If We Yield, We Find Our Essence:

A Conversation with Ernestine Hayes

Although often labeled “memoirs,” Ernestine Hayes’s Blonde Indian and The Tao of Raven are part of a much larger and more complex project. They intertwine her own experiences of growing up in Juneau with the invented stories of Old Tom and Young Tom, characters whose often tragic lives echo those of many of the people she has known. Layered atop these stories, too, comes that of the folkloric figure Raven. While these many levels may disorient someone raised to believe in genre classifications, “readers may come to agree,” Hayes told us, “that writing that is categorized as fiction most often contains more truth than writing categorized as fact.” It is that truth that she seeks in her writing.

Students in my course “Coal, Oil, Nuclear: Narrative Afterlives” at Bryn Mawr College spoke with Hayes in October while on a nine-day trip to Southeast Alaska. Her words challenged us to reconsider various truths, whether concerning western classification systems or the concept of “place” and our relationship to it. 

- José Vergara

Participants: Ella Allan-Rahill, Lindsay Damon, Kira Elliott, Sarah Fernandez, Selby Hearth, Maya Hicks, Isabelle Stid, Aashna Dolwani, Nisha Marino, Miya Matsumune, Clio Morbello, Bryn Osborne, Emma Rideout-Mann, Joel Schlosser, Carin Silkaitis, José Vergara, Aidan York

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Lindsay Damon: How did your travels through California, Nevada, and Washington impact you? Did they shape your views on your identity or home?

Ernestine Hayes: Even in my days of somewhere else, I found places I could love, and every place I touched and every place that touched me, from the Sierra Nevada to the city, from Yosemite Falls to the Tenderloin, was clearly a place that people could love, and did love, and called home. Being back home now allows me to appreciate the elsewhere places I wandered, to remember sliding off a boulder into the Yuba River, to remember people-watching on Market Street, to remember the sound of thunder. All my memories of place are full of motion and not viewscape. Memories of place are constructed of the energy—the emotion—our singular, unique human emotional response to the energy of that place. Our memories, our thoughts, our being, are made of energy and emotion of those remembered moments.

Emma Rideout-Mann: What would you say to someone who might not understand or feel the call of place through their own experiences? Would you encourage them to explore their fondest or most transformative places in order to discover the call of place?

EH: Although we think places call us—call us home, call us to adventure, call us to love and war and duty—it’s more precise to think that it is an anticipated emotional response that calls us. Place itself simply is; it exists and is autonomous without reference to humans. The call of place we experience is like an imagined call of water. Water, like land and like place, is alive, has spirit, and possesses no inherent quality other than that of being. The human thirst for water, for meaning, for identity, for place, does not reach the essence of those things. When I say I was called home — I was called by my memories of this place, by my memories of Mountain and Bear and Wind.

It’s helpful to remember that, like all things, “call” has an opposite that gives it meaning. There are places that call us and there are places that counsel us to stay away. What we term the “call of place” can be more fully understood within that balanced frame. This is not to say that place does not possess agency. Rather, the agency of place exists without specific reference to humans. As Abram suggests in Spell of the Sensuous, our human purpose might simply be to perceive and respond to our world — this world, our place in this reality.

Our perceptions and response are human experiences. Place can perhaps be understood to be the spiritual essence of the land. For example, might I, after returning to my clan lifetime after lifetime, incarnation upon incarnation, become part of that essence? Has the essence of my grandmother, her body buried decades ago in the old graveyard downtown, or her grandmother, ashes long passed into unknown earth, or her grandmother and all the grandmothers and grandfathers before them, all the blood, all the laughter, all their once-embodied perceptions, has the energy of those beings, of my ancestors, become part of the essence of this singular land, this Lingít Aaní, this place?

Sarah Elizabeth Fernandez: How do non-human objects help frame natural elements in your experiences? 

EH: Studying the effects of human practices, policies, presumptions on the land edifies and instructs insofar as correcting the consequences of human behavior. Viewing place through the same anthropocentric (capitalist, colonial, patriarchal, western) lens, maintains a colonial gaze that disallows Indigenous perceptions. Inherent qualities are not measured through a colonial lens. We mustn’t attempt to examine essence by means of temporal process. Because of the Eurocentric, patriarchal, capitalist, manifest-destiny schooling we have all received in this society, it’s necessary to step back from the lens through which we have all been trained to gaze and contemplate the personhood of rivers, and forests, and land, and place.

Indigenous cultures, languages, art emerge from and express place. Study the place itself, study its seasons, its reciprocity and balance, its interconnections. Lessons we learn from place include balance, reciprocity, persistence, adaptation, similarity, life, energy, seasons, cycles. We rightly spend all our lifetimes learning—and learning from—this world.

Miya Matsumune: When do you feel that written words are effective in sharing stories, and when are they not enough?

EH: Writing and oral tradition are two different things. The oral tradition of this place memorializes human histories that took place ten thousand years ago. Specific clan histories tell of traveling over ice at Chilkat and under the ice at Stikine. Clothed in metaphor and filled with symbolism, oral tradition keeps history, affirms legal claims, guides behavior, preserves knowledge, and strengthens community. Even ancient Raven stories tell the histories of place.

Nisha Marino: How has your teaching experience influenced your writing? How do you see the relationship between academics and storytelling, especially as it relates to Native traditions?

EH: My grandmother didn’t tell me stories in the sense of storytelling. She told me truths. She showed me things. She showed me how to feed seagulls and how to listen to the wind. She described to me my relation to everything in the living world. She didn’t tell me stories. Storytelling, like so many words in the colonial vocabulary, carries an intentional connotation. As does the word prehistory. And the word literate. But as far as telling stories (not storytelling): everything is a story. Our lives are stories telling themselves. Histories and seasons are stories. Story is human communication. We live our stories.

My grandmother didn’t ever end her stories with “And that’s why I told you…” Some of the lessons I only realized decades later, right? I think that’s an Indigenous way of teaching, to leave it open, and you chew on it for as long as it takes. You know, now that I think of it, she might’ve been telling me to do that so that I wouldn’t be showing fear, right?

LD: On that note, when we were talking and working with Outer Coast students, they used the Axe Handle curriculum, which is a place-centered framework for education. There’s this list of questions, and one of them is, “How do you communicate with your elders?” I was wondering if you could say more about that, about hearing stories as a way to communicate. How are you now communicating as an elder?

EH: I’m doing the same that my grandmother did with me when I was really young and living with her. Like I said earlier, she never sat me down and instructed me, and she never told me a story, like, “Okay, it’s bedtime, I’m going to talk about the woman who married…” You know, nothing like that, but she said things to me and she described things to me. Here’s an example. She always told me that the Taku Wind was my grandfather. I grew up believing that, and in some way, like we said earlier, that place is a spiritual reflection of the land itself. I just believed that the wind was my grandfather. But I knew it wasn’t physical, but however you believe that. And I never thought more of it. I loved the Taku Wind; it seems to be disappearing now. We don’t see it as much or hear it as much. But a couple years ago I was digging around, I guess on the Sealaska website or somewhere, and I found out that my grandfather was T’aaku ḵwáan. He’s from the Taku region just like the people from here are A’akw ḵwáan. My grandfather was T’aaku ḵwáan, and that’s what she was talking about, but she let me believe, and I—obviously that was intentional, right?—that was the way she not only told me my relation with my grandfather but also used that to show me relation with place. So, I try to do that. I’m not explaining why we believe or see things. I just say, “There it is, huh? There it is.” Another one: when I was twelve, my grandmother suggested to me to wear a sailor hat, and so I did. I just started running around wearing a sailor hat, you know? And then it wasn’t until I came back in my forties that I learned that Kaagwaantaan women are known as Yanwaashaa. Originally the term applied to women involved in an incident that took place in Chilkoot territory around Haines and Klukwan, in which it is said that U.S. Navy (or affiliated) did harm to Tlingit men after which Kaagwaantaan women boarded the boat and claimed the uniform as their crest. At a subsequent koo.eex' in Sitka, the term was extended to all Kaagwaantaan women, who wear “sailor boy hats” to demonstrate their ownership of the crest. The leader of the Yanwaashaa wears a Navy uniform. She didn’t tell me that; she just said wear a hat and left it up to me to learn the rest of it. I really feel like that’s probably a more common way to teach the next generation. Maybe it brings them in more? I know Native writing is often said to be open-ended like that. They don’t say, “And they lived happily ever after.” They leave it for you to figure out, so I think that’s what I do. But I certainly wonder.

Kira Elliott: Why memoirs? How does the medium of a memoir best support the work you are producing? 

EH: Memoir is a genre in the western classification system. Western systems like to categorize and separate and label and determine what can be included and, more importantly, what can be excluded. Stepping away from imposed labels to weave memories and histories and song and stories, blend concepts and ideas, link images and patterns, seems closer to the way human beings connect thoughts. Young Tom and Old Tom’s stories echo one another’s, and my story echoes theirs. We all went to Haines House, none of us knew our own language, we all made trouble and got in trouble, and we were poor, and we dropped out of school, and we drank. We lived that repeated, intergenerational, too familiar colonized story. Readers may come to agree that writing that is categorized as fiction most often contains more truth than writing categorized as fact.

Aidan York: Your writing contains metaphors regarding the pandemic and masking. How do you believe the pandemic has exacerbated issues of erasure for Indigenous people? Has it had unique impacts on your community that may not be present in other communities?

EH: There can be many comparisons made between colonialism and the pandemic; colonialism exacerbated Indigenous erasure, each area endured unique harm and indignities, each region suffered losses singular to the experience of that place, futures like no other were lost. There may be readers who go on to think of other similarities: disease, isolation, rumors, loss. It’s the purpose of white institutions to tell us who we are: to tell me who I am and tell you who you are. Movies, textbooks, fashions, language, especially in earlier days, in territorial days, identity, sent clear messages and shaped my self-image.

Maya Hicks: How do you believe white institutions shaped your identity as an indigenous woman?

EH: Most of my accomplishments and recognition have taken place in the white world. I’m still caught between worlds; I still live at the margins, whether by choice or circumstance, so in that way I suppose it can be said that the part of my identity that has been shaped by my experiences in this life have been shaped by white institutions. But it must also be that those institutions didn’t reach the essence of who I am, and in that sense, it must be that I am like place, and so are you, and so are we all.

NM: Your words about being on the edge of or between worlds really touched me. How do you navigate a constantly marginal identity in your personal and professional life?

EH: As a fatherless child in the Juneau Indian Village, judged and avoided, I lived at the margins of both worlds, edge of the Village, excluded from all sides for every reason. Luckily, as the only child of a single mother, I learned to be a loner, hermit, recluse. I find security in being alone.

Clio Morbello: What you’ve been saying about how your grandmother taught you by telling you stories and leaving them open ended I think speaks to a decolonial idea of place as simply “being” itself regardless of human interactions. Because these stories exist on their own, regardless of any type of lesson that might be intended to be communicated with you at the time of telling. So, when you were talking about a decolonial idea of place, I was thinking about other ways of being decolonial, like walking through a forest without a direct purpose. We were given this assignment to walk and find a “friend” in the woods, and I think other people were saying this, too, that there was a sense of it being an assignment, something you could do “right.” So, I was trying to decide whether my own urge to take care of myself is driven by a colonial view. Do I want to fully understand myself in a way that’s going to lead me astray? Or is there a benefit to recognizing that there’s an essence of myself that I can’t reach by buying the right skincare products? I’m curious if you have thoughts on the essence of things that are maybe not directly related to place and how colonialism has touched the “essence of something” in general. 

EH: We can’t reach our essence. We don’t reach it by reaching for it. One of the most difficult things that I’ve been learning as an old person is, I think the answer to so many things is just yielding. If we yield, we find our essence. And it might, or I think it must be, the same as when you go into the forest on an assignment to find a certain thing. Really, leave that behind and simply be, the way we said it was for place, for water and so on, and simply be. And that’s the part that takes yielding. Or just letting go and simply being. And I think that’s how it comes. It’s not difficult in one sense. The difficulty is just letting go, and that’s the hard part. But once that happens, then the rest just happens on its own. Did you find a tree? 

CM: I kept walking. I didn’t do the assignment. The assignment was to sit in one place for ten minutes, and I didn’t end up doing that. But I did walk for ten minutes. 

EH: You can find that by walking, right? You can find the same thing by walking. One of the things I do for SHI is take a look at the curricula they’re developing and kind of audit them for cultural literacy. One of the things was go into the forest and adopt it. And that’s not what we want, we don’t want to adopt the tree, and I’m not sure if we necessarily want to make a friend. I told them you cannot ask the students to adopt a tree because that reinforces the western hierarchy. They ended up having the students go be near a tree and be quiet around it. Feel its presence or something. Rather than to put one of our labels on it: “I adopt you,” or “Will you be my friend?” or anything like that. It might also be looking at it through a lens that makes it more difficult than it should be. I’ve only felt the presence of a tree I would say no more than three or four times in my life. And not because I’m tapping it, because… you just feel it. 

AY: I’m a geology major, so I found your comment about the intersection between geologic history and the end of the Pleistocene, and the relation with Indigenous stories particularly interesting. How have the unnatural changes of human climate change affected present-day Indigenous culture? Is there any sort of consensus about the situation?

EH: Are you going downtown to Sealaska at some point? You’ll see all the totems if you haven’t already, and they just installed twelve new ones, called Kootéeyaa Deiyí, Totem Walk. It occurred to me, when all that was happening and they were bringing the totems in, the carvers, and the artists, and all these totems were laying flat while the artists were putting finishing touches. It was this fabulous, wonderful thing that was happening, and I thought, “You know, we really should have an oral tradition about this.” We really need to continue our oral tradition, even though we have writing now, we need to keep this history. I tried to peddle it, I tried to sell it, but nobody would buy it, so I’m thinking it’s going to happen anyway, right? We’re going to get to a point where we talk about when we were colonized, we talk about ANCSA, we talk about these things that are occurring. We keep that history by means of oral tradition. And I think that’s going to happen. I hope so.

Ella Allan-Rahill: I was wondering, Ernestine, if you have principles for us to take with us about how to live in an anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist way?

EH: I was talking to some art teachers the other day, and I listed some things that we need to push back on. We’re schooled in this culture, in this education system, in the media, and everything we’re exposed to, we’re schooled to believe certain things. We’re schooled to believe that Indigenous cultures were not sophisticated enough to develop the systems needed for a culture to persist for thousands of years. We need to push back against that. We need to, at every opportunity, correct someone or, or bring it up that Indigenous cultures already had developed systems of education, health, trade, science. For example, scientific process is not exclusive to Western knowledge. All humans develop knowledge by observing, asking a question, developing a hypothesis, testing it, right? That’s how humans learn! But we are schooled to believe that the scientific process belongs to Western education. So we need to push back against that, all the time. There are other messages we receive, colonial messages that we need to always be the one to speak out against — a lot of those colonial messages that are in place to maintain the hierarchy that exists now. Speak up if something needs to be said, and there’s no one else saying it; it’s on you. You have to say something.

MM: We spoke with Yeidikook’áa at Outer Coast about how there’s been a cultural revival recently with more Lingít people learning about their culture. I was wondering whether you’ve seen or experienced that yourself?

EH: Well, clearly my experience was different from others because I grew up in the territory, but when I came back I started college here at the age of fifty. I only signed up for a two-year program, because that’s all Lingít Haida would help me with, but I stayed after two years. I went back and joined a bachelor’s degree program because I wasn’t finished. I didn’t feel like I was finished. And then, after, things happened, and I ended up going to Anchorage to get my MFA and then came back here and started as an adjunct here at this college in 2003. At the time, there were a couple other Native professors, but they all left, and it didn’t take long that I was the only one, and the whole time I was here I was the only Indigenous person teaching GER classes. The other Native people were teaching Native stuff; they weren’t teaching general knowledge. But at the time, when I was the only Native person here teaching, the language was dying. I was convinced it was moribund, and in fact it was — no one was learning it as a first language. I remember having a conversation about that with Robin Walz, who was a history teacher. I was telling him, “Oh, you know, it’s gone, because it’s moribund, because no one is learning it as a first language.” Then Lance Twitchell came to town. He brought back the language. He brought it back. Anything I might’ve thought about the direction we were headed was because I was looking back on my path, right? The truth is that something happened, and I’m convinced that bringing back the language here at UAS was a very important part of it. 

I think another essential part of it is in the person of a woman named Rosita Worl. Had it not been for her, I don’t think Lance could’ve done it on his own. Because of one powerful woman who had a vision of education, language, art, kootéeyaa, everything—she has a vision for everything—she turned it around. I believe she turned it around. But I also believe she was able to do it because it was her time. Right? It was time. It was time, and she was there, and there it is. 

I can look around and see. It’s all different. When I got here, I was thinking, “Yeah, right, you know, I’m the only Native here, look at this,” and I had a hard time with a lot of stuff, but we are in a different direction, and I don’t know how they’re doing it in Sitka, but here in Juneau, if people won’t give the land back, Lingít Haida’s going to buy it back. Right? Buying it back, SHI is buying it back. We’re buying back the land, right? And the art and the ceremony and the language… I think Juneau is a blue town in a red state and I think we’re going to lead the nation. I really think so.

I’d like to close with these questions: when I see myself walking toward me, who is that other self? Why must I embrace my other self? When I embrace that image, am I embracing my past selves, or have I been only one self throughout all those lifetimes? And I end with the call that ends all my talks: Decolonize. Undo capitalism. Smash the patriarchy. Condemn racism. Rematriate. Resist.