It was on Saint Paul that Phyllis and I decided to have children, as we had felt that there was no reason to raise children in a city and had waited until we were in the village. Our daughter Leatha was born in 1976 and Marissa in 1978. They both were beautiful children with distinctly different personalities. One thing they have always shared in common, however, was a love to be outside. I had a pickup truck, and whenever I drove with the family, both Leatha and Marissa wanted to ride in the bed of the truck, summer or winter. Phyllis and I loved the island, so we spent a lot of time outdoors as a family.
Marissa was always different from the other girls in town. One evening we were walking down the road at night when she was five years old. There were few street lights and no clouds in the sky, so the stars could be seen in all their brilliance. Marissa asked, “Dad, what are the stars?”
I thought for a while then gave a scientific explanation, “there are billions of stars, and they were created billions of years ago by the ‘Big Bang.’”
Marissa thought for a while, then said, “No, Dad, you are wrong. Stars are spirits of people.” Even at that age, Marissa always knew what she was going to do. “Dad, I know what I want to do. I want to get enough money to retire at age forty-five, and I want to be buried under the Great Pyramid of Giza.” To this day I wonder how she could have possibly known about the Great Pyramid at her age.
When Marissa finished high school, she enrolled at Arizona State University where she graduated and then entered law school there. She now has two law certificates, one in Indian law and the other in environmental law. I asked, “How did you choose Arizona State?” Her response was memorable, “I just looked at the pictures of the schools and chose the first one that didn’t have snow.”
Marissa’s first job, just out of law school, was to work at retrieving the water rights for the Maori. In one year she and her associates did just that. She now lives on the East Coast with her two sons, Kanuux and Hamati. She is the chief lawyer for the tribe on Saint Paul, our hometown.
My oldest daughter, Leatha, is equally accomplished. She was a vice president of the Alaska Native Medical Center, which provides medical services to all Alaska Native villages in the state. She is now Vice President of Administration for the Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium (SEARHC), which provides medical services to communities in Southeast Alaska. Both daughters are beautiful, accomplished, and very intelligent. Yet as polished as they are, each retains a measure of the village girl from how they were raised, and both return to Saint Paul as often as they can. I feel blessed that they are both doing very well.
My son, Ian Alexander, born sixteen years after Leatha, during my marriage to Sumner MacLeish, was also given to remarkable statements at an early age. Returning from playing with his best friend, Ian said, “When I grow up, I am going to marry Alix, and we will live in a farmhouse with roses attached to the sky.” He was four years old at the time. Now, in his mid-twenties, Ian is working in the culinary arts here in Anchorage, but his heart and soul are drawn toward a different form of art. He is a talented writer and is working on a screenplay in between work and being a father to his one-year-old daughter, Leah.