Aleutian Sparrow

by Karen Hesse; Evon Zerbetz

• ISBN13: 9780689861895
• ISBN10: 0689861893
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-10-01
• Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry

Summary

"Your work, Vera," Alfred's grandfather told me,"your work is to know the ways of our people." In June of 1942, seven months after attacking Pearl Harbor, the Japanese navy invaded Alaska's Aleutian Islands. For nine thousand years the Aleut people had lived and thrived on these treeless, windswept lands. Within days of the first attack, the entire native population living west of Unimak Island was gathered up and evacuated to relocation centers in the dense forests of Alaska's Southeast.With resilience, compassion, and humor the Aleuts responded to the sorrows of upheaval and dislocation. This is Vera's story, but it is woven from the same fabric as the stories of displaced peoples throughout history. It chronicles the struggle to survive and to keep community and heritage intact despite harsh conditions in an alien environment.In a luminous novel of unrhymed verse, Newbery winner Karen Hesse brings to light this little-known episode from America's past.

Author Biography

Karen Hesse is the winner of a 2002 MacArthur Fellowship and the author of some fifteen books for children. A school visit to Ketchikan, Alaska, was the genesis for this book. Her many novels include Out of the Dust, the 1998 Newbery Medal winner; The Music of Dolphins, an ALA Best Book for Young Adults; and Stowaway, a New York Times best-seller. Karen and her husband live in Brattleboro, Vermont.

Excerpts

KashegaMay-June 1942 Summer in KashegaThe 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 anAmericanchinhug, 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 JapaneseThey weren't always our enemy. There was a 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.Life in KashegaIn the beginning, when I first moved away to Unalaska village to live with Alexie and Fekla Golodoff, I longed for Kashega. Kashega winter, when the men trap the blue fox. Kashega summer, when they hire themselves out to take the fur seal off the Pribilofs. All the Kashega year, with the boats bringing home sweet duck and fat sea lion.Kashega autumns splash with salmon swimming into traps to become a winter of dry fish.Sometimes sheep to shear, sometimes driftwood on thebeach, sometimes an odd job.And always Solomon's little store, lit by kerosene, where the men drink salmonberry wine and solve the problems of our people.Solomon's StoreZachary Solomon ran the Kashega store for ten years maybe.But when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Zachary Solomon went to war.Always a white man has run the store.But my mother took over when Zachary Solomon left.And she likes it.Hot-Spring Memory"Remember," I ask my mother, "how we visited AkutanAnd walked the path up into the hills, passing the boiling springs, climbing higher, to where blossoms framed the steaming pools likemasses of perfumed hair?"Remember," I ask my mother, "how we waded in? Could we go again?""Maybe," she says, never looking up, lost in the pages ofLife.My MotherMy mother never talks about when she was young and she did not listen to the old ways to keep a man safe. How she closed her ears to the Aleut tales.She never talks about how she met and fell in love with and married a white man, how she sent him to sea without a seal-gut coat. She never talks about the storms driving in and piling up the waves. How time after time she watched from the headlands, fighting the winds, waiting for my father's boat to come in.She never says how I waited beside her, my fist crushing the seam of her skirt.And she never, never talks about the day my father did not come home.Even the StormsPari and I sit in the new spring grass watching a storm approach from the distance. "Have you missed Kashega?" she asks.I nod, remembering the welcoming kitchens, the Christmas star of wood and glass,The way our laughter crackled on winter nights like sugar frosting, the smell of our skin after a day gathering wildflowers in the summer hills.Pari pulls me up with both hands, and we race to her house down the mountain path, wind walls rising around us, rain filling the gray cheeks of the sky.White Orchid"Last summer," I remind Pari as we dry off in her kitchen. "Last summer y