Aleuts tell their stories of internment, and a Seattle filmmaker listens

ST. GEORGE, Alaska — I'm in the belfry of St. George the Great Martyr Russian Orthodox Church, trying not to throw up. I'm terrified of heights, but unfortunately in my line of work, that's not an excuse for avoiding high places — not if you need the shot.

I produce, write and occasionally direct television commercials and documentary films. Commercials buy the groceries; documentaries feed the soul.

Down on the ground, the associate producer is hollering, "We have to go. We have to go now." With the exception of the director of photography, who is trying to ignore me and get the shot, the entire crew is frantically tossing gear into the back of a pickup.

Through the belfry window, I see a massive storm front moving across the Bering Sea, gathering strength as it heads straight at us. If we don't leave St. George Island today, odds are we won't leave this month.

St. George, Alaska, is approximately 750 miles west of Anchorage and 250 miles northwest of Unalaska. It's unlikely you'll find it on a map. If you do, it will be one of five tiny black specks generally used to represent the Pribilof Islands.

I wouldn't mind staying — St. George is one of the most beautiful places on Earth; I'm tired; the locals are wonderful; there's a great little hotel with a fabulous kitchen, long-distance phone service and satellite TV — but the weather has already put us behind schedule and over budget.

Regular air service has been canceled due to weather. I've paid a bundle for a charter flight to get the crew out of here. Mayor Alvin Merculief is climbing into the cab of the pickup, putting the key in the ignition. The plane is circling the airstrip.

We have to go.

A short becomes a feature

The project had begun simply enough. Together with the Alaska-based film company SprocketHeads LLC, I was to produce a short video documenting the restoration of six Russian Orthodox churches in Alaska. The job was for the nonprofit Aleutian Pribilof Heritage Group, and we had about six weeks and $60,000.

Some five years and $500,000-plus later, we're pretty much done.

The film is called "Aleut Story." It is 90 minutes long and is airing on public television nationwide, including on KCTS at 10 o'clock tonight. Martin Sheen narrates.

"Aleut Story" is nothing like the corporate short we set out to make because questions lead to answers, and answers sometimes lead to a larger story.

Here's the story in a nutshell:

In June 1942, 881 Aleut Americans were removed from their homes in the Aleutian and Pribilof islands and sent to isolated federal World War II "duration" camps some 1,500 miles away. Disease and death were ever-present. As the Aleuts prayed for deliverance, "friendly forces" looted the Aleuts' homes and churches.

The Aleuts were not considered threats to national security. Instead, they were considered too valuable a labor source — the government relied on the Aleuts in the federally run fur-seal harvest — or too primitive to live alongside their countrymen. Aleuts who tried to leave the camps were told they'd be permanently banished from their island homes.

The Aleuts understandably lost faith in government, but they continued to hold fast to democratic ideals. Abandoned by their country, they would not give up on their countrymen. And that is the part of the story that really grabbed me, that took hold of all the people — famous and not-so-famous — who agreed to work on the film.

Protecting future generations

Mary Bourdukofsky had two small children and a third on the way when she was sent to the camp at Funter Bay, near Juneau. She's in her 80s. She taught me the only Aleut I know ("Aang! Aang!" "Hello") and tried to teach me how to cook seal meat (floured and seasoned — like Salisbury steak). She's tough to keep up with — but it's worth trying.

Mary lives in the present tense more than anybody I know. She only agreed to revisit the past to protect the future. "What happened to us shouldn't have happened to anybody," she says. "Maybe it helps to remind people. Americans need to stand up for each other."

Mary recalls how she and other Aleut women decided to defend their rights by petitioning the U.S. Department of Interior, which was responsible for their care:

"We all got together and had a meeting and then we wrote this letter. I'll read it: 'We the people of this place want some better place than this to live. This place is no place for living creatures ... Why they not take us [sic] to a better place to live and work for ourselves? Do we have to see our children suffer? We all have rights to speak for ourselves.' "

Aleuts who survived the camps returned home to wage a decades-long campaign for democracy — even if that meant the government's admitting it made a mistake. It was a historic undertaking, yet the Aleuts' story remains virtually unknown to their fellow Americans.

I learned much of their story at senior centers in the Aleutian and Pribilof islands, which always have hot coffee, fresh cookies and room for one more at lunch. Next to federal archives, I did most of my research at the seniors' weekly lunch.

We didn't talk about what happened for a long time. Some survivors hadn't spoken of the camps in 60 years, their humiliation and loss too great. So we talked mostly about various treatments for arthritis. I've never been so happy to have arthritis, the generational and cultural distance between us considerably lessened by discussions of gnarled hands and aching knees. Our pain was a reminder that we had a lot in common — namely, we're human beings. Americans argue a lot about how much government should do for its citizens. But in the case of the Aleuts, political leaders on both sides of the aisle ultimately determined the United States government failed its citizens.

Unanswered questions

On my desk is an Aleut "answer bone," a short length of seal bone, dark gray and worn smooth by hands with questions. Anthony Merculief, of St. George Island, gave it to me with the caution, "Some questions may never be answered."

Returning to the site of a former duration camp at Killisnoo, near Angoon, Alaska, I realized just how true that is.

Not much remains at Killisnoo. But a short walk from Whaler's Cove Lodge, the high-end fishing lodge that now occupies the ground, you can find the unmarked graves of the Aleut Americans who died there. You have to look closely; the small crosses that mark the children's graves are all but lost in the dense underbrush.

I visited Killisnoo with Alice Petrivelli who, at 12, watched U.S. forces burn her village to the ground before its residents were herded onto a transport ship and taken to the camp.

Sitting on an overturned dinghy behind a boat shed at Killisnoo, speaking between long drags on a cigarette, Petrivelli talked about how the dead are casualties of an indifferent nation.

Petrivelli smoked a lot then; she's since cut back on cigarettes and lost a lot of weight. She says telling the story was like shedding an old skin, making it possible to give up some old habits.

She still talks, though, of how her own daughter, born several years after the evacuation and internment, refused to believe it happened.

"I was telling Patricia about her Aleut family ... about how hard life was in the camp, and she looked at me and said, 'Mama, are you sure it happened?'

"I said, 'Yes, it actually happened.'

" 'But it's not in the history books,' she said.

"She didn't believe me," Petrivelli says. "Most people didn't."

Since the film began playing at film festivals, I've heard from people across America who find it hard to believe such a thing could happen in this country and the story not be told.

The truly startling fact is the story was told — in thousands of pages of government documents and hours of public testimony. But not many people were listening.

Last November, "Aleut Story" was screened for the first time in Anchorage to a sold-out theater. What drew the people — many of them survivors or the children of survivors — was the story, and that it was finally being told in a new and very public way.

Americans should not be strangers to one another. Think of "Aleut Story" as a kind of introduction.

Marla Williams is a Seattle-based filmmaker and former reporter for The Seattle Times. For information: www.aleutstory.tv