The oldest of nine children, I grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in a small town called DeTour Village. The day after I married Mark Wartes, we moved to the edge of the Arctic Ocean where we lived for the next several years on a homestead in the Colville River Delta. Mark had grown up in Barrow and along the Arctic coast, the son of a missionary pastor pilot and wife. He considers the Arctic to be home. I joined him there and together we’ve had many adventures since. While living in the Arctic, our two children were born.
We were very fortunate to live on Alaska’s North Slope prior to the development of the oil fields. The lifestyle we experienced really doesn’t, and can’t, exist anymore. We lived on a remote homestead, 40 miles west of Prudhoe Bay, 20 miles north of Nuiqsut, or 180 miles east of Barrow.
Our groceries arrived on a C-46 airplane once a year in the fall. Imagine the grocery list I had! What a learning experience. Mark shared with me the grocery list he had developed over the years. I learned to do my own food ordering, expanding it considerably as a bachelor’s idea of meal planning left room for improvement. If we started to run out of something, we slowed down on that particular item or switched to a similar one that could be substituted, or just went without. Then next year we looked at what we’d run out of and decide what changes needed to be made. We mailed our food and supply list to a grocery store in Fairbanks that supplied people in bush areas. They, in turn, took our list, knowing that if they didn’t have a particular item – that they should substitute something close to it, as there wasn’t any way to contact us and ask what we’d prefer. Several grocery carts and many, many cases of food and hundreds of pounds of flour and sugar later, they boxed up all of our food, put it on pallets and transported it to the Fairbanks charter airline company that flew our food north to us.
Since this was before cell phones, you may wonder how we found out when our food and supplies were to be shipped to us, so that we would have the runway all ready, smoothed out, and packed down, with lighted flare pots along its length? In Alaska, commercial radio stations send out twice daily messages to people living the bush, messages from families stating that they’d arrived safely in town, that grandma Susie says hello, that new baby Jonathan was born, that the tundra tires we’d ordered would be shipped by mail next week. We eagerly sat by our radio awaiting word of the long anticipated flight, sometimes to be disappointed when the weather was poor and they had to turn back because of fog or wind over the Brooks Range. Then came the day that we heard the drone of the C-46 in the distance. Everyone grabbed their parka and mukluks, jumped on their snow machines, and quickly drove to the runway so that the flare pots could be lit alerting the pilot of the runway.
Imagine, several trips with the snow machine sledding supplies up the house, where we would unload the sled, separating out the perishable supplies and bringing them into the house, along with checking the unmarked boxes that may contain catsup or mayonnaise or other items that couldn’t be frozen. Then there was the mail, such a welcome event. Over the next several weeks we would open more mail each day, read magazines or newspapers with what might seem to be “stale” news, but to us was news that had happened the day before. In addition, the Alaska public library has a system where they send out 10 books each month to us, keeping track of the books they’d sent, so there would be no duplication. When we finished reading the books, we would close up the mailbag and send it back to them on the next mail flight, usually every four months.
In the spring we traveled out onto the ice pack; summers we traveled the Colville delta hunting and fishing. We stacked and gathered driftwood for winter, which we would later retrieve with snow machine, as we heated our home by driftwood. The Arctic slope has no trees. We gathered the driftwood that collected along the shores in the Harrison Bay area, wood that had drifted down the Mackenzie River in Canada and floated over into Harrison Bay.
Come fall we would travel inland hunting ducks and geese, moose, caribou, and Dall sheep, preparing ourselves for the winter. From late September to mid-November we fished for Kaktak (Arctic Cisco) with nets under the river ice, fishing for our personal and commercial use. The sale of these fish helped offset the cost of the C-46 flight that was chartered each fall, bringing in our year’s supply of food, and things such as building materials, propane, and mail. Electricity was a luxury we used on an occasional basis from a small generator. Water came from a lake, snow, or ice (depending on the season).
Imagine my wash day! Mark would spend the day before washday chopping a hole in the lake ice, a task of several hours, dipping five gallon cans into the water, and transporting these cans of water to the house by snow machine and sled, where I would transfer the water to large clean garbage cans to bring the icy water up to room temperature. The next day we would put as much water as we could into large cooking pots or containers and heating them on our barrel stove and wood burning kitchen range. Then we added this hot water to the cold water placed in our washer, so as to have a warm water wash. Next came the drying of all these wet clothes, wet laundry hung everywhere, especially with two babies in diapers. In between major washdays I washed clothes by hand in a big washtub.
The rapid expanse of oil development was fast changing our subsistence lifestyle. We moved to Fairbanks and enrolled our children in school. While raising our family and working, I continued to take the occasional course, eventually attaining my certified professional secretarial rating. This certification transferred into university credits on my transcript, and I continued, frequently one course a semester, occasionally three courses, to attain a college degree. In 1996, I earned an associate’s degree, and in 2001 I earned an interdisciplinary bachelor’s degree in Alaska Native Studies and Business at UAF, eventually in 2007 obtaining a
Masters in Cross-Cultural Studies.
I have a life-long interest in working with Indigenous peoples, personally and professionally. Presently I work at UAF with the Rural Alaska Honors Institute (RAHI), a college preparatory bridge program for rural and Alaska Native high school students. In the past I have worked with UAF Alaska Native studies, Festival of Native Arts, and the Elder-in-Residence class. In addition, I have taught Federal Indian Law at UAF. I have also served as a teaching assistant for a number of classes, including Alaska Native Education, Comparative Aboriginal Rights & Policy, Native Self-Government, and Alaska Native Elder-In-Residence.
I have been fortunate enough to travel occasionally to Native villages, many Alaska Federation of Natives conventions, Bilingual Multi-Cultural Conferences, participate in, assist with, and attend the Festival of Native Arts for the last 35+ years. I have assisted with the World Eskimo Indian Olympics, along with numerous other events such as potlucks at UAF and throughout the community, such as the Presbyterian Church Eskimo Thanksgiving feasts, Christmas feasts, Christmas Nativity Program, and many funeral potlatches.
Life has been a wonderful adventure! And, my
Masters in Cross-Cultural Studies
helped me along the way.
