Poems 12-14 (Pandemic Day 29)

Summer in Kashega

The old ones, Alexie and Fekla, they say,

"Go, Vera. Go to Kashega.  See your mother, your friends.

It is only for the summer," they say.

"Go.  Nothing will happen to us."

So I go, eager to visit Kashega.

Riding the mail boat out of Unalaska Bay

     as Alexie and Fekla Golodoff,

     and our snug house in Unalaska village,

     and my photographs and books, my little skiff,

And my twelve handsome chickens,

All fade into the fog.

What War?

I arrive in Kashega.  My friends Pari and Alfred squabble over me

     like a pair of seagulls fighting for a crab claw.

     My mother greets me like a stranger, with an 

     Americanchin hug, then touches my hair.

There is no sign of trouble here.  We have crayon days, 

     big and happy.

The windows sparkle at night.

I had forgotten how a lighted window shines

     without blackout paper.

The Japanese

They weren't always our enemy. There was time when the

     Japanese sailed in and their crews played baseball with 

     our Aleut teams.

But we saw what they were up to.  We warned our

     government about Japanese who charted our

     shorelines, who studied our harbors from their fishing

     boats.

Our Japanese visitors expected always

     an amiable Aleut welcome. But

     when the hand of friendship was withdrawn,

They took their measurements and made their calculations

    anyway.

Karen Hesse, Aleutian Sparrow, Margaret M. McElderry Books, 2003.

I just finished reading this young adult novel written in free verse by the Newbery-winning author of Out of the Dust, (1998) which was also written as a series of poems.

While the infamous Executive Order 9066, which forcibly removed 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry from their homes during WWII is a well-known atrocity that took place on American soil; the removal and detainment of Native Americans from the Aleutian Islands was something I'd never heard about before opening this book from my poetry shelf.

While the number of Aleuts was much smaller (881) the relocation and detention was done "under conditions that are as shocking as any in the long, sad history of the Government's relations with its Native-American citizens." (David Oyama, New York Times op-ed, July, 1981).  The destruction of their culture was disproportionate.

Hesse's spare but powerful verses bring you into the lives and struggles of these displaced people through the eyes of Vera, a young Aleut girl.  Although the reason these people were moved was because the Japanese had seized and occupied some of these strategic islands, the Japanese had left by 1943 and yet the Aleuts were not returned until 1945 and they returned to homes that had been destroyed, without adequate compensation to rebuild.

What strikes me is that these actions taken to protect a group of people was done with such indifference to who they were and to their basic humanity--not willful harm, but lack of regard.  I've been fortunate enough to have lived in another country (Australia) and to have traveled widely enough to be able to recognize our universal commonalities as humans and to despair over our human tendencies to disregard our basic connections to one another and replace them with artificial barriers of race and color and nationality.  Will this current crisis help more of us to see that?