July 2021 – Page 3 – Alan Skeoch

July 8, 2021September 9, 2021

EPISODE 383 MEET MOSES LORD…INDIGENOUS PERSON, YUKON TERRITORY, 1962

Our Yukon job in 1961 was my closest relationship with first nations people…mostly

Northern Tuchone from their Mayo Landing Reserve.

This is Moses Lord having canned peaches for lunch on the job. He seemed to

be an important person among his people.

“Do you want to crawl into an old mine?”

“Sure do.”

“Then come along with Dinky and me…I”ll bring a lantern.”

(Strange, I do not remember Moses ever calling me Alan…)

alan skeoch

July 2021

MEET MOSES LORD

My two previous indigenous person stories were based on short

meetings. Very short…maybe 5 minutes max. Enough time to make

a lasting impression on me but really not enough time to make into a big

deal. Hell, the first contact was not even with a real indigenous person. In that

incident I was mistaken for a First Nations person. “Look, there’s an Indian up

on that rock outcrop. Take a picture, quick.” It was m sitting on the outcrop…skins

bed brown by exposure.

The second incident lacked humour. An incident of which I am not proud…even

at the time in May, 1960, I was uneasy with what I had done. I took pictures

that would have been best not taken. Unflatteirng pictures.

Now is the time for my third experience with First Nations people. Much much longer.

Moses Lord and I worked together from May to September, off and on. He was one

of our employees. Not hired because he was indigenous. Just hired from the available

labour pool in Mayo Landing, Yukon Territory.

The only way I knew he was aboriginal was because of his name. Moses Lord had

the clear ring of an imposed name given by some kind of Christian missionary .

Moses was old enough to be my father…I was 22 and he seemed somewhere between

50 and 60.

Now I wonder if he had been one of the native children yanked from their

parens aNd put in a kind of prison known as a ‘residential school’. That thought

never crossed my mind in 1962. I did not even know much about residential schools.

The subject never came up during the whole summer.

Moses was a nice man to work with. Friendly. Once he knew I was interested in

finding abandoned placer gold mines dating back to the end of the 19th century

he showed me one that we could explore. Most placer gold mines were vertical..i.e.

miners dug down through the permafrost to bed rock where gold nuggets and

gold dust was possibly trapped in the cracks or faults in the rock. A few were

horizontal where miners had tunnelled into hillsides. The one that Moses

showed me was fantastic as the tunnel was festooned with ice crystals and seemed

a fairyland. At one point we even found well worn shovels and pickaxes.

So I considered myself close to Moses. When I began writing this episode I expected

to say how a warm relationship was established. That would be an overstatement.

Granted we got along well although

it must have been hard for Moses who was perhaps 50 years of age having to do what

a 22 year old ‘boss’ decided was necessary.

In retrospect I realize we were not close. Friends…yes. But I had no idea whether Moses was Northern Tuchone

like most local First Nations were. Most but not all. I knew nothing of his family except he lived in a house

on the reserve ‘that seems filled with women of all ages’. He was married…had children…perhaps

grandchildren but I never asked about them. In other words there was social distance between

us. This was not intentional. Perhaps due to respect… for I noticed other First Nation workers seemed to

defer to Moses. “Dinky” for instance who is in the mine tunnel with Moses. Dinky had a trap line…Moses related how

a wolverine crawled down the stove pipe of Dinky’s cabin…vicious, solitary creatures. Dinky never said a word.

When the job was over and I was packing up our equipment in September one of the local

people…I think it was Moses…said:

“How would you like a set of caribou antlers?”

“Love to pay for a set.”

“No pay. There is a set leaning against our house…you can have them.”

And I still have them.

Caribou antlers. I never saw a wild caribou in all my years doing mining exploration.

DINKY with Moses (shoulder)…huge fire with lots of moss

piled on to get smoke … our defence against the flies.

Decades later, around 1980 I was asked to do a radio story on CBC

about something related to the Yukon and I mentioned Moses. When

the broadcast was over i was called to the broadcast booth. “Call for

you, Alan…from the Yukon.” One of Moses Lord’s daughtert wanted to

say thank you for mentioning her dad. Maybe we were closer than I thought.

SOURCE COMMENT…RE NA-SHO YAK DUN….FIRST NATION PEOPLE IN MAYO LANDING

The First Nation of Na-Cho Nyäk Dun represents the most northerly community of the Northern Tutchone language and culture group. In the Northern Tutchone language the Stewart River is called Na Cho Nyak, meaning Big River.

Historically, the First Nation of Na-Cho Nyäk Dun lived and trapped throughout the area, using the rich supply of game animals, fish, birds, and numerous plants for food and for medicinal purposes.

Their lifestyle required traveling throughout the First Nation’s traditional territory at various times of the year, for hunting, fishing, and gathering food to survive.

Today, the Na-Cho Nyäk Dun has a membership of 602. As a self-governing First Nation, the First Nation has the ability to develop and adopt laws on behalf of their citizens and their Settlement lands.

They are actively involved in affairs of the Mayo community to promote a better, healthier lifestyle for its future generations and a strong economy based on its rich natural resources.

July 6, 2021September 9, 2021

EPISODE 382 GARDENING WITH BLACK PLASTIC (Tarpaulins) AND OLD TIRES…

EPISODE 382 GARDENING WITH BLACK PLASTIC AND OLD TIRES…

Alan skeoch

July 2021

Gardening is a sport that we always seem to lose. Our weeds race vertically

faster than our garden plants. Eventually we give up and either

abandon the garden to the winning weeds or decide to get revenge

by driving the John Deere lawn mower over everything.

We usually have a bit of joy as the race begins. Like our

row of Zinnias this year and our cosmos jungle where the

weeds cannot get a foothold.

There is a solution. A pathway to victory. Not pretty. First let’s look at the

gardens on July 1…before the weeds….just to see if the race is worth the effort.

Zinnias are treasures

Gardens spotted here and there make skeins of shorn grass interesting.

Pond gardens require no work at all

Cosmos know how to beat weeds…crowd them…feed the weed their elbows.

Nest year we are planning a whole garden of zinnias…alongside the cosmos.

strawberries are an early crop…B.W. (before weeds)

“Alan, did Marjorie grow these berries?”

“Truth be told. No. We bought them but thought they

looked good in this story.”

“Can we trust other stories then?”

“Allow for a little padding now and then…but, yes,

I try to keep the stories honest…buttressed by pictures that do not lie.”

“Those strawberries are a picture.”

“Right. That’s why I am being honest. So you can trust my stories.”

“Do you grow strawberries?”

“Yes…as you will see.”

We grow strawberries in a giant plastic tub…only way they can win.

Dasies know how to make an ancient dump rake look like a fine carriage…daisies come

to bloom early…no help needed.

There has to be some kind of reward for wild tiger lillies. When tender flowers

fail, Tiger Lillies come to the rescue and bloom longer.

EXPERIMENT: Will the hand seeded Sweet Clover suppress the weeds.

We will keep you informed. This crop was planned to help the bees…am I

misled?

Some weeds I love.

Find three gardens here…two with the weeds starting to dominate.

why not let the weeds dominate…

This garden looks good right now but the weeds are poking through….

And now for the big experiment. Ugly for sure…..

we spread big sheets of black plastic sheeting… covered the ground. “Let’s deny the weeds light…

no chance for photosynthesis. Then cut holes to plant

our prize corps. The weeds were being denied sunlight. Death in the dark under the tarp.

In other case we planted beets in a big wooden crate…three feet above

the ground.

And then we gathered old rubber tires to hold the tarp down and provide nests for

the cucumbers, tomatoes, squash, pumpkins, gourds to thrive.

Pretty? Not very. Some late germinate cucumbers in a truck tire fortress.

Old cattle troughs with garish bedsteads are homes to red onions and yellow bush beans.

And big plastic bins on movable skids are growing places for parsley, thyme, oregano,

celery, tomatoes, peppers…etc.etc. When the weeds get too big we will pick

up the skids with the bob cat and settle the pots where weeds have been mowed.

Sounds stupid, I know.

Where did I get the idea? From our son Andrew who has constructed his garden

in such a way that the plastic sheet is not ugly and the old car and truck tires

are clothed in edible plant life. Then he harrows the periphery with the tractor.

Father copying son.

alan

Coming soon…Part 3 of indigenous contacts…The story of Moses Lord…a father

figure working for a 22 year old ‘boss’. Must have been hard to take but Moses kept

things cheerful.

July 4, 2021September 9, 2021

EPISODE 381 MEMORIES OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLE: THE ALASKA INCIDENT 1960…ILL CONSIDERED PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN

alan skeoch

July 3, 2021

THIS IS A STORY ABOUT THE PICTURE BELOW…A YUPIK COUPLE ON THE EDGE OF THE BERING SEA

Should I have taken the picture (Below) ? I am not sure. In the back of mY mind at the time I wondered if my actions

were appropriate and that thought has stayed with me for 60 years. After much searching I found the picture

and replicated it below. The Yupiks were very friendly, perhaps a little inebriated…perhaps not. The Yupik people

are Inuit. Their territory covers the vast barren southwest corner of Alaska…fronting on the Bering Sea north of

the Aleutian Chain. Dillingham, Alaska…a salmon fishing and canning centre. Called a City but really barely a town.

Over one tenth of the population live below the poverty line. Crime is high. Those facts have not changed in the

last 60 years.

In 1960, I was quite unaware of Dillingham. I had never heard of a Yupik.

“Alan, you will be going to Alaska

on a Turam job…wear some good clothes to impress our Humble Oil contractors…searching for copper…Our crew will

be setting up diamond drill sites. Big project, there will be two Sikorsky helicopters at the campsite. Bottom line!

You guys have make a good impression.”

MAKING A GOOD IMPRESSION

Time has passed, I can say more about the job now. Dr. Paterson got us all Green Cards which meant we had skills that no one else in the United States had.

Partly true. Bill Morrison taught us all we needed to know about the Turam method of detecting mineral conductors deep under

overburden. Simple put, we were trained to use a motor generator and a mile of copper shielded cable to push an electrical

current into the ground and take readings of that current on a grid. If there was a conductor …i.e. a great lump of chalcopyrite

under the ground… then we could detect an ‘anomaly’ that just might be important.

Were we important people? Specially trained? Who were we really? Three of us were students at

the University of Toronto…Don VanEvery, Ian Rutherford and Alan Skeoch…two maths and physics

student and one history student. (What the hell was a history student doing here? Good question.

I preferred to keep that part of my background invisible.) Bill Morrison was the Turam expert and

I became his assistant. Called ‘field men’…i.e. no engineering degrees. The brains of our team

were Dr. John Stam, a true geophysicist, and Mike Chinnery, a recent geophysical grad from England.

Were we important people. Felt that way even if it was a bluff. One thing for sure was that we seemed

important people to the two Yupik residents sitting on a wooden stoop

in a town that to me in 1960, was unremarkable save for its salmon cannery and huge pile of beer bottles in the garbage dump.

IMPORTANT PEOPLE!

For some strange reason be landed in Saskatoon en route to Anchorage, Alaska.

Even now so many years later this photo confirms our self importance. Don VanEvery,

Ian Rutherford and Mike Chinnery. Geophysical prospectors. Suits!!

In the Ancharage airpot diner I ordered ‘Milk Toast’ for breakfast because it sounded sophisticated.

Turned out to be baby food which gave the team a laugh.

Leaving Anchorage we boarded a smaller prop driven passenger plane…a Fokker F 27.

“Well , boys, we

can now say we flew in a Fokker.”

“Are not all airplanes Fokkers at one tome or another.”

(laughter)

We flew over the Alaskan

Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes where the crust of the earth is thin and the seething cauldron of molten

stone beneath us comes to the surface.

We flew westward for a couple of hours or more. Beneath us the land looked empty. Then a strange thing

happened. At least in my memory it was strange. A crew member came back and hand cranked down the the landing

gear. The F 27 could land on water as well as land. Hand cranked? Why? had the hydraulics failed?

Ah, yes, the passenger terminal at Dillingham, Alaska, in 1960. That could have been

a farmers’ drive shed back in Ontario but, here, in Dillingham it was the contact point with

the outside world.

Mike Chinnery and Alan Skeoch have kept up the pomposity four U.ofT. blazers. Ian and Don have relaxed.

We only stayed in Dillingham for an hour or so. Just enough time for us to meet the two Yupik people and a chance

to see a Yupik fish camp on the edge of the Bering Sea where we had our fuel dump.

The S 52’s were revving up when I ran to the beach to get this photo. Why were the hanging carcasses of

split salmon not bright red? Simple answer. Because they were covered with flies.

At some point we met the Yupik man and wife. At that point I took their picture. Talk about aggorgance.

…self-importance…rudeness…holier than thou thinking.

Everything was moving so fast. At the time I thought we would meet

many indigenous people. Wrong. These two were the onlyYupiks we

saw on the whole summer job.

Isn’t that strange? Why were the indigenous people so invisible?

Then we spent the summer being ferried by helicopter here and there across the empty space of SW Alaska. We never even spotted

another Yupik.

Bill Morrison with the Turam console…

Bill Morrison expected me to help him with his main love…fishing. We could fish while the midnight sun shone.

Of course this is an exaggeration.

A barren land cut by occasional river valleys. Thousands of years ago the Yupik people crossed here from Siberia.

ALASKA 1960: There were 31 of us on the job…25 American diamond

drillers and 6 Canadians using a Turam geophysical instrument to site drill sites in the great

emptiness of south west Alaska…north of the Aleutian Chain.

What I do remember clearly is that three of us, Canadians, proudly sported our University of Toronto dress

jackets. Anglo Canadians with specialized knowledge. Proud and arrogrant we must have appeared.

We only had a few minutes in Dillingham before we

were to be ferried by big Sikorsky helicopters to our tent campsite in the interior.

I did not think. Sitting on the doorstep in the village were two indigenous people. Likely Yupik. A Man and his wife…older…

perhaps in their 60’s. Both seemed either super friendly or somewhat inebriated. Without asking I took their picture. Think about that. These two Inigenous

Americans were treated like I had been years earlier in a rock outcrop in northern Quebec…subjects of photography.

In this case, however, I was the photographer just like the priest and his carload on the Opemiska road.

For the rest of the summer on the barren lands we never saw a native person. Yet this was their home.

None were part of our crews. They were the only indigenous people we met. WE flew in…did our

survey…and flew out. I never even asked their names.

Somewhere I have another picture. Not proud of it. When the Yupik man got up to shake my hand he

fell flat on his face. I helped him to his feet and asked one of our crew to take picture of us.

I was wearing my University of Toronto dress jacket. He was wearing the clothes you see in the picture.

Even then, back in late May 1960, I felt uncomfortable about that picture. I had crossed a line. Violated

a trust. Exploited a situation.

Today, in the bright lights of awareness of others, I would not have taken those pictures.

What should I have done? The same thing that most people would have done…pretended

these indigenous people did not exist. Which is worse?

alan skeoch

July 2021

WHO ARE THE YUPIK PEOPLE?

Population[edit]

The Central Alaskan Yup’ik people are by far the most numerous of the various Alaska Native groups. They speak the Central Alaskan Yup’ik language, a member of the Eskimo–Aleut family of languages.

As of the 2002 U.S. Census, the Yupik population in the United States numbered more than 24,000,^[4] of whom more than 22,000 lived in Alaska, the vast majority in the seventy or so communities in the traditional Yup’ik

July 2, 2021September 9, 2021

EPISODE 379 MEMORIES OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLE , CANADA DAY 2021″ “LOOK, THERE’S AN INDIAN…GET YOUR CAMERA.”

(Beginning…short series on my meetings with indigenous Canadians )

EPISODE 379 MEMORIES OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLE ON CANADA DAY 2021: “LOOK, THERE’S AN INDIAN…GET YOUR CAMERA.”

alan skeoch

July 1, 2021

In my ten years of summer work in mining exploration I met many indigenous Canadians and two indigenous Americans. In retrospect

the experience is unsettling.,,but also joyful. Mostly joyful.

This is the closest photo I can find to illustrate a strange experience in late summer 1967…Northern Quebec.

My experience with indigenous Canadians is episodic … i.e. discrete stories unrelated to each other

but collectively important to me on this Canada Day 2021.

1) Summer 1957: I had been working in a tent camp near Chibougamau, northern Quebec for two months. Outdoor work

slogging through our Canadian coniferous forests. Tough work. No time for the niceties of civilized life

like a haircut or a bath in soapy water. Our crew was flown out to an old logging camp on the Opemiska

road…a wide gravel road where mining trucks had the right of way and precious few cars ever travelled.

Early One sunshine filled evening I climbed up on a rock outcrop overlooking the roadway. In a cloud of dust

a car came barreling along. Passed me by. Then braked and backed up. A priest got out along with

some well dressed passengers with cameras.

“Look up there…that is an Indian…take pictures if you want.”

They were looking at me then snapped a few pictures. And then they were gone. That was my earliest experience

with native people. I was the native person. I was caught on camera as if I was a moose or black bear that had

crept out of the forest. Yes, it was amusing. But in the back of my brain it was also unsettling. WhyWere native people

treated this way…i.e. ‘Things’ to be photographed then ignored?

And what made me look like an ‘Indian’? My skin was now dark…like leather. My hair was uncut. My skin a bernished leather.

I had given up the war with insect cannibals…let them have their victory if they could chew their way through smoke filled pores.

I was part of the forest. An oddity…a shadow. My existence was entertainment…captured then forgotten.

That moment in 1957 remains crystal clear in my memory. There was something about the moment ,,,those cameras snapping.

Something disconcerting. At the time, however, it was just amusing. “Look, there’s an Indian up there on the rock.”

Our crew of ten men were all Anglo-Canadians. That is we were all English speaking. Our linecutting crew,

on the other hand, was all Franco-Canadian. French speaking. Our two crews did not talk to each other. We lived

in the two solitudes of Canadian life.

What was missing? There were no indigenous Canadians on either crew. At least none to my mind. Yet not many

miles to the North West was the Mistassini Reserve…a large population of English speaking native people..

Chibougamau was a boom town. Miners…lots of them. Young men mostly with a few prostitutes available at

$20 a throw. All this was very surprising to me for I was just a Grade 11 high school student from Toronto. Voltaire’s

Candide as it were.

Where were our indigenous Canadians in this hurly burly world of Chibougamau? Where were they? They were not present.

They may have been here and there in the forested fringe but I never met one…never saw one….then I became one.

Where were they? This is…was… their land. Why were some of them not working the bush trails they

must have known so well. Why was a Toronto high school student doing the job.

Now it is year 2021 and I have never heard an answer. Where were they?

NEXT: PART TWO … BARREN LAND OF WEST ALASKA

THE ONLY time we were ever armed as geophysical exploration teams was the Alaska job.

But I remember meeting two Yupik indigenous people more than I remember this

rifle meant to scare off Kodiak bears. The memory of first contact with Yupiks does not

reflect well on me. Remember I was just a kid. The contact was fleeting but in retrospect

disconcerting. Coming in Episode 380

July 2, 2021September 9, 2021

EPISODE 379 MEMORIES OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLE , CANADA DAY 2021″ “LOOK, THERE’S AN INDIAN…GET YOUR CAMERA.”

(Beginning…short series on my meetings with indigenous Canadians )

EPISODE 379 MEMORIES OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLE ON CANADA DAY 2021: “LOOK, THERE’S AN INDIAN…GET YOUR CAMERA.”

alan skeoch

July 1, 2021

In my ten years of summer work in mining exploration I met many indigenous Canadians and two indigenous Americans. In retrospect

the experience is unsettling.,,but also joyful. Mostly joyful.