“Ready?” He hollers.
I nod my head. I’m ready.
“Hang on!” he yells, raising his body up and leaning out 243
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M Y N A M E I S N O T E A S Y
toward the caribou as we close in on it.
You can see the muscles bunched up on its neck, round as rope. Its nostrils are fl ared, and its eyes are rolled back, running, always running.
All of a sudden Joe leaps off the machine and lands square on its back, his knife raised. I pull back on the handles and swerve away, the wide-open tundra fl ying by me like a big white bird. I take one long, icy breath and smile.
It tastes like life, that breath.
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Author’s Note
My Name Is Not Easy is a work of fi ction, but the story of Sacred Heart School and its students is based on a number of real places and real events in Alaska history. Prior to the Molly Hootch settlement of 1976, which required the State of Alaska to fund schools in even the smallest and most remote Alaskan villages, there were virtually no high schools in the vast region known as
“bush” Alaska. To earn a diploma, children from the Bush were forced to travel hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles from their homes to live at distant boarding schools for months or years at a time. Many were sent away at very young ages.
Virtually all of these students were Native Alaskans, and most attended schools operated by the Bureau of Indian Aff airs, such as Mount Edgecumbe in Sitka, Alaska, and Wrangell Institute on Wrangell Island. Some traveled as far as Chemawa, in Oregon, and Chilocco, in Oklahoma. And some attended Copper Valley, a parochial boarding school located in the vast central portion of Alaska known as the Interior, a school that educated both Native and non-Native students. My Name Is Not Easy is based on the many stories I have heard from the alumni of these schools, most of whom are my contemporaries, close friends, and relatives.
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Many of the events in My Name Is Not Easy actually did happen. Students at the Copper Valley School did earn a bus with Betty Crocker coupons, and they did earn tuition by hunting and were, unbelievably, allowed to keep their guns in their rooms. Junior is a fi ctional character, but his “uncle” Howard Rock—the editor of Tundra Times—was a real person, origi-nally from the village of Point Hope, just a few miles north of the very real proposed site of Project Chariot. Project Chariot was conceived by the Atomic Energy Commission as a means of demonstrating the peaceful use of atomic energy by creating a new ocean harbor through a series of simultaneous nuclear blasts 189 times the size of the one that leveled the Japanese city of Hiroshima.
Th
e Barrow Duck-In is also a real historical event. Th e
Duck-In and Project Chariot are the topics of two documen-tary fi lms written and directed by my daughter, the fi lmmaker Rachel Edwardson, and produced by Jana Harcharek, director of Inupiat Education for the North Slope Borough School Dis-trict.
Th
e military’s Cold Weather Research iodine-131 experi-ments were conducted in the late 1950s in the Iñupiaq villages of Wainwright, Point Lay, Point Hope, and Anaktuvik Pass, and in the Athabascan villages of Fort Yukon and Arctic Village—
as well as at Copper Valley School. Researchers wanted to fi nd out why Native peoples living above the Arctic Circle seemed to thrive in cold weather, while non-Natives suff ered. Th ey wondered whether the thyroid gland played a role in regulating the body’s ability to withstand extreme cold, but later found out that 246
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it does not. In 2000, following the release of a study done by the National Research Council, the North Slope Borough obtained a settlement for the victims of iodine-131 testing who had lived in the villages under its jurisdiction. Although the National Research Council has concluded that those tested as children were at the highest risk of developing cancer, none of those who were tested as boarding-school students have received settle-ments or acknowledgement of any sort. Some of these people have since died of cancer.
Th
e Good Friday earthquake of 1964, measuring 9.2 on
the Richter Scale, was the largest earthquake ever to hit North America and the second-largest earthquake ever recorded. Th is
earthquake caused 115 deaths in Alaska, 106 of which were due to tsunamis.
Th
e story of Luke, Bunna, and Isaac is based, in part, on the story of three real brothers. Th
ose brothers did have an uncle who
told them that Catholics eat horse meat. Th
e middle brother did
die in a plane crash, fl ying home from boarding school. Th e
older brother was not on that plane because he did, in fact, have a premonition about it and did try to stop his brother from fl ying. Th
e youngest brother was adopted out, without the family’s permission. He grew up in Texas and returned home as an adult.
I know these stories well because I married the oldest brother.
His real name is George Edwardson. I never knew my brother-in-law Bunna, and for reasons I still do
