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Thomasina's Full Interview

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Thomasina Andersen

Cordova, Alaska

September 4, 2011

My name is Thomasina Anderson.  I was born here in Cordova and, uh, I’ve lived here most of my life and I was, let’s see, if it was ‘89, I think I had just turned eight. 

Well, I remember the day the spill happened. I just remember being woken up and everyone was very upset.  Then someone turned on the news, and I saw the footage for the first time of the spill itself.  Then the reactions of the adults around me were just kind of like when a relative dies or something, only like times ten.  Everyone was just in shock, everyone was just kind of panicking sort of situation.  It was very, very upsetting of course to me as a child at the time, because it was something bigger than anyone could control.  I mean, when someone finally explained to me the enormity of what had happened it was like, here’s something even adults can’t fix, sort of situation.  And it was very disturbing.

Well, I recall there being a sort of a flurry of activity, you know.  There were meetings down at the high school.  I remember they had some teenagers kind of set aside to babysit us little kids in like the cafeteria and stuff while the adults were in the gymnasium.  A lot of the oil company representatives showed up and there was a lot of yelling going on and a lot of very upset people and a lot of trying to figure out what to do.  I think even kids could feel that things were in a state of unrest.  I think everyone was looking for someone to blame and that energy was circulating pretty strongly.

It’s actually kind of funny.  I have this one weird memory.  I was a very literal kind of child.  I remember they had these young kids babysitting us at the time, and sometimes we’d just get too excited and they’d take us for walks outside because of the kids were bouncing off the walls too much and because of all that weird energy that was going on at the time.  I remember, this one gal had this little sea otter puppet, on her hand and she was like, “Oh, where did I go?”  And I’m like, “It’s right there, the sea otter’s right there on your hand.  I understand you’re trying to be all cute and metaphorical, but it’s on your hand.”  But at the same time, that message was kind of resounding, that basically nature had kind of just kind of up and died on us was very, very depressing for a kid.  I think that the ripples for that for me went all the way up through adolescence and everything.   There were other factors that kind of affected some of the flora and fauna around here, like the canneries dumping gurry into the harbor and stuff like that that made it pretty obvious that things were screwed up, but the oil spill even more.  Just this resounding feel that everything was on the skids.  I mean, adolescence is supposed to be a time when the sky is the limit and everything is great and things are only going to get better for you, but for us, it was more like things are going down fast, and there’s nothing anybody can do about it.

I remember, my brother’s generation. My brother is twelve years older than I am, so he was just graduating from high school when it happened, and so there was not a lot of optimism for the generation coming out of that.  A lot of them graduated from high school and then went right to work cleaning beaches.

Well, before the oil spill, we’d had a really good fishing year.  You know, people had bought new boats.  My dad hadn’t bought a new boat, but other relatives and everybody. Things at the time, it was like, “There’s nowhere to go but up.” And then everything just came crashing down.  So there was a lot of everyone having to kind of tighten their belts to make it through.  My mom had previously been able to kind of be a stay at home mom for a little while and kind of be a homeroom mom for my class and everything like that.  After that she had to go back to work, and she had to work some pretty hard jobs for someone who was in her forties and had two kids. At the time it kind of felt like I had been sort of robbed of some time with my parents because they were both having to work so hard. Dad had to work a couple log ships, which is walking around in a storm and falling off of boats and stuff like that, nothing you do for fun.  So it was very, it was kind of, kind of a grim time really.  And there was a lot of time when my dad was cleaning beaches.  He was in National Geographic a couple times for going out and cleaning up oiled birds and things like that, and it’s kind of this weird feeling of, “Oh look, everyone’s on TV,” but they’re on TV for the most horrible reason in the world. 

Well, I know it seems silly and superficial, but like, whereas before Christmas was this big, everyone got lots of presents.  Then, after that, it was like, “Okay, you might not get everything you asked for from Santa.”  I mean, we were hit economically pretty hard, but some of the people it was even tougher for I’m sure.  And, so, it was stuff like that, and both parents having to work very hard to keep things afloat. 

There was also a lot of depression among adults, I think, too, that kind of circulated down to the kids.  From the start it kind of created divisions between families.  There were people who were like, “Oh, the heck with it, I’m just going to get my payout now and, you know, just go down South” or whatever and people just up and left town. Which was very hard, I think, on the kids.  There were some kids I knew, actually through the advent of Facebook who I’ve gotten back in touch with, who really loved it here.  The fact that their families were forced to leave was really hard on them at a young age and they went through a lot of problems because of it.  

From a subsistence point of view the idea that we can’t harvest this or that anymore because the water’s not clean anymore.  And the herring fishery too.  That was a huge thing, when the herring fishery here collapse.  I think it kind of hit people both economically and in a morale sense.  The idea that it can be wiped out just like that was just very difficult. 

People used to get herring spawns around here if they wanted to do that. Now they have to bring them up from Southeast, so that was kind of a hard thing.  Even just harvesting shellfish and stuff.  We used to get gumboots, which are little chitons, and certain kinds of sea snails and stuff like that.  It’s hard to find clean beaches in this region even to this day.  I don’t know if the jury’s in about how it may or may not have affected the salmon stocks.

My grandma used to harvest things like that, but I was kind of little to be helping with that before the oil spill and then after that there was kind of no chance.  Also, I think that some people had been kind of taking for granted, I guess, our subsistence rights before the oil spill. Then afterwards it kind of became this whole big bone of contention.  Well, we’ve been ignoring these things and kind of been letting them go fallow for so many years and now they’re not here.  Since Cordova’s kind of a company town, our Native culture is kind of spread a little thinner than out in the villages where, like people from Chenega and Tatitlek really rely on these things. It’s just part of their culture.  The culture is a lot less diluted out there.  My family, it’s kind of this thing of where we could go harvest something or we could go to the store.  There’s not that option in the smaller towns of relying on Western foods, I guess. 

I mean, I remember when I was a kid there was one winter where we had a whole bunch of king salmon that we’d put away in the deep freeze, and being a little kid and not understanding that this is the best fish in the world, all I knew was that we’d had, king salmon for dinner for about four weeks running. I was like, “Please, no more king salmon,” and my parents were like, “Do you know what you’re saying?” Now I’d give my right arm for a fridge full of king salmon.

The Native culture in this town has always been kind of weird in that way, because my dad’s generation, their parents were bribing the doctor not to put Native on the birth certificate because there was such a stigma associated with it. I guess it wasn’t until my generation came along that people started talking at least in this area. I mean, Southeast they’ve always had a strong Native, you know, those Tlingits, they’re hardcore.  In the seventies the Native Village of Eyak got their stuff together and it wasn’t until my generation that people were talking about subsistence like it was a thing.  Before that it had been just what we’d always done.  Now it’s talking about subsistence rights and subsistence, Katie John, and all that.

But it [the spill] did affect things, though. It was just one more extra pressure. Then people started talking because Native’s have subsistence rights, and people who were here, who are native to Alaska but not Alaska Natives were like, “Well, I should have just as much right as anybody because my family’s lived here for three generations.” So I guess it’s one of those things, when things start to go down economically, everybody’s looking for where am I going to get mine kind of thing. And it’s a valid concern.

Before the oil spill everyone was busy with all the fishing and everything going on, and so, I guess it was just kind of you’re too little, we’re not going to take you along sort of thing.  When people did go clam digging or whatever, they were always afraid that I’d get sucked into a hole in the mud or whatever.  But actually, I think that in some ways one positive affect of the oil spill is that people suddenly did become more concerned that the youth knew how to do this stuff.   So as I became a teenager they started having more focus on trying to re-educate the youth in their traditions and stuff like that before they disappeared completely. So actually, while the scarcity of the food itself went up, the urge to make sure that the kids were interested in the stewardship of it went up as well. 

One thing that did come out good from the oil spill was that the Science Center -- and some people may argue with me on this because they think the Science Center is just a lot of people measuring how fish dream and stuff like that, people justifying their own jobs -- but I think the one thing that came out of it that was good was that there was a lot of money for educating the young people.  I remember in elementary school, they’d have us all trek over to the Science Center.  They’d put on these little kind of weekly educational things for us, teach us how to identify local plants and animals and they’d do cute little puppet shows with animals and teach us. Where there hadn’t been money to do that before, they’d kind of engage kids with science and with understanding the value of nature around you, which I thought was really cool.  And actually -- I don’t know if they still do this -- they put on a couple of camps, you know, where they took everybody around and we’d go camp out different places. We got to Simpson Bay and different areas and we’d poke around in the tidepools and all that good stuff.  They also tried to incorporate some of the Native culture stuff in there.  I remember they had us do little skits of different Native stories and stuff like that.  That was fun.  I think that it did, in retrospect, raise awareness that people need to understand nature and understand what we have so we can help better defend it, which I think was really a very positive thing. 

I always kind of idolized my aunt because she was such a strong person and she was able to spend twenty years trying to speak on behalf of all the plaintiffs in our region and had pretty much devoted her life to it, but at the same time it seemed to me kind of a hard track to follow.  That’s something I don’t think I would be strong enough to do.  At the same time, there were also other forces at work, like the Native Village of Eyak was trying really hard (and they still do to this day, but just in particular in the wake of the oil spill) to encourage the youth to engage.  I know when I was in middle school, they had an environmental conference for the youth of the region and stuff like that.  So they were trying really hard to engage the youth in trying to be part of kind of the political scene that was going on with that. It was not easy to want to be part of that because, I mean, you’re thirteen, you just want to sit around and listen to music and write bad poetry. So outside my aunt, there weren’t a lot of role models for young people, because there’s never really been much of a mental health infrastructure here.

For instance, there were a lot of kids who I grew up with like me, their parents had been fishermen, and their grandparents had been fishermen and that’s the life they always expected to go into.  The fact that that just was not a viable option anymore left a lot of people out to sea about, “What do I do with my life? I can’t stay here, I can’t be part of my old culture anymore, that’s all disintegrating.”  For me, it was kind of a case of well, you’ve just got to do something to get out of here, but at the same time part of me very strongly is like, “Well, no this is where you belong, this is where you were born, this is where your family is, and someone’s got to, at the very least, curate that and try to maintain some kind of sense of cultural identity.”  And so I guess it created kind of an internal rift of the fact that there’s no economic viability but the urge to stay here and be part of, for better or for worse, what’s happening.  Which was very difficult. 

There were a lot of people that were isolated by things like depression and their own economic troubles and stuff like that, but the one thing that everyone kind of did rally around was the dawning realization that you really can’t trust oil companies.  There’s just mistrust in big business in general.  As the case dragged on five years, ten years, twenty years, at first they were like, “Yeah, we’re going to get all this money, it’s going to make it all worthwhile somehow.” As time progressed, people kind of realized. 

I was kind of young at the time, and I didn’t really understand what was going on, except I knew the basics of how court cases and trials worked.  I do remember Exxon’s lawyer was wearing this tie about this wide on, and it was just ridiculous looking. I don’t know where they got him.  I just remember that this kind of sense of unfairness while being there, because the guy was up there and was saying stuff that I knew wasn’t true.  He was questioning a witness and he was trying to get him to say things that weren’t true.  Just the unfairness of it all just kind of struck me as a kid.  It was just like, how do we compete with all this money and all this power.  It just felt like there was no standing against it.  And so it was really kind of disheartening to me as a kid. 

I remember my aunt would come by for a while when I was younger.  She’d come over, have a cup of coffee or whatever, and it’s like, “Well, what’s the latest Exxon news?”  It was never good and it was always, well, they’re doing that, they’re doing this, they’re taking it to a higher court. I kind of lost a lot of faith in the justice system when I was a kid, and as I grew up, I learned other things about how the Supreme Court works and stuff.  Probably my lack of faith was not displaced.  I remember my aunt used to keep this rock in a coffee can in her office that says “Exxon says this rock is clean” and it was covered with all this goopy oil.  Realizing at a really young age, this idea that you can’t trust justice, you can’t trust anybody to be out for your best interests but you.  That was kind of hard lessons for little kids to learn.

We’d never really been all that keen on the oil companies to begin with.  This kind of solidarity, it became this sort of us against them thing.  Even though it was kind of a bitter thing to latch onto.  It was kind of like the Grinch Who Stole Christmas.  At some point we’re like, “To heck with whether we get the money or not, we’re just going to survive no matter what. We’re going survive in the face of all this.  We’re just going to keep going.  The inequalities in the justice system for the rich and the poor, that’s just a fact of life that you have to live, and it doesn’t matter if the Grinch stole Christmas, we’re still going to keep on living our lives.”

I think around the ten-year anniversary, where everyone was just kind of like, “Oh, they’re going to pay out any day now.”  I wouldn’t say there was a specific point in time, it was sort of a growing feeling.  The more I listened to my parents and other adults, just kind of you can’t wait for these people, there’s not going to be any justice. We can’t wait on them. We just have to keep going. We have to keep moving. You have to keep swimming or you drown kind of thing.  Eventually it just kind of became this thing of “Well, yeah, the money will help.” When it finally did come through, it helped pay a couple of bills, but it wasn’t much more than that. At this point the money is almost like insult to injury.  It’s kind of, “Well, this is nice.”  We don’t really care anymore.

I do remember, when I was younger they had this sobriety celebration here every year, it is what it sounds like.  They had Father Oleska from Juneau come up. Because they were talking about payouts at that time, he had this really kind of moving speech, saying, “You can clean up after oil, but how do you clean up after money?” It’s like every year when PFD’s come out and people go out and buy four-wheelers and fill up on booze at Brown Jug or whatever. What happens if we do get all this money and we spend it all and we end up worse off than we started? It becomes kind of a monkey’s paw at some point.  I think it was kind of at that point that I was like, you know, maybe there’s some things that money can’t fix.  Money’s not going to go back and undo the oil spill, it’s not going to go back and put the seals back and put the fish back.  So why do we really need it?  The best we can just do is just do for ourselves, like we’ve always done. 

Actually, Dr. Steve Picout’s been doing some work around here with trying to help people realize that in the wake of a technological disaster, you can’t place blame, you can’t let it divide you, and you can’t let it tear you down.  But that stuff wasn’t really reaching fruition until the time I went off to college, so in the meantime it was just kind of a thing of, well, everything sucks but what are you going to do about it. 

I tried different areas. I went to school down in Juneau for a while and visited other places in the U.S. and come back. My family’s been here for, my grandma moved here back in the, I want to say the, late ‘30s or late ‘40s. She was from Katalla originally, and my great-grandma was from this region.  It just been someplace that’s always felt like home to me no matter where I go and there’s value in staying and trying to be part of that and trying to keep things going. Cordova as a town and Alaska as a state, are both old, there’s not a lot of young people here, and so some of the young people have to stay.

I’ve just gotten back to town after being in Anchorage for a couple years, but my goal is I want to participate in as many cultural activities as possible with the Native Village and I want to participate in any of the things that are involved with stewardship of our ecology and trying to keep things here healthy and trying not to let our guard down, as it were.  That scary thing with the tug that happened, that was no fun.  I guess, just because my aunt has been fighting this battle for so long, it’s technically over now, but it’s never over.  We’ve all got to stay here and try. This place is our home and we have to keep it like you would your home.

A lot of people try to be like, “Well, it’s everybody’s fault, we should all feel guilty, we should all feel bad, and we let these people in here, we let them do this to us.”   Kids have to realize -- it’s kind of like anything really traumatic that happens in a child’s life like if you’re parents are getting divorced or something like that -- you can’t blame yourself.  If you’re hurting inside because of it, you can’t just bottle all that up and take it all inside yourself and carry it all on your shoulders.  You have to realize that everybody around you is hurting too and that we can’t let it tear us down.  We have to build each other up and we have to take this, the pain and the guilt and make it our strength instead.

I really wish that our peer listener program had been implemented sooner, because right after the spill happened, that was kind of like when the stone is thrown into the pond, that’s when the big impact was and then it ripples out from there.  If there’d been more stuff in place, I think a lot of people would have not turned to drugs and alcohol, not just up and left or whatever.  If we’d been more willing to and capable of listening to each other and rather than being driven apart by it, bond together, there would have been a lot less, I think, psychological damage.

So I think that if kids could get together or just in classrooms, if teachers could just devote some time to saying, “Well, how do you feel about this?”  Kids encouraged to express themselves artistically or whatever, kind of sublimate those feelings into something positive if the teachers are willing to continue to educate the kids about, like we kind of did here, stewardship of their environment and realizing that they’re part of it.  That would be very, I think, beneficial.  And even just families, just listening to each other, there’s just so much power in listening.  We get so busy with our lives nowadays, everything’s so goal oriented, we have to go do this, go do that, you know soccer practice, blah, blah, blah, but just making time to just sit and listen to each other is very valuable. 

The oil companies will try to come to you and say, “Oh, we’re going to make this all better.”  They’ll promise you the moon, and it’s really easy, I guess, to get taken in by the whole, “Oh, we’re going to put your beach back better than it ever was before” You kind of have to learn to think critically and think for yourself and realize that people will promise you anything, they really will. I think that by uniting around one’s culture and one’s personal set of values, it makes it easier to kind of survive in that onslaught of sweet talking and PR schmooze campaign stuff.  At least from my experience, that’s something that kind of kept us going was uniting around our culture.