Standing Up Against the Giant

Abstract

The Anchorage Daily News's top three headlines on the front page on December 12, 2000, read High Court Ruling Awaited (regarding the Florida recount in Bush vs. Gore), followed by Top School Post Goes to Comeau, and, finally, centered lower on the page, in equally large font, Student Attacks Professor's Poem. The subtitle read, 'Indian Girls' described as racist, insulting. Two primary photos on the front page garnered attention, the larger being that of Elvis impersonators shoveling snow for a hockey game promotion. The other photo was the beleaguered look of a challenged local university professor postured amongst her books. Somehow, what seemed like a rather normal school semester and typical enough poetry class ended with a tidal wave of divisive controversy and inflamed a community already teetering from volatile race relations. I was central to the controversy. I was the student. We Tlingits have a story about the Cannibal Giant who at one time preyed on the people when they were weakened. The Cannibal Giant was once a woman but through evil became a monster. Even when she was seemingly destroyed by fire, the flame transformed her carnivorous essence from cannibal to mosquito, and thus she continues to plague the people to this day. Some say it is a metaphor for those things that would devour our sanity or our spirit. A University of Alaska classroom became another breeding ground of racial tension, an ostensible haven to a literary cannibal that feeds on the weakness of racial hatred. Like the young hunter, upon shoving the cannibal into the fire in an attempt to save the people, I watched with dismay the spread of stirring lies-the mosquitoes we must swat in futile swings of reason. I had the audacity to defend my tribal clan through e-mail by directing