony. Gilbert is an ordained Episcopal priest.

Chief Simon also received a shotgun. 

Daisy addresses those who came to see her grandchildren receive their names. "The kids were quite happy to be getting their Indian names.  They talk about it all the time," she told me in an email.

Kenneth Frank and his daughter, Crystal, who sang with him.

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*At the end of last year, the first full year that I had produced this blog, I ran a series of pictures in review. This year, my plan is to use December, a dark month, to sit down, revisit some of these stories that I have touched upon but have not been able to find the time to complete, and tell them in greater depth.

Another possibility that I am thinking about would be a create a separate, digital, magazine that I could use to tell complete stories in a way that I am beginning to think may not be feasible in a blog - not to replace the blog, but to complement it. I haven't made up my mind about this, but I am thinking about it. If so, I would seek to construct those stories mostly during the darkness of winter, so that I could keep summers open for shooting and story gathering.