River Serves as Textbook for Teachers:
Elders Give Lessons on Natural World
by Mary Beth Smetzer
Fairbanks Daily News Miner, June 10, 2001
ON THE TANANA RIVER—In the middle of a main channel, Sam Demientieff shuts down the engine of his 28-foot riverboat.
All 10 passengers lean toward the khaki-colored water intently listening. Sure enough the river is hissing—a soft, unceasing whispering against the boat's metal hull. "It's all the silt and sand in the water," explains Demientieff, who grew up working in his family's river freight business throughout Interior Alaska.
The river's siren song is interrupted by the surprised reactions of the passengers—Alaska teachers from around the state.
Fresh
from finalizing grades and closing down classrooms, the teachers have reversed
roles, becoming students engaged in a two-week summer institute at the University
of Alaska Fairbanks called, Observing Locally, Connecting Globally, part
of a National Science Foundation-funded science education project. The Native instructors this day have no advanced science degrees. But Demientieff, 61, Howard Luke, 78, and Wes Alexander, 51, have more than a century of combined experience observing the natural world around them. They will spend this second day of the institute sharing their observations with 13 educators and university staff while chartering them 30 miles downriver via two boats to Alexander's family fish camp, also known as the old Fox Farm.
Growing up along Interior riverways, the three Native men learned the ways of the watercourses from their elders and from continual observation.
The mood and tenor of the local river is never far from the minds of Interior villagers since it plays such an important part in their daily lives—providing food, and transportation year round.
Demientieff emphasized the river's influence replaying the conversation he had with Luke that morning when he picked him up at his river camp on the Tanana.
"Morning Howard."
"Morning Sam."
"Looks like the water raised six to eight inches. "
"Yeah."
Demientieff said the degree of the river's rising and falling can be seen by looking at the sandbars. They will be shiny if the water has dropped, revealing the amount of the fall. If the river is rising there are no shiny sandbars and more driftwood will be coming downriver.
"Howard calls it 'beckoning'", said Demientieff. "Howard says the river is beckoning with it's rising and falling. It is sending you a signal.
"When it rises it tells you there is going to be more drift and current. It is warning you when it is dropping that there is less water and there are going to be more problems. Shortcuts will be closed off, and there is the danger of running into sandbars collected during the high water."
The first stop of the day for the class is Luke's island river camp, just across the river from the trip's start at Perkins Landing.
Over the past two decades, Luke's homestead has evolved into a center of learning and keeping of traditional Athabascan life called Gaalee'ye Spirit camp. An outdoor cooking and picnic area, three cabins, several caches and a smokehouse over look the riverbank. The students gather in a large octagonal log building close to the riverbank for an introduction to river life.
When it comes time for Luke to speak, his dark brown eyes glimmer with a bright, warm intensity as he embarks on tale after tale of what life was like growing up along the Tanana River.
"My main concern is to teach young people and anyone else who wants to learn survival in the woods," Luke says.
He is fervent about sharing his subsistence knowledge.
"I don't care if you're white or black or yellow. What are you guys going to do when I kick the bucket? Are you going to carry on the teaching?" he asks the group.
"It was given to me," he says, referring to his Native knowledge of the rivers, land and animals, "and I want to give it to you, to pass these things on. I don't want to take it with me."
A small, compact man, Luke sports a black baseball cap with an Olympic logo and Sydney 2000 in bright letters. He has visited Australia and New Zealand several times participating in cross-cultural educational conferences.
Despite recurring heart problems, Luke spares no energy I talking to the group at every opportunity throughout the day, sharing stories, and joining in the walk to the Chena Village graveyard near his camp.
Later
in the day at Alexander's camp, Luke leads the tour of the long abandoned
fox farm site that flourished there in the 1930s and where he worked as
a young man. Then he continues on with the group for a mile or more, hiking
up a steep hill for an overview of the river valley and an equally challenging
descent, pausing occasionally to catch his breath. Luke lives in a two-room log cabin with his 10-year-old black Labrador, Schatzi, on an island in the Tanana River about 10 miles west of Fairbanks. He relishes greeting visitors and telling stories to whomever will listen. He was raised on stories, educational stories full of animal characters and insights, spiritual and practical protocols.
Luke tells his audience how the old people would cache moose bones against future hard times. If hard times came, they would boil the bones and drink the broth to stay alive.
"They were thinking ahead. I always think about the future."
Luke also worries about the future.
"I think about it at night," he said. "Everything is electronic today. It's too fast. What the heck are you going to do if all the power goes out in the whole world. What are we going to do without computers, without power?"
Other problems of this fast paced, modern world, the elder says, are "People don't get together. Don't visit each other, don't share with each other." He blames parents for not teaching their children.
"Our kids are going to pay. They won't know how to work. How to use an ax. The kids want to learn more.
"My mother would say, 'Come sit down here beside me and watch what I am doing."
Demientieff's lined, tan face contrasts sharply with his short-cropped white hair. Sitting in the riverboat's pilot seat, his eyes never rest. They move continually, scanning the water and banks as he maneuvers his human cargo downriver. Every so often he slows the motor to point out a slough or explain the changeable nature of the glacial fed river.
"A slight amount of raised water will float down and the logs will move out and open these little sloughs," he says as the journey begins. "The raised water will change the current, and the channels will change."
The Tanana River is more dangerous to traverse than the Yukon River, says Demientieff, not only because of its swift current (6-8 mph and up to 12 mph in some places as compared to 5-7 mph on the Yukon) but also because of its heavy load of silt.
"You can feel it on your hands. It clings to your facial hair." Demientieff said.
Even to the experienced navigator, the wide river and its ever-changing channels present a constant challenge. The free flow of water has a mind of its own, following no rules. There are no road signs as it meanders and surges. Its waters, dark with silt and sediment from the grinding glaciers that feed it, also hide debris that can capsize boats or rip up propellers.
Demientieff, like Luke and Alexander, is a storehouse of river knowledge. Born in Holy Cross on the Yukon River and raised in Nenana and Fairbanks, he comes from a long line of river boatmen and is a 13-year veteran of the Yukon 800, an annual riverboat race between Fairbanks and Galena.
As the boat skims along a center channel Demientieff points out a cabin that used to be way back in the woods, but is now precariously close to the riverbank.
At Pfieffer's Bluff a raven's nest is tucked into the rock face. Three black raven nestlings peer curiously out as an adult raven perched in a small tree atop the bluff keeps sentinel.
At a slough known as Squaw Crossing, Demientieff said the main channel can switch and change in as little as 12 hours. Then he adds that, because of the small amount of rain and snowfall in the last few years, it doesn't happen as frequently as it once did.
"In the last 20 years I haven't seen any high-water floods. Even the ice jams on the Yukon river are rather mild from what they used to be," he said.
From time to time Demientieff unzips the plastic window of the boat cabin cover to take a closer look at the running river and choose his channel.
Demientieff points to a ravished stand of trees along the cut bank where the water and ice moved over the riverbank at breakup, skinning the bark off in huge patches
Riverbank ledges, deeply undercut by the current, are draped with large sections of matted forest floor, like ragged curtains. Large spruce and birch trees, toppled by the mighty river, slump and sprawl haphazardly over the riverbank like derelicts.
Here and there, jumbled jams of trees, some with medusa-like root balls still attached and sanded white by the silty river waters, appear as piles of bleached bones.
Further on Demientieff calls attention to silted-in areas of the riverbed.
"They are easy to recognize because the water looks "real slack," he explains.
When river barges encountered silted-in channels, says Demientieff, the barges were parked along the riverbank, and someone went out in a skiff and sounded the murky waters of the channel with a 10-foot pole marked in one-foot increments.
"You had to hand sound to find the channels," he explained. "Now tugboats are much more powerful and they have electronic sounders "
Today, said Demientieff, there is no water volume. In early times breakup was always messy and muddy with a lot more water running off. "When I grew up in the '40s and '50s, it was usual to have extra high water and floods.
"For kids that was just a great time. For the adults it was work," he chuckled.
But flooding usually never lasted long, he said. Cabins would get wet, they dry out and life along the river would go on.
At the end of the day, the teacher/students disembark at Perkins Landing, laden with information on Native knowledge, wisdom and lifestyles, and natural world that flowed along Interior rivers.
The Native knowledge of elders is important, says Elena Sparrow, a UAF assistant professor in the school of agriculture and land resources management, since it is holistic rather than compartmentalized Western scientific knowledge.
The challenge ahead for the 12 teachers is to combine the environmental and Native knowledge of their respective locations with science instruction in meaningful ways.
In the institute Global Change Education Using Western Science and Native Knowledge" the teachers learn how to link their students other students, teachers and scientists in 93 participating countries around the world via the Internet. Their common bond is to learn more about the environment.
Eventually, in their own classrooms, teachers will guide their students through seasonal, collectible environmental observations such as air temperature snowfall, precipitation, etc. Using the Internet, students will give their data to the GLOBE Student Data Archive (www.globe.gov) for use by scientists and other students for research. GLOBE is an acronym for Global Learning Observations to Benefit the Environment program.
"We train teachers and they in turn train students in scientific methods," explained Sparrow. "We want to engage them in research and scientific study at an early age. Students not only learn how but actually do it (collect data)," she said. We want to teach them to be stewards of the environment.
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The Website for National Science Foundation Grant No. ES1-9910219
Last Modified on May 1, 2002 by Sidney Stephens
