Audio
Jim Stimpfle
Transcript
Sue: Yes, that wouldn’t be any good. So, um—well Jim, where did it all begin?
Jim: It all began at the city dump.
Sue: At the city dump!
Jim: At the city dump. I used to go out to the city dump when we could rummage through the dump, you know, make an evening run out to the dump, you know, on a nice summer’s evening, and figure out when we could go out to the dump and kind of rummage through the dump. And, um, I noticed that the fires that would burn at the dump, the smoke would roll up and if we had an offshore wind, it would be rolling toward, you know, Russia. And at the city dump one day, I met Kevin Walsh, or Dan Walsh — the senior, the father, and the old-time Nomeite — and he said, I got to asking him, I said, “Hey Dan, what’s happening? Did they used to go to Russia in the old days, you know, what was happening?” He said, “Yeah we had traders, we had boats, and of course the Eskimo people went back and forth.” And I knew about the Eskimo people because my wife, Bernadette, when I first came to Nome, had introduced me to people like Frank Ellanna, and I used to listen to the stories about them boating up to the Diomedes and across. And, um, how, you know, they used to go across and how, you know, people would travel. And this was during the, Nome’s real estate recession, so I wasn’t selling much real estate in 1985, ’84. ’85-’86, and I had a lot of time on my hands, so I just got this bug up my yayhoo that thought, well, wouldn’t it be nice to, you know, reestablish contact across the Bering Strait. So I, um, started to, um, uh, first thing I did was, uh, the Eskimo people told me about the trading they used to do—trading sugar, tea, for goods across the Bering Strait, and meeting people. And, um, so at Bernadette’s class, her bilingual class, we, um, put together some messages, you know, written in Siberian Yupik, Russian, and English, and we had Astrid Smart in Nome who spoke a little, who knew a little Russian. So she came and translated into the Russian portion of the messages. And the whole idea, I actually started in eighty-, in November of 1986, and, uh, the first thing I did was I launched balloons across the Bering Strait filled with mostly air or carbon monoxide from the tailpipe of a car, you know, with, uh, messages written on the balloon. Thinking that something might roll across the Bering Strait and land on the Russian shore.
Sue: So these were floating balloons, not …
Jim: Floating balloons, not air balloons, just blowing across in the water, following the currents in the air. And then I went to the weather service and got some helium balloons that they used to launch weather balloons. So I got about six of those and they looked like these huge prophylactics, you know, for an elephant, that would blow up with, um, helium. And so we tied messages, made a little bag and tied ’em onto these huge rubber balloons, and then we put some helium in ’em, but I wanted to put enough helium in ’em that they wouldn’t break, you know—they rise up and break and then drop back to earth, so we weighted them down so they would kind of drift across ….
Sue: So these were in the air?
Jim: Yeah, these would be in the air, but would only reach a certain height because the helium expands and it breaks the balloon and then it drops. So we, we got the sugar, the tea, the sewing needles, the thread, all the traditional trading items, put ’em in a packet with these messages of friendship from the bilingual class in about November of 1986. And as the balloons went off-shore, as they lifted and went off-shore, it sort of came down and bounced along on the surface. And it was in the fall, in November, and the Eskimo boats were out hunting seals. And, uh, I saw the balloon go offshore with my binoculars, and then I saw this boat come up to the balloon and grab it and bring it onshore and pop the balloon and drag it into the boat. And I was watching on shore from the jetty area, and then the boat turned around and sped down the coast. I got in my car and followed down the road toward Fort Davis. The boats comes ashore and it’s Tim Gologergen. Tim comes up to me and he says, “Jim, Jim! I just got this balloon from Russia! It’s got this Russian writing in it!” And I said, “Noooo, Tim, no, Tim, I’m trying to send the balloon across to Russia. So it was sort of a comical beginning to this effort to establish contact after forty years. The border was closed in September of 1948. J. Edgar Hoover shut the border down in September.
Sue: So it was shut down by America.
Jim: It was shut down by Americans first because J. Edgar Hoover had this thing about communism and the Cold War and the beginning of the Cold War, and the Eskimo people had been running back and forth across the Bering Straits for thousands of years, um, visiting, trading, and there were families on both sides of the border that were connected by marriage and blood. Blood, language and marriage. And many of those families were separated during this Cold War period. The end came in September of 1948 when the border was shut down by the Americans and then the Soviets shut it down, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Just so happened there was a group of Diomeders who were stuck over there who had gone over on a visit and who ended up being held prisoners for about 52 days. And, uh, I had a chance to talk to three of the remaining survivors at the time back in 1987 was Iyapana and um …. Albert Iyahuk, Iyapana, and Oscar Ahkinga. And those three guys had had various viewpoints about how what happened to ’em, and they were not terribly excited about what had, how the border had closed down, and then the no contact for such a long time and then the, they saw the indoctrination about communism and the West and the Cold War and the National Guard and how we became enemies. So when I first started this sort of crusade to reopen the border and to think about ways to go across, um, I made a couple of trips out to Diomede. We put this big sign up that said MIR, but written in Russian letters; we made it as big as plywood. We painted it and we put it on the Native store, facing Big Diomede. And it was sort of my thinking process at the time was to try to attract attention in the press. And I remember the Diomeders were like, we’re not, like, really greatly excited about that aspect of it. But the aspect of wondering what happened to their relatives, what happened to the other parts of their families that they hadn’t seen, uh, in those forty years. And so, kinda coincidentally a couple things happened. Uh, we had the ship called the Surveyor that came to Nome in August of 1987, and that ship was going to Provideniya—the first American ship in forty years to go there. And so we quickly in Nome got together a little task force of a group to extend, um, uh, friendship by writing some letters and sending some things over with the captain. And he did that, and the captain came back with this videotape of Provideniya and the Eskimo dance groups that came to dance on the Russian ship, and this letter from the mayor of Provideniya, Oleg Ivanovich …., who had written, let us be friends, and let us do this, and let us do that. So I took his letter, we got it translated, I made a lot of copies of it and sent it off to Juneau to the governor, to our congressional delegation, and, and so for working from that end of things, tried to get, you know, uh, some, uh, response to, to move forward with this.
Another event happened that was kind of interesting was Lynn Cox came to swim across the Bering Strait. And Lynn Cox came also in about August of 1987. And she went up to Diomede with a crew of about 18 people and I was part of that crew, and she was attempting to get permission to swim between Little and Big Diomede. She had a film crew with her from Sports Illustrated, but she had no money. And she had no permission. At the very last moment, the Ministry of Sports in Moscow gave permission for the swim. And that event mobilized Diomede. We all got in the boats in Diomede, almost the entire village, we had about six, seven boats filled with men, women and children drinking coffee, and it was the first time anyone had ever seen anyone jump in the water at Diomede and touch the rocks and swim to Big Diomede. It was an amazing event because we just couldn’t believe it! You know, normally you see whales and, you know, walrus and seals off shore, you know, between the Diomedes. But this was a woman, swimming, and she had nothing on but a swimming cap and a swimming suit. She didn’t grease her body up or anything. So Pat Omiak, Pat Omiak was the mayor at the time, and we had permission for two boats to go through, and I had brought along balloons thinking of, you know, the effect of letting balloons—I was into balloons. And we had brought about 300 red and blue balloons I dispersed among the boats. We blew the balloons, up, and as Lynn Cox was swimming through the fog, it was a foggy day, we were throwing balloons in the water behind her so that as we looked behind us we saw this sea of red and blue balloons floating on the fog in the water. And the two boats, the two skin boats, were side by side with Lynne Cox in the center, swimming. She was swimming. Every once in a while she turned over and they’d stick this thermal probe to measure her core temperature because when she jumped in the water on the Diomede side, her core temperature was about 102 degrees from, you know, activity. When she landed almost two hours later on the Big Diomede side, her core temperature had dropped to 92 degrees. When she got out of the water she was totally incoherent, she was met by the Soviet press delegation that were dressed with a white linen tablecloth on a table with a tea service and hors d'oeuvres and caviar and just all this stuff to kind of celebrate this. She was put into this sleeping bag and it took two hours to rewarm her body. Meanwhile, the rest of us, when we went across we were hoping we would all get permission to land on Big Diomede. But the Russians had come out in their boat and the Russian captain put his hands up and he let the two boats go through with the swimmer, but he told the rest of us to stop. We were all smiling and waving at him and he was very stern-faced and put his hands up and told us to stop. So we got on the short-wave radio to Pat Omiak in our boat. In my boat was Moses and Ruth Milligrock, and one of the Soolook boys was driving the boat —Dennis or I can’t remember who was driving the boat. My wife and my daughter Meghan were in one boat, and we were drinking coffee and we were sort of stopped there in the fog in the big swells between Big and Little Diomede. Total fog, couldn’t see a thing after they vanished through the fog to Big Diomede. Got on the radio to Pat, I said, “Hey Pat, when you land, see if you can get permission for us to come.” So they landed and he radioed back to us that, no, the Russians would not let the rest of us come. So we’re bouncing around, we’re sort of drifting out there between the Diomedes in total fog, Dennis starts up the engine and we start motoring through the fog. And suddenly we come up against the island and this huge rock wall, so we think, oh, that was a quick trip back to Little Diomede. And Moses and Ruth are looking at the rock wall and Ruth looks up at the rock wall and she shakes her head and says, “No. This is not little Diomede. This is Big Diomede!” And she panics! And Moses looks up and says, “Yep, this is Big Diomede.” They hadn’t seen it in forty years. They had not been that close since they were kids. And we stopped the motor, we radio back to the city hall and say, “Hey, we’re lost; we’re right up against the Big Diomede rock wall on the north part of the island.” We were actually heading around the north part of the island in the fog. And so Dennis is driving the boat, he stops, the compass is in the front of the boat. And we’re in the fog up against the big rock wall of Big Diomede and Ruth is telling us, “Oh yeah, we used to go here. I remember going here as a young girl picking berries and greens, picking greens. I remember this!” And this is the north end of the island. And so Moses, Moses takes his hand, and he points it out as if he’s parting the sea and says, “Go this way.” And I’m saying to myself, “Jesus Christ, somebody look at the compass!” But Moses doesn’t look at the compass, he just sticks his hand out into the fog and he says, “Go this way.” So we start the motor up and we vanish into the fog—and we end up at Little Diomede, right where his hand said he was pointing back to the city. So we landed. We rush up to Albert Iyahuk’s house and Albert is talking on the radio with Pat Omiak. And they’re telling about, because Pat had a CB radio with them and Pat and Albert are talking to each other about what’s going on. At first, the Russian guards would not let the Eskimo men go up to where everybody — we saw these two Eskimo women from our, our, what when the fog lifts up we see these two Eskimo women standing on the rocks to the National Guard big telescope, or big binoculars, and they’re doing Eskimo dancing, we could hear it on the radio. Uh, Pat keys the radio so we can hear the Eskimo dancing. Albert gets on the radio and says, “Go up to those women. And find out who they are.” So Pat tries to get by the soldiers. And he ends up giving them a pack of cigarettes to get by the soldiers [laughing]! So they walk up the hill to these two ladies and they happen to be Marguerite Aglooklik Siganova from Lavrentia — she’s Siberian Yupik but she’s part Inupiat. And, um, Pat starts speaking in Inupiat to her, and she comes back in Siberian Yupik. Pat can’t understand what she’s saying but Albert Iyahuk is listening. He understands Siberian Yupik. So [pause] he says to Pat, “Get her on the radio so I can talk to her.” So Albert starts speaking in Siberian Yupik to her and ask her who she is. And then they find out that they’re related because they had the same father. And, um, she asked how he is, and who the relatives were. And, uh, that was the first time in forty years that they had actually talked about what had transpired when the border closed in September of 1948. So we’re sitting in the kitchen in Albert Iyahuk’s house listening to all this, and Albert’s translating back into English and Inupiat for the rest of us who are sitting there. And, uh, the last thing we say is, “Get her address!” And so Pat gets her address. And at the end of that day when Pat comes back, uh, the two skin boats come back with, you know, Lynn Cox, we have established for the first time in forty years a contact, a real person, that everyone had, you know, had common relatives with. And so that was the beginning of the, of the connection. My wife took that address that she wrote a letter to Marguerita living in Lavrentia. It took thirty days for that letter to go to Russia, it took another thirty days for Marguerita’s letter to come back to us. So. This was the—the irony of this whole situation was that before the Cold War, people would freely go back and forth in a matter of minutes and hours, and now because of this border closing and we had lost contact for the forty years ------, the Eskimo people who were related by blood and marriage had not been able to establish contact. So, that led to, um, another series of events that, um, made the desire to connect across the Bering Strait more real because now we had the names of two real people. We had the mayor of Providenya, a Russian guy named Olag Ivanovich Kolentin, and we had Marguerita Glooklik Siganova’s name. And from there it was a like a letter campaign and writing to say, listen, let’s reopen the border, let’s do this. And along about in ’87, um, most of my time was spent in letter writing to, to the, our congressional delegation, going down to Juneau to make, to try to see the governor to open the border, and, um, along about the end of ’87, um, I was invited to a mee—I, I, I, there was an Alaska Airlines board meeting in Nome. Advisory board. I asked Wiley Scott if I could come and talk to the executives of Alaska Airlines about, you know, a friendship flight. And so I, uh talked to, I made a pitch at the meeting here in Nome—and there was total dead silence in the room—about flying over to Russia. Nobody said anything. After the meeting, a guy named Jim Johnson, who was vice president of operations, he came up to me and he said, “Jim, I like your idea, let me call you and we’ll take it from here!” Well, at first I was a little suspicious. I just thought it was the like kiss of death, like, they weren’t going to do anything—we’ll call you. But sure enough, he had written four letters to our congressional delegation and to our governor. And the moment that happened, when Alaska Airlines came on board and said, yes, we want to do this, then all that advance letter-writing and correspondence I had done with the governor’s office and the congressional delegation, suddenly it brought it into focus and it gave it, like, this wasn’t some crazy guy in Nome, this was Alaska Airlines that wants to do it now. So it added a whole big context to this question of a reunion of friendship, of establishing, you know, relationships back again that had been closed for forty years. And, um, from there things led to the Friendship Flight and, uh, the Eskimo portion of the delegation was composed of—I hate to say this—a few token Eskimo people from certain villages. But at least they were there. It was a real fight to get everyone on the plane. The plane was divided up. We had three, three people picking names on the plane, to get on the plane. The Alaska Airlines picked the press. They had about twenty seats for the press. The governor’s office were picking dignitaries that would go from the state of Alaska. And, uh, my job was to pick local people and more—most importantly—I concentrated because of how, I what I knew about the Eskimo people having relatives there, I had to come up with a group of people. And it became apparent to me at one time that my list kept getting cut shorter and shorter. And finally at one point I just said, “Listen, if you cut one more person off of my list, I ain’t goin’.” And that kinda got the governor’s office and Alaska Airlines to sit down and realize that the guy who’d thought of this and proposed the Friendship Flight—bad press if he doesn’t go. So we came to a, an even, even split-, three-way split between how many local and Native people will be going, how many press, and how many dignitaries. It was the most agonizing period of my whole Russian opening-the-border was to pick the names of people going. I’ll never forget when John Kimonok – we had picked John Kimonok’s name to go because he had an, uh, the longest relationship. But what had happened was, um, John’s daughter Lena Macalipin had sorta twisted, we hadn’t picked her. Uh, but she had twisted the situation to saying to convince her father that if you don’t take me, the fa-, my father can’t go. And the sad part about it was that John didn’t go because of that strategy. Um, we picked several people from St. Lawrence Island, including, um, uh, a woman who we, we could never get her passport because she was born on the Russian side and she had no history of her birth. And her whole face was covered with tattoos, and she came, she came with us. And I’ll never forget when we got off the plane and, uh, the Russian customs people were trying to get our passports from us and she said, “Well I have no” — she couldn’t speak English, she could speak no English, we had a translator come up and, uh, eventually it worked out they just, they just kinda rolled their eyes up in their heads, they said, “Let her go through, let her go through; look at her face, covered with tattoos, she’s obviously a Siberian Yupik woman, she’s no threat to, you know, to anything.” Ahm, but when that plane landed in Provideniya for the first time, when that Alaska jet took off from Nome, and we headed due west across the Bering Strait—the normal flights to Nome, it’s either through Kotzebue or Anchorage and the plane always goes south or it goes east it if goes to Kotzebue—or northeast. But when we took off and went straight across the Bering Strait, on June 13, 1988, we cross the dateline and it becomes June 14, and we lan-, and they flew that jet less than thirty minutes, we were heading toward the runway in Provideniya. We had dropped down in between the two mountain ranges between Provideniya. Through the cloud cover we could see the jet, see the runway ahead of us, and as we landed and, you know, there was such a thrilling feeling to realize that after forty years, here was a large state of Alaska contingent Friendship Flight that had started with sending balloons across the Bering Straits, you know, watching Lynn Cox swim across the Bering Straits, and the ship, this NOAA ship Surveyor coming back with that letter, items of friendship, cultivated in this big day. Plane lands on the tarmac, we, we all look out the windows at this desolate-looking, forbidden, Evil Empire that Ronald Reagan had told us what communism was all about was this Evil Empire. And we looked at this place, our neighbors of the last couple thousand years, but more recently it was the Russians who were there, and we got off the plane and it was a very organized get-off-the-plane. First the press gets off the plane, and then the dignitaries get off the plane, and the Russians had put up all these little rope fences around the plane, so, and there was this, like this red carpet so the two governors can meet each other, and take pictures. So as we’re all waiting in line behind the dignitaries, we’re all filing off the plane waiting to be re-served (???), I look at this sea of people behind this sort of imaginary line—it wasn’t really a rope—there in some sections, there was all these Native people dressed really nice, and non-Native people, and I’m saying to myself, “What the hell are we doing here standing in line? We got we got limited time. We’re over here for the day, we’re standing in line.” So I said, “Hell! Let’s break ranks!” So I motioned Tim Gologergen and I said, “Tim, let’s go over and meet these people!” So we break off behind the governor’s line of dignitaries, and we just kind of walk over to the line and I speak my one word of Russian that I’d been practicing, the only word of Russian that I know: “Strotspeecha! Strotspeecha!” Hello. I practiced that, I practiced. The only word of Russian I knew was Strotspeecha. And, uh, good bye, dasbedonaia. Those are the only two words I knew: hello and goodbye. So we saunter up to this group of kids and Eskimo people, and uh, I, I, I pull out a Hershey’s chocolate bar and come up to this little girl and say Strotspeechia! And she, handed her the candy bar and shake ha-, she hands me some pins back. And then these other press people rush away from the governor’s line and they all converge on us because we’re meeting for the first time. And, um, uh, Tim Gologergen looks up at this Russian woman across from us, this Russian Siberian Yupik woman, this Siberian Yupik woman. And she asks, he asks in Siberian Yupik, “Who are you?” And she comes back and says, “My name is Neena. I’m the sister of Margarita Glooglcih who you saw on Big Diomede!” [laughs] And I said to myself, “Wow, what a small world!” And they start speaking in Siberian Yupik to each other. No translators are needed. And they’re talking directly to each other, catching up. So all the Siberian Yupik people that were on the plane immediately start to intermix. And then the press rushes away form the two governors, Vasseslov Kovitz from Madagan and Mayor Koolinkin and governor Cowper and Leo Rasmussen, the mayor of Nome, they all rush, I mean uh, John Handeland and Leo was there, and Senator Murkowski was there, and that, and they converge on this meeting, and before you know it, the entire orderly procession that the Russians had tried to impose on us was totally broken down. There was total chaos. Everybody was speaking and meeting each other, and the Russians had, had planned these five busses to take us to the Provideniya, to the big meeting and everything.
Should I stop?
Sue: No I’m just checking
Jim: And, um, they had busses for the dignitaries, busses for the press, and busses for the Eskimo people. And this was a little embarrassing because we suddenly began to see that the way they treat Native people in Provideniya is sort of a racial separation of, of, they try to keep people separated for some reason. I didn’t know at the time what the reason was, but I was a little embarrassing because here I’m married to a Native woman and they wanted us to get in different busses, and I said, “No, I can’t do that, this is my wife, this is my kid,” you know.
Sue: They were gonna separate you?
Jim: They were gonna separate us. Yeah they were going to separate us. And then Bernie of course got upset and she said, “NO, no way am I separating,” you know. So, what happened was, once they, they could not separate the American Eskimo people from the Russian Eskimo people from the Siberian Yupik people and the Inupiaq people that were on board the plane, they could not separate us. So everyone just said, “Listen, time is running out. Everybody get on any bus you want!” [laughter] So as it turned out we were all mixed up. We had Senator Murkowski on our bus, we had press, we had Native people—every bus was so mixed up with different people—and we proceeded off to the big house or the, the House of Culture for a big meetings in Provideniya. And from that day, from that moment on, the next twelve hours was spent in, in meals, and feasting, and talking, and speech, and peoples mixing up and talking and that was, uh, a thrilling day for us. And it ended about twelve hours later. We all got back on the plane, and went back to Nome, and we were just totally exhausted! We flew back and it we got back at 12 midnight in Nome on June 14. After that long, long day. So that was how it, in a nutshell, it all got started and, um, and then from there we had a series of more and more exchanges, we worked on the, the visa waiver program through the State Department, and this whole thing took a life of its own until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. And then the economic conditions got so harsh over there that many of the exchanges that we had hoped, whether they be on a friendship, business, trade or whatever, kind of started to slowly stop because the Soviet Union had fallen and the system of order through the Communist system was breaking down over there. It became very difficult to do some of these exchanges. The last time I was over there was in ’92, which was another Eskimo reunion idea with a German film company that, first they wanted to kayak across and I said, “Hey, you know, that’s kind of boring, let’s do something else, let’s do an Eskimo reunion. Let’s go look for relatives of”—one of the things that we didn’t get to do in Provideniya was find all those relatives, all those families that were related by blood and marriage living along the Bering Sea coasts on both sides. Because the Soviets had a policy to move the villages that were once connected to the American side away, and many times they destroyed those villages. And we heard stories where they actually killed some of the older members of that village so there would be no more connections or stories with the American side. And so in ’92 we went across to find some of those people who still spoke Inupiat, who could still understand the Inupiat language. We knew there was Siberian Yupik because that community was pretty much alive. So in ’92 we went across in boats through the Diomedes with a group of people from, ah, various villages, mostly King Island people, uh, some Diomeders, uh, Tim Gologergen came with us again from St. Lawrence Island. And, uh, there was about thirty of us in six boats. And, and there was a dance group, too, that came, a group of dancers between King Island and Diomede, when we came across. The interesting thing in preparing that trip was, when we all landed at Little Diomede, it was a kind of an historic occasion because some of the elders at Diomede said that in, in, in the old days when people traveled by skin boats, they would travel in large group and they would travel to the trading centers in Wales and Diomede and different places. So it was a long time before in 1992, when we all, when six boats landed on Diomede—it was the first time that a large group of Eskimo people had traveled that way by boat. And so it was, uh, there was a lot of singing and dancing again in Little Diomede because that hadn’t been done in many, many years. We, we landed first in Wales, we stayed in Wales for about a couple days with a lot of singing and dancing there. And then we moved onto Diomede, a lot of singing and dancing there, and then we picked up the Diomede contingent and went on over to Lavrentia. We landed on the beach behind Luewelen, place called Cape Deshnev, Belusha Bookta Bay, right around the bend behind Cape Deshnev, and, ah, we landed there in ’92, we were met by the Russian border guards. They were very friendly, we landed our boats, they checked us in, we immediately went to sleep, took a nap, because we made the crossing at about 3 a.m. in the morning, when the seas were dead calm. And then they said, “Well, you’re free to, to anywhere you want to go, your passports say you go. So we had a big, uh, picnic on the beach with Eskimo food, there was no Native people there from the Russian side because we were in a very remote location. We got in our boats and traveled eighty miles down the coast to Lavrentia. We got into Lavrentia about 4, 5 o’clock in the afternoon, I walked over to spoocan, uh, spocan uh, you know the spocan, the office building of the of the ministry, and, and said, walked in and said, “Hey we just came from Alaska, where’s Margarita Gloocolach?” And they got her on the phone, Margarita came out, they were so surprised to see us, they didn’t think we were going to make it. We, we made it, and Margarita had arranged a, a big Eskimo dance and housing for everybody. And so we spent the next day in Lavrentia, and Lorena. And we found many speakers of Inupiat who still spoke Inupiat. And that’s what we were looking for on that trip were the some of the family connections that were moved off of Big Diomede, and were moved—where were they moved to? See that’s what, we had lost the contact. Some of the Diomeders wanted to know where were their relatives that they had remembered. So those contacts were reestablished, and we found families in Lorena and Lavrentia that remembered the people who lived on Big Diomede. So ’92 was the last time I was over there and it got to a point where, um, making these trips became harder and harder to do because of the economic conditions in, in Chukotka and the governor over there, Governor Azara, um wasn’t very helpful.
S: When did he become governor? Do you know?
J: Um, when um Magadan Oblast in Anadyr, uh, Chukotka, split off, they declared their independence in about ’91. So he became the governor of the Chukotka region and they broke off from the Magadan, and that’s when things got really difficult on doing these exchanges because at first we’d just do our own visas. We had connections in Provideniya but he took away the visa issuing capabilities. Now the visa waiver for the Eskimo people were always there but it just became more and more difficult, because things went into almost like an economic prison where the value of the ruble diminished so greatly that it was hard to do anything. So that’s it, Sue!
Sue: [laughter] Would you like a drink of water?
Jim: (???) I can probably talk for another hour but
Sue: Go for it
Jim: I think we better quit maybe 10 minutes. But
Sue: What do you think it’s meant to, what’s it meant to you personally?
Jim: Well, personally, it, um, it was, uh, a way, I’d always had a secret desire I think in my early life to be in the foreign service. I’d always felt like I wanted to be a diplomat or in the foreign service. And, um, cuz I grew up in Washington DC, I was thinking about going to Georgetown public s-, you know, foreign service school, I graduated with a degree in history, so I always had a, a sense to do something more than what I’ve been doing. So it gave me an opportunity to, uh, follow an idea through and it taught me a very important lesson: the power of individual people working on a common goal. It taught me that if you’re at the right place at the right time with a great idea and, and, uh, this idea of reaching out in friendship and reestablishing connections, and I learned a lot about the, the Bering Strait region and how people are connected and it was a wonderful experience. And, um, I, um, enjoyed it, I enjoyed it.
Sue: What do you think’s been of lasting value?
Jim: Well I think the, uh, the reconnection for St. Lawrence Island has definitely been good. The Diomeders have been a little bit tougher to do, they’ve had some connections but St. Lawrence Island people were able to have many more visits and now they do have visits right now with both coming over. It did, um, bring to bear the hardships that the group living on the Russian side experience, um, in the way they’re treated, and it points out the difference of I guess two economic and two political systems, how they affect people’s lives —not that our system’s the greatest in the world, either, but, it does suggest that many comments we always heard after these trips is, “Man, I’m so glad we live on this side of the border because the economic hardships on the Russian side are so immense.” And the other thing that was so striking was that – was when we always went over there, it was like a time machine. You get in your boat, you drive across the Bering Strait, it may take an hour or two, but it’s like a 20-to-40-year time difference. And I remember our last visit with the group of King Islanders when we went to one of the Chukchi reindeer camps, and we saw how they lived. Many of the the, the guys would say like Francis Alvanna and Sylvester Ayek would say, now I understand what my grandfather was talking about! How they lived! Because we could see a semblance of that time machine where we were thrust back into a prior time of how Eskimo people lived, how Chukchi and Eskimo people lived in the Bering Strait before the coming of non-Native people because they were still doing many of the same things, many of the same tools in their remote camps. And I’ll never forget that comment that Frances Alvanna had said, and Sylvester said, now I understand what my grandfathers went through. Much more. I remember the stories, them telling us the stories. But now I see it. And, and it related to a lot of things that were related to subsistence and hunting and how certain things are done. Ah, when we were with the Chukchi people, the reindeer camp outside of Loreno, in Lavrentia Bay, we traveled to a far end to gather eggs and do some hunting, for birding, and then the Chukchi people killed a reindeer as a feast and how they gave the reindeer, after they killed it, they ga — poured water on its mouth and they gave it some bushes, you know, some leaves, um, some willow leaves. That’s a symbolic gesture toward its spirit. And then we ate the reindeer. And there was, you know, it was a very – and they lived in the yurts in a mobile camp so it was really sort of like, wow, they’re tough, you know, we have it pretty easy with canned goods and stuff, and everything, and blah blah blah. But so that was, um, that time difference element was like a twilight zone. People looked the same, the countryside looks the same, it looks just like the Seward Peninsula, Chukotka looks a little a little different but basically the same weather patterns, the same moon, the same stars, the same sunrise, the same sea currents. You know we’re all used to those things on the Bering Strait on the U.S. side, but when we go to the Russian side the difference is the time element — it’s like going back in time. And that was a startling kind of realization that we could just simply get in our boats and drive back across the Bering Strait and be back in the, another time zone that was 40 or 50 years’ difference. So.
Sue: … I would keep asking you questions, but I don’t want to make you late.
Jim: Yeah. I was supposed to meet this other person but, I can be a little late. I guess. Anyway, it was, um, a brilliant, a wonderful time –
Sue: Well,
Jim: – to do all this
Sue: Would you want to go back now? With everything we’ve heard about …
Jim: No, I’m not so interested in going back, um, because it’s painful, um, to see what I see now. I, I guess in the beginning, I was naïve in a sense of the toll, the economic toll and it’s painful to see. And back in ’88, you know, we had the hope, well, yeah, let’s change this, you know, let’s, let’s do some trade, let’s get some, you know, ferry boat going, let’s do this, let’s do that, let’s get daily flights, and it all seemed to me like common sense. OK, let’s make this happen. But as we went through the bureaucracy of the different forms of government, and the different barriers to why it can’t be done, it became disheartening to see that there’s no way that we’re going to reopen this border in a, in a time fashion that makes sense, that we’re going to live in a relatively easy economy on this side and they’re going to, you know, live in a relatively, a hardship on their side. But, um, all that being said, I haven’t given up, it’s just that I’m, I, I guess I’m more focused on what is it that will make a difference and I’m kind of convinced that a ferry boat system that allows local people to travel back and forth between the villages is a, both a humanitarian business vehicle of transportation that’s affordable, that is based on the weather conditions and allows for slow, gradual development when needed, you know, in other words how do people make a living, how do they support themselves, how does subsistence activities, you know, relate to being able to travel back and forth and meet each other. So, you know, um, the big airplanes and the big tour ships and all that, it’s not going to, it’s not going to work to a large degree, it, maybe to a small degree it might work, but we really need a platform and a ferry boat might be a platform that is affordable for anyone to get on and travel
Sue: But won’t this take a governor and the government over there wanting it to happen? And it, my impression is, they really don’t. They want to close that door. They don’t want to keep it open.
Jim: Yeah, that’s been my impression too. But I keep thinking back to how, how it got started, how it felt, and I’m always thinking to myself, there’s always a glimmer or chance that somebody in the position of power will change their mind and say hey, that’s not a bad idea, let’s do it! Because I’ve had that experience before, the “Hey, let’s do it!” That if we can find the right connections with the right players, that we could restart again and start again where we left off in 1988. It’s been almost over 10 years now and we really have made no meaningful change other than the, the, the small token exchanges between some Native people. It’s OK, but it has not improved the living conditions on the Russian side. At all. And that’s so sad to see because, you know, you get to meet people and you live on our side and you shake your head when you go over there because (????), there’s no food in the stores! There’s no opportunity here! It’s like a wasted opportunity for people to be meeting, to, revitalizing by meeting each other and subsisting and making a living. And it’s all wonderful experience because of the, the, the two regions we live in across the Bering Strait, it’s a great, wonderful region that has so many abundance. Yet at the same time, so many, uh, problems. So I haven’t given up but I’m just trying to focus now down on what would do the greatest good the fastest, or in the greatest time. And I’m beginning to think a ferry boat platform would do it. Cuz it’s affordable for local people to travel on.
Description
Jim Stimpfle speaks on his efforts to make the Friendship Flight possible and what it was like to reconnect with Russian communities on the other side of the Bering Strait.
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