So, How Long Have You Been Native?: Life As an Alaska Native Tour Guide - Rilegato

Bunten, Alexis C.

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0803234627 ISBN 13: 9780803234628

Casa editrice: Univ of Nebraska Pr, 2015

Riassunto

So, How Long Have You Been Native? is Alexis C. Bunten’s firsthand account of what it is like to work in the Alaska cultural tourism industry. An Alaska Native and anthropologist, she spent two seasons working for a tribally owned tourism business that markets the Tlingit culture in Sitka. Bunten’s narrative takes readers through the summer tour season as she is hired and trained and eventually becomes a guide.

 

A multibillion-dollar worldwide industry, cultural tourism provides one of the most ubiquitous face-to-face interactions between peoples of different cultures and is arguably one of the primary means by which knowledge about other cultures is disseminated. Bunten goes beyond debates about who owns Native culture and has the right to “sell” it to tourists. Through a series of anecdotes, she examines issues such as how and why Natives choose to sell their culture, the cutthroat politics of business in a small town, how the cruise industry maintains its bottom line, the impact of colonization on contemporary Native peoples, the ways that traditional cultural values play a role in everyday life for contemporary Alaska Natives, and how Indigenous peoples are engaging in global enterprises on their own terms. Bunten’s bottom-up approach provides a fascinating and informative look at the cultural tourism industry in Alaska.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Alexis C. Bunten is a project ethnographer at Simon Fraser University and a senior researcher at the FrameWorks Institute. Her articles have appeared in American Indian Quarterly, Journal of Museum Education, and American Ethnologist.

Estratto. © Ristampato con autorizzazione. Tutti i diritti riservati.

So, How Long Have You Been Native?

Life as an Alaska Native Tour Guide

By Alexis C. Bunten

UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS

Copyright © 2015 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8032-3462-8

Contents

List of Illustrations, 
Preface, 
Acknowledgments, 
1. March: "Congratulations, You're Hired!", 
2. April: Workplace Training, 
3. May: Cruise Ships Arrive, 
4. June: Becoming a Native Tour Guide, 
5. July: Meeting the Tourist Gaze, 
6. August: Burn Out, 
7. September: End of the Season, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

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 wartime removal. Powerful non-Natives in industry and government worked hard to prevent Alaska Natives from fighting these social injustices through Jim Crow laws and discriminatory policies. Even after Alaska Natives gained equal rights and protections under federal law, policies such as the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act proved merely a smokescreen to pressure Alaska Natives to assimilate to non-Native economic and governing structures, under the guise of massive payouts for lands slated for big oil development.

I didn't grow up in a neat or pristine environment, nor was I the product of a single cultural influence. The days of homogenous culture were long gone by the time I was born (if they had ever existed). Still, my life has been easier than the lives of the generations that came before me. Sometimes it is hard to identify what mental health and social service professionals refer to as "intergenerational trauma," especially since those in our Native families and communities were taught to "not talk about it."

I learned about intergenerational trauma by reading between the lines of what was being talked about. "Mother always loved you better," my auntie told my mother as we sat around the table in an Anchorage coffee shop during the summer of 2000, when both of them had come to visit me. My auntie had married and moved to the Midwest decades before. This was her first trip back to Anchorage since being a teenager—and old memories had come flooding back. "What are you talking about?" my mom protested. "You always had nice things. I had nothing." "We all had nothing!" Auntie Barb set the record straight. "I worked for everything I had, breaking my back in the strawberry fields. You were too lazy." Auntie Barb jabbed my mother. "Even though, Mother always bought you new pink dresses and mary-janes. She loved to curl your blonde hair and dress you up like Shirley Temple. She cut my brown hair short and straight so it would 'stay out of my eyes,' she said. I always had to wear blue pants and got one pair of 'practical' shoes a year." Auntie Barb pronounced the words "pants" and "practical" with some distaste. I was vaguely aware that some part of my grandmother wanted to transform her beautiful, half-Swedish daughter into a child actor. Unlike most American parents who fantasize about their children becoming movie stars, my grandma saw this as a perfectly reasonable potential. After all, by the tender age of eighteen, she had already experienced a similarly drastic transformation in her own life.

My mother sometimes talked about her own mother's "missing years": the time period between being plucked from her small fishing village as a child and her return to Alaska as a young adult. Pictures from those years revealed a young Grandma, hair stylishly bobbed. One showed her tiny figure perched on a freshly cut stump of a once-massive California redwood, wearing a calf-length dress with a stylish sailor collar. In another photo, Grandma rocks a leg-bearing fringe shift dress while sipping champagne on the deck of a yacht. In another, she wears a fur parka, posed next to a sled dog team in front of an igloo. This photo wasn't taken in Alaska; it documented a nineteen twenties Hollywood set. These photos tell only part of the story of a young girl, shipped from Naknek, Alaska, to Chemawa Indian Boarding School in Salem, Oregon, who blossomed into a clever, bohemian young lady by way of forced domestic service in Hayward, California.

I faced a much milder form of educational discrimination, incomparable to my grandmother's experience two generations prior. It came in the form of disparaging remarks about my social skills on grade school report cards. "Talks too much with neighbors." "Distracts other students." Teachers were always pissed off at me for refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance, or for questioning why history starts on the East Coast. Starting with the kindergarten role of "Thanksgiving Indian," I was always inexplicably assigned the villain parts (one of Macbeth's witches, Scrooge's Marley, Snow White's Maleficent) in grade school plays.

When I reached middle school, the ancient teachers groaned, "Oh, no, not another Bunten !" during roll call on the first day of school. By the time I came along, our local public schools had already endured eighteen years of four unruly Bunten kids. When I transferred to a private high school and then went on to college, the overt challenges toned down to indirect messages—which I nonetheless received loud and clear. My value in the educational context was determined by affirmative action statistics. This brand of liberal, elite discrimination disguised as privilege followed me to graduate school, where my advisers in the anthropology department insisted that because I'm Alaska Native, I would have to conduct original research in Alaska, whereas the other members of my cohort were encouraged to work in exciting places like Chile and Indonesia. If I couldn't go to Tahiti, then Sitka would have to be the next best choice.

Working for a tribe I'm not related to, in a place I've never lived, would have to be my proxy for "real" anthropology, the kind where the intrepid explorer travels to an exotic destination to live among strangers in a strange land. Instead I'd spend my summers in America, albeit a part of America where I'd later find that tourists questioned whether we took American money, or why I spoke such good English. I was glad. I'm not much of a dirt, tent, and field notes kind of person anyway. In opposition to the culture shock many anthropologists feel when first traveling to their foreign field sites, I was looking forward to being among people who would understand me.

After making the decision to work at Tribal Tours, I wrote to the human resources director for Sitka Tribe of Alaska (STA) inquiring about a job. I explained that I wanted to work for Tribal Tours to learn more about the industry from the ground up as part of my dissertation research. The human resources director sent me an application.

STA's job application asks, "Are you eligible for Native preference?" I checked "yes" and indicated my enrollment in the space provided below. Like nearly all Tribal Tours employees, I was hired in part by meeting the tribe's Native hiring preference. While the U.S. government has moved away from discriminatory practices in the workplace through the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, tribal governments rely on Native preference in their hiring. The purpose of tribal governments is to serve their members and a key way to meet this goal is to provide employment for tribal citizens. STA's Employee Handbook states:

STA does not discriminate on any basis prohibited by law applicable to STA ... However, preference in hiring is given in the following order: 1) STA Tribal Citizens, 2) members of any other Alaska Native Tribe, 3) members of any other federally recognized Indian tribe, 4) [non-Indian spouse] and 5) other candidates.

For some, Native hiring preferences conjure up a stereotype that Native Americans have special privileges that other Americans don't get. The assumption that Natives take more than their share of public services fuels these ideas. Some people falsely believe that Natives live off monthly government checks, implying that they are too lazy to go out and earn the money themselves. Some also think that Native Americans are exempt from paying taxes, implying that they are not fully participating United States citizens. This suite of stereotypes encourages the mistaken idea that Natives are hired over non- Natives who are always more qualified for the job.

One anonymous blogger who posted under the moniker "P.J." wrote, "I have long suspected our state of Alaska gives Native preference in their hiring process and I have always questioned, why? ... Everyone is equal here in Alaska, so what is this preference? And why so blatant, 'In Your Face' and prevalent throughout advertizing [sic ] for Native jobs!"2

People like P.J. might think that Natives are unemployed because they are lazy or entitled, unaware of the many systemic obstacles to employment. Some of these impediments are quite tangible, such as lack of access to education or to jobs in the rural villages where many Natives live. But others are more psychological, like the lingering stain of boarding school "education" that taught young Natives they would never measure up to the abilities of whites.

Native American employment preferences began in 1834 when the United States Congress mandated that "a preference shall be given to persons of Indian descent if such can be found, who are properly qualified for the execution of the duties." The language of the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act strengthened this original order through dictating that a Native person who applies for a job and meets its requirements will be hired over a non-Native person who exceeds the requirements. Finally, the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1964 made an exception in allowing Native preference in situations where federal dollars are spent for programs serving Native Americans.

No wonder people like P.J. are confused when contradictory acts of Congress permit tribes to hire tribal members over others as part of an overarching policy to eliminate racial discrimination in the workplace. P.J. does not understand that the U.S. Congress frames this issue in terms of politics and economics, not race. From the perspective of the United States government, Native hiring policy is designed to facilitate tribal ability to govern their own affairs. It is not meant to serve as an exemption, only for Native Americans, to equal opportunity law.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from So, How Long Have You Been Native? by Alexis C. Bunten. Copyright © 2015 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Univ of Nebraska Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0803234627
• ISBN 13: 9780803234628
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Lingua: Inglese
• Numero di pagine: 251
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile