I’m back in Seattle, but before I left Alaska, I spent an evening going to art openings with my mother in my hometown of Homer, Alaska. It’s a bit of a nostalgia thing, really, as she used to cover arts for the local paper, and I tagged along with her to many many openings as a child. Homer is a big art town, so there’s quite a bit to see.

Our first stop was Bunnell Street, a restored building housing a wonderful gallery and a bed and breakfast. Rather than a single artist’s work, their current exhibition is a curated collection by a variety of Alaskan artists.

During the opening, the curator stood up and spoke to the crowd about his experiences coming to Alaska, originally as a seasonal worker. The first question that many people asked him was, ‘how long have you been here?’ Now that he’s lived in-state for ten years, he still feels like there is a line drawn in the sand, and he wanted address that with the show. Here’s his statement on the idea behind the show.

Curator, Michael Walsh, asks, “What is a native alaskan? I’ve heard the term Alaska Native and know that means a person of indigenous origin. I’ve heard people describe folks who are born here as native Alaskan, little n. How long does it take to live here too be called a native alaskan? I don’t know the answer. I don’t know if anyone does. And if so, does it matter? Should it matter? I think it’s worth a discussion at least. The definition of a native alaskan that I am using for this show is “one who is a life-long Alaskan,” from artists who can trace their family heritage back thousands of years, to artists who are born here as well as artists who may not have been born here, but started their life here at a very young age. The talent of native alaskan artists is very impressive. I am a fan!!”

There was the usual call for questions, and slowly, hesitantly, the audience began to discuss. Many had been asked, or asked, the same question: how long?

“I always say, ‘only fourteen years,'” one white-haired woman said. The “only” part, she qualified, is because you don’t know the relative “status” of the questioner.

“It’s a white people question,” said another man. “It’s never discussed among the Natives.” (That’s Natives with a capital “N”, please note.)

The ice had broken in the room, now, and another woman spoke up. She’d been in Alaska for about a year, working on a teaching certificate in Anchorage, where her first assignment was to write an essay on how long she’d been in Alaska. She pointed out that the Anchorage School Distract has sixty languages — more than anywhere else in the US — and seemed to feel that the Question is indicative of cohesive Alaskan identity, that anyone can become Alaskan if they’re around long enough, and she stated her wish that America as a whole had a similar attitude.

Asia Freeman, Bunnell’s artistic director, asked artist Ron Senungetuk his thoughts. He spoke about returning from Norway in 1962 to find that the Alaska Art Museum had Native art in a separate area from the other Alaskan art showing landscapes and such. But now the contemporary art scene does a lot more to recognize and value the contributions of Native Alaskan artists. (If you have a moment, I strongly encourage you to read his written comment submitted in 1969, during public hearings prior to the passage of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, in which he gives his background and speaks more about his hopes for multiculturalism in Alaska. And his art is amazing.)

When he had spoken, a young woman across the room suggested that people arrive in Alaska with their own ideas about what it should be. She danced around, trying not to say ‘fresh off the boat,’ but saying that those who are fresher off the boat have different ideas about what the “real” Alaska is. She dropped a couple local references that made people smile, and the conversation was more or less over. My mother and I left.

We had both held our tongues, but in the car I asked her what she thought. “It’s tied to the transient rate, and migration,” she said. People come to Alaska for a fling – they want to go back where they came from and tell stories about how they bagged a bear, saw a glacier, caught a salmon… “People want to visit Alaska,” she said, “but they don’t want to ‘marry’ it.”

‘How long have you been here?’ is a testing question, locals looking for those who have committed themselves to Alaska.

She reminded me of the brief time that our family lived in Dillingham. It’s a regional hub in Alaska’s southwestern coast, but it’s not a big place – I always tell people there were forty-two kids in seventh grade and six of us weren’t cousins with everyone else. Locals there, my mother said, call the people who come and go “suitcase people.”

In Dillingham, our family turned out to be suitcase people, and I’ve been a suitcase person passing through a number of places since. The strongest parallel, which hit me as soon as someone said “it’s a white person” thing to ask ‘how long?'” was the time I spent living in China. When I rehashed this conversation with my husband over the phone, the first thing he said was, “oh, like in Beijing?” We didn’t spend a lot of time in the expat community, but it was a perpetual question there, too. How long have you been here, how long are you staying, how much Mandarin do you know?

I remember being annoyed with the pissing contest of it, because with two months in-country, I always lost. So it’s interesting to realize how often I’ve been on the smug other side. I was born here. I grew up here. Yeah, I grew up eating nothing but salmon and blueberries. I walked home from school in the snow (even if it was downhill). I worked in the cannery, I’ve chopped down trees, stared down moose… you get the idea.

In the end, I keep returning to “this is a white people thing”, as the most obvious and yet the most meaningful observation. I’m native Alaskan, but not Native, and I spend a lot of mental energy on what that means. It’s an underlying theme, I’ve realized, in many of my writing projects. You can probably expect more ruminations in the future, so consider yourself forewarned.