Racing Toward Recovery. Lew Freedman

came to our school. They talked about the American Indian Movement and sovereignty. They really got me thinking when they talked about the history of how the federal government had treated Indians and Alaska Natives. They said, “It’s not right. We need to change that. We need to take our land back. We need to take our rights back. We’ve lost them so far.” What was interesting was that the United States was involved in a war in South Vietnam at the time and they seemed to be making waves.

      I was wondering, Gee, how come these guys are saying that? I was strongly affected by it. Most of the Native people I knew were not like that. Our people were healthy. They weren’t like that stereotype. I thought, We’re better than that. I also did a lot of reading, books like Custer Died for Your Sins, and read about the Wounded Knee Movement.

      Russell Means and Dennis Banks made a big impression on me and they were right. American Indians had lost their land and they wanted to reclaim some of that land. The American government broke every promise it made to Indians. It broke every treaty.

      My senior year was a turning point for my life. It raised my consciousness. I became much more socially aware. I had liked playing sports and I had fun doing it. When I made the change to becoming student body president my last year in high school that one thing became a big part of my life. That time period led me to the rest of my life. Yes, I do like dog mushing and remain involved in that sport, but becoming student body president and having those experiences helped me for the next thirty or forty years.

      That year I threw myself full blast into politics and government and issues. I gained so much awareness. It was never the same for me after that.

       CHAPTER 4

      What I learned during that year, after being student body president, after starting those programs, after the reading I did, and after hearing Russell Means and Dennis Banks, was that if I invested my time in good programs I could change attitudes. I wanted to change the idea that drunken Indians were no good. I wanted to overcome that image. We did a good job of it there at school, but I wanted to continue it.

      To me it meant that if I am a drunken Indian I am a loser. I wanted us to feel good about who we were and who we were as Eskimos and Alaska Natives. That year was empowering.

      I graduated from high school at Chemawa in 1972 and at that point I wanted to become a coach. I wanted to coach a football team, a basketball team, or become a physical education teacher. That was my goal. That was my thinking. I thought I could use my athletic background in a career and do good things for young people, as well. I wanted to work with young people and help others.

      My plan was to attend Oregon College of Education in Monmouth, Oregon, which is now Western Oregon University. I wanted to earn a degree in education so I could teach and coach at the high school level. I thought I would be able to play football there, too, which I wanted to do. I wanted to get back to football. My junior year in high school I had made All-State. But I knew I could still play at that level.

      Only one thing happened. I got drafted right after high school. By then my brother Ted was in the army. He had been drafted and sent to Vietnam. I was very close to Frank because he tutored me so much when I was a boy. He influenced me in everything, hunting, fishing, and everything else. He was a mentor. But Ted was, too.

      Ted was another tough kid. He was the one who taught me how to box. We made boxing gloves out of socks and were hitting each other. We grew up boxing a lot. My mom got tired of us using the socks that way so we bought some boxing gloves from one of the catalogs.

      We got pretty serious about the boxing and one time I punched Ted really hard and loosened his teeth. He fell backwards and was kind of knocked out for a while. Even if you are boxing with your brother you have to protect yourself at all times—that’s the first rule of boxing—and you’ve got to fight to the max or you’ll get it. You don’t back down on anybody. You fight. You don’t let them beat you. You beat them. That really helped me.

      Only we were doing all of this fighting in the house. My mother was not thrilled about it at all. Later, Ted and I were in high school together. He was two grades ahead of me. He had some wonderful friends from Hydaburg in Southeast and we always had good friends from Akiak with us in high school. We stuck together and we stuck up for each other, so nobody bothered us. We defended ourselves if we had to and we kicked butt in high school.

      So Ted got drafted and I got drafted and sent to South Korea. Ted went into combat, into the war, and I didn’t. When he got out of the army and returned to Akiak he had post-traumatic stress disorder. He had survived the bullets, but he couldn’t stand being back in Akiak. He had nightmares from all of the killings. He survived that, survived enemy bullets, but he couldn’t survive alcohol. We actually ended up coming back to Akiak at almost exactly the same time, except that he came from Vietnam and I came from South Korea.

      Frank taught me a lot when I was younger, but I was close with all of my brothers. Walter was one of the top sprint mushers in the Bethel region. He was the best in the west, you might say. In 1983 he competed in the Iditarod and finished in thirty-first place. That year Rick Mackey won and the race was still slower. It took longer than twelve days to take first place. Walter finished in over fifteen days.

      For a while after that I kept asking him if he wanted to keep running the Iditarod and he said he did not. He said, “No, Mike, you do it. I’ll just run the Kuskokwim 300.” And that’s what he did. He won all of the races around here for about ten years, the short ones and the middle- distance ones. For us, the Kusko 300 in Bethel, which everyone thinks of as the best and biggest middle-distance race, was even more important than the Iditarod.

      Walter won all kinds of races in the area. All of our friends and family were there to watch him and he didn’t have to travel to Anchorage to the starting line. He never captured the title in the Kusko 300, but he finished fourth twice. Walter really specialized in the village sprint races. He won the best sprint race in Bethel three years in a row. We went to Dillingham and he won that.

      When we were kids we all pretty much did the same chores. Some of those chores involved taking care of the dogs. We trained the dogs at a young age. We took care of their feeding. We took care of their health. My dad usually had trained dogs to use for transportation by the time the pups grew up. We made leaders out of them. We did all the chores that needed to be done around the dog yard and we also helped with the hunting and fishing. Walter was a top racer and my brother Gerald—he was one of my favorite brothers—always helped me learn how to do things in the dog yard. He was my handyman fixing things when they broke.

      Once, when we were small, Gerald threw an open can at me and it landed here on my eye. I still have a mark. I don’t remember what he was mad about. I think it was a can of beef stew and the top cut me. It did some bleeding for a while. But Gerald was the one who helped me fish and we did a lot of fish tendering together for the local fish processor. We fished at the same time and that’s how we made our money. He was always there for me.

      Timmy Jr. was the youngest and he did the same thing as all of us. He did some work in the house and he helped raise the puppies. In a sense we were all trainers of the dogs. Fred, too. All six of the boys worked with the dogs and ran dogs.

      When we were young my family attended the Moravian Church. My mom and dad and everybody in the village went to church on Sundays. It was our religion, but it was also a social occasion to bring everyone together. We didn’t have TV and we didn’t have extracurricular activities in town, so everybody went to church on Sundays. We did it consistently and we did it year-round. That helped make for a strong community, I think.

      There was a strong belief in God. My parents wanted us to respect the God who controls all of the universe and all that he made. That is what they told us and what they taught us. Every week we had Sunday school teachers. Sunday was a very respected day in my family. My mom and dad did not want us to do anything on Sunday except to rest. That’s what we did. It was a rest day. We didn’t go out hunting or fishing. That was a big influence on me. The Elders were consistent with my mother