Finding purpose...

Anchorage Daily News (AK){PUBLICATION2}

October 17, 1992

Section: Special Sections Edition: Final Page: D1

WITHIN REACH SOBRIETY MOVEMENT LEADER HELPS NATIVE YOUNGSTERS SOAR

LINDA BILLINGTON Daily News community editor Staff

The blanket toss is the metaphor for Greg Nothstine's life. When the young Inupiaq joins three dozen other pullers around the rim to help a jumper reach the sky, he's part of a human hoop, a cooperative effort. When he is the one on the blanket, he soars above his own rebellious, alcoholic past. "We've got to pull together, because we can't allow the younger generation to fall through this blanket," Nothstine says. "Too many have fallen through the cracks."

Nothstine knows all too well the pitfalls facing his own people, the cracks that swallow too many of Alaska's Native people into an alcohol-soaked oblivion. "How many more will die in vain before we take a stand?" he asks.

Nothstine, 30, is a leader now, chairman of the Alaska Federation of Natives Sobriety Movement, consultant for the Native Youth Olympics and Traditional Alaskan Native Sports, board member for the Arctic Winter Games Corp. of Alaska and the annual Spirit Days celebration.

He's a highly regarded athlete, champion or former champion in such events as the Alaskan high kick, one arm reach, toe kick and Indian stick pull.

Spending time with Native youngsters, he works to give them pride in their heritage and alternatives to the temptations that nearly dragged him down.

"He's a living example," says Jeanie Greene, producer and host of TV's "Heartbeat Alaska" Native news show. "He doesn't just talk about sobriety. He doesn't talk about being involved with youth. He does it, with or without fanfare, with or without media coverage. And that's the bottom line."

This past week, he was on the youth agenda at the Alaska Federation of Natives convention at the Egan Center, and presented a sobriety proclamation to the convention.
He also organized blanket tosses.

"I was up there about 20 feet almost touched the ceiling," he says. "A couple of kids went just as high as I did. And they really got a high from that cooperative unity."

Nothstine was born in Anchorage and given the Inupiaq name Tungwenuk, after a grandfather who had died in 1955. He spent a lot of time commuting between Anchorage and his grandmother in Nome. The shifting gave him a little exposure to the Inupiaq language, but not enough to make him fluent. "But I have a mental flavor for it," he says.

Alcohol had been working its way into his life as he grew up in what he calls "a typical, normal family" with two sisters, a brother, a mother, and a father who played lead guitar in a band.
"I spent many a moment sitting on a bar stool, listening to him play and drinking Cokes and eating cherries, and being somewhat traumatized by the scary strangers who came up and blurbled out, 'Oh, what a cute little boy he is!' "

FIGHTING THE SYSTEM

When the boy was 9, his father died of alcohol poisoning. Nothstine figures he took his own first sip of beer at about 10: "I guess being raised in an environment where some people drank socially, it appeared acceptable."

For high school, he was sent to Mount Edgecumbe in Sitka. Feeling isolated and alone so far from home, he did his best to get kicked out.

"I started getting in a lot of trouble, hanging around with the wrong crowd, getting on restriction for breaking the rules," he says. "And being the kind of guy that I was, or felt like I should be, I didn't like authority. . . . I didn't do my work, wouldn't come in on time."

For a year and a half, Nothstine fought the system. Then he wound up in a new coed dorm for troubled and troublesome students. The dorm offered additional discipline and required group therapy.

Gil Truitt, a Tlingit, taught U.S. history when Nothstine entered Mount Edgecumbe, and then became assistant principal in charge of discipline. "So I saw a lot of Greg for a while," he recalls.
"The school had rules and regulations, and when Greg decided that those rules and regulations applied to him as well, that's when the progress became quite visible," he says. "It was Greg who made the decision; once he did that, he became a leader and one of the best students the school had. . . . He was one we could point to with pride."'

SOMETHING CLICKED

Nothstine hit the honor roll. One quarter he racked up nearly straight As. When the Native Youth Olympics tryouts came up, he made the team. The Native sports gave him a solid center.
"From then on," he says, "it was just like something clicked. I found something I could really hold onto."

But Nothstine's academic career faltered in college. He lasted one semester at Alaska Pacific University, partying and letting his studies lag. "I drank myself out," he says.

Meanwhile, he was wondering about life after high school. The games he'd learned there grew more and more important to him, and he began to realize that the more he drank, the less time he had for them. He was world champion in the 2-foot high kick and won sportsmanship awards from the World Eskimo- Indian Olympics. He used that as a stepping stone to promote and teach the games.

The sobriety movement began in 1984 with a statewide symposium on alcohol and drug abuse. At that time, Nothstine says, "I was still practicing my right to indulge in beverages, like it says in the commercial be a sportsman, be attractive, be seen drinking the quality beer and just trying to identify with the gung-ho generation."

But eventually, he realized that alcohol had nothing for him any more. On May 9, 1988, he took his last drink.

"They say if you can't remember your last drink, you haven't had it yet," he says. "And I remember. . . . I remember the demoralizing feeling, and that's all I need to remember. If I ever forget, that's what I have to look forward to if I start drinking again."STAYING SOBER
A year later, Nothstine was appointed to the Alaska Native Blue Ribbon Commission on Drug Abuse. That was the start of his involvement with the sobriety movement.

By then, the blanket toss had become his metaphor.

He'd been a month sober when he was asked by a Spirit Days board member to fix up a walrus hide blanket they'd gotten from Little Diomede. "I went to the warehouse with them and looked at this 8-foot-long rolled- up hide," he says. "It was green and a bit brown, and it smelled a little bit. It didn't smell that bad when it was rolled up, but when I unrolled it, that thing was really NASTY. Yuchhh! And it rolled right back up."

He set 40-pound boxes of nails on the ends of the rectangular blanket and went to work on the mold first with a putty knife, then with a wire brush. "Green puffs of spores would fly in the air, and here I am, thinking, 'What the heck are you doing, Greg? Look at you: You've really sunk to the bottom this time. Sobriety is really paying off.' "

But he was determined to finish. "Anything I'd ever started prior to that, I had not followed through with. . . If I was going to follow through with my sobriety, I'd have to start following through with all the activities I started."

After wiping the blanket with oil, he got the notion that it ought to be round rather than rectangular. He cut a couple feet off each end with the idea of repositioning them on the sides. The result was "three curled-up pieces."

Nothstine started kicking himself, cursing and blaming the people who had asked him to take on the job. Then he called for help from elder Paul Tiulana. Tiulana told him to soak the blanket in a lake overnight and stitch the pieces together with black leather straps from the Black Elk Leather store.

During the 50 hours that Nothstine worked on the blanket, Anchorage police were trying to identify a young Native woman, an apparent drug overdose victim, who had been dropped at Providence Hospital and died there. The news reports made Nothstine consider his newfound sobriety at a time when other people were still abusing their bodies.

He had used the black leather strips to sew one side of the blanket together and was working on the other side when he learned from a newspaper that the unknown girl had been identified. She was 17-year-old Deana Black his neighbor, his sister's playmate, the sister of his best high school friend.

"The dismay I felt," he says, his voice softening. "I just just I was fighting back the tears."
He got mad. He cursed God for letting the tragedy happen, especially to someone he knew. He went back downstairs and, crying, resumed sewing, stitching so hard that his hands blistered and he broke a strap. As he worked, his mind started to make connections: from black leather straps to Black Elk Leather to the 19th-century Oglala Sioux prophet Black Elk. He'd learned of the prophet in third grade when he'd seen a hoop dancer, and now he recalled Black Elk's vision of a hoop within a hoop of many hoops, and a time of great healing.

He thought of a Fur Rendezvous blanket toss, surrounded by observers: a hoop of people watching a hoop of people pulling on the hoops that were the blanket's handles. He sewed in the black leather stitches from Black Elk Leather and thought of the dead girl's last name: Black. He thought of sobering up as someone else died.

So he dedicated the stitches in her memory.

"They hold the blanket together; they bring people together," he says.
Nothstine now uses that blanket as a way to get people to interact. And he will always remember what it taught him:

"When I found that blanket, it was rolled up tight, full of mold and mildew like me, before I stopped drinking. I was rolled up tight, set in my own ways. I had an attitude problem, I was angry, I was bitter, I was resentful; I was full of my own mold and mildew. Not until I turned my life over to a power greater than myself and started believing in my heritage and all of its metaphors and all of its power and principles did things begin to change."