Bio Sketch: Gael Moto

Bury Them Back

For the community of Deering the arrival of sewers was cause for celebration-adults lined the berms of the burgeoning trenches while children ran about in a fantasy world of archaeological pursuit, and so it was for Gael Moto, a teacher, a mother, a subsistence housewife. “I hung the floor lamp out the window at night and watched as they excavated bodies from the trench being dug for the sewer. What some see as a horror, I see as a part of culture, and if you stick around long enough, you realize why a culture was developed.”

Gael Moto, affectionately dubbed Ma Moto by the members of her community, has taught in public schools throughout Alaskan Native villages since 1989. Presently residing on the Central Kenai Peninsula in Ninilchick, Gael commutes throughout the Peninsula to fulfill substitute teaching assignments out of survival and passion. Economic survival. Child and culture passion. It is a passion born out of connection to each child, to find similarities between herself, the child and the content. It is a simple equation, yet it is a principle that Gael not only espouses, she lives. “I can’t know a place until I live there-I get to know the people while living with the people.”

For Gael this motto has led her into many communities, many stories. Her story begins in upstate New York where she grew up with a mother who taught through fear, a fear deep seated, a fear that only those who have had to hide something can understand. A fear rooted in new beginnings and the oppression that so often accompanies those new beginnings. Gael’s mother hid the Iroquois blood that ran in her veins that she passed to Gael, and who Gael has passed along to her own son. Yet in a defiance that mirrors Gael’s own, her mother taught her to stay connected to the native communities in the places she lived. On family road trips, her mother always insisted that her father stop at roadside Indian museums where Gael would lose herself in the possibility of the past.

It wasn’t until her mother handed a tattered family genealogy to her in recent years that Gael realized the family stops were not simply exercises in cultural awareness, they were a diligent communion with her past. It is fitting that she would learn about her past through words, as she considers herself a translator of culture. Though not the originator, Gael recalled Samuel Parker, a descendent who arrived on the Mayflower; his descendants, Gael’s family, were taken captive during the French and Indian wars, and later adopted by the Iroquois people. According to Gael, this adoption exceeded the bounds of adoption papers: “It was a transmutation of blood, a magical blood transfiguration.”

“After a period of time, the question arose: ‘what do we do with these artifacts? The elders said, ‘bury them back,’ and they knew. But as they continued to dig, they found the remains of a civilization that dated back to the 700s, a civilization most likely from Tibet. Regardless of where, ancient ivory death masks were unearthed, which were worth three quarters of a million dollars. Once money became involved, a whole new celebration ensued, though much less fantastic. Battles ensued as everyone found a connection to the remains, elders began to die, and the battles turned to all out interfamily warfare. Still, the remaining elders repeated the refrain, ‘bury them back’. And they knew.

Gael found love with a man named Jim Jim Moto, an Inupiat man whose grandfather was Japanese, in an oasis of ice. In their marriage she also committed herself to his family and community, a marriage more committed than their own, which ended in 1995. Still she maintains her vows to the family and community.

The isolation created out of geography and a patriarchal culture left Gael fragile, yet she was so embedded in the community that she “loved so deeply, but could not escape.” As time progressed, her emotions and self-esteem seemed to ice over, retreating ever further from the surface. Yet her son, Utuq, saved her. Gael recognized that children in the village are so often lost. Seeing a lack of options, a lack of responsibility, and a disconnect from the past, she feared for his future. Rather than remain trapped in fear and isolation, Gael and her son left behind family and community five years ago in a move that culminated in Ninilchik.

Already, Gael has sought to find connections, as a teacher in Ninilchik and throughout the Peninsula. “As teachers we try to find similarities, I try to find connections. I try to whittle it down to the bones so that they can then begin to start adding the flesh. Above all else, I try to remember what an experience was like through their eyes.”

The elders knew the people, they knew the traditions, they knew what was right-"bury them back.”