A piece of ground

A group of men were ripping open the roof of Jasmine’s house. The windows were all broken. One guy was tearing plywood off of the wall. Jasmine sat on the edge of the wooden sidewalk and smiled at me, though there were tears in her eyes.

“It’s hard to see it go—this old place. Even though the house is no good, it has been my home.” Jasmine is maybe sixty something. Streaks of gray run through her black hair. Her face is kind and finely wrinkled from her life on the arctic coast. She lives in what is called a “subsistence village” where fishing, hunting and gathering food from the tundra provides the sustenance of the people.

“How long have you lived here?” I ask, a typically ignorant outsider question.

Jasmine gives me a somewhat puzzled look. “All of my life,” she replies graciously. “This was my parent’s home before me. I was raised on this little piece of ground.”

The little piece of ground was the issue at hand. The MDS crew was trying to figure out how to tuck a new house between a neighbor’s house on one side and the arctic utility pipe on the other. It would be a tight fit. The public walkway and a twenty foot bluff bounded the other directions.

“Have you considered the other site that the tribal council suggested?” There was space on the other side of the village, near the medical clinic.

Jasmine didn’t answer for a few minutes. We sat looking out over the bluff where the sun was shining through gaps in the clouds and lighting up the river, which was lined with fishing boats. Swallows swooped by us and a raven croaked from a nearby post. The tundra grasses rolled in the breeze like the water itself.

“I have thought about it,” Jasmine finally said, “and I don’t want to be an inconvenience to anyone. If I have to move to the other side, I will move. But this little piece of ground is really my home. It is where I was raised and where I raised my children and my grandchildren. All of my memory is here.”

We sat for a little while longer and one of her neighbors, an elderly woman wearing a Star Wars sweatshirt, passed by with a grandchild. The two women held hands as they chatted about an upcoming gathering and a family member who was working for the electric company, but was going to take time off when the salmon started running. “He wants to catch his own fish,” laughed Jasmine. “That’s more important to him than his new job!”

Later, I asked how many people would be living with her in the new house.

“There would be my daughter and her significant other and their child,” she began, holding up three fingers. “Then my niece and her son and my other adopted granddaughter and my cousin’s elder.” She checked her fingers. “And me! That would be eight of us, as far as I know right now.”

MDS is going to partner with the tribal council to build a house for Jasmine and her extended family. We plan to start as soon as the tools and building materials arrive. They are currently on a barge, somewhere in the Bering Sea, having been “somewhat delayed”.

It can be a little complicated to build on the remote coast of Alaska. Materials come by barges, which can be delayed by sea ice or shifting priorities. The construction season is short and the cost of materials and transportation is high. The history of interaction between native and outside powers and culture has left some residual skepticism in place. All of these realities combine to create a challenging environment.

But in the meantime, hope persists. It shows up in MDS volunteers who hope that our attempts to be present will be interpreted graciously. That hope is evident in the consistent friendliness of people who greet and talk to strangers who don’t really know our way around this physical, social and cultural setting. Hope is evident when Jasmine is willing to describe her connection to a little piece of land on the grassy bluff, when moving to a larger site on the other side of the village might be easier and more practical. The hope is that our mutual vulnerabilities will not diminish our mutual dignity. And of course we hope that the barge shows up soon so we can build Jasmine a new house on her piece of old land…

By Scott Coverdale