Madeline Bifelt

My conversation with Madeline Bifelt took place in the comfortable and airy back room of Cue and Madeline's old, but relatively spacious house in Huslia, Alaska where Madeline has been doing a lot of her sewing. It was early afternoon on July 21, 1992. At the time of the interview, her husband, Cue, was away working on a barge. Although I have never interviewed Madeline before, we have known each other casually for some time. It was a relaxed and friendly interview that I thoroughly enjoyed. I took some photographs of Madeline's smoke house, dog yard, fish racks, and beadwork. Madeline had been busy during the summer with traditional activities: cutting and smoking salmon, tanning a moose hide, and sewing slippers and mitts, knitting socks, and doing beadwork. Much of this activity was in preparation for a big potlatch to be held in Huslia in September l992. One of the people to be memorialized at the potlatch was her son, Ralph.

Madeline began her tape by talking about her family, where they lived, and how they traveled. They had a cabin twelve miles below Allakaket at the mouth of the Kanuti River and a spring camp at Tsaalatna. This camp was not far from the ones used by Billy Bergman's family and Julia Simon's family. In early summer, they camped at the mouth of Old Man Creek or the Kanuti River. She talked about her father working for Wilfred Evans on his boat hauling goods from Koyukuk for his store in Allakaket and at Evan's sawmill, and about other members of the Evans family. She also talked about her father working for Sam Dubin who had a store in Alatna and a store and sawmill in Bettles, working with Steven Bergman and the incident in which Steven struck a match to light a gas lamp without closing the fuel container and the resulting fire destroying the Bettles store and killing Steven, though Sam Dubin got out alive. After that, her father did not work in Bettles again. She talked some about how her father had also worked for Les James, the storekeeper in Hughes.

We talked quite a bit about the seasonal round of activities, including how people would "spring out", traveling down the Kanuti River together. She talked about how people really enjoyed this trip, stopping to hunt and fish as they needed to and appreciating the beauty of the river, especially the canyon area with its late spring flowers. Because her family spent a lot of time living out on the land, Madeline only finished the fourth grade at school. As she talked about how her family made a living when she was growing up, she mentioned many people prominent in the recent history of the Allakaket area.

Like most older people, disease and death have also been important elements in Madeline's life. She talked about how, when she was 14, her sister Isabel died of influenza. She also recalled how devastating tuberculosis had been while she was growing up. Her mother died when she was eighteen, her first husband Harding Sam, died of tuberculosis while she was carrying their daughter, Isabel, and she also lost sisters to tuberculosis. At one point her present husband, Cue, spent 14 months away in Seattle and Anchorage undergoing treatment for tuberculosis.

Madeline also talked about sewing in the early days, and how hard it was to get materials. She described how she tans moose hides, and also talked about how sewing has changed over time. She concluded with some comments about how technology has changed over the past several decades, and the impact those changes have had on Native people's lives.