20 Books of Summer: Play with Fire by Dana Stabenow (Kate Shugak 5)

 

I always enjoy Dana Stabenow’s Kate Shugak mysteries, and Play with Fire is no exception.

The fifth book in this series finds ex-District Attorney’s Office investigator Kate, an Aleut Native, in the Alaskan forest. It’s summer, it’s hot, she’s picking mushrooms.

A terrible fire has raged through 125,000 acres of the Park – leaving in its wake ideal conditions for the growth of morels, a prized delicacy that can’t be artificially cultivated. The locals are out in force, picking in the Bush all day and selling their crop to agents waiting in the car park of the Tanada Inn each night. Kate is camping with her old friend and Vietnam veteran Bobby Clark; along the way they have picked up Dinah Cookman, a photographer and filmmaker who needs to make some cash.  And of course they are accompanied by Mutt, Kate’s half wolf, half dog, whole-hearted defender.

Morel mushrooms: image (c) USDA Forest Service

On the way to deliver the day’s pickings, Kate and Dinah stumble upon a naked man. A very dead naked man, who seems to have been lying in the forest since before the fire, yet whose body is strangely unburnt. He has no ID. And there are no reports of anyone going missing in the area over the past year.

When, shortly afterwards, a 10 year old boy hires Kate to find his father, Daniel Seabolt, it doesn’t take long for Kate to join the dots. Daniel was a schoolteacher in the tiny community of Chistona; his father is Simon Seabolt, the local fundamentalist pastor. Matthew last saw him in August, yet no-one has informed the authorities of his disappearance.

Kate now has a name for the corpse. She takes the job.

Kate is sure that the solution to what happened to Daniel lies in Chistona, but her attempts to investigate are blocked by the Reverend Seabolt and his evangelical flock. When Kate witnesses the outwardly friendly Sally Gillespie chastising her children for simply playing at being dinosaurs, she begins to realise the extent of the pastor’s grip on the members of his congregation. 

A few residents have resisted Seabolt’s call; ex-policeman Brad Burns lives in a cabin up beside a game trail on the banks of the Kanuyaq river:

The door had a sign on it:

ERIC CLAPTON IS GOD

Nope. Brad Burns probably didn’t belong to the Chistona Little Chapel.

Burns alone is willing to talk to Kate, and he tells her that Daniel Seabolt had been teaching his pupils about evolution. This had not gone down too well with the members of his father’s church.

Before she finally works out what happened to Daniel, and why, Kate must travel to Fairbanks to discuss belief systems with her old university tutor. Her student days were not happy ones, Tom Winkelbleck being the one academic whose teaching inspired her to stick with her course. Stabenow shows us just how poorly First Nation people were treated by the Canadian education system. When Kate arrived in Fairbanks at the age of 18;

I was terrified. I’d never been out of the Park before in my life, never had to meet new people all on my own. I’d never talked on the phone, I’d never watched television, I’d never seen a movie, I’d never driven down a paved road, or in traffic…I’d never even seen traffic….One of the drivers yelled out the window at me, called me a stupid Fucking native. On top of everything else, we couldn’t afford a single room for me and I had to share a room with a total stranger…I was so scared I couldn’t even go across the hall to the bathroom…I peed in the wastebasket.

A few years earlier, children had been routinely sent away to school – sometimes to Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding schools, particularly Mount Edgecumbe High School in Sitka*, but often as far off as Oregon or California, where they boarded with white families, many of whom treated them as servants. In 1976 Native Alaskan teenagers Molly Hootch and Anna Tobeluk successfully sued the State of Alaska for failing to provide high schools in predominantly Native Alaskan villages. Eventually 105 schools were opened and the drop out rate fell dramatically.**

Emaa said that nothing but drunks and mothers came back from Mount Edgecumbe and that none of her grandchildren were going there if she had anything to say about it.

And of course she did.

Of course. So I was. One of the plaintiffs, and one of the beneficiaries.  Because of Molly Hootch, Ninilta got its own public school….and I didn’t have to go away like my mother did.

Students boarding a Wien Air Alaska plane at Shungnak, Alaska, to attend schools in Fairbanks or Juneau, ca. 1945–1968. 
Image (c) Elmer E Rasmuson Library University of Alaska Fairbanks

Donna Stabenow’s writing is always a little elliptical; characters refer to events and people just as they would in real life – ie without explanation. This makes her books so much more interesting – the reader has to work things out for herself, and in doing so learns so much more. Stabenow also keeps us up to date with her ‘regulars’ –  Kate’s on-off lover Jack Morgan, State Trooper Chopper Jim, and of course Bobby, her fearsome grandmother Ekaterina Moonin Shugak – and her Auntie Joy, whose family visited Pastor Seabolt’s church when it first opened, and were told to destroy all their precious tribal artefacts and to stop dancing;

I’ve never felt so humiliated. It was like he was ignoring all the Anglos and preaching directly at us, the Natives, the only sinners in the room.  And our only sin…was in being born and raised Native…. 

When the pastor stood up there and said “Thou shalt not worship any  other god before me”...it was like he meant himself. We should not worship any other god before him, personally.

The terrible fate of Daniel Seabolt is finally explained. What happens next will perhaps divide opinions; I found the ending of the book very believable, but some readers apparently felt disappointed and cheated. Others were unhappy at Stabenow’s perceived antipathy to religion, but in my opinion she is writing from the point of view of Native Alaskans – and few would say that missionary zeal had ever brought them anything worth having.

Good plots, fascinating insights into a way of life, and the history of a people, and above all strong, engaging characters with a wonderful woman at their core, make this series one to which I return again and again.

There are 22 books in the Kate Shugak series; the first one is A Cold Day for Murder, which won an Edgar award. The sixth book is Blood Will Tell.

*Today Mount Edgecumbe School is run by the Alaska Department of Education. 

**For more information about the 1976 Tobeluk Consent Decree (which led to the setting up of local schools) visit the excellent Native Voices website.