In 1778, while on his third Pacific voyage, English explorer Captain James Cook sailed into the Bering Strait in search of the fabled Northwest Passage. When he saw the land jutting westerly into the channel, he named it Cape Prince of Wales, in honour of King George iii’s eldest son, the Prince of Wales. Eskimos called it Kingigin, or “high bluff,” and called themselves Kingikmiut, “people of the high place.” The names refer to a ridge that wraps around Wales like an amphitheatre. It starts as a rocky outcropping known as Razorback Mountain and gently bends to 700-metre-high Cape Mountain, which dives into the Bering Strait — the terminus of the Continental Divide. At the base of the mountain, the sea laps at a giant slab of granite shaped like an axe blade. Some villagers say this is where Paul Bunyan left his axe after chopping down all the trees in the Arctic.
When gazing up the mountainside and along the ridge, it feels as if people are perched up there looking back at you. In ancient times, the Kingikmiut stacked rocks to look like sentries to scare off enemies coming across the strait. Granite boulders dot the hillside, the biggest of which is painted white. The Kingikmiut called it The Door. They believed a spirit lived behind it; when he was hungry, he would cast a beam of light into the sea and snag a seal. There once was a pit near The Door, an underground altar to appease the spirit. When a Kingikmiut boy was old enough to hunt, he carried a stone up the hillside and dropped it in the pit, telling the spirit, “Here is seal meat. Eat it.”
The Kingikmiut occupied two villages huddled tightly together below the mountain. They were allied in trade and hunting, reigning over a territory stretching dozens of kilometres. Seven hundred people lived in Kingigin, one of the largest native settlements in Alaska; some anthropologists believe it was the biggest.
Other tribes in northern Alaska were small and nomadic, living at fishing or winter camps in a constant quest to find food. In Kingigin, animals regularly passed by the Kingikmiut’s doorstep. The people lived off the sea, hunting bowhead whales, seals, and walruses as they swarmed the ice-clogged Bering Strait. A whale could feed hundreds of people for months. Seal blubber heated and lit their houses — dark, subterranean mounds moulded from the tundra. The skins were used to make clothes, boats, and tents. After a successful whaling season, there were big dance festivals, called messenger feasts. Young men travelled to neighbouring villages, carrying poles festooned with the skins of wolverines, caribou, and bearded seal, and invited others to come and share in their fortune. Gifts were exchanged, and people danced to the beat of drummers.
The Kingikmiut were great traders, moving goods between continents and villages hundreds of kilometres apart. Eskimos from other villages came to Wales to swap deerskins and sealskins, jade and flint, ivory and beads. Bands of Siberian Eskimos would paddle across the strait and trade with the Kingikmiut. Other times they attacked the Kingikmiut, plundering the village for food and taking women and children as prisoners.
In the spring of 1979, a propeller plane rounded Cape Mountain, banked a hard right over the Bering Strait, and swooshed down upon the village like an Arctic tern diving for a salmon. Walter and Florence Weyapuk had brought home a baby boy. He was Eskimo, even had some Kingikmiut blood flowing through his veins. They’d adopted him in Fairbanks at six months old. The couple named him Michael Deland Weyapuk. Seelkoke was his Eskimo name, passed down from Buster Seelkoke, an elder who died three months before Mike was born.
Mike arrived in Wales at the time of year when people emerge from their houses squinting like moles. The sun hung in the sky longer with each passing day. The ice broke apart. Spouts from bowhead whales puffed like smoke as they swam north into the Arctic Ocean. Men got their crews together and spotted positions a kilometre out on the shore ice to launch their boats. After the whales passed, walruses and seals appeared, like black ants floating on water. Mike’s father, Walter, prepared to go after the walruses. His mother cleaned the storm shed, praying for a freezer full of game. Sister Leah watched over her little brother.
Mike belonged to an extended family of Inupiat Eskimos, the orphaned descendants of the 1918 flu epidemic. They spoke in thick, slow, choppy English, which had largely replaced their native language. Women wore traditional parkas, but more often dressed in blue jeans and snow-suits. The men had long hair and wispy beards and smoked cigarettes. They looked like truck drivers, sporting big sunglasses and ball caps. Villagers had turned in their dogsleds for snowmobiles by the time Mike showed up.
No roads connected Wales to the rest of Alaska, its only link being small propeller planes packed with food, mail, and passengers flying to and from Nome, a hardscrabble town of churches and taverns 160 kilometres southeast of Wales. Wales was poor and relied heavily on government subsidies. People didn’t have running water and still don’t today. They paid with tokens to shower at the washeteria and used five-gallon containers, called honeybuckets, for toilets. A city employee, riding on a four-wheeler in summer or a snowmobile in winter, drove around like a garbageman, picking up the waste and hauling it to a sewage lagoon.
A string of ramshackle homes built of weathered planks and tarpaper lined a sandy path running along the coastline. Mike’s grandparents lived in one, surrounded by dilapidated shacks and old wooden meat racks. Across the road and along the beach was another row of homes, each with three small bedrooms and a kitchen opening up to a small living room. Mike’s family home had been shipped to Wales in the 1970s on a barge. Beyond the houses were the Wales Native Store, the Lutheran church, the school, a few boats lying perpendicular to the sea, and then several more houses and shacks crawling up the hillside.
