44 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST17, 2020
was a wooden church, as big and red
as a barn. A few hundred feet out of
town, I found a spot on the banks of
the river to pitch my tent—Camp One,
I called it.
Uncle Warren had warned that I
might “have trouble gaining the sym-
pathy of the natives,” but, I wrote in my
journal, “Everyone’s pretty friendly.” As
I set up camp, some boys came by in a
fishing launch and invited me aboard:
the salmon were running, they said, just
a few minutes upriver. After a short ride,
we pulled in at a wide bend where the
current frayed over a line of rocks. A
few dozen men lined the banks, cast-
ing and firing guns at fish as they
splashed and humped through the water.
One of the men handed me a .22 rifle
and told me to try my luck. Everyone
watched appraisingly as I took aim.
A minute later, a big pink salmon—a
“humpy,” they called it—poked its bulg-
ing back and head from the water, and
I pulled the trigger. The fish thrashed
and then turned dead on its side. When
I pulled it from the water, I saw that my
lucky shot had hit it cleanly in the head.
At Camp One that night, I fried the
salmon and put it atop a pot of rehy-
drated ramen—my first wild meal on
the island. The coffee that I made to go
with it was less successful. My camp
was only a few hundred yards from the
river mouth, and the water was as salty
as the sea.T
he photographer Edward S. Cur-
tis visited Nunivak in 1927, as part
of a project to document Native Amer-
ican cultures, and he found the island’s
Cup’ig undisturbed by Christian mis-
sionaries. In pictures, his subjects wear
furs that would have cost a fortune on
the mainland, and, often, welcoming
smiles. Curtis described them as “a
happy-looking lot,” and left hoping
that the local traditions would endure.
“Should any misguided missionary start
for this island I trust the sea will do its
duty,” he wrote. Within a decade, though,
the missionaries did come.
Matthiessen arrived in 1964, and de-
scribed the island as one of the lastAlaska Native settlements where aborig-
inal culture resisted the “iron hand” of
missionaries. There were still walrus
skulls mounted on rooftops and sled
dogs tied up on the beach. But, even
then, things were changing. “The kay-
aks are fast being replaced by outboard
skiffs, and the dog teams by the snow
sled,” he wrote. “Mekoryuk’s young men
go away now to the mainland, protest-
ing the mission ban on dancing, drink
and smoking.” When I arrived, there
were no kayaks left, and hardly a dog-
sled in sight.
One night in Mekoryuk, a young
man invited me to his house, which he
shared with his elderly mother. On a
side table, she had set up a portrait of
Jesus, surrounded by candles and pot-
ted plants. Her son nudged me to look
closely at the plants. They were mari-
juana. He didn’t think she knew what
marijuana was, he told me—but he was
sure that if he kept the plants there she’d
water them.
My host said that his mother’s gen-
eration had been converted by Chris-
tian missionaries in the years before the
Second World War. That was when the
Cup’ig’s traditional rituals, their songs
and dances, had been abandoned, and
many of their artifacts destroyed, be-
cause the missionaries had insisted that
they were sinful. It was only now, he
said, that younger Cup’ig were trying
to revive some of the old customs, be-
fore they were lost forever.
I hung around Mekoryuk for a few
days, trying to figure out how to pro-
ceed. I would walk back and forth from
Camp One to visit the store and to check
in with the local flight agent, a woman
named Marvella Shavings, to see if my
fishing rod had arrived. (It never did.)
I found a community pump where I
could fill my canteen, but the water came
out a queasy yellow. When I asked the
locals if it was safe to drink, they laughed
and said, “Yes, except if you’re pregnant.”
Most people fetched their drinking water
from upriver by boat.
I spent a lot of time at the post office,
sitting on its wooden steps composing
letters to people back home. It was there
that I met a man named Jobe Weston,
who invited me to his house, which he
said was a better place to write postcards.
“I never wrote,” I noted in my journal.
“Instead we talked, drank coffee, and