The Sacred Center

I remember the exact moment I knew I would go to Ireland. It was a cold Alaskan night, and I was talking with Sikvoan Weyahok. That was his birth name; in English he was called Howard Rock. Every Wednesday Howard held court at Tommy's Elbow Room, where I unfailingly joined him. Almost forty years my senior, he was Eskimo; although that Algonkian word for "raw fish eater" is disdained by many now, it was Howard's word for himself and for his people, the Tigaramiut of Point Hope. He had been an artist in Seattle until threats of nuclear testing near his coastal village brought him home to become a crusading newspaper editor. As one of the most politically significant thinkers of the state, he was treated with respect by Native and non-Native alike.

Howard had no children, but he sentimentally called me his granddaughter. Perhaps that was because, at our first meeting, I fell into treating him like I treated my own grandfather, offering him attention that was both undivided and untinged by flattery. Just as I had with my grandfather, I challenged Howard when he became pompous, plied him with questions when he grew withdrawn, teased him when he turned maudlin. We were close for a dozen years. When Howard died in his mid-sixties — still so young, I now think — I was on the cusp of my first trip to Ireland.

I have only to close my eyes to see it now, the way it was then: The old mill below Thoor Ballylee, its whitewash long since dissolved away, its stones gray and rough. Nettles palisaded around its perimeter like sharp warnings. The broken millstone near the little sing-song river. The damp chill that hung about even on the brightest day.

I went to Ireland because Howard told me to. Not directly: he was far too traditional to give me explicit commands. Nevertheless, he told me to go. It happened one Wednesday night in 1970. We were sitting at his usual table halfway down the dim room at Tommy's, talking politics, as always. The Native land claims had not yet been settled, so we were probably discussing congressional strategies when Howard suddenly turned to me and asked, "You, now: Where are you from?"

There is this wonderfully oblique yet direct quality — something like what the Irish call "codding," a kind of blunt pointedness — about old-fashioned Eskimo speech. Perhaps that is why I fell into a special relationship with such a distinguished Native elder, because I recognized that kind of talk from my own grandfather, whose sidewise testing comments had been part of my childhood. Pop once commented to my roundest sister, when she complained of her weight, "Ah, but you'll be glad of it when the next Famine comes." Another time, when he was nearing ninety and his son's mother-in-law insinuated that he drank to excess, Pop inquired mildly of her teetotaling spouse, "What was he when he died? — seventy, wasn't it?"

I was reminded of Pop one evening when I showed off my new bearskin mukluks to Howard. I had stretched and tanned a hide for the traditional footwear, razored it into careful pieces, sewn the seams tightly with dental floss — that modern sinew substitute — and tied on bright multicolored yarn pom-poms. I thought my mukluks marvelous, but Howard was less impressed. Squinting down, he shook his head. "I think you forgot the claws," he said. I followed his eyes to where, yes, my feet resembled misshapen bear paws in the floppy oversized booties.

So I was used to listening beneath the surface of conversation. What was Howard asking? He knew I had grown up in Anchorage, that my parents still lived in Turnagain near the ruined clay cliffs of Earthquake Park. Clearly he wanted something other than the family address. Underlying our discussion of land claims was an unvoiced agreement about the importance of Howard's Eskimo heritage, so my own must be of interest. "Well," I offered, "I'm Irish."

Even when it wasn't March, I was proud of being Irish. I was proud of my ancestral home, that colonized land of splendid myth and bitter history whose yearning sentimental songs my family sang and whose poets I yearningly imitated. But I didn't know Kinvara from Kinsale, Kildare from Killaloe. The Ireland I imagined that I loved — so green, so beautiful — was vague, indistinct, unreal, not a place at all but a haunted haunting dream.

Howard waited, his face still, both hands around his glass. I tried again. "From Mayo. County Mayo," I said, retrieving what I could remember of my grandfather's stories. "From ... a town ..." Bohola, I would answer instantly now, but then I could not name where Pop John Gordon and Grandma Margaret Dunleavy had been born. Bohola: three syllables in a language I could not speak, meaningless because they were connected with neither memories nor stories, faces nor dreams.

The road beyond Bohola on a cloudy day. A sudden looming shape, blue-gray in the mist. A perfect pyramid that retreats, advances, retreats as the road dips and swoons. Around the mountain twists a pilgrims' path. Atop its height of eagles stands an ancient circle of stone.

Howard repeated my words. "From ... a town." I could hear how ignorant it sounded.

"More like a village, I think." The word village has resonance in Alaska. Native people come from villages. Villages are where people know you and your family, where you know the land and its seasons and the food it provides. I had never been to Point Hope, yet when Howard's eyes grew distant at its name, I could almost see a cluster of brown houses, the sea churning gray near it in summer, thin skeins of geese overhead in spring and fall, the sun's red ball on short winter days. I thought perhaps my grandparents were from somewhere like that, a small place far from the centers of power, easy to overlook, significant because of how deeply rather than how widely it was known.

"More like a village." Howard continued to repeat my words. I had exhausted what I knew. I stared into my drink. Finally he said again, gently, "A village. In Ireland." And I could only nod.

In his subtle Tigaramiut way, Howard had asked me a profound question. How could I ever know myself if I did not know where I was from — not just the scenes of my personal memories, but the places where my ancestors had walked, where my body understood the way time unfolded its seasons on the land, where people still spoke a language whose rhythms echoed in my own? Where history had been made by people with my family names? Where the unrecorded history of ordinary loves and losses had been lived by people with features like mine? Howard knew what Carson McCullers meant when she wrote, "To know who you are, you have to have a place to come from." Not knowing where I came from, I did not know who I was or who I might ultimately become.

At that moment, sitting silent...