LEMMING LESSONS By Nasuġraq Rainey Hopson (Iñupiaq) 
I earned my first master’s degree at age ten.
Of course, that is not what it looked like at the time. What it looked like was me being able to stuff twenty-five lemmings in the pockets of my bright blue windbreaker that was two sizes too big for me. But the pockets were large and easy to zip quickly—perfect for holding squirming rodents.
I caught all twenty-five lemmings in one afternoon. It wasn’t particularly hard as I knew exactly where to find each one of them. I had spent the last month strategically arranging pieces of plywood stolen from my father’s scrap pile across the tundra, focusing on places where the grass was thickest and the soil was dry, a lemming’s preferred habitat. The wood had to be the perfect size. Too big and the grass underneath would get compacted and hold too much water, making it damp and uninviting to the critters. Too small and the lemmings would not choose to make their fall time nests underneath them because it wouldn’t offer enough protection. You had to trick the lemmings into thinking they had found the perfect hiding spots for nests and food stores: dry, safe, and easy to dig through. I waited and watched the weather, and when I judged it to be the right time, I walked along the well-known path and flipped each board over to reveal the startled little creatures. They would stay still just long enough for me to grab at them, their initial instinct to freeze, hoping camouflage would work in their favor, betraying them.
I spent years watching and catching and learning about lemmings. I guess most people would say that I was being a kid, that my boredom manifested itself into me being a bit wild. But I wasn’t the only child chasing lemmings all summer and fall—there was a whole group of us who gravitated toward that type of stuff. And in an extremely rural and isolated arctic village in northern Alaska, there weren’t that many options for fun. But it was more than just entertainment. We passed along knowledge to each other like good colleagues would, sharing information about locations and noting the genetics in the slight differences in the markings on the lemmings’ backs. We shared observations about how the population would grow and peak and then wane, and how this was somehow tied to the number of predators. We figured out how many lemmings owls would need to feed their young, and we observed how lemmings treated their own young. Small creatures have so many quiet lessons to teach us, though I’ve often found that only children, who reside in the same type of world, are open to them.
This is also where I learned about death.
A lemming I had caught leaped from the shoebox I was holding them in (this was before I realized that jacket pockets were better). It fell beneath my feet, and I accidentally stepped on it and killed it. They are such tiny, fragile creatures. I stared at the small bright spot of blood on its chin and stood still as an unfamiliar feeling bloomed in me. It was a mix of guilt and sadness and fear… and something else. I wasn’t yet old enough to understand that I could die, that my friends and family could die, but in that moment, I learned that I could cause death. I felt tiny suddenly, as every single part of the world reached out to touch me gently. This little death tied me to the world in such a permanent and life-changing way. I was bound. I knew from then on that all my actions would affect the world around me in ways I could not understand and never would. But I became part of the world right then and there.
I took the lemming’s body and buried it behind the house, fashioning a cross made of sticks that I placed over the grave. I didn’t tell anyone about it.
The year after I caught twenty-five, I suddenly felt a little too old to be into lemmings, so I taught the younger kids what I knew in passing. My interests shifted to catching ground squirrels. They were harder to trap and a little bit scarier with their larger teeth and braver attitude. The next year it was songbirds, and the year after that, as I roamed farther away from my village and my world got bigger, the animals also got bigger and more varied. Soon I spent my time with aunts and uncles and cousins and mentors, roaming the tundra or beaches or ice floes, absorbing the world. But the pattern was the same, as I moved from earning one master’s degree to the next. Binding myself with a thousand threads to the Arctic. To my Culture, to my People.
But this world, filled with animals and family and nature, wasn’t the only world that existed.
Even as a child I knew when I crossed from one world into the next. When I was too little to know what to call this other world, I associated the boundary with a change in smells. When I walked into school, it smelled like the cleaner they used to shampoo the carpets, burnt coffee that Uncle said was weak and wouldn’t even be worth drinking, and paint that was less than a year old. Smells with no depth, sterile and severe on the nose. Even the people who worked there matched the way the school smelled. The teachers there smelled like a base of nothing with a heavy splash of carefully choreographed personality of perfume or cologne or deodorant on top. The clinic smelled just like the school, as did some offices in the borough buildings too.
But me, I smelled like wolf fur on my parka and tundra sod in my nails. I smelled like seal oil from two nights ago somehow clinging to my skin. I smelled like Uncle’s old cigarette smoke and the blue disinfectant we added to the indoor bucket to hide the fact that we had no flush toilets. I never knew how I smelled until I crossed that boundary into the other world. My world clung to me like my history, complicated and deep. I knew that these places in the other world, these places without normal smells, well, they hated me. They hated me in so many ways. They made fun of the way I spoke and the way I walked and the way I thought. These places scratched my skin with sneers and wrinkled noses. These places belittled me for my master’s degrees. Barbaric, the walls would whisper. Sad, the clean floors would say to me. And the people there would mimic this disdain for me. Uncivilized, they said with the rolling of their eyes. I quickly learned at a young age how to navigate through this other clean, sterile, bland world. I rounded out my mouth, so my speech sounded like it fit. I changed my walk from the way I walk on ice and straightened my back, even though it made my calves ache. I read and read and read so I knew what kind of words to use. I coached my face to not move when they said things that stung like mosquito bites and avoided scratching the stings so they did not fester. Like the lemmings taught me, I worked to blend in when danger was around.
I did all these things to make it easier to be in that other world because my mother made it known that to be successful, I would have to be successful in both places. And I never gave it a second thought, because I was good at watching worlds and figuring all the wildlife out. Even if that wildlife included people from faraway places.
I earned my master’s degree in the Western World at age seventeen.
One thing I gathered as I grew up was that there has been and always will be two separate worlds. They never mixed. Anything of my culture that made it into the school or clinic or borough buildings was scrubbed clean of its smell, too, scrubbed clean of the depth and character. And if it could not be made to fit and/or if it made the people who were there uncomfortable in any way, it was simply removed.
I got smart enough to graduate from high school and even got accepted to college in California. By then, my mother had left this world, taken by cancer. And the only real things she left behind were her wishes for me, like boards spread across the tundra in hopes that there would be bounty underneath, wishes for me to be successful in both worlds. So, I left all that was comfortable for me, left everything I knew, and stepped into the world that did not like the real me. But I did it carefully. I made sure to pack only clothes that did not look Indigenous. I only took a handful of pictures of family where you could not really tell from the background that I was from a small rural village in Alaska. I embraced vagueness as much as I could, making sure to scrub all the scents of home from my skin. When people asked where I was from, I smiled and did not answer if they asked only the once. I tucked that part of me into the folds so that I could avoid the disdain and noncelebration.
And, as you can imagine, I was miserable. You cannot deny parts of yourself, sever them from your daily life, and expect to be normal. I had gotten rid of all my anchors and was floating adrift. Lost. I was diagnosed with panic disorder and anxiety and found myself at weekly visits sitting across from a person who did his best to ignore where I came from, not once asking about the wounds growing in my Lemming Soul. Best to focus on learning how to counter the attacks, he would say, as he taught me breathing techniques. It made him uncomfortable that I was such a foreign entity, I think.
I learned the breathing techniques. Inhale, exhale, relax.
The second semester of my freshman year, I took an introduction to cultural anthropology course. It was required and it had openings, so I signed up, not really expecting much. The teacher was a woman originally from Australia; her accent came in and out as she spoke, like ocean waves. One day we opened the massively overpriced book and all of us turned to the page indicated. I was supposed to read the chapter ahead of time but hadn’t, and I was surprised to see that half of the page was written about my own culture. The teacher briefly talked about the passage and asked if there were any questions. My palms started sweating almost immediately as I read my tribal name in black words on white paper again.
Iñupiaq.
I glanced around, wondering if anyone else saw my nervousness. A few students raised their hands to ask questions. The type of questions you ask if you want credit for participation. There was no anger, no disdain, no mocking laughter like I expected. Seeing my culture present in the other world pinned me to my desk. I felt like someone had taken a thumbtack and stuck it into my soul.
Here. You exist… here.
After class, I immediately made my way to the library. Seeing my culture in a book triggered something in me. I never imagined that someone would write anything about us in any book, and suddenly I wanted more. I wanted to see everything that was ever written about us. I found six books. Six. Four of them only had brief mentions of my culture and didn’t go into any detail at all. Two of them were recountings of explorers, and each spent a couple chapters describing everything they saw and all of their experiences in our lands. Who they met. One of the books even included several black-and-white photos of Iñupiaq people. There was one of an Iñupiaq woman, her chin held high, eyes like flint, a slight smile on her lips. Three lines were tattooed on her chin, and she wore a caribou-skin atigi with beautiful qupak designs sewn into the hem. I could tell she would have never hidden anything of herself into the folds. I knew she would never be ashamed of where she was from. Of her history and family.
I felt those same tendrils of the world reach out to me as I did when that lemming died. I could feel myself being bound. But this time it was different. I knew without a doubt I was on the way to something I could only vaguely see in the distance.
A couple days later, I hung back after my cultural anthropology class to talk with my teacher. She was one of the nicer people I had met, not overly friendly, but open and no-nonsense. She asked if she could help me.
“I’m Iñupiaq,” I said, maybe a little too loudly. “I’m Iñupiaq from Alaska.” I don’t know what I expected to get from her by telling her this, but I was young and needed to move forward somehow. I needed to say those words out loud, in this place, this place that was thousands of miles from home. Her brow furrowed as she took a second to understand what I was saying, and then she smiled. “That’s amazing,” she said, and then proceeded to pepper me with questions. Each question was a gift. She truly was interested in my culture, each query insightful and encouraging. We sat outside the building and chatted for half an hour, and eventually she asked if I could do a presentation about my culture and the way I grew up. She offered in exchange pretty much a guaranteed A in the class. I accepted.
Books are powerful. Media is powerful. Movies and music and other expressions of human emotions and celebrations. Little did I know that this experience would lead me to a life creating as much media as I could that included our culture. Our language, our history, our faces, and our stories. Eventually I would go on to make illustrations, documentaries, perfume, herbal remedies, videos, stickers, and anything else I could make, all with this one goal. Each thing I create, I create for that little girl catching lemmings in the tundra. Each thing I create is a love letter to her. Each thing I create is a means to celebrate childhood brilliance and culture. And when the negative voices creep into my head, when those voices of my childhood from the sterile place start scratching at my skin again, I remind them that I caught twenty-five lemmings in one day, and that they all fit in my pockets. And if I can do that, I pretty much could do anything.