"So where did you get the money?” Tom
asked.
“The Native corporations receive federal loans
and no-bid contracts to do all kinds of stuff. One group of villages got a
contract to replace bridges in Napa, California. Someone else replaced all the
windows in the JFK federal building in Boston.” Turner barked a laugh.
Keenan
Powell, Hemlock Needle, Kindle Loc.
365
In
Anchorage, Alaska, Yup’ik Eskimo chief financial officer and single mother,
Esther Fancyboy, walks out of a party and into a blizzard. She is never seen
again, leaving behind a seven-year-old son, Evan. The local cops say she’ll
come home when she’s done partying, but family friend Maeve Malloy doesn’t
think it’s that simple. She goes looking for Esther just as she’s getting bad
news of her own, a career-ending accusation. When Esther’s body turns up in a
snow berm and a witness is shot to death in front of Maeve, she suspects Evan
might be in danger. Maeve must race against time to save the boy–along with her
career, and maybe her life.
Last month, Level Best Books
released Hemlock Needle, the second
book in Keenan Powell’s Maeve Malloy mystery series. Keenan is an Alaskan lawyer
who has seen it all and lived to tell the tale. The book is not a traditional
legal thriller. The focus is on a murder investigation, which delves into
federal contracts given to Native corporations, and on Maeve’s current problem
with the bar association brought on by her past mistakes. But that doesn’t mean
Maeve’s stupid, it means when even the good guys aren’t, there’s little
recourse.
The
book contains a glossary of terms at the very end. When I finished reading and
found it, I felt as flummoxed as when I read A Clockwork Orange, eons ago, without knowing it contained a
glossary of terms at the end of the book. Perhaps my advanced copy lacked a
table of contents but don’t read the entire book full of Native language terms
without bookmarking the glossary at the end.
Read
my first interview with Keenan here. Welcome back to WWK. E. B. Davis
You
refer to the Alaskan natives as “Natives” or “Eskimos.” Are either politically
correct? How do the natives refer to themselves?
That’s a great
question.
In recent
history, there was a commonly-used vulgar term used to describe Eskimos, which
I won’t repeat. During that period of time, the politically-correct term was
“Eskimos”. However, there are more than one Eskimo group. I am aware of several
in Alaska: the Alutiiq, Chupik, Yup’ik, Inupiat, and Inuit. There could be
more.
In addition,
there are tribes in Alaska historically referred to as “Indian” rather than
“Eskimo”. Those include the Aleuts, Athabaskans, Ahtna, Kenaitze, Tlingit,
Haidi, and Tsimshian.
These groups did
not care to be lumped together. Not all of these groups are friendly towards
each other. They have had recent history of competing for resources and even
war between some of these groups. For instance, the Aleuts sided with the
Russians against the Tlingits in the Battle of Sitka in 1804. So nowadays, it
is common in media to refer to the specific group the person identifies with.
However, in the
distant past it was customary to take all the Native children from their homes
and send them to a boarding school where they met and intermarried. So it is
not uncommon to meet someone who has a complex heritage.
I read an article
in a local newspaper when I was writing this book about specifically how
Eskimos felt about the term “Eskimo”. Some said that it was offensive to them
and some said they were proud of it. So, each to his own.
The term “Native”
is often used in the media when identifying a suspect or a victim. With
well-known individuals, such as mushers or politicians, their specific heritage
is usually noted. “Native” is also used in reference to all the Natives, such
as the Alaska Native Medical Center or the Alaska Federation of Natives.
Akutaq’s
(Eskimo ice cream) ingredients are whale fat, seal oil, and blueberries whipped
to cream consistency. Have you eaten it? Doesn’t it taste like fish?
Once upon a time,
I visited the western Alaskan village of Kwethluk and while there, our hostess
served akutaq. She apologized because she didn’t have whale fat or seal oil. So
in their stead, she used vegetable shortening and vegetable oil. It looked like
blue Cool Whip. I ate it. It looked prettier than it tasted to me as
blueberries in western Alaska are bitter. Years later, I talked to a little old
lady in Anchorage who said that she would add sugar to her akutaq if white
people were going to eat it.
A
Chinook wind melts snow and ice revealing a missing woman’s body (Esther
Fancyboy) whom Maeve and her investigator, Tom, are looking for at the request
of her mother, Cora, an old acquaintance of Maeve’s. Is a Chinook wind the same
as El Nino? How warm is warm? Are bodies often found after such a wind?
A Chinook wind
isn’t the same as El Nino. El Nino is weather cycle that effects large portions
of the globe. During El Nino years, Alaska will have a milder winter.
A Chinook wind is
a more discrete event. In Alaska, it is caused by warm air moving in from the
Pacific Ocean. The winds are often 40 to 50 degrees in temperature and gust
over 100 mph, so snow and ice melt fast.
It is not unusual
for a body to turn up after a Chinook rips through Anchorage.
If
it is a tradition of native peoples that grandparents raise their
grandchildren, doesn’t it follow that native children are always behind due to
older values and lack of technological knowledge? Is this also why Esther’s
son, Evan, calls her by her first name rather than “Mom?”
In the village in
olden days, the grandparents would raise their grandchildren while both parents
were expected to hunt, fish, gather, prepare food, and attend to the family
needs. However, with statehood and development of urban centers occurring at
the same time that traditional subsistence activities were outlawed or
regulated and the removal of Native children from their homes to go to boarding
school, these traditions have been disrupted. That disruption is more extreme in
nuclear families who are now living in Anchorage, having left the extended
family in the village.
I am not quite
sure why the Native kids I’ve seen address their parents by their first name. I
wonder if it’s a holdover from precontact.
I
had no idea many natives were of the Russian Orthodox religion. How did that
come about and what is a Starring ceremony?
Russians settled
Alaska before it was sold to the United States. Coastal areas were occupied by fur
trappers and traders and the Russian Orthodox Church took on the challenge of
spreading Christianity amongst the Native Alaskans.
Starring is a
Christmas tradition like Christmas caroling. In the village, people stroll from
house to house singing Christmas songs while men hold tinsel stars about two to
three feet in diameter and spin them. Then everyone goes inside, eats and
drinks, and the singers move on to the next house. In Anchorage, the different
Native groups gather in an event room at the Alaska Native Medical Center where
food is shared, songs are sung, dancers dance and the stars are spun. Orthodox
Christmas is January 7.
In
times of stress, Maeve, a recovering alcoholic, experiences phantom tastes of
alcoholic beverages. I’ve heard of smells setting off memories, but never this
phenomenon. Was stress the reason Maeve drank?
Maeve is an
alcoholic of the genetic variety. She didn’t need a reason to drink. Once she
experimented with alcohol in college, her disease took hold. Negotiating a
sober lifestyle is stressful in itself for the newly-recovered and if something
extra stressful happens, yearning for oblivion, the kneejerk reaction of any
alcoholic or addict, is a typical response.
When
Maeve is brought up on charges of malpractice stemming from an incident that
happened prior to her going into mandated rehab, she realizes she was set up.
It seems like she’s being punished twice for the same incident, and this time
the outcome could get her disbarred for life. The charge is due to her client
providing a false alibi, which at the time she didn’t know about. She was a
public defender. Isn’t it the prosecution’s responsibility to break the alibi?
Why is she being charged for what she didn’t know? Vice Versa, if the
prosecution knew and didn’t say, why aren’t they charged with malpractice?
These are all really
good questions. It seems unfair, doesn’t it?
I developed this
plot point because it occurred to me that the authorities can be trapped in a
web of their own making. What would
happen if the police were working with a confidential informant (“snitch”) who,
at the same time, was doing something illegal. Would they turn a blind eye?
What if the only
way the prosecution could win the second case (where the snitch is involved in
illegal activity) was to disassemble the snitch’s alibi thus revealing that he
was a snitch in another investigation, possibly destroying that case and/or
risking the snitch’s life?
Point in fact:
just a few months ago, a snitch was identified in a drug case to the
defendant’s attorney and two days after his identification, he turned up dead.
The defendant who he was testifying against has not been charged with his
murder.
In Maeve’s case, her client’s alibi witness
lied. He testified that he was with the defendant in a strip club and not robbing
a store when in fact the snitch was on the other side of town doing a
controlled drug deal for the police. A controlled drug deal is when the police
wire up the snitch, give him marked money, observe and record the transaction.
Under ethical
rules, the prosecution has no duty to reveal their methods or strategy. Nor do
I believe that they have an ethical duty to inform the court that another
party’s witness is lying. If they did, it would open a snake pit of
side-litigation because in almost every case, an element in virtually every case
is the accusation that the other party’s witnesses are lying.
But an attorney
has an ethical duty to inform the court that her own witness lied or plans to
lie. When Maeve learned afterwards that her alibi witness had lied, she was
under a duty to inform the court even though her client was acquitted and
couldn’t be tried again. Instead, she
swept it under the rug hoping no one would find out.
Maeve
feels responsible for the actions of her clients, whom she can’t control. One
mentor keeps after her about it “not being all about her.” Why can’t she take
that advice?
That’s a
complicated question. I’m not a psychologist but I’ve observed that there are
many people, alcoholic or not, who interpret every event as effecting them
personally or feel they have the power to effect everything around them. Thinking
that everyone is out to get you or that when something good happens to someone
else, you’re getting cheated is the flipside of the personality that thinks
they can go around fixing everyone else. Both behaviors are rooted in
self-centeredness.
Newly recovering
alcoholics like Maeve sometimes have difficulty grasping this concept. It could
well be a developmental thing as many alcoholics begin drinking as teenagers
when they should be figuring out who they are, where they end, and where other
people begin. So when they sober up, they are adults in adult world with the
psyche of a young teenager. It can be quite confusing.
Thomas
Sinclair, her investigator, is a complicated character. He’s good at what he
does, but he also seems personally involved with her. He’s teaching Maeve
defense moves, which she needs. He presses his jeans. He champions Maeve. He
protects her, but she provides work for him. Does he fulfill the lack of male
role-models in her life, father, brother, boyfriend? How old is Tom?
Tom is functioning in all those roles for
Maeve. He introduced her to sobriety. He got her into rehab. He went to her
boss to get her time off to go to rehab. He quit his job to go work for her
when she left the Public Defender’s Office in part because he enjoyed working
with her but also because he hated the politicking at the office. He is like a
big brother but his feelings towards her are complicated and so his presence in
her life seems to keep her from dating other men. And because Maeve is that
teenager psychologically in an adult world, she doesn’t have perspective on her
relationship with Tom to understand what exactly is going on between them.
I see Tom as
about ten years older than Maeve. So if she’s in her late 20’s, he’s pushing
forty.
“Traditional
Yup’iks were stoic, especially in the presence of white people.” (Loc. 210)
Why?
Traditional
Yup’iks seem stoic to white people because white people haven’t learned how to
read their facial expressions and body language, which is subtler than in the white
culture. Several years ago, I was a presenter at the Alaska Federation of
Natives annual conference on the topic of subsistence, having just won a major
case in federal court related to that issue.
Before my talk, a
local politician spoke. He told the audience that they didn’t need subsistence
rights, they needed electricity and clean water and jobs. He was met with stony
silence. Then he made a crack about the audience being inscrutable.
I had no problem
reading them. Those folks were angry. They were doing just fine before we
showed up, thank you very much, and subsistence lifestyle was their job. State
regulation of their subsistence rights had turned them into a dependent
poverty-stricken population. Then to have this politician show up as a guest at
their convention preaching they should assimilate was truly insulting. And bad
manners.
The
federal government awards contacts to corporations formed by natives. Because
of a lack of experience and/or knowledge many of the contracts are subbed out
to nonnative corporations. The money passes through the natives who take a cut
off the top. I can understand this happening at one time, but like Esther’s
cousin who is an engineering student, at some point the new generation should
get the education and experience necessary to manage and/or execute contracts.
Does the money still just get passed through the natives?
As far as I know,
these SBA programs are still being funded and administered.
Sal,
a retired cop, opens an Italian restaurant on the first floor of the building
in which Maeve’s office Is located. Will she ever get immune to the smells of
bread and pizza?
Man, I wish. Of
course there is a part of me in Maeve and every time I smell baking bread or
pizza while I’m driving down the road, I want to turn my car around and find
it.
Isn’t
hemlock poisonous?
The hemlock tree
in the Pacific Northwest is a variant of pine. It’s not the same stuff Socrates
drank. Tea can be made from the needles of the hemlock tree.
What’s
next for Maeve and Tom?
The next book, Hell and High Water, is scheduled for
release in 2020. After the events in
Hemlock Needle, Maeve is not practicing law – at least temporarily. She has
taken a summer kitchen helper job at an ecolodge in Seward, Alaska, while Tom
is in Homer working on a halibut charter boat. A “pineapple express”, a late
summer storm with lots of rain and wind, moves into the area cutting the lodge
off from civilization just before someone is murdered. Maeve needs to find who
the murderer is and avoid getting killed herself. Tom is doing everything he
can to get to Seward to rescue her.
