A Poetry of Place: Nome, Alaska / Part 2 of 3.
grandmother’s eye.”
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Here in Alaska, I have mostly worked as a teacher in high-needs, remote village schools. Nome Elementary School is also a trauma-informed school. The student population is mainly Alaska Indigenous. Many of these students are impacted by multi-generational trauma, which is similar for most “Bush” schools.
Teachers are first responders in the classroom as students, feeling safe, express a wide-range of emotions and behaviors responding to that trauma. This is one reason art is a significant element in my weekly lesson planning, as is creative writing.
When I taught PreK and Kindergarten in Metlaktla, in the Annette Islands (Southern Alaska), the only Indian Reservation in all of Alaska, I taught my students how to create small chapbooks utilizing their emergent writing skills.
I cut magazine photos out so they could choose a few and write stories (one or two sentences with 3-5 words) about each image. Most of my students were members of the Tsimshian tribal community. If they were going to be successful with this lesson, they needed the creative freedom to write stories that spoke of their cultural heritage.
I remember one student had glued a small picture of an alligator on his writing paper. Near the alligator he drew and colored a man. A few inches to the right, he drew a fox. When we sat together for a mini-conference and to talk about his work, I asked him about each image.
He told me the man was his father and the alligator was going to attack him. The boy said he transformed himself into a fox to protect his father. He told me his grandfather had told him that he had once transformed himself into a bear when he needed to hunt for more food for his family.
That was why he thought he could turn himself into a fox as he needed to make sure his dad was safe. I thanked him for explaining it all to me and to continue his good work. He finished his book by the end of the week, the due date. It was his best work since the beginning of the school year.
When I taught in Nome last year, many of my students faced hardships, some extreme. I knew that if I wanted my students to write, I needed to listen to their stories first told out loud; to invite them to visit me at my desk during snack or lunch time so as to share their thoughts and ideas. Then, when they told me they had nothing to write about during that period of the day, I would remind them of one of the stories they told me, affirming their authorship.
I heard such fascinating and culturally rich stories from my second graders who waited at my desk eager to share. Two told me about the Beings that had no lips and lived under the beach. If you weren’t careful where you walked, they would grab your ankles and pull you under. Another told me his great-grandmother, who had lived in Nome all of her life, spoke of the See-Thru fish; you could see their insides as you could look right through them.
One day, three students came to my desk. They said they felt bad that I was allergic to shellfish because crabbing was such a big part of Nome subsistence life. They thought about how I could enjoy the taste of crab without getting sick. They had figured it out.
They each took turns talking. They told me what I should do. I should get the head of a cod and boil it in water till the eyes whitened over. Next, take one of my fingers and dig out an eye. Then, pop that in my mouth and taste the best crab flavor ever! One moved closer to me and added, “I know this sounds gross to people who aren’t from here, but maybe you could close your eyes when you dig out the eye with your finger.”
I asked them to write it all down into a story and add drawings. When they finished, they shared it with the entire class. Many quickly raised their hands and without waiting said, “Yes! That tastes so good!” Oral storytelling became written narratives and recorded cultural history.
It was at the end of a school day when a student came to tell me about his grandmother who had a goldfish swimming in one of her eyes. He pressed his palms together to show me how that fish swam from one corner of her eye and back again.
I asked him if I could write a poem about this goldfish, never questioning what he described or saw. I told him I would add other bits and piece from things I myself had experienced and from stories others had told me to create that poem. He said he was the teacher now, and yes to my poetry idea. I agreed that he had taught me much.
I knew when he first told me his grandmother had a fish in her eye that she had the same gold fleck that my grandmother, Bertha Willamena, had in her’s from glaucoma. But, she didn’t call it a goldfish. She called it gold-leaf. The poem I wrote is below.
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Fin and Gill
I teach
young children
who often
stop by my desk
wanting to tell me
their yet silenced
sightings or stories.
I listen.
That’s why
they come.
One of my
students
said to me
just last week,
“My grandma
is bothered by
her one blue eye.
Her second eye
is brown, just
like mine.
That eye
never bothers her.
Neither do I.”
Too, he said,
“A fish swims
in that one
blue eye.”
I asked him if
it was salmon
or halibut,
Alaska’s most
noted fish.
“No,” he replied.
“That fish is
a goldfish.”
My grandmother,
Bertha Willamena,
we called her
Bertie for short,
had a yellow fleck
in her left eye
that was large
enough to make
a Nome gold
panner happy.
But, it wasn’t
gold or fish.
It was pigmentary
glaucoma.
Bertie said,
“My Bible has
gold leaf and
so does my eye.”
The boy
clasped his hands
and zig-zagged
them left to right
to show me how
that goldfish swam
from one corner
of the eye
to the other,
and back again.
That tickle
of fin and gill is why
she was always
rubbing it:
goldfish, gold leaf,
grandmother’s eye.
Susan Slocum Dyer / © SSD
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