Who was Julius Monroe Harkey and Kotzebue

Julius was my father, Stephen H. Hopkins’ uncle, making him my great uncle. From 1954 to 1965, he was the principal and teacher at the small native school in the Native Alaskan Village—Kotzebue—on the west coast of Alaska as well as in Savoonga on St. Lawarence Island. He was born on March 21, 1917 in Arkansas to Julius Wellington Cromwell Harkey and Nettie Lou Mathews. He married my great aunt, Opal Fowler, in 1942 at Fort Towson, Choctaw, Oklahoma. Opal was the third great-granddaughter of Choctaw Chief Thomas LeFlore, who led his tribe on the Trail of Tears from Florida to Oklahoma.

Opal lived in Kotzebue with Julius until his death of a heart attack in 1965. Opal had sent my father a telegram letting him know of his death and would he please come help her fly him home to be buried at Garvin, McCurtain County, Oklahoma. He was only 48 years old. They never had any children and to my knowledge Aunt Opal never married again. At one time I had that telegram, but I misplaced it at the time of this publication.

Around 1991, after Opal’s death in 1990, she had a lot of Julius’ things sent to my father when he was living in Lewiston, Idaho. There were pictures, thousands of slides, eight-millimeter films Julius took, and about a dozen or so manuscripts written by him. I have most of the slides from those pictures I’m having converted to CD. When I publish this as an eBook and in print, some the photos he took will be put in that book. Fascinating to see the Eskimo’s way of life during that time from his point of view—a white man of German descent looking in.

There were about six foil boxes full of slides, also. Those eight-millimeter films and those foil boxes I had donated to the University of Alaska in Fairbanks when I was living in Sitka, Alaska; and that collection can be seen on their website. I kept the manuscripts to put them in book form, so what you are reading are those he wrote. Ninety-nine percent of his writing is his own. I only edited where I thought there might be some misunderstanding or where I couldn’t read his handwriting from his own edits, or words he used I had never seen or heard before and had to look up to make sure the use and spelling were correct; I may have missed some. Please keep in mind these stories, musings, and observations were his own and written before 1964!

I had heard he tried to get a lot of his manuscripts published, I believe as short stories, but they never came to fruition, except possibly one but I’ve found no evidence it was. So, what you are reading are his stories. I hope you find enjoyment in reading them as I have. Though he lived in Kotzebue, some of his writings are about other small Alaskan villages throughout the west coast of Alaska, including a story titled, ‘The Ragged Rim of Yesterday’, about a village on the island of St. Lawrence not far from the Russian border.

“There’s no point in painting a gentle picture; this not a gentle land.” Julius Harkey

Kotzebue

Kotzebue sits squarely at the crossroads of yesterday and tomorrow, bereft of the dignity of one, experimenting with the sophistication of the other, it enjoys the established security of neither. It is a strange mixture of the antique and the atomic, the modern and medieval.

Consequently, it is a collection of vague indecision and contrast, of selfishness and selflessness, of all the vices and most of the virtues known to man liberally combined with a few of both that are particularly our own.

Kotzebue’s story is of the Eskimo, the prospector, the trapper, the trader. Of bush pilots and preachers and polar bear hunters. Of little white whales and caribou herds stretching darkly out of sight to the horizon. Of fishes and friendship and bitter enmity all wrapped up in a neat package of Arctic environment tucked cozily out of sight inside the pocket of the Circle.

The 1960 census shows a total population, both native and white, of nearly 1200 people in a ratio of about five to one predominantly native. It is a sprawling, unlovely settlement. From the Federal Aviation Administration unit on one end, past the hospital and school and the B and R Tug and Barge Company, to Nellie Henry’s, the last house on the other, the village stretches a two-mile line of shacks and stores and log cabins and more pretentious dwellings along a strip of low, gravelly beach land fronting north on Kotzebue Sound.

Front Street, the main thoroughfare and business center, is a narrow roadway between houses and stores, which line it on one side and the waterfront, and gives the street its name on the other. Barely able to accommodate the traffic of a dozen trucks and cars the village boasts, Front Street is typical of the “Last Frontier”.

Saturday nights are a variable beehive of activity—much of it inebriated. Celebrations of this sort vary both in degree and number of celebrants in direct proportion to the amount of money available. Both the movie theaters, Stumpy’s Café, Archie’s Pool Hall and Café, and Steve’s Restaurant are the local night spots. Any night of the year will find them buzzing.

Theoretically, in the face of such evidence, Kotzebue is ‘dry’ by local option; but even the most optimistic are compelled to admit to a little ‘dampness’ in spots.

At times during the long winter, when nights are separated one from the next by no more than a thin thread of token daylight, the aurora spreads its weird, wonderful dance across the cold heavens. When the lights are most active, sled dogs howl their ageless protest of the mystery. Superstitious Natives huddle in their cramped cabins, half-fearful, because of the old, half-amused because of the new.

Two short centuries cannot undo the training of ten thousand years. Legends passed down through a thousand generations gathered about guttering seals for oil lamps are not forgotten in a day nor are they discredited because of dubious new learning.

Any Eskimo old enough to understand the spoken word knows the Northern Lights are a personification of quiescent malevolence always ready to wreak vengeance if aroused by insult.

Long ago, one of their number dared the “Lights” by whistling at them and suffered the loss of his head as they swooped in anger and took it off as a plaything. And the People remember. Even today, whistling at the Lights is the height of foolhardiness. What happened once may well happen again; so, they learned to live in peaceful co-existence. This, time has taught them. This, and many other secrets, we do not know.

Although the Eskimos wear white man’s clothes and eat his food, it is from preference, not necessity. For this is “Eskimo Land”. Yet they still know how to tan the skins of seals and caribou for boots and pants and parkas; and every season the land and seas offer food, often with prodigal abandon.

From the hills, caribou in the hundreds. From the lakes and rivers, fishes are taken by the hundred thousands—salmon, and Dolly Varden and the unique shee; seals and oogruk from the sea is plenty. Soon, after the ice break-up in the spring, beluga whales become the dietary mainstay carrying over into the season of ducks and geese and other migratory foul. Creatures, all of which, are considered edible.

Contrary to popular southerly opinion, Eskimo Country is not one of frozen, lifeless desolation. Nature is lavish with her children, and except for rare periods of isolated instances or areas, food has never been a problem for natives. Such as it is, nature provides in abundance. We should remember, too, that eating is a necessity with the Eskimos, not necessarily a pleasure; and although seal oil and blubber and frozen flesh or fish seem small fare to us, such substantial foods adequately provide the nourishment and energy essential to strenuous activity in a cold land, and are pleasing enough to palates conditioned to the menu from birth.

In no other facet of their existence is the environment and the personality of the people better reflected than in their food and eating habits. They eat whatever is available when they are hungry. In neither their preparation nor consumption have they ever displayed any great amount of culinary imagination. Most foods are eaten frozen or as is. Cooking is limited almost wholly to boiling and is rarely ever seasoned or prepared in combination. Eskimo ‘ice cream’ is the single exception, and although it is a misnomer—for it’s neither ice or cream—it displays some ingenuity and inventiveness.

Basically, this purely native food, is a combination of hand-homogenized animal fats to which has been added raw frozen fish or any the half-frozen or so indigenous wild berries. However, there are enough variations in the type of quantity of fats used and the proportion of fish or berries (black, blue or salmon) necessary to perfect to satisfy the most experimentally-minded Eskimo housewife.