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September 30, 2005
Red Alert
by Soren Wuerth

Hey, Anchorage: You Can’t See Me

     The sophomores started a writing assignment today with the prompt: “If I were invisible ... .” While some students immediately took to the task, thinking dirty thoughts aloud, I considered my own plan for traveling unseen.

     I would, of course, be on the next flight to Washington D.C. where I would head for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Bush, presumably, is no different from Nixon and there is bound to be many more Downing Street Memo-type documents to peruse and pilfer.

     My invisible students would stay closer to home, however. Most wrote they would go to Anchorage, the big escape, but only briefly.

     “If I were invisible,” one student conjectured in an endless sentence, “I would hop on a plane to Bethel and then go see my auntie and my uncle and, after that, fly to Anchorage and go ... to movies .... and then go to foot locker and get me and my family some shoes, clothes and winter stuff, and then go to Kenai and visit my auntie... and after that go back home and go back to normal.”

     Other students wrote about things they would loot from stores (can you blame them?), go to the Alaska Federation of Natives convention, or would take pleasure in the solitude of imperceptibility.

     “Nobody would be able to bug me,” one student wrote. In other words, a la Simon and Garfunkle, “hello darkness, my old friend.”

     Invisibility is an idea with metaphoric combustion. When Ralph Ellison used the conception of obscurity for his novel Invisible Man—which begins by describing an African American man beaten in a white hazing ceremony—he could have easily been writing about the trials of one of my Alaska Native students on their way to their first year of college.

     The excesses and selfishness encountered by Alaska Natives during initiation into College USA are—in the way Ellison’s blonde, naked coed taunts black recruits—both alluring and emotionally imposing. For example, two students from our village, who earned scholarships and tuition waivers, rejected the university (UAA) after only one harrowing semester.

     And, unlike in their home communities, Natives in Anchorage are invisible. They are routinely ignored at best, and, at worst, labeled as peddlers, drunks or oddities. The pattern of marginalization has remained steadfastly unchanged since the Cossacks first drew their bibles.

     This October the AFN will hold its convention in Fairbanks, partly due to the invisibility of the Native rights to Anchorage legislators and partly due to unappreciative and racist businesses, among other reasons. It will be a big, fun event. Fairbanks can expect $4 million in revenue from the gathering.

     The First People, the real people, are your bogeymen, Anchorage. You are little more than a temporary stop for them because the sign your politicians hung over you reads “whites only.” You offer little solitude for your minorities, your victims are women and another culture’s heroes.

     From a rural perspective, it’s easy to appreciate the student who, when invisible, would go only to Anchorage to snatch food and family, and, once the secret trip is done, “come home and go back to normal.”






Soren Wuerth is perhaps Alaska's best known community activist. He resides in an undisclosed location in rural Alaska and can be reached at soren@insurgent49.com.
- Columnists -

Editor's Desk
by Aaron Selbig

Red Alert
by Soren Wuerth

Alaskan In Exile
by Neil Zawicki

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in-sur-gent (in sur'jent), n. 1. a member of a group which revolts against the policies of its leadership.