Alaska is the Center of the Universe

Peter Frick-Wright: This is The Outside Podcast.

You ever hear a podcast so good, you want to stand up and clap both when it’s over and at several points along the way? But you don’t, cause you’re on a run. Or on the bus. Listening in earbuds, in your own little world.

You ever get choked up, in public, at a weird moment to be emotional? Like at the dog park? Or waiting to get on a flight?

If none of this describes you, I’ve got some listening to recommend. It’s an Audible Original called Alaska is the Center of the Universe and the concept for the series is so simple and so good, I’ve sort of become its personal ambassador. If someone mentions any kind of connection to Alaska, I’ll ask if they’ve heard it. If the conversation veers towards indigenous narratives, or native stories, I’ll bring it up.

The series follows James Dommeck Jr, an artist, drummer, and storyteller from Alaska. He’s Iñupiaq. And he travels around talking to people from different tribes and villages, asking them to tell their traditional stories. What they grew up with. A lot of them are about cryptids, magical, maybe mythical creatures like Bigfoot and the Kushtaka, which are like shape-shifting otters who play deadly tricks on people out at sea.

Then, they talk about how that story is different than what he’s heard before, or how it’s similar to the stories he grew up with.

That’s it.

It’s a travel show, about stories. And it’s brilliant.

James introduces the series better than I ever could, so I’ll leave the rest of that to him, but if you like what you hear, you can find Alaska is the Center of the Universe on Audible.

Here’s James.

James Dommeck Jr: Long ago, before we the Iñupiaq people had any songs or drums or singing…

There was a young hunter. He was walking through the tundra on a fall day, when a big shadow fell over him. He didn’t know what it was from. But instinct took over. He notched an arrow in his bow and turned and shot at the huge shape in the sky above him.

A dead eagle fell to his feet.

The hunter took the eagle back to his house, and hung the skin on the outside of his wall to dry.

Later that fall, he was walking in the same place, when again a shadow fell over him.

“I’m gonna shoot whatever is up there,” he said to himself, and again he set his arrow into his bow. But this time when he aimed upward to shoot, he didn’t.

He saw something unbelievable. Two boys walking in the sky towards him.

The hunter was dumbfounded.

The boys picked him up by each arm and started walking in the air with him. They took him high in the sky all the way to the mountains.

As they got higher and higher, the hunter started to hear a sound. It was faint at first, but the closer they got to a cave at the top of the highest mountain, the louder the sound got.

Right outside the cave, the sound became almost deafening. But the boys led the hunter inside.

Inside the cave, there was an old woman lying on a bed.

The deafening sound the hunter was hearing was the sound of her heart beating.

“My other son went out hunting,” she said to the hunter. “And I don’t know what happened to him.”

Then it suddenly came to the hunter: These people are eagles. They're people right now, but really they’re eagles. The eagle I shot was her son.

The hunter confessed to the old woman. “It was me,” he said. “I shot your son with my arrow. I thought he was going to attack me. His skin is hanging outside of my house.”

The woman’s heart got quieter. Her face became less pained. She was still sad, but at least she knew what had happened to her son.

“Thank you for telling me,” she said. In exchange, the Eagle Mother taught the hunter how to make a drum. And she taught him a song.

It was our first song and our first drum.

“This drum is meant to bring people together,” She told the hunter. “And this is a song for celebrating life. The beat you’re going to play is my heartbeat. Take this back to the people, get them all together, and have a big feast.”

The boys brought the hunter back through the air, all the way back to his home. They took the skin of their eagle brother and returned it to their mother.

The next day, as instructed, the man brought the people all together for a feast, and he played the song that the Eagle Mother had taught him.

I grew up hearing this story. I love it because I’m a drummer and a storyteller. My Iñupiaq name is Milligruk. My English name is James Dommek, Jr. I’ve been a rock and roll drummer, a film PA, a voiceover actor, and lately, I’ve been making podcasts.

To me, the Eagle Mother Drum story is about how the very first beat we ever hear is our mother’s heartbeat.

And it's about celebrating life despite things being hard.

Because life can get really hard up here in Alaska. It’s a big, wild, strange place. It’s dangerous but it’s also very beautiful.

I was born and raised in Kotzebue, a village of about 3,000, just above the Arctic Circle on the Chukchi sea. I grew up playing basketball and trying to skateboard on one of the only little patches of pavement at the airport. My dad worked there. He was a mechanic. And my mom sewed traditional fur parkys. She’s an amazing skin sewer. She makes hats, fancy parkas, mittens, gloves, earrings. I was raised around fur and tools. I was also raised around stories.

Storytelling is in my blood. I’m the great grandson of Palungun, or Paul Monroe, a revered Inupiaq storyteller. My people have been living in this part of the world for over 10,000 years.

And before books, before tv, before the infinite scroll on your phone, we had someone who would just tell you a story for a long time.

Since then, there’s been a lot of changes that happened really fast. Western Contact. Colonization, and all that came with that. Climate change. But our stories are still here.

Ethan Petticrew: Yeah, I’m ready. [Speaking Unungan] Hello, my name is Ethan Petticrew. I am Unungan. My family comes from Nikolsky on Amna Island and I lived in Atca for quite a few years and raised my children there.

James: So I got my buddy Ethan Petticrew to tell a straight-up old school story. This one's Unungan, from what outsiders call the Aleutian Islands.

Ethan: I think other people call us Aleut, but our true name is Unangax.

James: It’s not about a cryptid, but about something that might seem like a cryptid if I’d just described it to you. You would think that I was talking about a straight-up monster. A big hairy Volkswagen covered in teeth. A killing machine.

Yeah I’m talking about the bear. The symbol of Alaska. The symbol of the wild.

So sit back, don't look at any screens, and buckle up.

Peter: We’ll be right back.

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Ethan Petticrew: Long ago, there was a man and a woman who chose not to live in a village, but to live off on their own. They had a Ula Soka house that they had built, and they lived in this house. They ended up having two children with him. These children were just infants, little children yet.

Every morning it was his responsibility to go hunt, and he would go out hunting.

For a period of time he would bring back food and meat, and life was pretty good for a while.

But after a while, he kept coming home and there was nothing. There was no food. No seal, no sea lion, nothing. Not even fish, nothing.

What's going on? What did we do? Did we break a taboo? Have we broken one of our traditions?

And they could not find anything that they have done that had broken a tradition, because these people followed the rules.

One day, She has to start crawling for food. And we use that expression for, um, picking up, uh, clams, mussels, things on the beach. It was a good food source, but it was also considered, in ancient days, a lesser food source than the rich sea mammals we get in the ocean, if that makes sense.

Day after day this was happening. So she'd bring home, you know, chitons and things for her children to eat.

Every day he'd return and there'd be nothing.

She's out there and every day it's getting harder and harder because she's depleting the food in their, in their, in their bay that she's in.

And at some point it becomes time that these children have to, I mean, she has nothing to feed them.

And she starts boiling pieces of old clothing so they have something to chew on. They're starving. They're starving to death.

Sure enough, he goes out to hunt. While he's out there hunting, she's on the beach looking for little pieces of food she can feed her children. And, uh, a Chikuyaakax̂  lands on her shoulder. It's a song sparrow. In our culture, the song sparrow is this little bird that tells us lots of things. Like, there's an old lady in Atka that, uh, used to listen to Chikuyaakax tell her when their earthquakes gonna be and she knew them like that. So, um, this little bird is notorious to us about telling us things, whether it's gossipy or whether it's truth. Just loves to tell humans things.

And the song sparrow spoke to her. And he said, “do you know where your husband is?”

And she says, “yes, he's out hunting.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yeah.”

“And how much food does he bring home?”

“Well, he's not had any luck. There's been no food lately. He's not been able to find.”

“Tomorrow, when he goes hunting, I want, after he leaves, I want you to hike over to the other side of the island and just wait and watch. He's there. He goes there.”

“What are you talking about?”

“No, listen to me. Go there and watch.”

She was bothered by this and sure enough, evening comes, her husband returns and he's got no food, nothing. She's really bothered. She doesn't tell him about the Chihuahua. And she's, she's sitting there wondering all night long and stewing on this? What is that bird talking about?

So the next morning comes, he prepares this kayak, and off he goes into the ocean to hunt. At that point, she gets her children and she hikes over the island, and she comes to a down slope on the other side of the mountain. There's a little knoll area hidden and she kind of stops there and lays her children down and she stands and looks over the knoll and sure enough she's looking down at the beach and she sees a Ula Soka down there, a house.

And she stays and she watches. And she watches. And then she thinks, ah, I wonder who lives there. So she goes down. And she scratches on the roof, as we enter our houses through the roof and through a ladder, and a female voice, “Oh, hello! Please come down into my house. I have soup on, I'll feed you some food. Please, I don't have any visitors here usually. Please come in.”

And so she came down, and as she was going down the ladder, she's looking and there's sealskins filled with fat and, um, berries. And there's seal meat drying and sea lion drying. This house is dripping with oil, basically, on the floor. It's just rich with food. It’s food everywhere. And she sits down to eat with this woman.

And the wife then asks this lady, “Where do you get all this food? Do you live by yourself?”

“I do live by myself, but I have a man. And he comes to me only in the daytime, though.And he brings me things for the daytime. This is what he brings me. It's my man. We just don't live together.”

And the wife then becomes suspicious, like, “Oh. Okay.”

So she finishes her meal, and then they do their goodbyes, and she leaves, and the lady says, “Please come back to visit me again.”

“Oh, I definitely will.”

And the wife goes and she waits then up in the knoll again, and she's watching with her babies there. Eventually, she sees a ikyak, a kayak, coming way out in the ocean, and it's getting closer and closer. She can't recognize it yet, but it's a man's boat. And this boat gets closer and closer, and she sees that it has a seal, pulling a seal with it on it. And it gets to the beach, and he steps onto the beach.

And she recognizes by his posture, that's her husband.

He calls out, and sure enough, a woman comes out of the house, comes down, they greet each other, they pull the ikyak up above that high water mark, and then they go into the house.

He's there for quite a while, then he leaves, gets in his boat, paddles away.

The wife, meanwhile, grabs her children, and she hikes back home. She gets home, and she's home by the time the husband comes around in his ikyak. He's coming to the beach, and she goes and greets him at the beach.

“Did you get us some food today?”

“No, I was hunting, but there's nothing out there again. There's nothing. I keep trying, but there's nothing.”

“Okay.”

Now she realizes that this man is deceiving her. She knows now, but she doesn't let him know this. And so, the next morning comes. He does his breathing in ceremony, brings her the water. She wishes him luck. Off he goes in his ikyak. He disappears from the bay.

She grabs three bundles in the back of her house, and they're bundles of something brown, and they're wrapped just around like a blanket kind of, but big and thick. And she has three of them. And she straps those onto her back. And then she grabs her two infants. And she then hikes back to the part of the island that she was across over the mountain. She lays her babies down. Then she goes back down. And she scratches on the door.

Of course the, “oh, come in my friend again.Come in, come on. I got more food for you today. My man brought me food. Brought me a whole seal yesterday. I hope he brings something today too. I'm so glad to share with you. Let's see, what can I feed you today?”

And there's a feast of food. She's just filling her with food. The mistress reached in to get a soup out of her, um, skin she had soup boiling in.

And when she did that, the wife took her woman's knife, grabbed her by the head, and chops her head off. She puts her head into the soup pot with all that seal meat. We know all the good stuff sinks to the bottom. And the head sunk to the bottom. And she takes the body and she takes a grass mat and she wraps it up and she puts it in the back of the house so that nobody will see it. Then she leaves, and she goes back to her children, and she waits, and she watches.

The husband comes, and this time he's got a kawakh, a sea lion he's pulling. And, he starts calling out for her, his mistress, but she never comes out of the house. There's no answer. He's like, huh, she must be in the hills picking roots or something, alugas or something. So, then he goes to the house.

And as he steps into the roof of the house, he gets this wonderful smell of seal meat coming up. “Ah! She's not here, but she's made wonderful soup for me. I'm gonna go eat, and then I'm gonna head home. Um, she's made sure I got a meal. That's wonderful.”

He sits down. He goes and gets a bowl, and then he gets this big ladle, and he gets up to get himself some soup, and he pours some liquid in it. But he wants some of the good heavy meat and bone, which is in the bottom, and so he takes his big ladle and lifts it up, and lo and behold, it's his mistress's head.

He's immediately shocked, and he thinks, enemies on the island. It could have been enemies on the island that took her head, uh, and severed it.

And he thought, “oh my god, I gotta get back home because if they're on this part of the island, they're gonna get to my wife and my children as well.”

And so he comes out of the house. And he's looking to see if there's anybody around or enemies.

And he looks up, up the, up the hillside. and he goes, What is that? And it was his wife standing there.

And she reaches down and she takes one of the bundles. And she unrolls it. And she takes her infant and lays it on that bundle. And she rolls that infant in that bundle and sets it aside. Takes the other one, does the same thing. Puts that infant in that bundle. Rolls it back up. Like two infants in a bundle. She takes the third bundle. Rolls it open. Puts it on her back like a blanket. Wraps herself in it. She drops to all fours. And at that point she starts walking up the hill. On all fours. And her babies raise up from the laying position. And they follow her on all fours.

Those were our first bears.

And so it explains to us, first of all, why we can't eat bear because they're humans transformed.

But also, why that, um, bear when it's skinned looks like a human. But I think also explains that, um, relationship we have with bears and their anger sometimes towards us, um, for good reason. Dirty guy cheated on her, um, so, uh.

James: That's such a good story. I mean, how else would you make sense of a mother bear's anger? Like, what else would you be able to equate it to? Like, I've never seen anything so angry.

Ethan: And she was angry, obviously.

James: Yeah.

I always say that these stories, they're about making sense of the world. Including how we got here.

Ethan: We believe that the first beings on Earth were not really human, but were human-like and covered with hair, um, and that they fell from the sky.

One was male and one was female. And as they fell to the earth, they landed in what is called the Islands of the Four Mountains today, which is the center of the Aleutians.

James: The Aleutians are the island chain that stretches West from Alaska, out into the Pacific. That’s where the Unungan people live. It's a place with big volcanoes. Big waves. Big Ocean Not a lot of trees. But there's tall grass everywhere. And that's what broke the fall of the two hairy beings.

Ethan: And as they, uh, arose from their fall and looked around, they realized they're the only beings on earth. One being male, one being female, eventually they mate, and they, they, they created the first human being. And he was different than his parents in that he had hair, um, only on his head and another, a couple other areas.

From then they made many more children and that was our creation. That’s why we consider the islands of the four mountains the center of our universe.

James: Ethan's current home is the center of the universe, but he actually wasn't born in the Aleutians.

Ethan: In fact, I was, um, born in Southeast Alaska.

James: Ethan's journey is one of return.

Ethan: I am a product of the internment of World War II.

James: Can you talk a little bit about that? What do you mean by that?

Ethan: So internment for the Unangax people, in the 40s, you know, Japan and America were at war, and Japanese planes had been spotted, they bombed Dutch Harbor. That caused the Americans to panic, I guess. They rounded up all of our people in the Aleutians and transported all of our people down to Southeast Alaska and put us in, um, internment camps down there.

James: Ethan's mother was among those rounded up. It was officially an “evacuation.” But it didn't seem like much care or thought was put into it. Most villagers were only allowed to bring one suitcase. US servicemen burned the homes and the church in Atka to prevent the Japanese from using them.

When the Unungans arrived at their new homes, which the US called "duration camps," it got worse.

They were in southeast Alaska, far from their home, among the  big, dark, wet trees and mountains. Nothing at all like their island homes. They were put in abandoned canneries, a herring salting facility, rotting mines with no plumbing, no electricity.

Ethan: There was no heat, no food, no medicine. Um, in some of our, you know, village of Atka, a third of its population died in four years in those camps. Mostly children and mostly elders. The children death certificates just say cause of death, pain, um, we don't know really what, it was probably disease of course. Things were not sanitary. It was bad. People had to, in some camps they had to take turns, uh, families were too large to sleep in one small area that they had blanketed off in an abandoned cannery, no heat, so they had to actually take turns sleeping for the night, um, things like that. I think we were people that felt like we had no control.

James: Ethan still remembers what his grandmother told him about that time.

Ethan: My grandmother said, I felt like we had no future because the babies were dying, and I felt like all our grandparents parents were dying off. There was no past even. It's like we were being erased. It's like, ah, it's a, it's a, it's a, that's a, when you think about it, that’s why that generation doesn't even like to talk about it. They just cry and, yeah.

We were removed from our homeland. It broke our families apart. Many of us were left behind in Southeast.

For instance, my grandmother got tuberculosis. She didn't die in the camp. Luckily, she got it towards the end. They put her in Tacoma Sanitarium where, uh, she was for nine years. Came out with half a lung, almost deaf totally. But, um, survived. And then rounded up her kids. It was just a horrendous experience for us.

James: Bad as it was, Ethan still wants people to know about it.

Ethan: I think that the hardest thing is to be told by Americans that it's not true, and we've been told that over and over by different people.

We were, a group of us from Atka went to New York to perform our tradition dances. Uh, at the Museum of American Indian on Bowling Green. And at the end, we told about the internment, and an older lady stood up and she was so angry with me.

She, “you're lying, you're lying, uh, it's not true, our government would never do that to any of its people.” And, yes, it's true, it's in the Library of Congress, it's documented.

This was our own country doing it to us. We were not at war with this country. We were citizens of this country. That's the amazing part of it. Who really is the enemy here? I think they're more cryptid than our cryptids actually.

James: It is really spooky. It does feel a little more scary because it is real.

I'll never say that cryptids aren't real-that bigfoot,the little people, the kushtaka don't exist. But you're also not gonna find them in the Library of Congress. And yet if you told a story about what happened to the Unungan, it would feel almost fictional.

James: Like there's, there are really people thatare trying to like change your reality. It's scary as hell.

Ethan: It is.

James: And yet, despite everything that's trying to change our reality. We're still here.

Peter: James Dommeck Jr. From the Audible Original, Alaska is the Center of the Universe.

Alaska is the Center of the Universe was created, produced and written by James, with Isaac Kestenbaum and Josie Holtzman. This episode combined parts of episodes 1 and 6. Find the whole series at audible.com

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