Life in Old Chenega

by Margaret Borodkin

We used to have so much fun in Old Chenega. We used to love it. There were ten of us in my family. I was the youngest. We have always been a close family.

Whenever somebody in the old village went out hunting, they'd bring back a seal or a sea lion. They'd leave it on the beach, and the people would go down there and help themselves. That's how we all helped one another. First, people from the family that caught it would come down to the beach and cut off a chunk of meat. Then everybody else would go down and get whatever they needed. Everyone was invited to take home some of the seal or sea lion.

I think my dad used to bring our meat up to the house, and my mom would cook it in different ways. Sometimes we ate porpoise. My mom used to cook that good. Oh gosh, I remember how she would cut the porpoise meat into cubes or steaks and roll them in flour and fry them. It was so tender and tasty. I'll never forget that. It was so delicious. I used to eat duck soup a lot, and now I can't even stand the smell of it. I'm getting away from my Native foods. I miss some of my Native foods. It takes me way back. We had a good village. It was a good life there. People never wanted for anything. Everybody shared.

That's what a community is about—sharing and helping each other.

My Dad used to do a lot of hunting and fishing. He used to commercial fish out of Shipyard for the Nellie Juan Company. His boat number was NJ 34. Nellie Juan 34. In the summer we lived in Shipyard while the men were out fishing. The women stayed home. Some of the younger people worked in the Nellie Juan cannery, which was around the corner from where we used to camp. I loved it over there at Shipyard. It was such fun.

We used to collect seagull eggs to eat. But around here and in Cordova you get fined if you collect seagull eggs. The scissortail eggs are so small. When you're collecting their eggs, those birds dive right at you like they're going to land on your head. They're just trying to protect their eggs, I guess.

I used to go fishing once in awhile. A couple of us would row out into the bay in Old Chenega. We would catch salmon, halibut, and tomcod. I still eat salmon, but not halibut that much. Then we'd go clamming around the point in the evenings and take a gas lamp with us when it was dark in the wintertime. There were butter clams and those little steamers. My brothers would always go clamming around the point and bring back a bunch of clams.

I used to watch my mother make blueberry jam, but I never learned. We used to go blueberry picking, and now I think, gosh, we were brave. We weren't even afraid of the bears in the summertime. Sometimes, we would go around the bend and pick blueberries. We'd take smoked fish, fried bread and stuff like that for lunch.

I don't remember any recipes now. I don't think I was too interested in cooking when I was young. I remember very little. I've been away from it for so long. I don't know if I could eat seal or sea lion now. But that's what we grew up on. It was good food, back then. There were no chemicals in the food, so people hardly ever got sick, except for a couple of old men who were bed-ridden with tuberculosis. Back then, tuberculosis was the number one killer.

I grew up liking almost everything, like fish heads and seal flipper, which tastes just like pigs' feet. I still have fish heads once in awhile. I cook them myself. They used to eat sea cucumbers too. We could scrape all that stuff off the top, cut off the ends, and cut them open. My sister would put bacon on top and stick them in the oven. They looked so good, but I never did eat them.

I remember my sister, Sally Evanoff, and our sister-in-law, Frieda Vlasoff, used to go out halibut fishing in the bay. They'd come back with one or two. In fact, they were out fishing on the day of the 1964 Alaska Earthquake. Luckily, they came back in before it happened, before the tidal waves. I remember that I was out on a skiff earlier that day with some other people. We got thirty sea urchins.

Things changed after the earthquake. The razor clams disappeared around Cordova, where they used to be plentiful. A lot of things disappeared. I moved to Cordova after the earthquake. There was this one lady there who used to invite us over for lunch almost every week. She'd invite us elders for lunch so we could have our Native foods.

I met my husband, Nick Borodkin, in Valdez. He was a commercial fisherman. We got married in Valdez. It was a double wedding with Paul Kompkoff's daughter, Polly, and her husband. We were blessed with one son. That's where I got my three granddaughters: Angie, Jenette, and Niki. I lost my son Ray, in 1986.

I know that a couple of my granddaughters used to eat herring spawn. Man, they are good. Way back when, we used to dunk them in seal oil. But now I can't even stand the smell of seal oil. I melt butter and dunk them in butter instead. This man who lives in my building said he's going to go out to Sitka and get some. He puts them in Ziploc bags and gives them to whoever wants them in the building.

I was in Cordova when the oil spill happened. It was terrible. People couldn't go out to harvest anything for quite a while. Everyone was worried because of the oil.

I could have had a home in Chenega Bay, but I had to give it up because I was under doctor's care after the earthquake and the tidal waves. I was in the hospital for three months after the earthquake. I haven't even been to Chenega Bay. I should have taken that house anyway, and then I could have gone down there in the summertime and rented it out in the wintertime. They have so many gatherings down there. They have so much fun in the village. My sister, Maggie Totemoff, lives there. I think she still cooks Native foods whenever she can get some. They get berries and deer. She doesn't eat deer meat. I don't either.

Maggie and I always say, "Them good old days are gone forever." All we do is sit and reminisce about it now.