It wasn't all gays, trans genders, druggies and runaways.

There was a pretty good sized native population in Kodiak, mainly Russian Aleuts. There are no more pure Aleuts anymore. There haven't been since the very early 1900s.

While the drunks seemed to be the ones you saw downtown a lot there were a lot of hard working natives in that town.  Some kept to themselves and were pretty industrious and successful.

While the Filipino community tended to be a little more open to me, I did manage to get invited into a few Native Alaskan's homes. Like just about any Alaskan party, you brought a bottle.

Native Americans seem to have a reputation for alcoholism and I suppose it is well earned. The rate among them is high. From what I have seen I have noticed that the natives of Alaska  seem to have been hit a little harder with it than their Lower 48 counterparts. 
Personally I attribute a part of this to diet.

Historically the natives of the north are a lot more protien than the natives that grew corn and other grains. Alcohol is a grain product and grains are pretty alien to a northern Native American diet.

I could be wrong here, but it is what I tend to believe.

Still, I managed to get invited to a couple of native home grown native parties over the time I was there and recall having a great time. The time I remember best is the night an uncle of the woman that invited me played the accordion all night. He was one hell of an accordion player and they danced polkas all night. 

It was actually fun. Straight out of Lawrence Welk. I could almost picture the bubble machine in my mind. Actually the accordion player could (and did) play just about anything. He was really talented. 

Sometimes he would go straight from Lawrence Welk to AC/DC!

The other thing I noticed is that nobody seemed to have gotten really plastered. While a lot of the natives I saw downtown were often plastered,  everyone here seemed to drink responsibly. This wasn't the stereotype. 

During the few breaks in the action the matriarch sat with me and told me who was who and gave me a lot of information about the families.

She pointed out her grand daughter, a woman about five or six years older than me and told met her father was a GI stationed there during the war. She had beautiful features. My guess is that GI Joe had been of Italian extraction.

The matriarch was good to me and let me in on a lot of the town's history and dirt. 

Out in the kitchen I had a chat with my host and the subject of the Native Corporation came up. I won't get into the native corporations here but my host wasn't all that pleased with the way the one serving the Island was being run.

Apparently my host was a fisherman that ran his boat like a business which is the way an owner has to if he is to be successful. 

A fish boat IS a business. He was annoyed that the local corporation was being run by pretty much self-appointed native leaders instead of professional managers.

We both agreed that the solution was to hire someone that knew what they were doing and in the meantime ship a couple of sharp native kids off to college somewhere and get a good business education for eventual management of the corporation.

He was frank enough to admit that the natives could be their own worst enemy because they didn't really like to deal with whites if they could avoid it.  The prejudice meant that they often put natives in over their heads as managers.

I told my host about the time I had crossed swords with one of the managers of the local corporation over a damned parking space. I had parked in an unmarked space and the manager parked behind me, blocking me in.

I found him and he refused to moved. My protests that the space had been unmarked were met with "Everybody knows that it's my space."

I told him I wasn't an everybody and walked off. I simply walked over the sidewalk and waited. Then I flagged down a cop who ticketed him for double parking or some damned thing. I later heard he threatened to refuse to pay the ticket and in return was offered a night in jail.

After that I parked in that spot every chance I got.

My host was really amused by that. Apparently he didn't like the guy very much and told me that he was a classic example of someone in over his head.

I later heard that the native corporation bought a local air service (among other businesses they bought) that had been successful and promptly ran it into the ground in the course of a short time. I think that management had a hard time figuring out that all income wasn't money from heaven and that things have to be maintained and that means spending money. I was off-island when I heard that, though.

It was an interesting evening and I learned a lot. When I'd run into the family members downtown after that they greeted me warmly.

Actually I attribute my invitation to the party to the time I mouthed off to a longtime resident and embarrassed him in front of a group of natives. They didn't like him too much and the enemy of my enemy is my friend and so on.


Besides natives that stayed out of the limelight there were also a couple of bluegrass bands that met for pickin' sessions from time to time and a friend of mine that was a banjo player took me to a couple of these. 

Great music! I have always loved home grown bluegrass. The drink of choice here seemed to be bourbon, of course.

Of course there were a lot of other things like woman's clubs, Bible study groups and things I had no real interest in but others did or they would not have existed.

I mentioned being invited to the native party to a long time resident and he said he had never been invited to one although he knew they happened from time to time and asked me how I had wangled an invite.

"Right place, right time, I guess," I replied.

I have already posted here that I got along well with the Filipino community several months ago. That was a snap. All you have to do to get along with Filipinos is to show your Irish side. There's not a whole lot of difference between the Filipino community and the Irish if you look at it carefully. They like to have a few drinks and a good time.

I generally refer to the Phillipines as the Ireland of the South Seas.


During the decade I spent in Alaska I found myself in all sorts of interesting situations I never would have had happen to me anywhere else.

Actually I attribute a lot of what happened to me to treating most people with respect if they were worthy of it and looking for character and not color.



To find out why the blog is pink just cut and paste this: http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-feminine-side-blog-stays-pink.html NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED IN THE WRITING OF TODAY'S ESSAY