To the Bright Edge of the World

by Eowyn Ivey

It is remarkable how we go on. All that we come to know and witness and endure, yet our hearts keep beating, our faith persists.

You’re living the long repercussions of the Colonel and his men. I suppose you’ve got to feel some loss and mourning over that, and now you’re left trying to preserve your culture. Nothing is as simple as we’d like to make it out.

what makes the question of cultural loss the most uncomfortable, and difficult for me to address, are the inherent definitions built into it. If a group of people is described as existing in a state of loss, it is necessarily therefore lesser, and those that took greater. It’s such a limiting and two-dimensional idea.

There are some important and hard questions to be asked of history in Alaska. Native children were abused for many years by missionaries and teachers at territorial government schools. How do those effects trickle down through generations? How do we help families get out of patterns of alcoholism and addiction and domestic violence? These are real problems. But when we use terms like subjugation and loss and the desire to ‘preserve culture’, it devalues and limits people in a way that I don’t think is accurate. You shouldn’t assume my opinions represent how everyone feels, though. Even within my own circle of friends and family, you’ll find twenty different opinions on one subject.

I think there’s this tendency to lump people together, to think that all people who look like this or come from this background must think the same.