Hazel Apok: Interview Outline: Section 5 Hazel's father, tribal council, living in the old days, and stories Tape Reference Number: H2002-09-13 Hazel spoke with Bill Burke in Fairbanks, Alaska on April 3, 2002.

Hazel Apok: A lot of -- a lot of my peers are deathly afraid of my father who passed on when I was 16. And it was because he was looking out, you know, for their best interest, and my peers didn't think he was at the time there. Still, even today when they talk about him -- you know, they still -- I could still hear the fear in their voices, you know, and to me, that's my beloved papa. He was part of -- part of what we consider now a tribal council, I guess. When there is somebody that did something wrong in the community, they would make the individual go in front of the elders and the elders would pass judgement. I don't recall ever anybody being banned from our community, but it's my understanding that it has -- it has happened in the past. And that -- that's some of the things I learned in going to tribal court conferences and talking to different people about how life was in the -- long ago.

Course, them days we didn't have television, we didn't have -- we -- we did have radios and we'd get stations here from Fairbanks. We would have to do things differently them days to be able to get different radio stations. I remember listening to KSUI in Nome and KJNP here in Fairbanks up in one of our camps. We never grow up with TV. We worked from the time we got up until the time we went to bed. We -- we worked to survive. We had to heat our homes, we have to get water, pack water. We had to get wood for heat. We had to do different things. We'd barter to get the staples that we needed like coffee and rice and sugar and flour. I remember my father bringing furs to the -- to the -- to -- we used to call him Blank -- Blankenship, Ruth's father. You know, to trade for -- for the things that we -- that my father and them, you know, started liking coffee, started liking tea. Sugar was introduced, you know, so. We used to trade. We didn't have a full cash economy or even a mixed cash economy.

Bill Burke: So life has really changed?

Hazel Apok: Uh-hum. It's really changed.

Bill Burke: From then.

Hazel Apok: Today I see our young kids, they are not lazy, they just don't know, you know, how we lived. They grow -- they grow up just flipping a switch and their lights are on. They go turn a few knobs and the water flows, you know. They don't know how hard it was for us to get water into our homes or to heat our own homes.

My -- my father -- our house was a gathering place for -- for all the other elders like Richard Glover, Lauren Black. Some of the Westlake boys would just hang around just to go listen. Teddy Johnson. But Richard Glover was our storyteller. I used to fall asleep on my -- at my mom's feet listening to them tell stories. Some of 'em -- to me when I look back on it now, some of them were tales, you know, about different things. For their entertainment after they did all their work to survive they would gather and tell tales, you know, tell stories. A sense of humor was important, so they would weave stories, you know, that would -- that would have us laughing and rolling around. I wish I could remember all those stories. I wish I knew then how important it was to record it -- you know, if I had a recorder I would have recorded all them stories. Of course, there were stories about different expeditions or different things when people went out hunting, especially in the winter, and they would come back and say -- we would update each other about what happened during the past year. But our place was a favorite gathering place.

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