Transcript: Reverend Dr. Michael James Oleksa, Ph.D.
Some Alaska Natives prefer to die outside, under the open sky
- [Oleksa:]
- Among the Kodiak Alutiiqs we have incidents where someone died in the house, and they had to remove the body through the smoke hole, because that was the passage the elder was making from this world to the world beyond. They couldn’t just take them out the door. The doorway is the birth passage. Or the alternative is to put them in the storage area beneath the floor and collapse the whole house and abandon the house. In the middle of winter it’s rather inconvenient for the whole family to have to go build another house, in fact it’s impossible. I still find among Aleut people on Kodiak Island among the elders, the preference simply to die outside, and I’m sure this goes back to the notion that you’re doing the family a favor. You don’t have to put them in the basement and collapse the building, and you don’t have to rip apart the roof. They just die outside, and the way the elders conceive it that’s the natural place to die, out under the open sky.