March

"Congratulations, You're Hired!"

I punch out my time card and start walking toward the restaurant. I pass a grassy park, whose sole feature is a gigantic totem pole, and the souvenir shop windows displaying T-shirts with slogans like "Alaska State Bird" with a picture of a giant mosquito. I round the corner under the shadow of the onion dome of the Russian Orthodox cathedral at the center of the downtown district, and glance toward the marina on Silver Bay. Over the water, I can see the tail ends of two cruise ships, as each steams out of town through a great gorge of sea flanked by mountains. Downtown is eerily quiet, empty now that the day's five thousand tourists have left aboard their ships. I reach the hotel at the edge of the village and make my way to the restaurant inside.

Malia and Sandy, my coworkers, are already waiting for me. They beat me on foot by a couple of minutes by driving, since downtown Sitka, Alaska, is only a few blocks long. I sit down in the booth next to Malia and she reminds me to take off my black felt vest with mother-of-pearl buttons, designed in a style similar to robes used in ceremony. Once I remove the vest, we three women match. We are all wearing black skirts and white tops, also part of our work uniform. All of us have dark hair and skin of various shades of summer tan, from olive to dark brown.

For the most part, we talk shop as we eat and drink, discussing the ins and outs of our daily lives as "authentic" Native Alaskan tour guides. The women share a story that happened at work that day:

SANDY: So, I drove up to the totem park and let my passengers out at the lower parking lot. I got out of the bus and stood on that grassy area, you know, right in front of the beach.

MALIA: It was so funny! I was standing right there waiting for my tourists to come out of the building when it happened.

SANDY: And these people were gathered around me, and this lady says, "So, what's the altitude here?"

MALIA: I was standing right there and I almost couldn't hold it in!

SANDY: I almost started laughing out loud!

MALIA: What did you tell her?

SANDY: I pointed to the beach and let her know that we're at sea level.

ME: I guess it must be confusing for people since they see all these mountains shooting out of the ocean in the fjords.

MALIA: I swear, when people go on vacation, so do their brains!

SANDY: When they are getting ready for their trip, they don't forget to pack a big wad of stupid.

We start swapping tourist stories. Sandy always tells the best ones.

SANDY: You all know what my favorite one is, right?

I think we all know it, but Malia plays along.

MALIA: "No, tell it."

SANDY: My favorite is when the tourists say, "So, how long have YOU been Native?"

Bouts of laughter erupt around the table. The old fisherman eavesdropping in the booth next to us laughs so hard that beer spews out of his nostrils.

ME: Well, what DO you say when someone asks that?

SANDY: I say, "I'm gonna try this thing out for a few days, and if it doesn't work out, I am going back to what I used to be." Seriously, one of these days I am going to gather up all the funny things that tourists say to us and the other people I know working in tourism, and I'm gonna write a book about it!

I wonder if Sandy would mind if I include her joke in the book I'm researching about working in the cultural tourism industry?

Week 1

I applied for a job with Tribal Tours in early March. I knew that if I wanted a summer job in Alaska, I needed to start the process at least two months before the season began. I was a little nervous about my decision. I had only been to Sitka a few times over the years, and only as a stop on the ferries between Seattle and Juneau. I didn't know anyone in Sitka, but it was a place where I had always wanted to live. A small town surrounded by mountains that stretch to the ocean, Sitka remains one of the most beautiful places I have ever been.

Located on a remote island in Alaska's southeastern panhandle, Sitka checked off every item on my list. It is inhabited by people who live off and love the ocean. It has at least one church situated next to a dive bar. It's the kind of place where whales, sea lions, or salmon can be easily spotted with the naked eye while standing on the beach. Its abundant trails wind through a thick rainforest full of bears and charismatic fauna.

The Tlingit people recognized the incredible resources this place has to offer. They lived here for thousands of years until the Russians discovered its wealth, in the form of sea otter pelts, in the late seventeen hundreds. For a short time, Sitka was the capital of Russian America, the empire that enslaved and brought some of my distant ancestors all the way from their islands in the Bering Sea to Sitka and as far south as Monterey, California, to hunt otters. It fascinated me that the brutal tactics that enabled the Russians to expand their empire across central Asia and beyond to Alaska never subdued the Tlingit people.

Few Americans from the Lower 48 know that this quaint town was the first capital of the territory of Alaska when the United States bought it from Russia in 1867, a purchase mistakenly criticized as "[Secretary of State William] Seward's icebox," while the rest of the country tried to pick up the pieces from the Civil War. Nor do they know that this town sowed the seeds of a social movement spearheaded by Alaska Natives that would catalyze the first antidiscrimination law in the United States, ratified nearly twenty years before Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. Alaska is not as backward as some people would like to think.

But what I really wanted to do was spend a year in Tahiti. I was in the middle of graduate school, studying the ways that Indigenous entrepreneurs sell culture without "selling out." Before going back to school, I had worked for Alaska Native organizations involved in culture-based tourism. I applied to graduate programs in anthropology thinking that if I could get a PhD, I could somehow impact policy that affected the work I was already engaged in. I noticed that most of the grants that supported heritage only released their funding if my employers presented our cultures according to strict grant guidelines set by America's most powerful elites. I saw this as a thinly veiled form of assimilation and as part of a larger continuum of genocidal practices first perpetuated by Russians and later by Americans. While the Russians usurped Alaska Native bodies, hearts, and minds through disease, rape, forced labor, education, and religion, the Americans finished the job, stealing lands and removing our forebearers from their homes through the policies of manifest destiny, boarding schools, homesteading acts, and...