Articles

Balika's Full Interview

Details

Category: Balika's Full Interview

Published Date

Written by Super User

Hits: 11299

Balika Haakanson

Haakanson Home

Kodiak, Alaska

November 3, 2011

My name is Balika Haakanson. I was born Balika Finley. I was born on the west side of Kodiak Island, in Uganik Bay. My parents were homesteaders and fishermen. At the point when the oil spill happened, I was—I must have been 13, if my addition is good and had moved to the city of Kodiak.  At that point my dad had started doing winter fishing and watched me in the summer, and my mom had started to do summer fishing and watched me in the winter. At that point we were fully ensconced in the Kodiak community.

Actually, the year the oil spill happened was the year that—I mean, I know you can’t take a maternity leave when you’re a commercial fisherman, but it was the year that she ended up having her second kid, my sister Imy. So she had taken that year off, which was nice in one way because she was home, but it was weird in another way, because then she had somebody who was supposed to fish her boat that didn’t have anything to do and didn’t know where to go and what to do. But I also had her around, which was nice. That was kind of an interesting experience.

Whenever I think of this, I always think of—one of the last seasons that I commercial fished for my mom, there was a boat fire, and we were like, “Oh!” And we battled the fire and it was all fine, and then we got towed back to town, and on the way back to town we were like, “This isn’t so bad! This isn’t so bad!” And we cleaned up the surfaces a little bit and things looked pretty good, and then we got in and the specialist came down and took a look in the electronics and the engine, and we realized, “Oh, wait! Oh, wait!” So there was very slow dawning realization, almost like your classic whatever it is, three steps, six steps, whatever thing of grieving, whatever that is, where it slowly dawned on us that, “Oh! Oh, we’re not going to be fishing this year!” And that’s kind of how I remember it happening. It was—March in the midst of the school year. Normally my mom would be off on the herring grounds. I can’t remember what her boat—if she had a relief skipper for her boat or not, but I do remember that her husband at the time was involved in either getting ready, or he was down there, or something. I don’t remember, but it was like, everybody was in full-on herring mode, and then the oil spill happened, and we thought, “Oh, that’s pretty bad! That kind of sucks!”

We watched the news, we watched the black cloud spread, I remember that very vividly. We thought, “Wow, that’s really bad for them, those poor guys over there! And poor Prince William Sound,” because my parents were Prince William Sound herring fishermen, too. So they knew that one year of not doing Prince William Sound, maybe next year. And then there was a slow dawning, like a looming realization, “Oh, look at the wind direction! Look at the prevailing winds!” They’re always this way, so of course it was going to come this way. But very, very, very, very, very slow. It was definitely like little fits and starts of realizing, and little bits of news. So yeah, I think we all probably remember the moment at which we were told of the crash of the Exxon Valdez, but I think worse than that was the, “OK, here’s the latest update. It’s hit the east side of the island. Now it’s hit the west side of the island.”

My mom had her relief skipper use her boat for oil spill cleanup that summer, I remember that.  All I know is, at that point I was too young to do anything with the spill, with any cleanup stuff, I think you had to be 18, so I had been slated to go the Uganik and babysit for some friends of ours, the Foxes. The little boys were two and four at the time I think. So instead of going out and helping them clean up,my job was to watch the kids while Mom and Dad cleaned up the beach and wiped oil off the rocks and whatnot. It probably wouldn’t have changed a whole lot had I been babysitting while they fished. It probably would have been pretty similar for me as a babysitter. But there was a lot of uncertainty and depression in the bay. So that was kind of an interesting thing to deal with.

Around town there wasn’t a whole lot of oil, so to me it was totally abstract until I went out to the setnet site and started work babysitting these little boys, and we were seeing these tar balls washing up on the beaches, and talking to my stepdad, who was picking up the oiled puffins and whatnot. So that was—it was—it was such a slow-motion sort of summer. Very slow-motion.

And I just felt—I felt pretty overwhelmed, just because I didn’t—I wanted to do something to help, and it was frustrating that all I was doing was watching kids. But then again, Don and Ilva would go out, they’d wipe off the rocks and come back, and then they’d go do it the next day, wipe, wipe, wipe, and come back and do it again the next day. And that’s probably in retrospect what’s even been more degrading, to have to do that over and over again. They’d bring home puffins and seagulls and all sorts of things that I tried to block out of my brain that we saw. You know, as a 13-year-old, stuff like that, you’re not used to seeing that sort of stuff.

But I think my most interesting or empowering memory is of when—I don’t remember at what point it was. It was either after—it must have been before, right before the salmon fishing would have normally started, because the oil spill happened in March, and then we sort of waited around for a couple months, and then there was a sort of weird limbo where everyone was like, “So what’s gonna happen? Is salmon gonna happen?” And my mom, you know, you still have to find relief skippers and whatnot, so my mom still worked hard to find somebody to run her boat.

And then there was this moment where we were like, “Wait a second, we’re really not going to fish, are we?” And the people didn’t quite believe it. And then people started getting angry at Exxon, and then, I don’t know who it was exactly, a bunch of people organized this march in Kodiak. I still remember the chant, because one of my best friends and I decided that we wanted to march and we wanted to stand up to Exxon! They had these things to clean up the beaches. We called them pom-poms. I’m not sure if they were actually called pom-poms. They really did look like cheerleader pom-poms. But they were black. And I was never a cheerleader ever in my life, and I would never have dreamed of being a cheerleader ever, but I got those pom-poms in my hands and all of a sudden it occurred to my friend and I that it would make a really good cheerleader chant.

So the people were marching down the street going, “Hey, Exxon, clean it up!” And my friend and I decided we would turn into cheerleaders. We choreographed a routine to “Hey, Exxon, clean it up!” And I remember thinking at the time, like, I think there was a little bit of adolescent, like, we don’t really understand what’s going on. We probably weren’t taking it, obviously, as seriously as we should have. But at the same time, the more I marched, the more I looked around us and saw how upset and sad people were, but it was like this sort of slow-dawning realization of just how serious the situation was.

And then at the end, I felt good about marching. It made me feel like there was something to do, even though it really didn’t make any difference. But it was something to build solidarity. And it felt good to be also taking part in a community statement against—maybe not so much against Exxon, but for taking responsibility for your actions. I think that’s my fondest memory, my one moment of being a cheerleader.

Life went on. And I felt like after that, actually that was the moment when I felt most empowered, and then after that I felt more and more sort of helpless, and it became litigated and just all about the litigation and all about people just trying to find their way again. So actually the moment where I felt the best about the oil spill was the moment where we had somebody to stand up to and stand up against, and of course, because it wasn’t really about Exxon, it was about Joseph Hazelwood, it was about just that whole situation.

I mean, I felt proud when I was in high school, my mom was a founding member of the Cook Inlet RCAC and that, I felt proud of her for doing that, because I felt like that’s the sort of thing you could actually to prevent future oil spills from happening. But no, as far as me, no, I don’t feel like there was anything that I did that ever made me feel empowered ever again, just because there wasn’t a way to do it. There wasn’t an avenue that I knew of. Maybe somebody else knew about it. We just sort of waited through that year, and then the next year, salmon went on, and I babysat I think the next year and eventually fell into fishing, but I still felt like I was in an industry where at any point a company or a disaster could come in and wipe out our way of life and our community.  Not a good feeling.

The thing that I think was the weirdest, and the thing that made the whole experience so surreal was the whole getting the Exxon contract thing. There were certain boats that were snapped up to run around and pick up oil from the setnetters or pick up oiled materials or deliver things to the setnetters whose job it was to clean up the rocks and whatnot. And the part that I remember being so awful and made me actually become, I think, a little bit more pessimistic about politics in general, was that there were certain people who got those contracts, got really, really lucrative contracts, and there were certain people that didn’t.  You saw the widening of party lines and the pulling apart of friendships.

I remember at some point during the summer, I think all the setnetters may have gotten contracts. But I remember at some point during the summer talking to a young fisherman. He’d just gotten his fishing boat. It was real rough during second year, and he couldn’t pay his bills, he couldn’t make his boat payments, and he couldn’t also get an Exxon contract, because his boat was too small.  But regardless, he wasn’t in on the big money, the only money there was around that year. That, I think, was eye-opening to me, almost more than anything else about the financial turmoil and how something like that can actually pull a community apart. At the beginning of the summer, I think it might have been in June, I think we were all sort of pulling together and the goal was for everybody to clean up and to work together. And then it became, like, the big boats get the big money for the big contracts, and the little boats maybe don’t even get a contract, so they have no way of paying any bills at all. And then it became sort of like our community was working against each other. At that point, all I wanted to do was get out to the fish site and do my job and babysit, because that at least gave me something to do. But I know my mom had a really hard time with it in Kodiak, because she would normally have been—her relief skipper did get a contract, so she did at least have a little bit of money coming in, but she was—she just had to observe all that, too, and I think that was tough for her. 

Discussing the oil spill was always really present in our house, but I think maybe more so in our house than in an average house, just because that was the year my mom took maternity leave, so she didn’t have a settlement check coming for her that year. However, her husband at the time did, so there was this expectation that there would be this huge settlement for my stepdad, and then there was that sort of thing that was my mom of, I’m not really sure what she’ll get, because she had taken that year off, they have a baby, and so it became kind of awkward. But yes, it was a topic of conversation a lot. And then there was the divorce settlement to deal with and how to deal with potential Exxon funds.

I’m not sure how much it became community-wide. It was constant, yes. People were always talking about, “When Exxon comes through, when Exxon comes through,” but after probably 10 years, I think people gave up, they just assumed it was never going to come and tried to move on with their life. At that point, I almost felt guilty thinking about it, because you’d lost a year’s income, but most people had bounced back. And if they hadn’t bounced back, people had gone on to do different things. It almost felt dirty to think about it as something that was due to us.

But yeah, people were always talking about it. I think a lot of it went over my head. There was tension between people who’d gotten the contracts and people who didn’t. But it was also a big boat-small boat sort of thing, which may have been present anyway. So I don’t know. I mean, I guess I feel like our generation, the kids who were adolescents when the oil spill happened, which is a good time for it to happen, because you’re at least able to comprehend it a little bit, rather than—like, if I’d been five, I wouldn’t probably have cared, or I don’t know, it would have taken me a long time to figure it out. I definitely felt like our group became more environmentally aware than maybe some other age groups, because we saw the local connections to environmental issues. There was an environmental studies class that Stacy Studebaker taught when we were in high school, a lot of us took that, a lot of the kids of fishermen took that, and I felt like it was a pretty powerful class for us kids trying to figure things out.

The thing I wish I’d known more about is how the villages had dealt with that, because I always felt like we were at the center of everything here, and my mom and stepdad were really involved in the political situation. So the contracts came easily and there were meetings at our houses and it was always just real, like—I felt like I was at the center of the whatever. But I just wonder how people who were first-year fishermen, second-year fishermen living in the villages and out of the mainstream must have felt. Probably a pretty helpless feeling.

Just because we did what we did. We were a family that talked about everything and did stuff and went out and did march in parades. I think we wrote letters together and we were interviewed by the news, and I really felt like we did as much as we could. What else could we have done, really? The oil was on the beaches, and it needed to be cleaned up, and everybody in the family had a job cleaning up the oil who was old enough. I didn’t really have anything to do, I couldn’t, so I helped out people who were cleaning up the oil. In retrospect, would I have done anything differently? I can’t imagine what. It felt so good to be able to support the community and to march and go to meetings and whatever. And I was young. I mean, 13, who goes to, like, political meetings, really? And that was the first time I’d really done that.

I don’t remember there being a huge amount of kids or teenagers going to some of the political meetings.  I’m glad that I did, and what I would continue to tell people to do, even if you’re young, that you can still, if nothing else, be a body in the—not the result, but whatever, in the political message, and that it feels good. And it may even make a difference to be one of the people who was marching or sitting in or whatever. The people in Kodiak that we hung out with and fished with at that point were ex-hippies, so it just felt normal to do the whole marching thing, because they were so used to it. It seemed normal. But when I think about it now, if this were to happen now, would I have my kids out there marching? I think I probably would, but would everybody? I don’t know. And I think it’s important for kids to be exposed to that and feel like they’re actually making a difference. So I don’t know if I would have done anything different or if there’s anything I would have wished that I would have known. It’s a weird, helpless feeling to be young when stuff like that’s happening and not to know what to do. I don’t know.

I mean, I was pretty sure I was going to go into fishing. When I went up to college, my goal was to just sort of explore the world and then come back and become a fisherman like my mom, and I think what ended up stopping me was the unpredictableness of it, but that’s not all the oil spill, that’s just fishing in general. So I’m not sure how much of a part that had to play with it. But yeah, one whole year of not having any income whatsoever, that is a really scary thought. I don’t know how people went through that. Of course, that’s nothing I even thought about at the time, because there were these contracts, the cleanup contracts. If that hadn’t happened, holy cow, how scary that would have been!  So yeah, maybe that was part of stopping me from making a career of fishing. But it might not have happened anyway. I’ll never know.

As far as the environment, it’s so hard to know. It’s, like, part of your life growing up, and how it would have been different, not having that, I probably would have been less aware of the tenuousness, I imagine, of nature, just because of all the dead animals that we saw. But I don’t really know. It’s a good question. I also felt like it really let me see people for the—not the faults, but, like, let me see people’s vulnerabilities a lot more, because I saw grown men, really tough, big fishermen, cry after the oil spill happened, and that made a huge impact on me, just because that never happens. Seeing a big old burly 60-year-old fisherman burst into tears, that may have made the biggest emotional impact on me. Maybe even more than seeing, really the oiled birds, just because I couldn’t fathom that something as little as an oil spill can make that happen. So that was one of the things that really hit home, I think.

I think community engagement and being involved in the political process, that was a major one for me personally. I see that, because I work with gifted kids and I teach science right now, and I see a lot of helplessness and hopelessness with kids. They just feel overwhelmed by all the looming environmental issues. So I deal a lot, probably me more than other teachers pretty much, because gifted kids tend to be a little hypersensitive anyway about the state of the world. So I get a lot of really concerned kids talking about how helpless they feel that people aren’t recycling, a huge litany of things.

What to do?  I do have a hard time with that, because to some extent, you just need to get off your butt and do something, but in another, what do you do to help others? So we talk a lot about making sure to be an advocate for things you believe in, standing up to—standing up for what you believe in. That’s the biggest thing that makes the difference, I think, for kids, to be able to feel like they have taken a part in changing something, changing the way people behave. Whenever I’ve been dealing with the feelings of helplessness in the classroom, the thing that makes the kids feel better is to make a plan and go figure out some way, some little way, that you can improve the situation. That always helps more than talking, really. If you talk about it too much, eventually you’ll get back to this whole hopelessness about where our world is headed, or the unknown, because the unknown is so scary. But if kids can fixate on “What I can do to help my neighbor and my neighbors in my community to deal with this situation,” then at least the burden will be lifted off their chest of what they could and couldn’t do. It’s just too big of a situation, too big of a question. There’s no way to solve the huge problem that—I think everybody needs to feel useful, even if you’re 12 or 10 or eight. You can know that you’re doing something.