Читать книгу Racing Toward Recovery. The Extraordinary Story of Alaska Musher Mike Williams Sr. онлайн

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Our language and culture were intact. Our whole lives were complete then. But then contact came with gold miners, government workers, and missionaries starting in the late 1800s. They brought diseases that we had no immunity from, and they brought alcohol. It used to be that the Elders said if they heard about a death from a hundred miles away they cared about it and felt the same about that one death from far away as they did about one in their village. People had their own government, their own way of taking care of themselves, living off the land. They had a complete way of life that they enjoyed.

Obviously, things have changed. They changed with contact. The amount of deaths changed from smallpox, diphtheria, whooping cough, tuberculosis, and sexually transmitted diseases, too. Alcohol was brought in. People who had experienced their healthy way of life were subjected to trauma. At one time in Akiachak, which is only eleven miles from us, there was mass starvation because people couldn’t take care of themselves. They had to dig mass graves and some of our relatives were among them.