User:Yksin/Sandbox

Work in progress for Peter Kalifornsky

Birth and family background
Peter Kalifornsky was born October 12, 1911 at Unhghenesditnu ("last creek down"), or Kalifornsky village, a Dena’ina Indian village on the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska. Kalifornsky village was situated on a bluff overlooking Cook Inlet four miles north of the mouth of the Kasilof River, about ten miles south of Kenai. At the time of Kalifornsky’s birth his grandfather, Alexsay Kalifornsky, was chief of the village, which consisted of probably five or six families totaling thirty to forty people in a half-dozen houses. The village also had a Russian Orthodox chapel called the Chapel of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary, which reportedly was built single-handedly by Aleksay Kalifornsky.

The first Kalifornsky and the founding of Kalifornsky village
Kalifornsky was the great-great-grandson of the village’s founder, the first Kalifornsky, whose Dena’ina name was Qadanalchen ("acts quickly," literally "bounces up and out"). According to a story passed down in the Kalifornsky family, Qadanalchen had been the son of the chief of Ski’tuk, the original Dena’ina village at mouth of Kenai River where the town of Kenai is now situated. Born in about 1776, Qadanalchen was around 15 years old when the Russians landed in the Kenai area in 1791. Relations between the Dena’ina and the Russians were not good. The oppressive tactics of the Lebedev Company under the leadership of Grigorii Konovalov were resented by the Dena’ina, and in 1797 they went to war. By 1799 they had driven the Russians away.

But some contact between Russians and Dena’ina must have continued, because in about 1812 Qadanalchen, now about 36, sailed aboard a Russian ship to Fort Ross, the southernmost outpost of Russian America. Fort Ross, located in California north of San Francisco, had been founded as an agricultural colony to grow wheat and other foodstuffs for Russia’s Alaska settlements. Most laborers at Fort Ross were Alaska Natives. It’s not known whether Qadanalchen went to California voluntarily, but he apparently longed for home. A song attributed to him was published in 1991 in his great-great-grandson’s last book:

The story as passed down in the Kalifornsky family was that as Qadanalchen sang this song, he would take some soil out of a bag he had brought with him from his home and rub it on the soles of his feet. This was a traditional Dena’ina antidote for homesickness.

While at Fort Ross, Qadanalchen was baptized into the Russian Orthodox faith and also began to learn to write. When he returned home in about 1821, his father, the chief of Ski’tuk, had died and the village asked him to become the new chief. But apparently a faction in the village would not accept a Russian Orthodox chief, and Qadanalchen refused to give up his faith. Qadanalchen left Ski’tuk with family and friends and founded a new village called Unhghenesditnu ("last creek down"), so named because it was at the last creek north of the Kasilof River. The village was also called Kalifornsky village, after the name Qadanalchen was given on his return — Kalifornsky, the Russian version of "Californian."

Family
Peter Kalifornsky was of the fifth generation of the Kalifornsky family that lived in the village. His great grandfather Feodore Kalifornsky (1826-1896), grandfather Aleksay Kalifornsky (Oct. 1867-1926), and father Nikolai Kalifornsky (1884-1965) were all born in Kalifornsky village. Kalifornsky’s mother, Agrafena Chickalusion Kalifornsky, was from the Tulchina clan of Dena’ina who lived on the western side of Cook Inlet. Her brothers were Theodore, Max, and Simeon Chickalusion. Kalifornsky's older sister Mary was born in 1909. As an adult she married a Danish adventurer and fox farmer named Louie Nissen (1886-1973) and became a ticket agent for Pacific Northern Airlines.

Agrafena Kalifornsky died in about 1913 or 1914 of influenza. Years later Peter Kalifornsky’s older sister Mary Nissen remembered leaving Kalifornsky village after their mother’s death, walking up the beach to Kenai, and then growing up there passed from auntie to auntie. Kalifornsky, too, remembered being cared for by women he remembered only as "my aunties." He remembered his mother not at all.

Early cultural education
Shortly after Kalifornsky's maternal uncle Theodore Chickalusion married in 1917, Kalifornsky, then about 6 years old, went to live with him. Chickalusion was chief of the Dena’ina on western side of Cook Inlet in the 1910s-1920s, and lived at Polly Creek north of Tuxedni Bay and also at the village of Kustatan, depending on the season.

In matrilineal Dena'ina society, Chickalusion, as Kalifornsky's maternal uncle, or bez’a, was responsible to act as his nephew's mentor. However, he had a year-round contract to cut fish trap poles for Alaska Packers Association, and was often away from home. In consequence, much of Kalifornsky's early cultural education came from Chickalusion's father-in-law, an elderly man named Niłk’dghułneshen (“one who gathers potlatch gifts”), also known as Old Man Karp.

Kalifornsky later recalled, “Old Man Karp raised me in the real old-time Dena’ina way.” Karp would wake him early in the morning to do running, jumping, and strength exercises. He taught him trapping, hunting, fishing, and woodsmanship. Karp also taught the boy spiritual and magical songs. “Like prayer, something like praying all the time,” Kalifornsky later remembered. “You start with the morning wake-up song, keep going with your movements all day, and then end with bedtime song.”

In the summer of 1920, Snug Harbor Canning Company had set up a factory to can clams near Polly Creek, and Alaska Native people came there to dig clams from all around Cook Inlet — Iliamna, Tyonek, Kenai, Ninilchik, Seldovia — and even from Kodiak Island in the Gulf of Alaska. The cannery paid $1.25 for a gas box of clams; Kalifornsky recalled that his uncle Theodore Chickalusion on a good day could gather twenty boxes of clams. When they weren't working, the clammers' encampment was full of activity, with games -- a stick gambling game, cards, qamuga (quoit) -- or wrestling. Men went hunting for black bear, porcupine, beaver, beluga, and seal. Kalifornsky, 9 years old, would fire up steambath for the elders. In the evening, old men gathered to tell stories — Kalifornsky's first exposure to sukdu, the traditional stories of the Dena'ina people. “Before the year 1921," Kalifornsky later wrote, "I heard those songs and stories there.” The experience left a lasting impression. "[W]hen they left," wrote Kalifornsky, "I was left alone again for the long winter, but their visit to us was my company for all winter, their stories and their songs, and the games they played."

In 1921, Kalifornsky's father remarried, and Kalifornsky went back across Cook Inlet to live again with his family and to attend school. Before he returned, Old Man Karp took him into the steam bath and performed a ceremony to cleanse the boy of the magical hunting songs he had been taught. Old Man Karp told him the old songs would confuse him and make him unhappy as he tried to lead a modern life in Kenai. Kalifornsky forgot the songs. To compensate for loss of the songs, however, Old Man Karp conducted a second ceremony to give Kalifornsky spiritual protection as he returned to Kalifornsky village and Kenai.

Further education in Kenai
Kalifornsky received five years of formal schooling in territorial schools in Kenai, meanwhile being insructed in Russian ways at Kenai's Russian Orthodox Church, where his father was a lay reader. . In the summertime he visited his grandfather Aleksay in Kalifornsky village, while in the winter his grandfather would visit Kalifornsky's family in Kenai. His family had meanwhile expanded with the birth of his half-sister Fedosia (later Fedosia Sacaloff) in March 1921. Kalifornsky's adjustment after his years with his uncle and Old Man Karp wasn't easy. "I was wild because I had been raised in the woods by myself," he later wrote, "and when I got back on this side [of Cook Inlet], I had to live a different life. I was used to Native food."

Kalifornsky continued his Denai'ina cultural education during this time under the influence of Feodore Sasha (1880-1945), a Denai'ina man known as the last of the Russian River Athabascans, who told Kalifornsky more of the traditional stories, or sukdu, of the Denai'ina people. Sasha had been born in a Dena’ina village near Cooper Landing, probably Sqilant, and moved to Kenai as young man. Sasha usually didn’t tell Kalifornsky an entire sukdu at once, but would tell only part of the story and then wait days or even weeks before telling the rest. Sasha remained an important influence in Kalifornsky's life until Sasha's death in a cabin fire in Kenai on February 17, 1945, and it was to him that Kalifornsky would dedicated his 1991 book A Dena’ina Legacy — K’tl’egh’i Sukdu: The Collected Writings of Peter Kalifornsky.

Cultural changes
The continuation of Kalifornsky's education took place within a context of rapid cultural and social change on the Kenai Peninsula. In the 1920s, the Dena'ina still practiced subsistence hunting, fishing, and gathering, but traditional ways of life were being increasingly disrupted by the operations of commercial fish canneries and the commercial mining industry and the news ways of resource control associated with those industries, which increasingly concentrated control of natural resources like fish and minerals into the hands of private individuals or corporations. The Denai'ina became disenfranchised in their own traditional lands.

The American educational system likewise brought change. Whereas the Russian-American parochial system had been tolerant of indigenous cultural practices, the American educational system as practiced in Territorial Alaska had a policy of forced assimilation, with the goal of replacing indigenous cultural ways with American values and language. The impact of forced assimilation was muddled Native identities and language extinction. Many Kenai Peninsula Dena'ina had stories of the cruelties inflicted by territorial teachers to stop them from speaking their own language. Kalifornsky himself was being beaten with a stick by a teacher for speaking Dena’ina. "My English wasn't too good," Kalifornsky later recalled, "and he hit me several times so hard it broke the skin and caused a boil."

The death of Kalifornsky village
Another force which brought change to the Dena'ina was rapid depopulation from epidemics of "white man's" diseases. Smallpox epidemics in the 1830s reduced the Dena’ina population by half, and in 1918 an influenza epidemic reduced it again by about a third. In the mid-1920s, another influenza epidemic struck the Dena'ina, killing Kalifornsky's grandfather Aleksay in 1926 and other residents of  Kalifornsky village. (Kalifornsky's stepmother, mother of Kalifornsky's half-sister Fedosia Sacaloff, died earlier in 1925, though the cause of her death is not recorded.) By 1929, the population of Kalifornsky village was too small to sustain a community, and most village residents moved to Kenai.

The 1920s epidemic also devastated other Dena’ina villages, including Kustatan, Susitna, and Knik on the west side of Cook Inlet. Among the deaths on the west side was that of Kalifornsky's uncle Theodore Chickalusion in about 1926. The villages were abandoned; survivors moved to Tyonek on the west side,  Eklutna in the north, and  Kenai in the east.

Kalifornsky village also suffered the loss of most of its buildings. Logs from the Russian Orthodox chapel, the Chapel of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary, were sold to a man in Kenai for use in building a house for $25. Kalifornsky was hired with two others to dismantle the chapel and float it up Cook Inlet to Kenai. They placed the logs on a barge, which they tied up to a piling at the fish trap of Father Pavel Shadura, the Russian Orthodox missionary to the Dena'ina during this period,, to wait for a favorable tide. But a violent storm blew up, which broke the barge loose, and the logs were scattered and lost. The Dena'ina interpreted the event to mean that the logs from a sacred building should not have been used for anything but a church.

The rest of the buildings in the village were destroyed in the early 1930s when a white homesteader was burning grass in order to improve the pasture for his horses and the fire got away from him. About half of the village site was eventually washed away by beach erosion, and by the 1970s only the cemetery, the church foundation, and a few house foundations remained.

Early working years
Now living permanently in Kenai, Kalifornsky combined itinerant wage-work with subsistence hunting and fishing. In the wintertime he worked a trapline at Gene Lake in the Swanson River area that had previously been worked by his father. . Summers he variously worked as a carpenter, cannery hand, and commercial fisherman, and also built dories.

Marriage and family
In 1938, he married Agrafena Sacaloff (1910-1960), a Dena’ina from Seldovia, with whom he had a son, Sam Holstrom (1934-1995). He also helped raise her daughter, Eva Holstrom Lorenzo.

World War II and postwar
But Kalifornsky was seldom at home. In 1941 he worked as rock driller on the Alaska Railroad helping to drill tunnels on the Portage-to- Whittier track, once suffering a crushed hip in a rock slide. He recovered from the injury, but frequently suffered arthritic pain throughout his life. .

During World War II, after the Japanese attack on Dutch Harbor in June 1942, Kalifornsky worked on military construction projects on Amchitka Island in the Aleutian Islands. He then returned to Whittier to work on widening the Alaska Railroad tunnel. In spring 1945 he went to work at the PAF cannery in Naknek, and that fall returned to Kenai, this time staying home for awhile. An event of great personal significance to Kalifornsky also occurred in 1945: the death on February 17 of Feodore Sasha in a cabin fire in Kenai.

After his return to Kenai, Kalifornsky went back to building dories, working on boat and house repair, and whatever other work he could find, including working for the Alaska Road Commission on a highway out of Kenai.

Changes to Dena'ina life
World War II and the postwar era brought further change to the Kenai Peninsula. Kenai went from being a small village to a small city. It became connected to the state road system with completion of the Sterling Highway in 1950. An influx of homesteaders, many of them former GIs, led to the transfer of large tracts of land into private hands, making those lands unavailable for traditional Dena'ina subsistence uses, and the formation of the  Kenai National Moose Range in 1941 also had an impact on the subsistence lifestyle. In 1951, work on Wildwood Army Station (later Wildwood Air Force Station) brought construction jobs and military families to the area, and the 1957 discovery of oil in the Swanson River area led to Kenai becoming a petroleum refining center by the 1960s. For the first time, the Kenai area had what Lance Petersen in his musical drama The Ballad of Kenai referred to as “winter paychecks," representing the transition from a subsistence to a cash economy. Some Dena'ina transitioned from traditional subsistence lifestyles to working in the commercial salmon industry or the local oil patch, but others were overcome by depression, alcoholism, and the problems that stemmed from them.

Religious changes also occurred. The Slavic Gospel Association, with a goal of countering the teachings of the Russian Orthodox Church among Kenai's Native population, established the first Protestant church in Kenai in 1942. The organization's efforts, and the growth of other Christian denominations in the Kenai area, led to religious divisions amongst the Dena'ina.

Hard times
In 1956–1957, Kalifornsky spent sixteen months in the Laurel Beach Sanitarium in Seattle with tuberculosis. There he met Albert Wassillie (1922–1989) of Nondalton, Alaska, who had also been hospitalized for tuberculosis. A speaker of the Inland dialect of Dena'ina, Wassillie went on to become a prolific writer in Dena'ina.

After his release from the hospital in 1957, Kalifornsky returned to Kenai to an empty house stripped of furniture, the windows broken out, and the door off its hinges,, though there was still a stove. Additionally, his wife had left him. Kalifornsky received assistance from a friend, a school bus driver named Dan France, who gave him the hindquarter of a moose, groceries, and household items such as blankets, dishes, and pots. Kalifornsky built France a dory, for which he was well-paid.. Through the late 1950s and much of the 1960s, Kalifornsky got along with odd jobs such as building dories or boat repair. He gave up fishing in 1960 because of arthritis, and eventually arthritis pain forced him into unemployment. He went on food stamps and, later, on welfare.

Becoming a writer
The early 1970s saw the beginning of a cultural revival among the Dena’ina of the Kenai Peninsula, in part influenced by efforts statewide by Alaska Natives to settle land claims, a movement which culminated in the 1971 passage of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. Kenai Native Association, Salamatof Native Association, and the Kenaitze Indian Tribe were formed around this time.

In 1972, Kalifornsky and other Dena'ina elders in Kenai met to plan a potluck ceremony — the first to be held on the Kenai Peninsula in decades — and found words, phrases, and song fragments springing back into their collective memory. Kalifornsky's English-language explanation of the potlatch, which was held on March 4, 1972, was his first cultural writing. Around this time also Kalifornsky obtained in a dream the melody for the first part of his potlatch song, “Hqetitl’ K’elik’a Ch’tunik’nasdzeden, The Potlatch Song of the Lonely Man,” which laments the impacts of colonialism on the Dena’ina people.

In May 1972, James Kari, a linguist with the Alaska Native Language Center at University of Alaska Fairbanks traveled to the Kenai Peninsula on his first field trip to study the Dena'ina language. He met Kalifornsky on June 2, 1972, and worked that year with him and three other Kenai people — Kalifornsky's younger half-sister Fedosia Sacaloff, Ephem Baktuit (1909–1973), and Bertha Monfor (1907–1974). They, along with Kalifornsky's older sister Mary Nissen, were the only remaining people on the Kenai Peninsula who could speak the Outer Inlet dialect of Dena'ina. Kari did most of his work with Kalifornsky and his sister Fedosia Sacaloff, recording place name information, word lists, noun vocabulary, and data on the complex Dena’ina verb. Kalifornsky also recorded or dictated four short stories and some songs.

Kari returned to Kenai in September 1973, grappling with the phonetics and orthography of written Dena’ina. He told Kalifornsky that the Dena'ina language could be written and encouraged him to try. By 1974, Kalifornsky was writing in Dena'ina. He began his first Dena’ina notebook around January 1974, when he accompanied James Kari on a visit to Tyonek. As recalled later by Alan Boraas, an anthropologist at Kenai Peninsula College who also worked closely with Kalifornsky, writing was, for Kalifornsky, “an instrument to probe Dena’ina phonetic and morphological structure.” Kalifornsky "would write pages of words that began with a certain sound to illustrate phonological patterns, or write variations of a particular verb to examine the grammar."

Kalifornsky also began to write sukdu, or traditional stories. His stories "K’eła Sukdu, The Mouse Story" and "Ch’enlahi Sukdu, The Gambling Story," both published in 1974 by the Alaska Native Languages Center, were the first stories published in the Dena'ina language. Just as the use of the Dena'ina language had declined, so had the telling of sukdu, and Kalifornsky often had to work out the plots of stories some of which had hadn't heard for fifty years or more. In 1974, as Kalifornsky was becoming increasingly literate in Dena'ina, the second part of his potlatch song came to him. “When he performs it," Alan Boraas wrote in his 1991 biography of Kalifornsky, "he breaks into a lively, upbeat, cheerful chant”.

Kalifornsky often discussed what he was working on with other Dena'ina speakers, including his stepbrother Peter Constantine, his cousin Maxim Chickalusion and Maxim's wife Nellie Chickalusion, all of Tyonek; Dena'ina writer Albert Wassillie of Nondalton, whom he had met during his 1956–1957 hospitalization in Seattle for tuberculosis; Chief Mike Alex of Eklutna; Antone Evan of Nondalton; and especially his sister Fedosia Sacaloff, who herself made notable contributions to study of the Dena'ina language. Sacaloff, who was blind from birth,, was a balanced trilingual in Dena’ina, Russian (her second language), and English. . She also contributed much of the information on Dena'ina plantlore and medicinal practices included in Priscilla Russell Kari's ethnobotany Tanaina Plantlore, Dena'ina K'et'una.

Teaching
In 1974, Wildwood Air Force Station was conveyed to Kenai Native Association in partial settlement of  Alaska Native land claims. That spring, Kalifornsky started a small Dena’ina language class at Wildwood and became a teacher along with his sister Fedosia Sacaloff and with Bertha Monfor. Kalifornsky wrote lesson materials, stories, and translations for the class. He continued teaching through much of the remained of his life, at Wildwood, later through the Kenaitze Indian Tribe, and from 1989 to 1991 as an adjunct instructor at Kenai Peninsula College. He also made many presentations to school groups and community organizations.

Kalifornsky's work was part of a larger effort by the Dena'ina to maintain their language. Dena'ina Qanaga (Dena'ina Language Society) was founded in Kenai in September 1973, and 1974–1975 saw the start of bilingual programs in schools in Tyonek, Pedro Bay, and Nondalton.

Rediscovering Kalifornsky village
After beginning his work as a writer in Dena'ina, Kalifornsky decided to look for the village of his birth. By 1974 there was a road, then known as Kalifonsky Beach Road (i.e., the name Kalifornsky but missing the r), leading south from Kenai towards Kalifornsky village. However, there had been no road in the 1920s, when Kalifornsky had last been there, and he didn't know his way there from the road. Rather than driving, he set out on a hike down the Cook Inlet beach until he found the creek that had given the village its Dena'ina name, Unhghenesditnu ("last creek down"). He followed the stream up the bluff, pushing through brush and young trees, until he came upon the collapsed remains of the spirit house he had built for his grandfather's grave many years before.

By that time, about half of the village site had been washed away by erosion to the bluff above the beach, and all that remained were the cemetery, the church foundation, and a few house foundations. Kalifornsky set out on his own to restore the cemetery. Shortly thereafter Kalifornsky met Alan Boraas, an anthropologist at Kenai Peninsula College who approached Kalifornsky and his sister Mary Nissen for permission to undertake an archaeological dig at the village site. "Even though the borough owned the land," Boraas later recalled, "it was the right thing to do. Peter and Mary and I sat down, and she grilled me like a graduate record exam." Kalifornsky and Nissen gave their permission for the dig, but did impose some restrictions, which Boraas and his team respected. Boraas went on to become an important friend and collaborator of Kalifornsky's.

At the the time of the rediscovery of Kalifornsky village, the Cook Inlet coast south of Kenai had come to be known as Kalifonsky Beach, without an “r,” due to a transcription error by a U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey mapmaker in 1916. Likewise, the road south from Kenai that passed near the village site was called Kalifonsky Beach Road. A proposal in 1976 before the State Board of Geographic Names to restore the "r" was rejected. In 1979, the Kenai Peninsula Borough attempted to sell village site as scenic bluff frontage property, over even the protests of Father Macarius Targonsky, Kenai’s Orthodox priest. The sale was halted by a judge for an unrelated reason, but the controversy generated by the attempted sale led to wider knowledge of the story of Qadanalchen and the village's origin. In 1981, the state board reversed itself and restored the “r,” making "Kalifornsky" the official usage for the beach and road.

In 1981, Kalifornsky’s niece Mary Ann Tweedy, daughter of his sister Mary Nissen, was placed in charge of a crew employed by Kenaitze Indian Tribe to clean up the Kalifornsky village cemetery. They cleared brush, improved the trail to the village site, and built a picket fence around cemetery. Crosses, including some made by Kalifornsky, now mark graves that had been marked by spirit houses, and a Russian Orthodox ceremony was conducted each September to bless the dead and reconsecrate the chapel grounds.