OPINION: We call them elders

Listening to the news lately, things sound terribly out of sorts, and I can’t help feeling a little lost, questioning what passes for new values. And what have people done with their old values? Last month when I traveled south on snowmobile in stormy conditions, those thoughts kept plaguing me, crossing the sea ice and trying not to get truly lost.

I went down past a place that old-timers here call Arctic Circle, where the U.S. Army built a temporary beach runway during World War II. It was cold, a long journey to search for caribou, my face frosting and inside my fur hood my mind wandering, bumping into news stories. The ones bothering me then were questioning if Joe Biden is too old to be our next president.

The light was flat. I kept hitting rock-hard snowdrifts I couldn’t see coming. Miles in the distance a low ridge came into sight. The landscape was foreboding, desolate, and dangerous if the wind intensified, and I wished I knew my surroundings better. I thought of Inupiaq elders I’ve known, men who were fearless and skilled hunters, and women who were shockingly generous and kind, skin-sewers and tenders of the myriad of requirements of survival.

The elders knew every crevice of this coastline — because they needed to. Values were more straightforward, back before climate change and storebought everything; there were far fewer willows to burn if you needed a fire, and no Bic lighters, flare guns, or InReach devices to press a button for “HELP.” No words would thaw a finger or a foot, or feed your family. Only strength and ability, wisdom and experience kept you alive. The kind of knowledge you learned slowly, over the course of a lifetime.

Thinking about that “news” from the Lower 48, I found myself getting disgusted. Behind my facemask, in the roar of the wind, I was surprised to hear my voice out loud: “Don’t those people have any common sense?”

Seriously, what is going on down there?

The Lower 48 is locally referred to as “down states.”

“You going down states?”

“Aachikang! Be careful you don’t get lost down states.”

Long ago it was customary to believe things made sense down states. That’s where the big ships came from, loaded with Bibles and books, gunpowder and wolf traps, canned butter, tea bags and all that. Nowadays, online news of race relations, protests and homelessness, factory chickens, lead in water and school shootings give us in the Far North a different impression. It sounds like a hard place to live, down there.

It’s confounding, too, for us to keep up with the deluge of new rules people there are coming up with; how it’s wrong to say or do this or that — not to mention all the actual legal laws. That’s another reason I guess I was shouting at the wind, upset about how too many people are publicly picking on our President for his age. It’s wrong to discriminate against elders. Period. And why the hell isn’t that the first rule of the “woke” club?

Here, we think of elders as an important tie to who we were and what matters. We surely don’t focus on their hair. Or how they walk or don’t. Or idiosyncrasies in the speed or the sound of their voices. Actually, we love their voices! We record them, to cherish in the future. Here, each time an elder in one of the villages passes away we are stunned; we reel in the wake of such enormous loss. Who could replace Minnie Gray, Bob Uhl, Clarence Wood, Oran Knox, or so many of those elders we’ve lost in just the last decade? They lived the past, a different world; they walked out of history. They were there! That kind of knowledge is irreplaceable, and regardless of common misconception, being a wise elder has not one thing to do with race. Our elders’ quiet acceptance in the blizzard of so much change can be pure grace, and the breadth of their vision is, and will be, vitally important for survival in our modern hardships and social upheaval.

I stopped speaking aloud to myself after that — I was too busy getting worried. Worried enough to forget all about the waterfall of modern news cycles. Snakes of snow were starting to move, a ground blizzard growing. And across the ribbon of land to the west, I saw a last glimpse of a dark band of cloud — open ocean reflecting dark off the sky. It was an old warning, of a new danger: unfrozen ocean in winter.

Quickly, I stopped to glass ahead one more time for caribou. There was only the white landscape fading into obscurity. The animals were out here, somewhere, using their instincts to survive. I had instincts too, and they told me it was foolish to go on alone with this wind rising. I knew if I were traveling with an elder that we’d simply nod to each other, laugh, and continue on, hunting. Instead, I had to turn around and head back. My tracks were already disappearing. I sped up, trying to locate marks in the moving snow, hoping I could still find my way home.

Seth Kantner lives in northern Alaska and is a commercial fisherman and the author of “Ordinary Wolves” and, most recently released, “A Thousand Trails Home: Living With Caribou.”

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