Forum - Fall 2014

THE M AGA ZINE OF THE AL AS K A HUM ANITIES FORUM

W I N T E R 2 014 – 2 015

Honoring Richard Dauenhauer | From the Shores of Ship Creek | Kiska: Occupied Island

LETTER FROM THE CEO

Bridges of Understanding T

he Alaska Humanities Forum is a leader in promoting crosscultural understanding and creating a deep appreciation of Alaska history across our great state. We strive to tell the stories and impact the lives of all Alaskans. We accomplish this though our cultural educational programs, statewide grants for projects in the humanities, our esteemed leadership development program, and special projects, such as partnering with the Smithsonian Institution to bring traveling Smithsonian exhibits to small towns across Alaska.

EXPERIENCE OF WAR We are also pleased to announce our participation in the new National Endowment for the Humanities initiative Standing Together: The Humanities and the Experience of War. To quote the NEH, “Since 2001 over two million American men and women have been deployed in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan...

Yet, as members of an all-volunteer service corps, in which less than one percent of the U.S. population serves, they will not always find their military experiences readily understood by the public at large.”

Per capita, Alaska has the greatest number of recent war veterans in the nation. With our participation in Standing Together, we will draw on the power of the humanities to promote discussion and deepened understanding of the experiences of Alaskans affiliated with the armed services.

MAKE A MEANINGFUL DIFFERENCE From Ketchikan to Point Hope, Kotzebue to Fairbanks, Dillingham to Sitka, our many programs offer Alaskans a chance to build bridges of understanding, to preserve, celebrate and share Alaska’s rich history and cultural traditions, and to strengthen the foundations of civil society in Alaska.

But we can’t do this alone. We have an incredible team in place here at the Alaska Humanities Forum and I look forward to another wonderful year of delivering humanities-based programming throughout Alaska. However, we need your support to continue providing all of our programs and grants that make a meaningful difference in a wide range of Alaskan communities.

Your donations directly support our programs and have a significant impact across our state. A donation of any size will help an Alaska Native student from a rural Alaskan community pursue post-secondary education goals. It will provide an opportunity for a student from an urban center in Alaska to better understand their culture and then travel to a rural community and learn more about the culture of a fellow student living there.

Your support will provide grant funding for language preservation, for the development of the next generation of leaders in Alaska, and for scholars throughout the state to explore the rich and vast history and cultural diversity of Alaska in creative ways.

Your support will help us make a real and positive difference in the lives of many Alaskans statewide.

Please consider donating today to help us demonstrate the importance of Alaska’s strong history, culture and heritage.

Thank you for your support!

— Nina Kemppel CEO Alaska Humanities Forum It is easy to give to the Alaska Humanities Forum If you wish to give via credit/debit card, please log onto www.akhf.org and click the Give button.

If you wish to give via check, please send your donation directly to the Alaska Humanities Forum: Alaska Humanities Forum 161 East 1st Avenue, Door 15 Anchorage Alaska, 99501

ALASKA HUMANITIES FORUM 161 East 1st Avenue, Door 15 Anchorage, Alaska 99501 (907) 272-5341 | www.akhf.org BOARD OF DIRECTORS Joan Braddock, Chair, Fairbanks Catkin Kilcher Burton, Vice Chair, Anchorage Elizabeth Moore, Secretary, Kotzebue Evan D. Rose, Treasurer, Anchorage Dave Kiffer, Member-At-Large, Ketchikan Jeane Breinig, Ph.D, Anchorage Christa Bruce, Ketchikan Lenora Lolly Carpluk, Fairbanks Michael Chmielewski, Palmer John Cloe, Anchorage Dermot Cole, Fairbanks Renee’ Duncan, Soldotna Ernestine Hayes, Juneau Joshua Herren, Anchorage Scott McAdams, Sitka Pauline Morris, Kwethluk Wayne Stevens, Juneau Kurt Wong, Anchorage

STAFF Nina Kemppel, President & CEO Megan Zlatos, Interim Grants & Office Manager Kitty Farnham, Leadership Anchorage Program Manager Matthew Turner, Special Projects Coordinator Christina Barber, Curator of Special Exhibits & Programs Lauren Rocco, RCCE Director Veldee Hall, RURE Sister School Exchange Project Manager Carmen Davis, C3 Project Manager January Scott, Take Wing Alaska Project Manager Nancy Hemsath, RCCE Program Associate Nate O’Connor, Take Wing Alaska Project Coordinator Carmen Pitka, Take Wing Alaska Family School Liaison

FORUM MAGAZINE STAFF David Holthouse, Editor Dean Potter, Art Director Contributors Deb McKinney, Augusta Reimer, Brendan Coyle, Catherine Moncrieff, Megan Zlatos, Charles Wohlforth, Nathan Shafer, Angela Yatlin Gonzalez, Mike Gordon, Tom Snyder

THE M AGA ZINE OF THE AL AS K A HUM ANITIES FORUM

FA WLI N L T/E W R I2N014 T E R– 22015 014

Photo courtesy Mike Gordon

FORUM 17–27 / Anchorage Centennial Oral Histories Record stores on 4th Avenue. Party lines in Spenard. Dumpster gold on Government Hill.

4 Language Warrior Richard Dauenhauer, 1942–2014

12 Jack and Nellie Brown

Excerpt from the Anchorage Centennial book From the Shores of Ship Creek

30 Kiska

The Japanese occupation of an Alaska island

36 Tracing Roots

Delores Churchill’s journey forward to connect back

38 Up the Koyukuk

Documenting Native place names for future generations

40 Program Notes

A major new grant, Leadership Anchorage news, Writers in the Schools, and Anchorage Centennial Grants

43 Unpacking, Then Diving In

Cultural Divers delve the lesser-known depths of Anchorage’s immigrant stories

47 Augmenting Fish Camp

How the next chapter of Anchorage Narratives came together, and how to use it

48 Dach’ shan Qayeh Ch’qełchish

Fish camp, 1919—as a graphic novel, with augmented reality features.

58 Second Fridays @ the Forum

Smart art at the Forum’s venue along Ship Creek

On the cover : Nellie Brown (see page 12). Photo courtesy of Mary Barry.

Forum is a publication of the Alaska Humanities Forum, supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, with the purpose of increasing public understanding of and participation in the humanities. The views expressed by contributors are not necessarily those of the editorial staff, the Alaska Humanities Forum, or the National Endowment for the Humanities. Subscriptions may be obtained by contributing to the Alaska Humanities Forum or by contacting the Forum. No part of this publication may be reproduced without permission. ©2014. Printed in Alaska.

Language Warrior Rich a r d Daue nh auer , 1942 –2 014 A L A S K A H U M A N ITI E S F O R U M W I NTE R 20 14 –2 01 5

5

Alaska State Council on the Arts

above:

Richard Dauenhauer speaking at the 2014 Governor’s Awards for the Arts and Humanities in Juneau.

Dauenhauer at work at his home in June, 2013. MICHAEL PENN

preceding pages:

By Debra McKinney

6

A L A S K A H U M A N I T I E S F O R U M W I NTE R 2014–2015

ormer Alaska writer laureate Richard Dauenhauer had many more poems in him, many more scholarly writings and thoughts to share with the world. But then along came July 3.

He awoke that morning in his Douglas Island home feeling awful. A doctor’s office visit turned into an ambulance ride and a five-day stay at Bartlett Regional Hospital in Juneau. Then the test results came back. It was cancer, metastasized, and most certainly terminal. He broke the news to friends and family in a letter, telling them he hoped to have the strength and energy to make his departure a tidy one.

“Needless to say, this isn’t the plan Nora and I envisioned for our golden years. Three quotes come to mind: “Man proposes, God disposes;” Ferlinghetti’s “in the middle of it all, comes the smiling mortician;” and the

Chinese poet Po Chü-i (aka Bai Juyi) who said that once you’re packed and ready for your long journey, it doesn’t really matter if you hang around a while longer. I think I’m prepared to go, but not quite ready… It’s been a good ride, I have no complaints. You can’t have everything, and I think I’ve had more than enough of my share of good things.”

His “medical adventure,” as he called it, turned out to be a short one, less than seven weeks from start to finish.

He died Aug. 19 surrounded by family and others who loved him as Nora, his wife of nearly 41 years, sang “The Lord’s Prayer” in Tlingit.

Poet, linguist, educator, translator, anthropologist, historian—really, this could go on for several more lines— Dauenhauer was a man in love with knowledge, fascinated by everything

from the works of philosopher-poet Yehuda Amichai to the stories behind the heirloom potatoes he grew in his garden. Endangered languages were of great importance to him. But so was showing his grandchildren and greatgrandchildren the wild places he loved, the mountains and rivers and glaciers that inspired him artistically and spiritually while giving his poetry a deep sense of place.

He and his wife, Alaska’s current writer laureate, Nora Marks Dauenhauer, pooled their intellectual resources and devoted their lives to reviving and celebrating the words and wisdom of Nora’s Tlingit ancestors. Both fluent in the language, their meticulous translations and documentation helped elevate the Tlingit oral tradition to its rightful place among world-class literature. Had it been up to them, it would have been taught in comparative literature classes alongside such classics as Moby Dick.

Through the years, the Dauenhauers published their four-volume opus, more than 2,500 pages in all—the Classics of Tlingit Oral Literature, with a fifth volume on Raven stories in the works.

Two of the four volumes won American Book Awards from the Before Columbus Foundation: Haa Tuwuna’agu Yis, for Healing our Spirit: Tlingit Oratory, and Anóoshi Lingít Aaní Ká: Russians in Tlingit America: The Battles of Sitka, 1802 and 1804. The latter, written in collaboration with the late anthropologist Lydia T. Black, offers a new perspective on these bloody wars with the Russians. And that’s just a few of the contributions they’ve made to Alaska and the world. Between the two of them, to itemize in print all of their work—the poems, essays, plays, articles, books, anthologies, recordings, translations, forums, conferences—would require the sacrifice of a good many trees.

The Alaska Humanities Forum helped fund many of Richard Dauenhauer’s projects through the decades, the kind of projects that are essential to the Forum’s mission, from his poetry book, Glacier Bay Concerto, to his Classics of Tlingit Oral Literature to Tlingit clan conferences he helped organize to bring scholars and indigenous culture

R i l ke at Gla cier B ay Lest the land grow desolate you will always hear our voices on it.

— Aant’iyéili, Lukaax.ádi composer 1 In the beginning was the word, and the ice descended: pure transcendency, establishing a temple in “to hear.”

2 And it must be heard.

O God, this is so ephemeral.

As the word passes so the utterance, the sentence, the need for interaction, human life, speech, and language itself.

3 The utterance gives it life.

There is no return.

There is only invocation of the instance as time becomes the thing itself like the dancer and the dance, like the speaker and the speech, the words uniting the living and the dead, the words creating the world of metaphor, breaking the bonds and profanity of time.

4 The language eternal though the speech extinct.

As every utterance brings language to life through speech, that very speech, the instance of speech that gives it life, is the passing of speech.

As the sentence closes, It brings the spoken language closer to death.

5 Language as the birth of dying generations.

The language lives though the speakers die ‘til death removes the final instance of human speech from the cycle of being born and there is no more; death by death the instance giving way to eternal structure, eternal memory: death by death the concrete event moribund, bound by death to the abstraction of eternal life.

6 The speech recedes like Glacier Bay emptied of its people, emptied of its soul except the sole woman in the ice whose voice we hear, whose voice of silence creates her own eternal words of requiem. ­— RIchard Dauenhauer

A L A S K A H U M A N ITI E S F O R U M W I NTE R 20 14 –2 01 5

7

courtesy of Le Florendo

Nora and Dick on Alsek Lake with granddaughters Genesis Lee Ransom and Elena Marie Topacio, in 1990.

bearers and elders together on equal footing.

So when Richard Dauenhauer passed away at 72, he didn’t just leave a hole, he left a crater.

“He was a keeper of so much information, so much knowledge,” said Laura Schue, a former grants officer for the Alaska Humanities Forum (AKHF).

“He was one of those people who could truly bridge culture and bridge time.”

“It’s like one of those big mainframe computers going down,” said Peter Metcalfe, Juneau author and historian. “We don’t have that resource anymore.”

A Perfect Team

Richard Dauenhauer—“Dick” to his family, friends and colleagues, “Grandpa Dick” to his 13 grand- and 17 great-grandchildren—came to Alaska in 1969 to teach comparative literature at Alaska Methodist University, now Alaska Pacific University. That’s where he met Nora Marks, an anthropology student 15 years his senior who’d been taping and translating her people’s stories since the early ‘60s. She’d never heard of this man until he wrote her a fan letter.

8

A L A S K A H U M A N I T I E S F O R U M W I NTE R 2014–2015

“I was absolutely moved by the beauty of the oratory,” he once told a reporter. “I thought this was as great as anything in English poetry.”

Then came love letters. They were married in 1973 and became a perfect team of opposite worlds blending their expertise, he with his technical knowledge of languages, she with her traditional. By all accounts, they had fun doing what they did. Watching the Kentucky Derby for instance, they’d be translating crazy racehorse names into Tlingit, names like Scat Daddy, or Háatl’i Éesh, Father of the Poop.

Dick was a founder, along with Nora and Andy Hope, of Tlingit Readers, Inc., a nonprofit devoted to language research. He helped develop the Alaska Native languages program at Sealaska Heritage Foundation, now the Sealaska Heritage Institute, and the Alaska Native Languages and Culture program at the University of Alaska Southeast.

Both Dauenhauers received a Governor’s Award for the Arts and Humanities, sponsored by the Alaska Humanities Forum, the Alaska State Council on the Arts and the Arts and Culture Foundation.

In his office on the second floor of their house overlooking Gastineau Channel, Dick had three separate desks devoted to different projects.

“The walls are full of bookshelves, on all four sides,” said Nora’s daughter, Le Florendo. “It has so many books, so many piles of papers. I believe the house is sagging on that side there are so many books up there.”

Of Different Worlds

Born in Syracuse, N.Y., Dick and his brother, Tom, grew up in a middleclass neighborhood, the sons of an Irish/ Scottish homemaker mother and German father who did many things but was primarily a farmer, a physical education teacher and a coach who took his family on annual camping trip to the Adirondacks.

Born in Juneau, Nora, or Keixwnéi, was one of 16 children, some of whom were “lost” along the way, as she calls the deaths of her siblings. She grew up in a subsistence family, living on a fishing boat, and spoke only Tlingit until she was 8. She was forced to learn English in the days indigenous languages were being smacked from

Native children’s mouths. Her mother, Emma Frances Marks, was a master beader, and her father, Willie Marks, a fisherman, trapper and master carver specializing in totem poles and wooden clan hats. As protocol in the Tlingit nation, Nora’s father adopted Dick into his moiety—the Chookaneidi Clan, Brown Bear House, Hoonah— and he received the Tlingit name Xwaayeenákh.

Keixwnéi and Xwaayeenákh were married in the Russian Orthodox Church. As stepfather to Nora’s four grown children, he always encouraged them to follow their dreams.

“Seems like when you say Dick, you have to follow it with Nora because it was always Dick and Nora,” said Gerry Hope of Sitka, a longtime friend who worked with the Dauenhauers as executive director of the “Sharing Our Knowledge” clan conferences pioneered by his late brother, Andy Hope.

“In Tlingit culture, you have to be either one half or the other. We call them moieties. In the Tlingit world, you marry the opposite moiety, so being adopted by his father-in-law made that work.

“It takes two halves to make a whole.

That’s the way I view Dick and Nora.

They made each other whole.

“My heart really goes out to Nora.”

Beautiful Obsession

Besides Nora, Dick’s number-one love was studying and teaching the beauty and complexities of the Tlingit language, which is packed with metaphor and contains some sounds not found in any other language. Tlingit verbs can have as many as 26 components, and like Chinese, the meaning of a word can change dramatically with tone.

Ishmael Hope, writer, poet, lifelong friend and father of one of Dick and Nora’s godchildren, described by email how Dick was “‘neck deep’ in his love for Tlingit verbs, which he rightly characterized as ‘the heart of the Tlingit language.’”

As Hope tells it, among the verbs that fascinated Dick was “yawdzi.áa,” which among other things means (according

T wo C oven a nts 1 In two covenants, the turning of the year, atonement over; and beginning of the new.

2 The LeaveTaking of the Cross: I carry leaves to mulch the berry beds.

Winter surprised us coming over the Starnbergersee, et cetera, the leaves heavy with falling snow.

Caught, as if between two covenants, I stack the woodpile in the piling snow.

3 A coda: the unexpected smells of summer: caked grass scraped from the power mower bottom, the smell of oil and gas; the mower stored, the spark plug ready for another year, bikes and garden hose hung for winter, preparing the beat-up shovel for the car trunk, lamenting only the tune-up isn’t done.

In the carport, garbage cans rattle in the wind.

4 Nearing dark, when suddenly, Brueghel-like, a black bird startles, flies across the snowfield into brush-stroke trees of winter.

5 This is a day of atonement, at-one-ment with the world: living out eternal images of winter, and impending death. Nightfall, and the day begins; autumn, and the year is new.

The promise: everything is only put away. ­— RIchard Dauenhauer

Nu a nc es of D aw n

Playg r ou nd

Morning Star over Soldotna, cow moose still where bedded down at dusk on the frozen Kenai River.

I think of Williams, Wallace Stevens, and archetypes of dawn at twenty-five below.

The sliding hill in January sunlight: volcano-like, alive with lava streams of brightly flowing children. ­— RIchard Dauenhauer

­— RIchard Dauenhauer

A L A S K A H U M A N ITI E S F O R U M W I NTE R 20 14 –2 01 5

9

JUNEAU EMPIRE FILE

to the Tlingit Verb Dictionary by Constance Naish and Gillian Story), “swim under water but with head emerging every so often; peer; peep.’

“Richard explained that it is often used for a seal peering out of the water. It can also be used for sacred crests emerging… He really enjoyed that the verb is also used for “kissing” when paired with the word for mouth, ‘xh’éi.’”

“He loved figuring out how the language functioned, not just how to say it in English,” said Xh’unei Lance Twitchell, assistant professor of Alaska Native Languages at the University of Alaska Southeast (UAS). “He was just a real champion for Native knowledge, making sure it got into the schools, and not as some inferior form of knowledge, which was the standard for a long time.

“They [Dick and Nora] were part of a whole community of advocates and speakers who wanted to change the narrative.”

Twitchell first came to know Dick when he was far from home, studying at the University of Minnesota, and missing his grandfather, who’d been teaching him Tlingit before he died in

10

A L A S K A H U M A N I T I E S F O R U M W I NTE R 2014–2015

1997. Walking through campus listening to Dick and Nora’s Tlingit lessons on cassette tapes helped him deal with his loss. When Twitchell returned to Alaska, Dick and Nora became his teachers and mentors. And when Dick retired from teaching at UAS, Twitchell was offered the job.

Before their lives intersected, Twitchell wasn’t sure what he wanted to do, and drugs and alcohol were leading him a direction he didn’t want to go. The Dauenhauers’ work changed his life.

“Within the language, I found what our ancestors had been saying to us, and what our ancient ones had been saying to them as well. Through my study of language I found sobriety, purpose, vision, and power.

“Sometimes in language revitalization efforts we have ideas that we are saving the language, when it is the language that saves us.”

Language Collector

Dick arrived in Alaska with a bachelor’s degree in Russian from Syracuse University and a master’s in German from the University of Texas. He would later get his doctorate in comparative literature from the University of

Wisconsin, with the dissertation Text and Context of Tlingit Oral Tradition.

Besides Russian, German and Tlingit, he studied a number of other languages along the way, including classical Greek and Latin. He spent two years in Finland as a Fulbright scholar so he learned Finnish. Swedish, too. And Haida, Tsimshian and other indigenous Alaska languages. And then there was the Mongolian language Buryat.

Translating its epic narratives and poems was one of his passions for years.

Before he got sick, he was studying Hebrew, Nora said by phone from their home on Douglas Island, where her family has been based for five generations.

He had a sporty side, too. At one point, he took up fencing. Canoeing, rafting, snowshoeing, hiking—he loved being outdoors, and kept a walking stick parked by the front door.

“He and mom taught the kids how to ski—downhill ski, cross-country ski,” Florendo said. “He took them camping. I think that is where he got his inspiration, just being outside in God’s country.”

Although he was a world traveler, one of his favorite places on Earth was

courtesy of Le Florendo

close to home, the Tatshenshini River, and he made sure all the grandkids got the chance to see it by taking them in batches of two and three on guided river trips.

And he could cook.

“You should see the spice cabinet and spice drawer; it’s unbelievable,” said Florendo, who calls it good with salt and pepper. “He liked exotic food.

The seasoning drawer here is ridiculous, chock full of little jars.”

He was also a tonsured reader at Saint Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church, and sang bass with the Tlingit Choir (Nora sang alto). Plus he studied the Torah with a local rabbi on the side.

“He was at every church service I can remember,” said his longtime friend, Father Michael Oleksa. “He took his faith very seriously without trying to push it on anybody or being obnoxious about it.”

Dick took Yup’ik from Oleksa, and Oleksa took Tlingit from him and Nora. And Dick recruited him from his village priest position in Old Harbor to teach at Alaska Pacific University, where they team-taught cross-cultural communication. Dick also got him interested in exploring the Russian period in Alaska Native history, which would later become the subject of Oleksa’s doctorate.

“At some crucial junctures in my life, Dick Dauenhauer made all the difference,” Oleksa said. “It’s one of those things that you don’t really realize is happening until you look back.”

Dick wrote several poems about Oleksa and his family. He did that a lot, wrote about friends and family.

“Dick frequently would spend time with someone, and then the next day send them a poem about what they had done,” said Kathy Kolkhorst Ruddy, a friend of nearly 40 years who worked with him on various projects. “He made them seem effortless, and yet they were so well crafted. Many of his grandchildren and great-grandchildren have little poems about them.”

When Ruddy’s husband, Bill, was dying last year and pondering the afterlife, he said he hoped to meet

Mozart and Beethoven up there. Dick wrote the poem Shaking Hands with Beethoven in his memory.

Unfinished Business

Dick never intended to leave unfinished business, but cancer has its own agenda.

The Raven stories, the fifth volume of the Classics of Tlingit Oral Literature, a 20-year project, was unfinished when he died. He named Ruddy his literary executor on the English side, and James Crippen on the Tlingit side.

Together, with Nora, they will guide it to completion. When the manuscript is finished it will include several dozen Raven stories mostly in Tlingit, plus one of Dick’s “stunning, comprehensive and insightful” introductions, Ruddy said.

Backed by an Alaska Humanities Forum grant and others, Twitchell is making a film on the Dauenhauers’ legacy, “a call to arms for language revitalization,” with the working title, Language Warriors. He got about an hour of footage of them together a few weeks before Dick died.

“He knew he was dying; he didn’t know it would be so fast,” Twitchell said. “It took me a while to go back through the material.”

The filming is continuing, only now with just Nora, 87. “It’s painful that he’s no longer here, but it gives her sustenance to talk about their life together,” Ruddy said.

Dick’s latest book, Benchmarks: New and Selected Poems 1963-2013, came out last fall. Ruddy describes it as “the best of his best,” with meditations on the natural world, family, spirituality, mortality, and faith, with a series of poems about digging potatoes grown from his heirloom, genetically rare seed potatoes and a favorite metaphor of his for the cycle of life. Ruddy recommends four poems—“Rilke at Glacier Bay,” “Nuances of Dawn,” “Playground” and “Two Covenants”— as representative of his work.

“It was a joy to think back on his legacy,” she said. “He was an Alaska treasure, and a national treasure, and, time will tell, an international one.” ■

‘He loved figuring out how the language functioned, not just how to say it in English.’

— Xh’unei Lance Twitchell, assistant professor of Alaska Native Languages at the University of Alaska Southeast

A L A S K A H U M A N ITI E S F O R U M W I NTE R 20 14 –2 01 5

11

An excerpt from the Anchorage Centennial Celebration commemorative book From the Shores of Ship Creek

BY CHARLES WOHLFORTH

E

ven before the construction of the Alaska Railroad and founding of Anchorage, the Chugach National Forest, created in 1907

by President Theodore Roosevelt, outraged many Alaskans as a barrier to the territory’s prosperous future. Alaska’s congressional delegate, James Wickersham, called for abolishing the Chugach entirely in 1911. When the Territorial Legislature convened for the first time in 1913, one of its initial actions was to pass a resolution demanding the Chugach be eliminated and its lands opened to development. The war between the developers at the Interior Department’s General Land Office and the land conservationists at the Forest Service continued for years to come.

The front line of this war centered around Ship Creek, the future site of Anchorage, which lay entirely within the Chugach National Forest. The Forest Service dispatched a Scotsman hired as a forest guard to set up a ranger station there in 1912. Jack Broan tramped around the area, exploring Ship Creek, Campbell Creek, Fish Creek, Point Woronzof, Point Campbell, and Eklutna Lake, and writing reports back to Washington about what he found.

Jack’s wife Nellie arrived as a newlywed. Born east of Cordova in the Native village of Eyak, before it was obliterated by the Copper River and Northwest Railway, she spent most of her youth at a boarding school for Native children in Oregon.

In 1910 her father, William Shepard, a Cordova businessman, asked the school to send her back, noting he, “understood she has a fondness for boys and we would like to have her where we could advise and help select her associates.”

Nellie met Jack Brown in Cordova in 1911, married him the next year, and celebrated her hon-

12

A L A S K A H U M A N I T I E S F O R U M W I NTE R 2014–2015

eymoon in May and June 1912 aboard a series of boats on the way to Ship Creek, where they became the first permanent residents, in the canvas tent which was the ranger station for the Chugach National Forest, and later in a log cabin next to the creek’s mouth.

Jack Brown’s diaries recount how he worked to investigate and prosecute a theft of timber by a homesteader in the thick forests of Girdwood in 1914. The case must have seemed absurd in a wilderness where timber was abundant and just getting to the site of the alleged theft was an adventure. While traveling from Ship Creek to Girdwood to serve a subpoena on one Axel Lindblad, a witness, Brown’s boat was driven on the beach near Hope and hopelessly stuck. The whole trip took eight days and when he arrived, Lindblad wasn’t at home. Brown had to go back again the next week.

Smart observers could see that the Ship Creek area would be key to construction of a government railroad. The speed at which officials selected the site is evidence of that. President Wilson took office in March, 1913, and made the railroad a major priority in December. The railroad bill passed in March 1914, and less than three months later, in June, a party of five men with 20 horses and supplies of lumber and equipment arrived at Ship Creek aboard the steamship Dirigo to set up a headquarters for eleven survey parties assigned to pick the railroad’s route.

With local help, the Alaskan Engineering Commission, known as the AEC, built offices and corrals by the creek. While AEC crews surveyed and staked the route of the railroad, Jack Brown marked the boundaries of a three-by-three-mile railroad town-

Main Street in the tent city near Ship Creek, 1915. Businessmen set up shop without owning the land, gold-rush style, before moving their operations to newly divided lots sold by the government on the bluff above the creek. Photo by Sydney Laurence, courtesy of Mary Barry

site that had been set aside near Ship Creek. But work on the town went no further. The government hadn’t built a town before and no one had decided even who would be in charge. The land remained part of Chugach National Forest and its officials believed Brown was responsible for it as the forest guard. But the federal General Land Office believed its agent, Andrew Christensen, was in charge.

The personalities of the two men made a difference. Brown went on exploring and investigating as a forest guard. But Christensen understood that people were coming and pleaded with his superiors in November, 1914, to allow him to lay out a town and prepare to sell private property along its streets. They did not respond. In the meantime, Brown quit his job to make money running supply boats in the coming boom.

A tent city sprouted by the creek in April 1915.

Anyone reading the newspapers had been able to see money would be made at Ship Creek, and money powered the churn of Alaska’s itinerant

population. The territory had been gold rushing for two decades. Its roaming workers, entrepreneurs, bootleggers and flim-flam men were experts at installing instant boomtowns.

Restaurants, clothiers, a billiard hall and many one-room brothels occupied canvas tents set up on the muddy creek bottom. The AEC hired as many men as it could for immediate work—a crew of 100 at $3 for an eight-hour day—but hundreds more disembarked with each ship, and within weeks 2,000 people were living in the tents and shacks, paying 5 cents a bucket for drinking water and going to the bathroom wherever they could find a spot.

The AEC chose to move everyone to the bluff on the south side of the creek, which became downtown Anchorage. Jack Brown helped Andrew Christensen stake the lots. The land auction on July 10, 1915, is often regarded as the event that founded the city. Christensen stood on a platform before a crowd of bidders in the tent city and gave a stirring

A L A S K A H U M A N ITI E S F O R U M W I NTE R 20 14 –2 01 5

13

Nellie attended every party, dressed up for every masquerade, joined clubs, took pictures, danced the tango, took wrestling lessons from burly athletes, and, above all, visited. Anchorage was tiny and she knew everyone.

speech about the future. When the bidding began, money flowed with abandon. The new town was a smashing success. Jack and Nellie Brown bought a lot on L Street for $85, where they moved their house from Ship Creek and established the town’s first pumped well.

Residents and businessmen dragged their buildings and tents behind teams of horses up the bluff to their new lots. Christensen ran the town first through the land office and then as head of the AEC’s Land and Industrial Department. His most difficult early challenge was controlling vice and organized crime. Anchorage rocked and rolled like any gold rush boomtown, with high stakes gambling and wide-open drinking, although card rooms and saloons were theoretically outlawed.

Scores of prostitutes worked from squalid tents and shacks called cribs, all controlled by pimps and a corrupt deputy U.S. Marshal. That quieted down as the railroad was completed and civilian government took over in 1920, but Anchorage kept its hard-partying frontier segment for many decades to come.

Nellie Brown enjoyed the lively atmosphere.

That she had a lot of fun is demonstrated by many stories and by thousands of photographs, in which she smiles mischievously or broadly, wears costumes, paddles a canoe, raises a glass or poses as a sultry Indian maiden. She was lovely and petite and became painter Sydney Laurence’s favorite life model. She lived in Anchorage until she died here in 1978.

Residents of Anchorage from before World War II had many warm memories of those days. After the departure of railroad construction workers

14

A L A S K A H U M A N I T I E S F O R U M W I NTE R 2014–2015

and wealth seekers, well before the railroad was completed in 1923, Anchorage settled down to be a quiet, comfortable little town with an economy as stable and unchanging as a government pension.

It lived entirely off the railroad’s biweekly payroll, funded by annual Congressional appropriations.

There was a single main street, Fourth Avenue, a swimming beach at Lake Spenard, pond skating with bonfires near Ship Creek, a ski jump, dances every Friday night, and parades and festivals for holidays.

Nellie loved photography and got pictures of everything, especially of herself in charming outfits.

She looks crisp and fetching in a sunhat and pinafore, standing outside the tent with her rifle and black retriever, Buddy.

In 1917, the couple selected a homestead, on Green Lake, near the Cook Inlet bluff, north of Anchorage. Jack had helped survey the land while working for the Forest Service. Homesteads ringed Anchorage, in areas now known as Midtown and Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson. The Forest Service offered homesteads to citizens within Chugach National Forest to encourage development, and later the General Land Office did so after the president eliminated the area from the Chugach. Jack and Nellie called their place Alderwood. They built another log home and kept a large garden and enough livestock for their own needs.

Jack and Nellie shared the work. In a photograph Nellie looks as delightful as always, stripping bark off a log with an ax.

Jack Brown settled down to long-term employment with the railroad. He was a quiet, serious man, self-taught and well read, and he worked most of his career watching gauges at the government power and heating plants. When he came home from work he enjoyed smoking his pipe and reading a book. Jack and Nellie remained married the rest of their lives—more than 60 years—but she did not stay quietly at home. Nellie attended every party, dressed up for every masquerade, joined clubs, took pictures, danced the tango, took wrestling lessons from burly athletes, and, above all, visited.

Anchorage was tiny and she knew everyone.

Sydney Laurence was Nellie’s intimate friend.

Laurence, a painter and photographer, arrived in Anchorage in 1915 after years spent adventuring and prospecting and set up a studio and gallery.

Although born in New York, Laurence had studied oil painting in Europe and left behind a wife and children in London to vagabond around the world.

He told American friends his wife had died; she told people in London he was dead. Both remarried, although it’s not clear if they ever divorced.

Nellie Brown was Sydney Laurence’s favorite model. Although she maintained little connection with her Eyak culture, she enjoyed dressing up in costume for photos like this one. Photograph by Sydney Laurence, courtesy of Mary Barry.

A L A S K A H U M A N ITI E S F O R U M W I NTE R 20 14 –2 01 5

15

Alaska gave Laurence the subject that made him as a painter. His images of Mount McKinley became famous. He sold paintings of caches and prospectors in his shop at a time when such things were still commonplace. Later paintings of the kind became cliché or kitschy, but at his prime Laurence was the city’s primary symbol of high culture— well-dressed, distinguished and highly respected.

Nellie drove him around town in his own Model T Ford. When he moved to California, he gave her the car. On her extensive, solo vacation travels she included long visits with him and his wife there.

Laurence painted few human figures, but Nellie was a favorite subject. She dressed up for him as a sort of Indian princess, although she had kept little connection with her Eyak roots. She also posed nude, and Laurence’s photos of her include some that suggest erotic playfulness. People assumed Nellie and Sydney had an affair, but Nellie’s friend, Mary Barry, never found proof of it when she wrote Nellie’s biography.

Unlike most women of the day, Nellie spent evenings socializing in bars, leaving Jack at home. She loved the company of men and was an expert poker and pool player. She joked that she drank beer unless a man was buying, in which case she drank cocktails. But Barry says spending every night at a bar meant something different than it does today.

The social life of Anchorage took place in fraternal and service organizations, such as the Elks Club, Moose Lodge, or Pioneers of Alaska. As a Native, Nellie wasn’t allowed in their doors, so she had to meet friends in bars.

Racism was engrained and accepted in Alaskan society in the 1920s and ‘30s. In the city’s earliest days, Christensen established rules keeping Dena’ina people out of town, supposedly to prevent them from infecting the white population with diseases. In fact, germs brought by the newcomers killed untold numbers of Dena’ina in those years and shattered their families and communities. The AEC offered health care to Eklutna residents as an after-thought and to deal with crises. A Native boarding school established near the village was located there to keep Natives away from Anchorage.

Anchorage remained a sleepy small town until World War II, when it once again became a wideopen boomtown with explosive growth and floods of new people. Some of the old timers who lived here before the war would regret the change. They were wistful about the close-knit community they remembered. But they also took advantage of the new business opportunities.

16

A L A S K A H U M A N I T I E S F O R U M W I NTE R 2014–2015

U.S. Forest Service Guard Jack Brown, photographed by Nellie Brown in his tentoffice at the mouth of Ship Creek, 1912. courtesy of Mary Barry.

Nellie Brown opened Nellie’s Diner in a decommissioned railcar, one of the old cars that the Army was rapidly replacing. It was a popular place, and Nellie used the opportunity to form warm friendships with servicemen who came in, some of whom sent touching letters back from their later postings.

A colonel wrote from Fort Bragg in 1943, “It makes me a little jealous to realize that what you meant to me, you now mean to others to that much greater extent.”

The military bought the homesteads north of town to build bases. Jack and Nellie had already moved to a railroad-built cottage at the western tip of Government Hill, a spot that came to be known at Brown’s Point. They sold their Alderwood home and 153 acres to the government for $2,500, less than they believed it was worth. Nellie said they agreed to the price out of patriotism, and because they expected that after the war everything would go back to normal and they could get the place back.

But after the military arrived, Anchorage would never be the same. ■ This article was excerpted from the official commemorative book of the Anchorage Centennial Celebration, From the Shores of Ship Creek, by awardwinning Anchorage journalist Charles Wohlforth.

Published by Todd Communications in conjunction with the Alaska Humanities Forum, the Anchorage Centennial Celebration, and the Municipality of Anchorage, From the Shores of Ship Creek will be in Anchorage bookstores in spring 2015.

ANCHORAGE CENTENNIAL ORAL HISTORIES

Photo courtesy Mike Gordon

A

s part of its ongoing partnership with the Anchorage Centennial Celebration, the Alaska Humanities Forum in 2014 conducted a series of indepth oral history interviews with longtime Anchorage residents, helping them to record and shape their stories of life in Anchorage in past decades. The Forum then collaborated with them to select historic photos from their family albums to accompany the written presentation of their oral histories.

Three examples of these collaborations appear in the following pages of this issue of Forum, beginning with “The Entrepreneur” by Mike Gordon, best known as the owner of the popular Spenard nightlife establishment Chilkoot Charlie’s.

Gordon first moved with his family to Anchorage in 1953.

Following Gordon’s story and photos is “West Chester Memories,” by Augusta Reimer, who lived with her family, beginning in 1947, in the vibrant, low-income West Chester neighborhood that is now covered by Westchester Lagoon.

The third oral history is “Spenard: Hub of the Universe,”

by Tom Snyder, whose family homesteaded in Spenard beginning in 1935.

All three contributors of their family histories and photos still live in Anchorage today. The Forum thanks them for generously sharing their personal stories and precious family photos. To view more Family Album oral histories and photos gathered as part of this project, visit the official Anchorage Centennial Celebration website, anchoragecentennial.org.

Me with my gun and our dog, Duke, in 1955.

The Entrepreneur

By Mike Gordon

M

y dad was already in Alaska when my mother, my sister and I boarded the Greyhound bus that was to be our home for the next week, traveling from Mississippi through Texas and New Mexico deserts and California and Oregon redwood forests the summer of 1953. All I remember about Seattle, our disembarking point for Alaska, was the shots. Alaska was considered an overseas military

A L A S K A H U M A N ITI E S F O R U M W I NTE R 20 14 –2 01 5

17

ANCHORAGE CENTENNIAL ORAL HISTORIES left: With a caribou rack, 1958.

Before I moved to Alaska, the largest wild animal I’d seen was a raccoon.

All photos Courtesy Mike Gordon

below: Me with my parents, Ruth and Whitey Gordon, in 1960.

move, so we were inoculated against everything under the sun. We felt like human pincushions, and I thought, “We’re really leaving America.”

The trip north to Seward was on an old gray tub named the U. S. S. Funston, after the colorful Teddy Roosevelt era general who nearly single-handedly captured a fabled Philippine guerrilla leader on his own turf during America’s “pacification” of that archipelago. Years later, he would order the destruction of the buildings along Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco during the Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906, thus saving the buildings between there and the Pacific Ocean. There is a street named after him in the city by the bay.

Of course I couldn’t have cared less about history at the time, and my ten-year-old brain simply wasn’t capable of imagining all the implications and possibilities of a move to Alaska, which was as alien to me as if I were on that freighter headed for the uncharted volcanic island home of King Kong in the old black and white movie. Then, sure enough, while busy watching whales and playing shuffleboard a rumor circulated around the ship that a huge volcanic eruption had just possibly turned our destination, Anchorage, into another Pompeii. I thought, “Wow! How cool is that!” a sentiment not shared by my mother.

18

A L A S K A H U M A N I T I E S F O R U M W I NTE R 2014–2015

Having docked in Seward we boarded the Alaska Railroad for the ride to Anchorage and I marveled at the herds of moose on either side of the tracks going through the Portage flats. The largest wild animal I’d ever seen was a raccoon.

Though the sun was visible from Anchorage again, the place was in fact covered with an inch or two of fine volcanic ash that got into everything. The stuff could have squirmed into a sealed Zip Lock bag. If you were too lazy to scoop it up yourself you could buy it by the labeled jar for years afterward in souvenir shops around town, some enterprising person’s attempt to make a buck or two.

And, I was soon to realize, I had landed in the middle of a different kind of enterprising gold mine.

We lived in a part of Anchorage called Government Hill, aptly named because it was contiguous with the base, where my father was stationed. Government Hill was one huge apartment complex of mostly one and two bedroom apartments filled to the brim with military and civil service people, all transient, so just going through the dumpsters was like dredging for gold. My friends and I fashioned a couple of sleds out of perfectly good corrugated metal sheets and slid

I wandered through the barracks with that picture of my sister. The deal went like this: You sign up for one month of the Anchorage Daily Times, pay in advance and I’ll give you my sister’s phone number.

down the steep gravel cliffs next to Ship Creek, returning exhausted to the WWII pillboxes we fancied to be forts decorated with a treasure trove of dumpster furnishings.

Then, of course, there was the military base right next door with the rows of huge barracks filled with enlisted men. My dad had made me a shoeshine box and I would cruise the barracks shining shoes for fifty cents, shooting the bull with the guys. Sooner or later it came to my attention that there were a lot of pop bottles lying around those barracks. A pop bottle was worth ten cents at the Piggly Wiggly on Government Hill. All one needed was a grocery cart to haul them from the barracks to the store. No problem. It was an early recognition that making money wasn’t difficult.

The essential components were just lying around, and all a person had to do was put them together.

Of course, I was too young to have any long range plans—I was just having fun—and learning to look for opportunities.

Next I acquired a paper route—a pretty big one. A buddy of mine had an adjacent route, and we would alternate not delivering our routes every Friday. Instead of delivering them we would take the papers to the base gate at the end of the day when everyone was in line in their cars on the way home from work and sell them for

ten cents apiece. I even had the foresight to save a few in case of complaints from people on my route.

At that time, my sister was a freshman in high school and a real knockout—the living embodiment of the word pulchritude. I had a school picture of her posing very seductively in a tight sweater, showing off two of her more significant attributes. In order to increase circulation on my newspaper route I wandered through the barracks with that picture of my sister.

The deal went like this: You sign up for one month of the Anchorage Daily Times, pay in advance and I’ll give you my sister’s phone number. What a bonanza. That is, until the phone started ringing.

Wall Street knew nothing that I did not know intuitively. Sex sells and I had the perfect setup. The only problem was my sister, who liked getting calls from guys—but not every Tom, Dick and Harry on Elmendorf Air Force Base, practically twenty-four hours a day! Could be we had to change our phone number. I don’t remember. But I do remember my sister’s plaintive cry, “Daddy, make him stop!” and the subsequent licking I got.

It was the last licking I ever got from my dad, and it was, perhaps because of that licking, the last superlative business idea I had for the next fifteen years.

Chilkoot Charlie would just have to bide his time. ■

A L A S K A H U M A N ITI E S F O R U M W I NTE R 20 14 –2 01 5

19

ANCHORAGE CENTENNIAL ORAL HISTORIES

West Chester Memories

By Augusta Reimer

M

y mother made note on her calendar on January 27, 1946 that we moved to “good old Anchorage” from Nome, on Alaska Airlines, and that we left Nome at 2:00 p.m., arrived Anchorage 6:00 p.m., with stops in Unalakleet and McGrath.

My father had bought a two-room tar-paperedexterior dwelling in the West Chester neighborhood, on 18th Avenue, the north side of Chester Creek.

The actual creek ran through the area a few hundred yards from our back door. Our house was just east of Spenard Road. We children, all born in Nome, were: my brother John (aka “Sonnie”), my sister, Bonita, and me, Augusta. Our father was John Gaede Reimer, a German, raised on a farm in California. He arrived in Alaska in 1926 on the famous Coast Guard Cutter, Bear, out of Oakland, California, disembarking in Nome. Our mother, Sarah Bernhardt Reimer was Iñupiaq, raised with 11 siblings in a traditional, subsistence way of life in Teller, Alaska.

Our little Chester Creek house in the late 1940s had no electricity, plumbing, or running water; we used a kerosene lantern, a honeybucket and outdoor toilet.

We hauled water from the creek in large metal barrels. We bathed in round aluminum tubs. There was a spruce tree near the outdoor toilet that we called “the slop tree” where we dumped dish and bath water. It

20

A L A S K A H U M A N I T I E S F O R U M W I NTE R 2014–2015

My sister Bonita (left) and I posing in our front yard in 1947.

The houses in the background on ‘Boundary Hill’ are still there.

PHOTO COURTESY Augusta Reimer

A L A S K A H U M A N ITI E S F O R U M W I NTE R 20 14 –2 01 5

21

ANCHORAGE CENTENNIAL ORAL HISTORIES

22

That’s me on the left, then John in the middle, and Bonita on the right, in the summer of 1947, back when Chester Creek ran its natural course, before the city channeled it and built lagoons. Like a lot of the kids in our neighborhood, we didn’t have any plumbing or electricity, so were pretty scruffy looking, a little wild, and we liked it that way. PHOTO COURTESY Augusta Reimer

Building on 4th Avenue. Even when we were teens 4th Avenue was the place to be, to run into boys and hang out with our friends, like at Hewitt’s drug store where we got “graveyards,” a soda with marshmallow topping that floated like a ghost on top of the drink.

There was a photography studio on the second floor of Hewitt’s operated by an old man with an old-style camera on a tripod. When I was about 15 we kids had our portraits taken there as Christmas gifts for our parents. (I remember my brother taking a city bus from 18th Avenue and Spenard Road to town for his portrait. I recall he was sick with a cold but he went anyway).

We would go see movies at the old Denali Theater, 4th Avenue Theatre, and Empress Theater, all on 4th Avenue. There were also clothing stores on 4th where we would occasionally shop. The Northern Commercial store was one of our favorites. Oh, and record stores!

The first record I ever bought was from a 4th Avenue store called Dorna’s. It was Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” on a 78 speed! The old bus station was next to Denali Theater, and we kids would sometimes hang out there. All those places are gone now, except the Federal Building and what remains of the 4th Avenue Theater. Obviously, “town” has extended way out from when it used to be mostly 4th and 5th Avenues.

may sound primitive, but many people in Anchorage lived like that back then.

My father worked as an electrical foreman for City Electric, from which he retired about 1980. City Electric did many wiring jobs all around Anchorage including for the Hotel Captain Cook as it was being built.

About 1953 my father and his brother H.G. “George” Reimer built a larger house around the old two-room shack. We then had three bedrooms, a living room, a modern bathroom and kitchen, and an enclosed back porch with the furnace, water heater, and a Speed Queen ringer washer. Ours was one of the larger homes in West Chester. And, thereafter, we had running water, electricity, and a septic tank but never adequate sewage.

North of our house was what we called “Boundary Hill.” Today it’s Minnesota Drive turning into I Street.

We walked Boundary Hill for many things: to go to school, to town for shopping, and to visit friends who lived closer to “town.”

When we walked Boundary Hill to go to “town” that meant mostly 4th and 5th Avenues. We used to get our mail at a “General Delivery” box at the old Federal

West Chester was mostly a Native neighborhood, with a few black families and a few Caucasians. Nearby East Chester was almost entirely black. Some of our non-Native friends’ parents who lived in town weren’t too keen on their kids hanging out with us, because they looked down on us, and because I guess they considered our neighborhood a ghetto compared to theirs.

Right in the middle of Boundary Hill was a house, that’s still there, that had a stairway all the way from the top of the hill down to our neighborhood. That’s the route we used most often to get to town and school.

For a time a family named Prentiss lived there, including a girl named Roberta who was about my age. Her father ran an auction house, a large wooden building that faced Spenard Road. My father used to frequent the auction and bring items he bought home with him.

There were other trails up Boundary Hill we would take, including one that passed a grove of trees, also still there today, where there was a rope swing hanging from a large cottonwood we would play on (now there’s another wooden stairway up and down the length of the hill there). Many of the homes that were on top of Boundary Hill are still standing today.

To the southwest of our house, right where Spenard Road crossed Chester Creek over a culvert, was a

A L A S K A H U M A N I T I E S F O R U M W I NTE R 2014–2015

This photo was taken in 1957, with my dad’s ’55 Chevy in the background.

That’s Bonita on the left, then, moving right, my good friend Pat Van Etten, who lived in the white house that’s still there on 15th , my brother John, and me.

PHOTO COURTESY Augusta Reimer

A L A S K A H U M A N ITI E S F O R U M W I NTE R 20 14 –2 01 5

23

PHOTOS COURTESY Augusta Reimer

ANCHORAGE CENTENNIAL ORAL HISTORIES

Bonita with her puppy in 1948. left: The winter of 1948, that’s me to the left, on the side of Mrs. Fredericksen’s garden, my mom in the middle, and Bonita on the right.

second-hand store owned by a man named Kish. My brother, John, remembers a small tent-city kind of place near Kish’s in which a group of religious people lived.

Further south, up Romig Hill, was our high school (now West), and the hinterlands that are now called Spenard.

Next to our house on the east side was a small wooden house in which our grandfather (mother’s father), Albert Bernhardt, lived with his son, our uncle, Robert, until Albert was sent to the Sitka Pioneers home in the early ‘50s.

All around our home there were other dwellings that sprang up over the years after we moved from Nome, although at first there weren’t many other residents.

Some of the families and people there that I remember were: the Kaleraks, the Mosquitoes, the Topkoks, the Johnsons, the Kirschners, two Miller families (one across Spenard Road to the west, and one to the east of us right on Chester Creek), the Crombies, the Bagleys, Marshall Stewart, Phillip Stewart (not related), Louis Miller (not related to the other Millers), Dale Sellen (our paperboy), two old Swedish men (one John Wilson, the other named Sven) a Native man named Romeo, two small boys we played with named Rainey and Johnny, two little girls who were also our playmates named Linda and Sandra Metheny, and a black family we especially loved, Willie and Icey Gray and their little girl named Pearly May, and a boy named Clifford.

A particularly colorful resident of West Chester back

24

A L A S K A H U M A N I T I E S F O R U M W I NTE R 2014–2015

then was Georgia, a white woman whom we children believed to be a “lady of the night.” There was a variety of men in and out of Georgia’s who were always nice to us kids; one day my sister, Bonnie, a friend named Carol Bahr, and I all tied grass around our waists and did a “hula” for Georgia and her male friends, and they gave us money for it.

Another never-to-be-forgotten family was the Fredricksens: mother, father, and two sons, Leroy and Butch. Mrs. Fredricksen had a fenced garden in front of their house that was side-by-side with our house.

She did not appreciate our stealing vegetables from her, but I remember her throwing small potatoes out toward the street and me collecting them to boil and eat.

One of my fondest memories of the old neighborhood was the large metal spool we found (I believe just across the street from us). We played endlessly on, under, around, on top, and inside it. I can still to this day hear the sound that spool made as we rolled it, clanging metal on our dirt road.

A typical summer day for us was to delight in being outdoors. I don’t remember being inside the house much unless it was raining. We’d go inside mostly only to grab some food when hungry. Sometimes a snack meant dried up white bread with mayonnaise.

Our mother always cooked dinner, simple foods like casseroles and stews. We loved it when we had a special dinner of fried shrimp and homemade french fries. Occasionally our mother would have a Native

West Chester and East Chester were demolished for ‘urban renewal.’ In other words, the city got rid of two areas where mostly minorities lived.

female friend over and they’d prepare boiled meat like moose or fish, which we’d dip into seal oil, and for dessert during a Native lunch we’d have pilot bread crackers with butter and jam, canned apricots, and tea. We played kick-the-can until our mothers called us home (sometimes late, like 11 p.m.), or Red Rover, or banged around inside the big metal spool, or we’d swing from the rope swing near the top of Boundary Hill.

Prior to being teens we played at the creek a lot, having picnics there, or wading. Later as the area became more developed Chester Creek got polluted and had broken glass in it. One summer day my sister and I and some other friends were at the creek in an area to the east of our house (very near where Valley of the Moon Park is now) when a bee buzzed her, her foot slipped in the water, and her toe was cut by glass. I ran home to get a Band-Aid and Watkins salve making sure to avoid our mother who would have scolded us if she knew Bonita was bleeding. One memory Bonita and I have is making mud pies and decorating them with wild flowers especially from what we called Dandelion Hill, the side of Boundary Hill just a bit west of what’s now Valley of the Moon Park. It was brilliant with dandelions and other flowers in summer.

Around 1960 my family and everyone else in West Chester had to sell out and move because the city took down our Chester Creek neighborhood. Now there are bike trails through there, and the creek was

dammed to create the current lagoons.

West Chester and East Chester were demolished for “urban renewal.” In other words the city got rid of two areas where mostly minorities lived, perhaps with “beautification” in mind. To us, though, our neighborhood was a wonderful place to live, full of freedom, with all the trees, the creek, the inlet nearby, and all our friends of many races.

Today, when I stand at 17th Avenue, the north side of the metal bike trail tunnel, it seems like I can still hear our childhood voices as we played all over the area. To see photos of our old friends and playmates is bittersweet for me because I don’t know what happened to many of them. I still occasionally dream of our old house and everything around it. West Chester was a thriving, lively, fascinating old neighborhood full of interesting people and things. Most who live in Anchorage now don’t even know it existed, in the same way that, when I was growing up there, I didn’t realize the area used to be a Dena’ina Athabascan summer fish camp.

When the city was getting ready to dam the creek, the house our father and uncle built was moved to the corner of 72nd and Arctic just to the south of a Tesoro station. It’s easily recognizable today from its roof that has one long side and one short side. For a time it was a second hand store, then an animal shelter.

How sad that it “went to the dogs.” I believe it’s vacant right now. Dad and Mom moved to the hinterlands of Spenard in the 1960s.

But that’s another story. ■

A L A S K A H U M A N ITI E S F O R U M W I NTE R 20 14 –2 01 5

25

ANCHORAGE CENTENNIAL ORAL HISTORIES

PHOTO COURTESY TOM SNYDER

Spenard: Hub of the Universe

The population of Spenard in 1933.

By Tom Snyder

S

penard was the hub of my universe for my first 12 years of life. I spent those years mostly along Fireweed Lane, between C Street to the east and Spenard Road to the west. The main Spenard business district back then was Spenard Road between Northern Lights and Fireweed.

My family roots in Spenard date back to at least 1934, when my grandfather on my mother’s side, W.D. McKinney, acquired a homestead on Fireweed Lane that ran from what is now Arctic Boulevard all the way to B Street. Before that he and his family lived at Spenard and Minnesota on “McCain’s hometead,” and before that “in town” at 7th and L. O.W. Petersen had filed on the Fireweed Lane home-

26

A L A S K A H U M A N I T I E S F O R U M W I NTE R 2014–2015

stead and built a one-room cabin on it; Mr. Petersen relinquished the homestead to my grandfather for the price of the cabin and other improvements.

The cabin became home for my grandfather and wife and children, and he gradually enlarged it to accommodate the large family. They hauled water from a nearby spring and used wood and coal for cooking and heat. My grandfather used his truck to clear the land, pull stumps and haul wood and coal to his cabin and other homesteaders in the area. During the winters, at night he had to drain the oil from the truck and remove the battery and keep both the oil and the battery by the stove all night long to keep them warm so the truck would start in the morning.

TOM SNYDER, SR., COURTESY TOM SNYDER

Homesteaders acquired crank phones. Everyone listened in to every call because whenever there was a call, the phone rang in every house in Spenard.

Gradually, improvements were made to the property. A generator was installed, and a sewer line was put in. The city put up a telephone pole at the intersection of Spenard and Fireweed, but the city wouldn’t put any more city telephone poles any further on Fireweed. However, they agreed to let the homesteaders on Fireweed connect to the city phone system by stringing their own lines down Fireweed, which the homesteaders did by stringing phone lines on Cottonwood tri poles. This was in the late 1930s, about 1939. Homesteaders acquired crank phones and were given city phone numbers such as “rural 1X,” which meant one short and one long crank. Everyone listened in to every call because whenever there was a call, the phone rang in every house in Spenard.

Fireweed Lane was originally a block north of its present location. When it was moved to where it is now, the road was put in straight except for a jog around this one very tall spruce tree in the area that everyone called “the big tree.” Much later the Alaska Railroad Commission removed the tree and the jog in the road.

Back when I was growing up on Fireweed Lane, Parker’s Department Store anchored the north end of what might be considered a 1940s-1950s strip mall. It was right at the southeast corner of Fireweed and Spenard. The Parkers lived in the basement. A wood boardwalk fronted the businesses for a block. I recall a barbershop, a bar, and other businesses that seemed to come and go. At the south end of the block was a tiny log cabin that housed a small grocery store. It may have been “Jackson’s,” or “Jackson’s grocery.” Much later that very same tiny log cabin would become Chilkoot Charlie’s. Safe to say that that cabin has grown considerably since then. ■

A house that my father built on Fireweed Lane.

Fireweed Lane about June 1941.

A L A S K A H U M A N ITI E S F O R U M W I NTE R 20 14 –2 01 5

27

KATIE BASILE

A desk once used at the Kwethluk Children’s Home. A Forum grant in 2013 supported Katie Basile’s project to document the history of the site.

Your support makes all the difference

A

t the Alaska Humanities Forum we tell the stories that define the culture, history and people of Alaska.

We disseminate knowledge and insight into what makes Alaska singular in the world. Through the humanities we reaffirm and celebrate what makes Alaskans unique.

We couldn’t do any of this without you.

Your annual contributions support programs like the Sister School Exchange that promotes cross-cultural understanding and appreciation between Alaska’s youth; and Take Wing Alaska, which provides direction and support for rural teens preparing for post-secondary

Giving is easy 28

pursuits. Your support allows Leadership Anchorage to develop our next generation of leaders at the community, state and even national level.

Your generosity also helps us fund humanities projects across the state, projects that help us to understand as Alaskans where we came from, who we are and what we want to become.

In short, your contribution to the Alaska Humanities Forum is a contribution to the very essence of what defines Alaska—its people and its cultures.

Go to www.akhf.org and click on the donate button.

Or, send a check to Alaska Humanities Forum, 161 E. 1st Ave., Door 15, Anchorage, AK 99501

A L A S K A H U M A N I T I E S F O R U M W I NTE R 2014–2015

FRIENDS Tara Alvarez Jane Angvik Tam Agosti-Gisler Dot and Linne Bardarson Mary Frances Barker Marsha E. Bennett Barbara Brown Brenda L. Dates Campen Lenora Lolly Carpluck Blanche Crandall Emily Cohn Lauryn Cyrus Marie Darlin Richard and Nora Dauenhauer Carmen Davis Shannon Daut Ana Dittmar Louise Driscoll Renee’ Dunkin Ian Dutton Melinda Evans Laurie Evans-Dineen Sherry Eckrich Wendy Erd and Peter Kaufmann Ann Fienup-Riordan Victor Fischer Pauline Fredrickson Linda Freed Kay F. Gajewski Rebecca Gallen Anjuli Grantham Heather and Joshua Harris Michael Hawfield Joshua Herren Dewey Hoffman Elayne Hunter Marie Husa Kelly Hurd Martha and Brett Jokela Barbara Karl Jun and Chiyo Kawakami Terrence Kelly J. Allen Kemplen Carolyn Sue Kremers Nancy Lord Cheryl and Mark Lovegreen Mildred M. Martin Jordan Marshall Nancy M. Mendenhall Peter Metcalfe

Kenneth Miller Stanton Moll Elisabeth Moorehead Robert Morris Glenna L. Muncy Peter Neyhart James and Irene Norcross Adam Ottavi Bruce and Meredith Parham David and Angela Matz Payer Lee Post Virginia and Robert Potter Charles Reynolds James Renkert Sigrun Robertson Lorraine (Alice) Ryser Clifford and Marjorie Salisbury Juan San Miguel Shirley Schleich Laura Schue Krista Scully Wendell Shiffler Sean Stitham Katherine Smith Jim Stratton Robert Strick Brit Szymoniak Francine Taylor Jonathan Teeters Alan Traut Deidre C. Watt Amanda R Watt Tonja J. Woelber SCHOLARS Wilfred and Sharon Abbott Shawn Aspelund Cynthia Berger Mary Margaret and Charles Bingham Joan Braddock Jeane Breinig Christa Bruce Lisa Butler Annie Calkins LaMiel Chapman and Waltraud Barron Michael Chmielewski Dermot Cole Carol S. Comeau Jerry and Sandy Covey

Sharon Davis Brenda and George Dickison Susan Elliot Melinda Evans Kitty Farnham Pat Branson and Gordon Gould Joe Griffith Ernestine Hayes Anne Hanley Caitlin Holman Mary Hughes Karen L. Hunt Tim and Donna Hurley M.E. and D.P. Inman Sara Jackinsky Martha Jokela Diane Kaplan Stephanie Kesler Dave Kiffer Catkin Kilcher-Burton James and Mary Lou King Janet R. Klein Jenifer Kohout Marc and Sandra Langland David and Marilyn Lee Cindy Lister Barbo Lyon Peter Maassen Blythe Marston Scott McAdams Larry Merculieff David and Janet McCabe Dennis McMillian Jo and Peter Michalski Ben Mohr Elizabeth Moore Pauline Morris John Mouw Anthony and Lynette Nakazawa Peter Neyhart David Nicolai Becky Patterson Jim and Susan Pfeiffenberger John R. Pugh John and Carolyn Rader Angela Ramirez John Roderick Kathy Ruddy Tim and Alice Samuelson Gregory Schmidt

Alan Schmitt Ken and Liz Sherwood Michael Smith John Stalvey Wayne Stevens Arliss Sturgulewski Charles Tobin Alex Turnwall Shelley Wickstrom Vicki Wisenbaugh Charles Wohlforth Kurt Wong Shelly Wozniak Sheila Wyne Nancy Yaw Davis

CORPORATE BRONZE Agnew & Beck Consulting LLC The Boardroom The Foraker Group Frances & David Rose Foundation Hellenthal & Associates Pepsico Pyramid Island Press Sealaska Heritage Institute Shell TKC Development United Way of Anchorage Wells Fargo

PATRONS Maggie Balean and Nick Coltman Christa Bruce Heather Day George and Aase Haugen Lora Jorgensen Nancy Kemp Mary Kemppel Steve Lindbeck Barbro Lyon Harry Need Mia Oxley Dean Potter Libby Roderick Jim Ustasiewski and Mary Irvine

CORPORATE SILVER Alaska State Council on the Arts GCI John C. Hughes Foundation Margaret A. Cargill Foundation Ravn Alaska Smithsonian Institution CORPORATE GOLD

BENEFACTORS Indra Arriaga Al Bolea John Cloe Jack Dalton John Fizgerald and Jennine Williamson Louise Harriet Gallop Mary K. Hughes Jonathon Lack Denali Kemppel Gwen Kennedy Nilo Emil Koponen Estate Cathryn Rasmuson Evan D. Rose David Shechtmann

A L A S K A H U M A N ITI E S F O R U M W I NTE R 20 14 –2 01 5

29

KIS 30

The Japanese Occupation of an Alaska Island

KISKA Faces of war—gas masks still lay where discarded by soldiers some 70 years ago.

A L A S K A H U M A N ITI E S F O R U M W I NTE R 20 14 –2 01 5

31

In June of 1942 Japanese forces occupied Attu and Kiska, westerly islands in Alaska’s remote Aleutian Archipelago. Some 7,500 troops made up the Japanese Emperor’s stronghold on Kiska. The enemy evacuated Kiska thirteen months later under threat of invasion from American and Canadian forces. In the summer of 2009 author Brendan Coyle spent 51 days camped on Kiska, recording images of the enemy occupation—in the footsteps of the Japanese forces. These excerpts and photographs are from his book, KISKA: the Japanese Occupation of an Alaska Island. (University of Alaska Press, Fairbanks). Coyle’s project was supported by a 2013 Alaska Humanities Forum grant of $6,000.

By Brendan Coyle | photos by the author

T

he inflatable boat crunched against the gravel shore, and two deckhands tossed our gear onto the beach. We were an expedition of only two people, dropped at our base camp at Gertrude Cove on uninhabited Kiska Island, three-quarters of the way to Siberia from the Alaska mainland, near the far western end of Alaska’s remote and treeless Aleutian Archipelago.

After decades of aspirations, I stood on Kiska’s storied shore with mixed emotions. At fifty-two, it had been decades since I had left home and family for such a length of time. When I did,

32

A L A S K A H U M A N I T I E S F O R U M W I NTE R 2014–2015

those sojourns had been brief compared to the nine weeks I would spend alone in the Aleutians, save for one other person. A quick handshake from the deckies and they were gone. With a pang of apprehension I watched the skiff disappear into the fog, the resonance of the outboard motor fading into the distance. Other than my compatriot, this departure would be my last human contact for some fifty days.

I had signed on as a field assistant

to a biology professor researching the effects of the Norway rat on the indigenous bird populations of Kiska and the western Aleutians. Rattus norvegicus was introduced to the Aleutian Islands by a Japanese fur hunting ship in the late-1700s. World War II brought an increase of human activity to the islands. Japanese forces invaded Kiska on June 7, 1942, and a large AmericanCanadian force reoccupied Kiska in August 1943, conceivably accompanied by an increase in the rat populations.

With little else to eat, the highly adaptable rodents devoured native bird eggs and chicks in the lowland marshes and cliff rookeries. Whole colonies of native Aleutian seabirds were lost on Kiska and other islands of the Aleutian chain as the rats proliferated.

When we arrived in mid-June there was still snow on the hills. I brought several versions of the “Alaska tuxedo”: a full layer of nylon long johns, a layer of fleece, another fleece sweater, nylon cargo pants, and an outer layer of rain gear, depending on the weather.

I brought three weights of hiking boots, a pair of Xtratuf gum boots, and sandals to wear in camp over layers of wool socks. For longer explorations of the island, we had to pack for every type of weather because it could change from rare sun to cold fog to freezing rain within a short time. Everything I had read of the Aleutian weather proved true. Perpetually overcast, the rain and sleet of summer was made even less endurable by the notorious williwaw, powerful winds that howl down the valleys to the sea. We packed extra food in our day packs in case we had to unexpectedly overnight away from camp due to the weather.

At Gertrude Cove, our camp life was reminiscent of that of the Japanese-Aleutian soldier, giving me the opportunity to experience their simple and harsh existence firsthand. Our base camp was situated next to a freshwater stream fifty yards up from the stony beach in the lee of a bluff. Directly above us was a well-hidden machine gun bunker built into the bluff by the Japanese.

A Type 41 75mm Howitzer. These cannon, built in the late 1880s, were obsolete by the start of the war. Originally 33 of them defended Japanese positions on Kiska; now only this one example remains.

The remains of an Aleut barabara, a sod house. There are still several of these structures on Kiska built by the indigenous people, the Unangan.

The Japanese incorporated some into their beach defences or used them for storage.

Jikatabi: traditional Japanese, two-toed footwear.

A L A S K A H U M A N ITI E S F O R U M W I NTE R 20 14 –2 01 5

33

left:

A Type A, Japanese two-man submarine (Ha-boat) is on the right of this photo taken during the allied re-occupation of Kiska in August, 1943. right: Japanese soldiers on Kiska. Their garrison on Kiska reached a strength of about 7,500, made up of 5,700 Imperial Navy troops and 1,800 soldiers of the Japanese Army. below: The same Ha-boat rusts into the substrate at Kiska Harbor in 2009. Submarine: Alaska Defense Command Advance intelligence Center, North Pacific Command. Soldiers: Daitoua

34

A L A S K A H U M A N I T I E S F O R U M W I NTE R 2014–2015

The Japanese Army transport Borneo Maru disintegrates into the waters of Gertrude Cove. The ship took several hits from American aircraft before being beached.

Kiska Island was an anomaly

among World War II battlefields because there was no Allied, noncombatant population on the island.

That meant it could be bombed without regard for a civilian populace. The island’s fragile landscape still bears the wounds of bombardment from air and sea. It is pockmarked with bomb craters that range from forty-eight inches to sixteen feet in diameter. Oddly enough, we found that some waterflooded bomb craters support small fish and sustain geese, ducks, sticklebacks, and freshwater vegetation.

I kayaked out to the wreck of the Borneo Maru, a Japanese transport sunk by American aircraft. A common eider with ten ducklings and a curious harlequin duck paddled in and around the wreck like children run amok. It was hard to imagine the intense and protracted carnage that took place in this serene bay seventy years ago. Water washed in and out of the broken hull, and two holes with the metal bent outward were evidence of explosions from inside the hull. On a calm day when a mild breeze blew over the wreck, I could hear a faint tune like that of a Japanese flute. I had thought the sound was the result of the constant wind’s assault on my hearing, but it turned out to be the gentle breeze passing over water-filled pipes. Like blowing into a soda bottle, it made for a strange little melody, almost Japanese in nature and audible on only the calmest days. ■ A L A S K A H U M A N ITI E S F O R U M W I NTE R 20 14 –2 01 5

35

GRANT REPORT

Tracing Roots Delores Churchill’s journey forward to connect back | By Megan Zlatos

left:

Delores Churchill collecting bark. OWEN KINDIG / UAS A still from the film, showing Churchill working on her reproduction of the spruce root hat. Ellen Frankenstein

right:

‘T

he first thing they saw was the hat flew up in the air.”

About 300 years ago, a young man, eighteen or so, was trekking across a glacier 50 miles from the Southeastern coast of what many years later would be called Alaska. Cloaked in squirrel pelts, carrying crustaceans and beach asparagus in a leather pouch and wearing a finely woven spruce-root hat, he likely fell in a crevasse His body lay hidden as the blue ice shifted, cracked, and slumped, until three Canadian sheep hunters discovered it 15 years ago. The man was called Kwäday Dän Ts’ìnchi, meaning the “Long Ago Person Found” in Southern Tutchone, a language in the Athabaskan family spoken in the Canadian Yukon where his remains were found.

Delores Churchill, an eminent Haida elder now living in Ketchikan, read of the discovery in the news. “The connection was immediate because I am a weaver,” Churchill says. She wanted

36

A L A S K A H U M A N I T I E S F O R U M W I NTE R 2014–2015

Frankenstein told Churchill that she wanted to join her on a journey.

That’s when Churchill told her about the hat of the Long Ago Person Found. to see the hat. She wanted to re-create it. She believed that the process would reveal the origins of the mysterious man found on the glacier.

So begins the story behind Tracing Roots, a documentary by Ellen Frankenstein that follows Churchill on her journey to see the hat of the Long Ago Person, a journey that crosses cultures and borders, exploring the many ways we connect with, understand, interpret and protect our past. The stories within the film are woven as intricately as the spruce root hat at its center.

Churchill learned Haida weaving from her mother, Selina Peratrovich,

and she earned the trust of other weaving elders who taught her Tlingit, Tshimshian, Athabaskan, and Aleut techniques. Her skill is widely recognized. Museums including the Smithsonian Institute often consult her when analyzing woven artifacts. Through Churchill’s eyes, a basket becomes more than just an object: it is a full story, lovingly crafted, used, and repaired until ultimately discarded. Churchill sees not just the weaving but also the weaver and the owner. She sees an heirloom passed down, generation to generation.

Frankenstein speaks with eager admiration about Churchill, whom she describes as an “incredibly generous, kind person… Things excite her. She takes joy in encounters on a ferry, books, food, ideas…” In the film, that joy is visible and infectious.

Delores so enthusiastically examines woven baskets that she imbues the otherwise mundane objects with weight and wonder. “Every time I see these baskets, I get knocked down to kindergarten,” she says as she pulls open an exhibit drawer in the film.

The filmmaker wanted to convey Churchill’s vibrant spirit, but knew it would be easy to fall into the stale format of a retrospective of her past accomplishments, failing to recognize her as living leader and working artist.

Frankenstein told Churchill that she wanted to join her on a journey, and asked what kind of journey they could go on together. That’s when Churchill told her about the hat of the Long Ago Person Found.

Their adventure took them from Ket-

chikan to Whitehorse, where the Long Ago Person’s belongings (including the hat, the squirrel pelt robe, a walking stick, a dart, and a spear) are kept and cared for by the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations. Though Churchill was allowed to see and take notes on the hat, Frankenstein was asked not to show photos of the hat in the documentary. The film, however, does not suffer from the omission. The audience needs Churchill’s expert eyes to interpret the hat, and she is able to convey her findings through the replica she creates.

Three years after Frankenstein and Churchill examined the hat, the replica is still a work in progress.

During that examination, Churchill recognized that the hat combined both clockwise and counter-clockwise weaving techniques, intertwining both the Haida and Tlingit traditions. Though this cultural combination leaves the hat’s origins ambiguous, it provides evidence to support the work of George T. Emmons, a 19th century ethnographic photographer, which suggests that the Tlingit learned certain weaving techniques from the Haida. “So there was always an exchange of intellectual property,” Churchill summarizes. She sees the hat as a continuation of that tradition. “He [the Long Ago Person] is sharing his intellectual property even though he has been dead for two or three hundred years. We still are learning from our ancestors.” ■ Megan Zlatos is the interim grants director for the Alaska Humanities Forum.

Tracing Roots December 7 December 8 Alaska Experience Theater,

as part of the Anchorage International Film Festival

To learn about future screenings, to schedule a screening, or to order an advance copy of the DVD, visit www.tracingrootsfilm.com.

Tracing Roots screened on November 15th in Sitka at the Coliseum Theatre, November 17th in Juneau at KTOO, November 23rd in Seattle at the Bill Holm Center for the Study of Northwest Coast Art/Burke Museum.

Tracing Roots is made possible by support from the Alaska Humanities Forum, Rasmuson Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Douglas Dornan Fund, the Sitka Alaska Permanent Charitable Trust, and the Intellectual Property Issues in Cultural Heritage (IPinCH) Research Project.

A L A S K A H U M A N ITI E S F O R U M W I NTE R 20 14 –2 01 5

37

GRANT REPORT

Up the Koyukuk Documenting Native place names for future generations | By Catherine Moncrieff

A

s we sat around the woodstove, crammed in a small cabin on the bank of Beedoy Khuno’, or “3-day Slough,” off the Koyukuk River, Koyukon elders Benedict Jones, George Yaska Sr., and Bill Derendoff told story after story, with youths from their communities at their feet.

They told stories of their younger days growing up in the very places we were traveling the river to visit. Rain poured down outside the cabin. The youths operated recording equipment and held the microphone as Elders told stories until late into the evening. The stories were significant for the youth because their family histories were featured. Their grandparents used to live year-round at the very places the Elders were describing.

We were traveling along the Koyukuk River by boat to document Alaska Native place names as part of the ongoing “Koyukuk River Traditional Place Names: Hughes to Koyukuk” project, which is funded in part by an $8,650 Alaska Humanities Forum 2014 general grant.

The boat trip was inspired by an Elder during the project’s first visit to Huslia in 2011 to collect and map place names and the stories that go with them. This Elder lamented about how talking about these place names made her want to return to them, something she hadn’t done for many years.

From June 10-15, 2014, the project team, along with Elders, youth, and scientists, embarked on the boat trip as a way to connect youth and Elders from the Koyukuk River communities of Koyukuk, Huslia and Hughes.

Along the way they continued to collect place names and post Koyukon language signs at the sites. We reached the community of Hughes where we

38

A L A S K A H U M A N I T I E S F O R U M W I NTE R 2014–2015

had not yet held a community meeting or gathered additional place names for the project.

The Koyukuk River Traditional Place Names: Hughes to Koyukuk project builds on original work begun

by Eliza Jones, Koyukon language expert and Elder from Koyukuk or Meneelghaadze T’oh. The project team is made up of a diverse group of collaborators including the communities of Koyukuk, Huslia (Ts’aateyhdenaadekk’onh Denh), and Hughes, the Yukon River Drainage Fisheries Association, the YukonKoyukuk School District, the Koyukuk National Wildlife Refuge, and the United States Geological Survey, Alaska Science Center (USGS).

675 366 6

place names collected

place names located

winter trail systems documented

Phase one of the project involved reviewing previously documented place names and fieldwork from Huslia and Koyukuk in 2011. The current phase of the project is focused on holding community meetings in Koyukuk and Huslia to finalize the place name maps and to receive community feedback on final product ideas.

Additionally, during this phase the

project team is collecting place names and stories for the Hughes area and plans to return to Hughes during the coming year to interview more Elders, present a draft map and hold another community meeting. The next phase of the project will be to produce a final product highlighting the finalized list of place names along the Koyukuk River from Huslia to Hughes so they can be archived and shared with future generations. Some ideas for final products include incorporating place names into USGS topographic maps, an atlas-type book with stories and photos describing the history of the place names area, and an interactive spoken language-based website.

Accomplishments so far through this project include collecting 675 place names, 366 place name locations and locating six previously undocumented old and current winter trail systems. Additionally, we interviewed nine Elders in Huslia, three Elders in Koyukuk and two Elders in Hughes and collected video and voice recordings of place name stories, meanings, and pronunciations.

This project would not have been possible without the broad support of our many sponsors which include the Traditional Knowledge Holders and Tribal Councils of Koyukuk, Huslia, and Hughes; the Alaska Humanities Forum; the National Endowment for the Arts; the USGS – Alaska Science Center, Yukon-Koyukuk School District, the Koyukuk National Wildlife Refuge (United States Fish and Wildlife Service); Doyon, Ltd.; and Gana-A’ Yoo, Ltd. ■ Catherine Moncrieff is the staff anthropologist for the Yukon River Drainage Fisheries Association.

ALL PHOTOS BY Susan Paskvan

top:

Karen Bodoni, George Yaska Sr., Shirley Sam, Elsie Vent, Eliza Jones, and Benedict Jones review maps at the community in Huslia. Shirley Sam listens as Benedict Jones shows her where her parents and grandparents had camps. left: Elder Benedict Jones telling place name stories in George Yaska Sr.’s cabin on the second night of the boat trip.

A youth from Huslia holds the microphone recording his story. right: Youth from Huslia and Hughes post traditional place name signs as we travel along the river.

A L A S K A H U M A N ITI E S F O R U M W I NTE R 20 14 –2 01 5

39

Courtesy Todd Hardesty

PROGRAM NOTES

Anchorage Centennial Grants Second Round Awardees The Alaska Humanities Forum and Anchorage Centennial Celebration in late summer 2014 announced the awarding of $215,815 to 13 humanities projects in the second and final round of the Anchorage Centennial Community Grants program. The program, created by a $500,000 grant from Rasmuson

40

Foundation, supports community projects commemorating the first 100 years of Anchorage. Listed below are details on the second round awardees, identified by project title, name of the sponsoring organization or individual, grant amount, and a brief project description. The projects are listed alphabetically by title.

Anchorage: The First 100 Years, a Theatrical Tour Eccentric Theatre Company, $16,350 A summer-long series of “living newspaper” short plays bringing Anchorage history to life through the eyes of former mayors.

ANCHORAGE’S PLACE IN THE WORLD Alaska World Affairs Council, $12,600 A speaker series analyzing the economic drivers that fundamentally shaped Anchorage, including the military, the railroad, and the oil and gas industry.

Arctic Entries Audio Project Arctic Entries, $2,500 A series of six one-hour radio shows drawing from the popular monthly Arctic Entries storytelling event.

Centennial Arch Design Greater Anchorage Inc., $7,000 The design of a downtown Anchorage Centennial Arch commemorating Fur Rendezvous.

A L A S K A H U M A N I T I E S F O R U M W I NTE R 2014–2015

Charter Commission Digital Archives Municipality of Anchorage, $10,000 A searchable online archive of the complete recordings of the 1975 Anchorage Charter Commission hearings, to be available through both the municipal and University of Alaska library systems.

The Cheechakos Project Anchorage Fine Arts Society, $29,000 An original orchestral score for the 1923 silent film The Cheechakos, which was

filmed in Anchorage, and a performance of the score by the Anchorage Symphony Orchestra at a public screening of The Cheechakos.

Contemporary Cabin Design Challenge and Celebrating Anchorage’s Log Cabins Alaska Design Forum and Donald Ricker, $20,000 A contemporary cabin design contest, workshop series, exhibition and retrospective on cabins in Anchorage featuring cabin art by local artists.

Flying Past: 100 Years of Anchorage Aviation Alaska Aviation Museum, $7,700 A monthly lecture series drawing from the artifacts, photos and films in the Alaska Aviation Museum archives.

Girls Love Anchorage: Connecting Girls With Their Community Girl Scouts of Alaska, $23,000 A program for girls of all ages to earn a “Girls Love Anchorage” patch by participating in hands-on centennial activities throughout Anchorage.

Imagining Anchorage: Anchorage Centennial Symposium Cook Inlet Historical Society, $36,000 A major public historical symposium at the Anchorage Museum.

In-Tent City Trailer Arts Center, $16,665 A free festival of 16 large white wall tents, reminiscent of Anchorage’s original “tent city,” each featuring a different aspect of the arts, crafts, foods, and history of the city.

Sponsorship of Historical Village Teams for the Fur Rendezvous Open World Championship Alaskan Sled Dog & Racing Association, $10,000 An effort to revive the tradition of rural Alaska village dog teams competing in the Fur Rondy.

Unpacking Our Cultural History Shirley Staten, $15,000 An exploration of the diverse cultures of Anchorage, culminating in an evening of multimedia performances. (See story page 43.)

Forum Coordinates ‘Writers in the Schools’ Book Distribution The Alaska Humanities Forum has engaged in a “Writers in the Schools” literary project in the Northwest Arctic Borough School District. Writers in the Schools (WITS) is a nationwide effort to inspire high school students to write, revise, edit, publish, and perform original creative writing. As part of the Northwest Arctic WITS effort, bestselling fiction author Marc Cameron recently visited with students throughout the region to discuss his creative writing career as well as the real world importance of reading and writing in all professions. Cameron also donated a considerable number of books to be distributed to students throughout the Northwest Arctic school district. The Forum wishes to thank Ravn Alaska for generously donating airfreight services to ensure their books were distributed.

Leadership Anchorage Announces 2014-15 Participants and Projects The Alaska Humanities Forum is pleased to announce the members of the 18th cohort of Leadership Anchorage, Alaska’s premier civic engagement and leadership development program.

The new cohort members will participate in a total of 10 rigorous, full-day sessions. In September 2014, members of LA 18 participated in the Alaska Dialogue, a policy focused gathering convened

by Institute of the North, where they explored “Lessons in Alaska Leadership.”

The cohort and a group of alumni have also selected and launched the following community impact projects, to be completed by May 2015. (The projects are indentified by the benefitting organization followed by project title.)

• Alaska Community Foundation: Giving Catalog • Covenant House: Homeless Youth Transportation Initiative • Friends of Alaska PYLI (Points of Light Youth Leadership Initiative): Train

Leadership Anchorage 18th Cohort Michael Clark, Educational Coordinator, Hiland Mountain Correctional Center; Jeremy Creasey, Volunteer, Student; Jocelyn Eastham, Managing Partner, Soriano-Eastham Consulting; Stevie Frakes, Chemical Dependency Counselor, Alaska-ARCH, Volunteers of America; Megan Gregory, Partnerships Manager, Best Beginnings; Steven Holley, Project Coordinator, Alaska Village Initiatives; Anna Hoover, Executive Director, First Light Alaska; Nancy King, Owner, Nancy King & Associates, Smart Stock Investing, LLC; Ann Lindsey, President, Lindsey Consulting; Grace Mulipola, Legal Assistant, Bristol Bay Native Corporation; Lauren Nelson, Marketing / Outreach Officer, Bean’s Café; Bernice Nisbett, Outreach Coordinator, Crossroads Leadership Institute; Eric Rodgers, Mechanical Engineer, RSA Engineering; January Scott, Program Manager, Take Wing Alaska, Alaska Humanities Forum; Kay Sind, Graduate Engineer, ConocoPhillips; and Matt Waliszek, Marketing Account Manager, Buzzbizz Studios.

the Trainer Seminar • Girl Scouts of Alaska & NeighborWorks Anchorage: Identify and Train Girl Scout Troop Leaders • Institute of the North: Alaska Leader Series • Government Hill Community Council: Outreach Initiative • Alaska Humanities Forum: Film Festival Founded in 1997, Leadership Anchorage focuses on leadership development by using diverse group experiences as well as personal reflection, all in the context

A L A S K A H U M A N ITI E S F O R U M W I NTE R 20 14 –2 01 5

41

PROGRAM NOTES

THE Leadership Anchorage Alumni Council is organizing. Contact Kitty Farnham at (907) 272-5313 or kfarnham@akhf.org,

of the dynamic issues leaders of Alaska currently face. Currently, more than 300 Leadership Anchorage alumni serve as leaders in a wide array of businesses, public agencies, and non-profit organizations statewide.

Conoco-Phillips, the Atwood Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities are major sponsors of Leadership Anchorage. Other sponsors include the United Way of Anchorage and LA alumni.

C3 teachers at the Walker family fish camp outside Kotzebue.

David Smith, Northwest Arctic Borough School District

Forum Awarded U.S. Department of Education Grant The Alaska Humanities Forum was recently awarded a major U.S. Department of Education/Alaska Native Education Program Grant for the Creating Cultural Competency of Early Career Rural Teachers Project (C3 ECT2).

This new project builds upon the success of the original C3 project with an added component that strengthens the connections of teacher participants with their new communities. Calista Education and Culture, Inc. and Maniilaq Association will recruit village families to encourage and include teacher participants in local activities throughout their first year.

Project goals are to improve new teacher preparation for living and teaching

42

in rural Alaska, to increase teacher retention through a combination of cultural induction and mentoring, and to increase student achievement in persistently low-achieving schools in two rural Alaska school districts.

The project will serve 60 early career teachers new to Alaska.

Teachers who qualify for the program will participate in a multicultural studies course led by a university instructor from the region, a cultural immersion orientation, a multi-day Alaska Native culture camp alongside elders, youth and other culture bearers, and a debrief.

Teacher participants are then paired with an Alaska Statewide Teacher Mentor for two years.

Outstanding partnerships were the primary reason for the success of the original C3 project. The Forum looks

A L A S K A H U M A N I T I E S F O R U M W I NTE R 2014–2015

forward to continuing these relationships with our engaged project partners: Lower Kuskokwim School District, Northwest Arctic Borough School District, University of Alaska Office of K-12 Outreach, Maniilaq Association and Calista Education and Culture, Inc.

2015 Humanities General Grants Application Opens The Alaska Humanities Forum recently announced the opening of the 2015 General Humanities Grants application period.

Once a year, the Forum awards General Humanities Grants of up to $10,000 to nonprofit organizations and individuals across Alaska to support projects that explore Alaska themes through the

lens of the humanities. We are particularly interested in projects that bring together diverse groups of Alaskans and reflect collaboration between organizations within a community. Project categories include oral history, media, public meetings and exhibits, research, and planning grants.

Forum General Grants range from $100-$10,000 and must constitute no more than 50 percent of the full project budget. In other words, grantees are expected to match Forum grant funding dollar-for-dollar with other in-kind or cash donations, sponsorships, and/or other grant awards.

Applications must be submitted by January 9th, 2015. For more information, please contact Interim Grants Manager Megan Zlatos at (907) 272-5313 or mzlatos@ akhf.org. ■

Cultural Divers explore the depths of Anchorage’s immigrant stories

Unpacking, Then Diving In Angelina Estrada-Burney with two young dancers of the Xochiquetzal-Tiqun Mexican Folkloric Ballet, at a Bridge Builders event. courtesy Angelina Estrada-Burney

T

hree women from varied cultures have come together to uncover the stories of individuals from immigrant cultures who settled in Anchorage since 1915. Shirley Mae Springer Staten, Vivian Melde, and Angelina Estrada-Burney call themselves the Cultural Divers. The name came to them while they were filling out their on-line application for a second round Anchorage Centennial community grant for the Alaska Humanities Forum. The limited number of characters visible on screen within one of the data fields limited the words “Cultural Diversity” to “Cultural Divers.”

Melde found it to be the perfect name for their intended work. “I remember saying to Shirley Mae and Angelina, ‘That’s what we are doing here. We’re diving into the stories of how some immigrant cultures arrived here and chose to make Anchorage their home.’”

Their project, which was awarded a $15,000 Anchorage Centennial Community Grant, is entitled, “Unpacking

our cultural history: the growth of diversity in Anchorage during her first 100 years.”

The three women will research the stories of individuals within six cultural groups in Anchorage: African, African American, Chinese, Filipino, Hispanic, and Pacific Islander. The stories will come to life in the spring of 2015 in a multi-media performance and community workshop revolving around immigrant narratives.

Staten, Melde, and Estrada-Burney’s own personal cultural roots have a powerful influence on the project, which they acknowledge and honor in this article by sharing their own accounts of how they came to Anchorage, and how they transitioned from outsiders to Anchorage-ites.

Angelina Estrada-Burney

Angelina arrived in Anchorage in July of 1991 with her husband who had been assigned to Elmendorf Air Force Base. She had never before lived

anywhere outside of her hometown of Alamogordo, New Mexico, and remembers being excited about the promise of an adventure in a land so far away and so different from anything she had ever known. As a child of the Southwest, her notions of diversity were dominated by the comingling of Anglo cowboy and rancher culture and her Mexican heritage.

“I grew up hearing my father’s stories of the severe racism that he and his family had suffered during his childhood. In 1947 my grandmother couldn’t get a loan to buy a modest house despite having a full-time job and money for a down payment. Banks were reluctant to lend money to Mexicans, or “Mess’cans” as my father bitterly put it. These stories of my father’s childhood make me that much more appreciative of how far we’ve come as a society,” Estrada-Burney says.

“I have to say I was lucky, mainly due to the efforts of my parents, never having been the victim of racism personally. What I did find though, was a

A L A S K A H U M A N ITI E S F O R U M W I NTE R 20 14 –2 01 5

43

different sort of prejudice within my own Hispanic community. Although I’m fluent in Spanish, my English is unaccented and for this I was accused of not being “Mexican enough.” Imagine then, the talk and the gossip when I married an Anglo—the first ever in my family to do so. My father bore the brunt of generations of old resistance to marrying outside “La Raza” for allowing his daughter to marry a gringo.

It took years for some in my family to accept my husband.

“Fast-forward to July 1991 and our arrival in Anchorage. Aside from the overwhelming natural beauty of the place, I was soon struck by the breadth of Anchorage’s cultural diversity. And it wasn’t just the mere presence of various cultures in one place, but the easy and unpretentious way Alaskans interact with each other. Racial diversity is a part of life in our city but it’s rarely an obstacle to neighbors being neighborly.

“I took a job with what was then the National Bank of Alaska. As timing would have it, that was the year the bank began to focus on outreach to the local Spanish speaking community in order to better understand their financial needs. It was the perfect opportunity for me to engage in the bank’s mission while at the same time learning more about my Spanish speaking neighbors—never before had I been in a town with so much diversity in just the Spanish speaking community alone!

“After having spent my life surrounded by my Mexican heritage, it was here that I was exposed to other Spanish speakers from across Latin America.

This was the spark that began my journey as a community activist and my outreach work within Anchorage’s rich cultural diversity. I have been fortunate to have many firsts: I was among the first involved with Healing Racism in Anchorage; I am a founding member and past Chairwoman of the Anchorage Hispanic Cultural Committee, and a former Director of Bridge Builders of Anchorage.

“In 1997, I was fortunate to be selected for the inaugural class of Lead-

44

A L A S K A H U M A N I T I E S F O R U M W I NTE R 2014–2015

ership Anchorage. A direct focus of the program was to bring members of Anchorage’s minority communities to participate in boards and commissions and to learn to ‘plug in’ to overall civic engagement. My time in Leadership Anchorage was the perfect fusion of my past experiences, my passion for this town, and the importance of bringing different cultural voices to the table.

“Last spring, I was approached to take part in the Cultural Divers project and I jumped at the chance to reunite with two dear friends and powerful voices: Vivian and Shirley Mae. We worked together a decade ago during the production of the play BIRTH. It was my first attempt at acting and it was only by the steady hands, excellent direction, and encouragement of these great women that I was able to play my part.

“With the advent of the Cultural Divers Project the importance of highlighting the contributions of those in the Hispanic community who built their lives in Anchorage over the last 100 years was a fascinating topic to research. The basic question of ‘What brought you here?’ has rolled off my lips too many times to count so I thought what better way to answer that than featuring the legacy of Anchorage’s Hispanic community.”

Shirley Mae Springer Staten

In 1979, Shirley Mae was sitting in her friend Charlene’s Southern California beauty shop, waiting to get her hair done. They chatted about possible summer employment. At that time, Shirley Mae was employed by the Los Angeles Unified School district and had the summers off as a teacher’s aid.

Charlene mentioned a friend who traveled to Alaska every summer for work, and encouraged Shirley Mae to go.

Charlene called her friend Juanita, who spoke with Shirley Mae. Juanita said, “If you come, I will find you a place to stay and help you find a job.”

That was Shirley Mae’s first visit to Fairbanks, Alaska. She traveled to Fairbanks for two more summers, until

Shirley Mae Springer Staten

‘Anchorage became a place for me to grow into myself. I came here and stretched my wings, creating the most amazing life for my son and myself.’

1981, when she decided to come to Anchorage. She stayed with a woman she had met in Fairbanks. Shirley Mae worked as a waitress and felt very confident that she would have no problem finding a job.

“My first morning in Anchorage, I walked from 13th and Arctic to the Holiday Inn on 4th and C Street. When I walked that morning, I knew that I liked this place. There was something different about Anchorage, but I couldn’t quite identify it. I walked slowly, glancing at the mountains, enjoying the greenery and beautiful flowers on my route. It was June and the plants were in bloom. It was a vast contrast from the pavement and bars on the windows in Los Angeles.”

She got a job waitressing at the Holiday Inn and another job at the Red Ram. A few weeks later, on a break at the Holiday Inn, she remembered sitting in a little alcove having an overwhelming feeling of a dream she had years before of moving to Alaska. It was at that moment that she knew she wanted to stay.

Then her task became convincing her nine-year-old son, Kemon, to join her in Alaska. He was visiting his grandmother in Brooklyn, New York. At first, he said, “No way.” Then, he said yes after negotiating with his mom a length of time they would stay, which was one year.

“I promised him that if he did not like Anchorage, we would move back to Los Angeles. Well, that was 1981 and we are still here,” says Staten.

During her summers in Fairbanks, Staten felt a strong and vibrant AfricanAmerican community. She was impressed with the close-knit community and the accomplishments of AfricanAmericans. She immediately found a church and people who shared her southern roots from Moultrie, Georgia.

In the early 1980s, Shirley Mae believed the Anchorage African-American community was very similar to the one in Fairbanks. There were a number of African-American owned businesses, the black newspaper, the Kuumba Arts group, the Alaska Black Caucus, a local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the entitlement of being the first African-Americans in the city and state.

Shirley Mae fondly remembers on Friday nights, the Khamane Club in Fairview was the place to be. “There were lots of ‘Hey, how y’all doing? It’s good to see you,’ even if you were the new kid in town. It was familiar and it felt welcoming. A few years later, we moved over to the Living Room and continued the dancing, socializing and meeting new folks.”

Sunday mornings were no different at Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church.

Shirley Mae knew the songs and she knew the call and response to Pas-

Vivian Melde with her mother, Perfecta, in about 1968. courtesy Vivian Melde

tor Patterson’s preaching. “I knew how to say ‘Amen,’ which made me feel included. This was my new home.

Anchorage became a place for me to grow into myself. I came here and stretched my wings, creating the most amazing life for my son and myself. I completed my degrees from Anchorage Community College and Alaska Pacific University. I created a new story for myself. I sometimes think, ‘If I had continued living in Los Angeles would I have lived such a bold life?’ There was something about this community that gave me permission to open myself up to many possibilities. As a storyteller, I am very interested in learning the stories of those who came before me and forged new stories for their lives in Anchorage, Alaska.”

Vivian Melde

Vivian arrived in Anchorage in 1966 at the age of 9. She is the youngest of three children of Henry and Perfecta Hicks. Her parents met in the Philippines during World War II. Her father was driving his weapons carrier down the streets of Manila and he saw a beautiful young woman walking home from the movies with her cousin. He offered them a ride and cautiously, they refused the ride from the handsome black soldier. He drove down to the end of the street, turned around and stopped again. At the insistence of her cousin, Perfecta accepted. Five years later, after courtship, much paperwork, and the final permission from Perfecta’s eldest brother, Henry and Perfecta

A L A S K A H U M A N ITI E S F O R U M W I NTE R 20 14 –2 01 5

45

married. Henry received an honorable discharge from the United States Army and went directly to work for the Department of Defense as a civilian. They moved to Guam, Marianas Islands, a U.S. territory, and lived there for 14 years. All three of their children, Sandra, John, and Vivian, were born at the Navy hospital in Guam. In 1961 they moved to California and then Henry received an assignment to relocate to Anchorage.

In August 1966, the Hicks family arrived at Elmendorf Air Force Base and lived in the guest housing on base until they rented a home on Government Hill. Vivian attended fourth grade at Government Hill Elementary. She recalls riding her bike down Harvard Avenue when she experienced her first snowfall. She could look out the window at the construction of Third and Fourth Avenues that was ongoing, following the 1964 Great Alaska Earthquake. She began dancing with the Anchorage Civic Ballet and had her first of many performances at West Anchorage High School Auditorium and the old Sidney Laurence Auditorium. After a year, her family moved to a newly built subdivision at the edge of town in Chester Valley. Back then, Muldoon dead-ended and Tudor Road, also considered the edge of town, did not connect.

“We used to be able to count the number of lights that we could see on the hillside from our house. When my brother got a mini-bike, we’d ride trails in the woods that are now the east Northern Lights area,” recalls Vivian.

Her father was the Chief of Concessions and Services for the Alaska Command Army and Air Force Exchange Service. He was involved in marketing the stores, laundry and dry cleaners, gas stations, car washes, movie theaters, and other services for the Alaska military and their dependents.

He also moonlighted selling real estate for Heflin Realty. Her mother Perfecta was a stay-at-home mom until she went to Cosmetology School and opened up Petie’s Beauty Salon in downtown Anchorage at 4th and D Street. The salon

46

A L A S K A H U M A N I T I E S F O R U M W I NTE R 2014–2015

Vivian Melde in 1966, her first year in Anchorage on Government Hill. courtesy Vivian Melde

Racial diversity is a part of life in our city but it’s rarely an obstacle to neighbors being neighborly.

operated for two years until the family moved to southern Indiana. Cyrano’s Theatre lobby is in the same location as the former beauty salon and Vivian is a veteran performer for the theater company.

“It’s funny how things come full circle. When Dad told us we were moving, I felt so sad. I hated leaving Anchorage,” said Vivian. She loved it so much that she returned to Anchorage in 1976 as a newly divorced mother with her two-year-old daughter Nikki. “I wanted to raise my child in Anchorage and felt more connected here than in Indiana.

We used to live across the Ohio River from Louisville, Kentucky and in 1974 they had just started desegregation and busing. It was scary. I wanted out from such a racially charged place. To me, Anchorage was my home.” ■

ANCHORAGE NARRATIVES: 2

Augmenting Fish Camp Introduction, illustrations, and augments by Nathan Shafer story by Angela Gonzalez Dena’ina cultural consultation by Aaron Leggett

illustration by Nathan Shafer

O

n the following pages is the second of four installments of Anchorage Narratives, an augmented reality and historical fiction project funded by an Anchorage Centennial Community Grant administered by the Alaska Humanities Forum, in partnership with the Anchorage Centennial Celebration, and funded by Rasmuson Foundation.

Augmented reality is a new media format, using mobile devices to overlay digital information on the real world.

The real world includes the interactive print you are holding in your hands right now.

This installment of Anchorage Narratives is written by Angela Yatlin Gonzalez and entitled Dach’ shan Qayeh Ch’qełchish, or “How We Made Summer Fish Camp.” Angela’s story is set in 1919 Anchorage, one year after the devastating flu epidemic. Angela tells us the story of a young Dena’ina girl from Idlughet (Eklutna) named Ashana, as she travels with her surviving family members to summer fish camp in Tak’at, near a place near that white settlers of Anchorage would later call Cairn Point.

The interactive print version of this story is similar to graphic novels or comic books, with a few added features. The texts in cream-colored boxes are Dena’ina words related to the story, and where possible, all character dialogue is in the Upper Inlet Dena’ina dialect.

Most of the augmented reality in this piece will function as a Dena’ina to English translator, or link to audio archives of Dena’ina being spoken by its wealth of storytellers and performers, which were placed in the public domain by the Alaska Native Language

Archive at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. The audio tracks included here are being used for educational and historical purposes. For example, the illustration of the funeral Potlatch in Eklutna links to a recording of the Mike Alex Funeral Potlatch in Eklutna.

While working on this project, I have become deeply indebted to the work of previous and contemporary scholars of Dena’ina culture. I cannot encourage you strongly enough to go read Alan Boraas’s essay “What is Good, What is No Good: A Traditional Dena’ina Worldview.” It is beautiful and rich.

Shem Pete’s Alaska is one of the most amazing books ever put together. Peter Kalifornsky is one of the most incredible wordsmiths known, and I borrowed a line from his Putting Up Fish for the grandfather’s only dialogue in the following illustrations. The Alaska Native Language Archive has amassed a terrific archive of Alaska Native languages with several recordings of Dena’ina storytellers like Mary Trefon, whose Chickadee Story has been included in the augments. I have relied heavily on the Dena’ina linguistic work of James Kari, and inside of the text I have placed links to some online resources he has put together.

Throughout the whole process of creating Dach’ shan Qayeh Ch’qełchish, Aaron Leggett has guided both Angela and me to help us represent the Dena’ina as accurately, and with as much cultural awareness as possible.

Aaron once told me that he picks up Shem Pete’s Alaska every day, which I, myself, have now done for about six months straight. I am much wealthier for it and have only a fraction of the understanding of it that Aaron has. ■

To access the augmented reality in the following pages, you will need to download the free app, Junaio, which is a mobile augmented reality browser. Once downloaded, scan the QR code below. That QR code will open a channel called ‘Dach’ shan Qayeh Ch’qełchish’.

When this channel has fully downloaded (it may take a minute or so) simply scan any areas with Dena’ina text in the following pages, and there will appear augmented reality overlays.

Unlike our previous story in Forum, the augments in this group are much smaller.

Some pages have as many as eight “targets” (images your device uses to launch the digital content overlay). Hold your smart device as near to the Dena’ina words as possible for the best result when scanning.

Your device will only scan one at a time, so try different approaches into the page, looking for your augments. It is like finding hidden treasure.Not all of the augmented content is marked. Every page has augments—every illustration is augmented, and all Dena’ina language in the illustrations is augmented.

A L A S K A H U M A N ITI E S F O R U M W I NTE R 20 14 –2 01 5

47

dach’shan qayeh ch’qelchish (how we made summer fish camp) by angela yatlin gonzalez I am a K’enaht’ana or Upper Inlet Dena’ina Athabascan and this is my story about how we made summer fish camp.

My name is Ashana, which means flower in Dena’ina. Dlin’a is my older brother and his name means mouse. A lot has changed since we were children. My parents and two younger sisters died of the flu during the Influenza Pandemic in 1918. It was not an easy life. Back then, everyone had to work hard to survive off the land. It is 1970 and I am now in my mid-sixties, and I feel more changes are ahead for Dena’ina people.

Despite the great loss of my closest family members and maybe because of it, I look back at that summer spent in our fish camps as one of the most difficult but also one of best times of my life. When we were younger, we moved to follow the food throughout the seasons.

During the coldest and darkest part of the year we lived in our village of Eklutna. In the spring, we moved out to our spring hunting camps until the arrival of the salmon when we moved into our fish camps. As the salmon runs slowed down we moved up into the mountains where we hunted sheep and trapped ground squirrels before returning to our winter village. The Dena’ina also hunted beluga whales and seals.

Many people around Alaska succumbed to the flu. Modern medicine and even traditional medicine was no match for the fast moving virus. My brother was 15 and I was 13 years old the year we lost our family members. I was his bedaja (younger sister). We moved in with our grandparents, Chada and Chida. They kept us busy all winter and spring since our parents and siblings died.

Dlin’a and I went around with broth soup to feed people who were sick. Sometimes whole families perished. I was lucky to have Dlin’a, Chada and Chida after the flu swept through the village. I still cried at night occasionally, but my brother and grandparents comforted me.

We fed the grave for 40 days after the death of our loved ones.

On the 40th day, we held a potlatch. Many people died, the potlatch was more of a community thing. Spirit houses were built and placed on top of the graves.

We were Russian Orthodox and attended the church in Eklutna.

Every summer we moved to fish camp. It was located on the banks of Dgheyaytnu, which would later be known as Ship Creek, near the port of Anchorage. Before we left, I would visit the graves of my family members.

It was hard to leave them even though they were already gone.

idlughet

nuti

tustl’agh

tak’at tikahtnu

tak’at qenuch’en

nuk’elehitnu

DGHEYAYTNU nuch’ishtunt

DGHEYAY kaq’ chansh kaq’

chanshtnu

qatuk’e’usht

We had always had a couple of dogs which were used to hunt and pack things It got more difficult to take care of them after my parents died since we had to provide for them just like we provided for ourselves. After spring break-up, Dlin’a loaded up the dogs with supplies and went ahead of us to get the camp ready. .

Meanwhile, my grandparents and I took our time walking from the village to the fish camp and camped out half way between Eklutna and Anchorage. We saw camps along the way and people invited us to visit and eat. We camped out for the night if we were invited.

Chada and Chida knew everyone along the way. They introduced us if we didn’t know the people, and we were instructed to hug everyone. I befriended all of the kids. Many of us kids lost family members or knew of people who also succumbed to the flu. The families really had to come together because it was a struggle to survive.

The adults looked at me sadly when my grandparents told them I had lost my parents and siblings. I felt a tightening in my chest at their

sympathetic attention, but my grandparents taught us to be strong. I ignored the looks and would go out and play. I only allowed myself to cry every once in a while.

Chada and Chida knew where to stop and spend the night along the three-day trip. The coastal area was beautiful along the way with tall trees, and a fresh spring scent. I felt the excitement of impending summer, and craved fresh salmon. We fed the dogs some dried meat and fish and let them drink the water from the river and streams. It was still cold at night and in the early mornings, and we kept a fire at night.

Chada told stories about the land along the way. He showed me things, like the loop trees that people used as markings for hunting grounds, old camping areas and other spots. When the trees were willows, they were tied into knots. As the trees grew, they were twisted into shape. Chada knew where they were located because he has been traveling this land since he was a boy. The trees were used as landmarks to give people a sense of direction.

I remembered the area well because we went there every summer. I tried not to cry as I recalled memories of my parents and my younger siblings. There was always chores to keep you busy and from dwelling on the loss. It took us a few days to settle into fish camp. We were tired at the end of each day. Chida told us stories to entertain us at night and Chada sang traditional Dena’ina songs as he worked. We were excited to stay up a little later at night and to be outside longer. Ts’is (mosquitos) slowly started coming out.

We finally reached the fish camp on the third day. Our camp was located at CAIRn Point, which is about two to three miles north of the mouth of Ship Creek.

I loved the land around that area, and smelling the salty cool breezes coming off the Knik Arm. There were about three families who all camped in the same area.

We stayed in a small 12’x16’ log cabin with dirt floors. The dogs were tied around the camp.

They protected us. We gathered wood around the camp. Chada showed us the best places to get wood.

He reminded us where the loop trees were around the area and showed us safe places to work and

D’lina sukdu’a shel nuqulnek.

play. One thing we avoided was going too far out during the low tide and getting stuck in the mud.

To keep entertained, we played ch’enlahi (a hand game). Chada made the two marked sticks and two unmarked sticks for the game. It was fun to play the games with a group of kids. Two pairs played at a time and tried to correctly guess for the set unmarked sticks. We learned Dena’ina songs, strategic thinking and speed. Sometimes adults would play and we all watched and learned their strategies.

dghili dnanilu

I learned to listen for animals. I knew most of the birds by the songs they sang. Since my brother already knew how to hunt and trap most things, he was allowed to go a little bit further than me. I stayed closer to camp and helped Chida. I helped her to cook, sew, collect roots and plants, keep fire, and with many other chores.

ch’ggagga

untay’uyi

k’eq’e

lik’a

yilq’a

k’tl’ila

qanchi gega

q’ey hagi

Qinaydli nqul kegh

BASHLA

ggis q’ach’ema

Chada and Chida spoke to us in Dena’ina. Dlin’a and I spoke Dena’ina and were learning English. Dena’ina may seem like a simple language, but it has very complex descriptions. Our grandparents taught lessons as we grew up. At a young age, we learned the basic word for mosquitos (ts’is). Over time, we learned about the different stages from larvae to full-grown. We also learned the different words for mosquitos from different parts of the year. Looking back, I realize it was a lesson in biology.

There were lessons in almost everything we did. Even walking around camp, we always kept a watchful eye out for signs of animals. We regularly saw moose, fox, bears, and many smaller animals.

The trails we walked on were like super-highways for animals and people. Dlin’a and I would see who could interpret an animal track faster. If we weren’t sure, our grandparents would correct us.

We also went on walks up Ship Creek to hunt small game. We would go back and forth across the creek by vaulting with walking sticks or sticks along the trails. It was a thrill to see who could cross the fastest and furthest without getting wet. We carried packs with hunting supplies and some snacks.

One day we ran into a qanchi, a porcupine. Dlin’a got a long stick and hit it over the head to kill it. After he thanked the spirits for gifting its life to us, he tied up the feet to a pole and carried it back to camp. We pulled the quills that evening and the next day. We roasted the qanchi for dinner that evening.

Chida told me Dena’ina used to use quills to decorate their clothing.

53

Before the salmon began to run, the adults and older children gathered spruce poles to build a structure they could walk on that was above water. They removed the branches from the poles and got the rope ready to build the structure. It was built during low tide, and it had to be built in phases. It was tiered with about four levels they could walk on. It was built like that to accommodate the rising tide.

The poles were six to eight feet, and about five were put together in a row along the coast.

k’nilagh liq’a

During high tide, the fisherman held dip nets and watched for salmon. When salmon were around, there was an excitement in the air, and the fishermen collected the fish. They brought the fish to the shore as they caught them. We got about 50-100 salmon each day depending if the fish were around.

Luq’a shegh dighilagh.

tach’enil’iyi

Dlin’a and I teased each other a lot and competed in everything we did. We mostly got Silver and red salmon. Dlin’a and I helped Chada by getting the fish and clubbing to stop them from slapping around.

We had to pay attention and be ready when Chada brought fish. If we didn’t kill the fish right away, there was a chance they could slip back into the water.

Dlin’a and I competed to see who could kill the fish the fastest. Dlin’a won most of the time, but I did not give up. I wanted to prove I could do anything he could do. Dlin’a was stronger so it was easier for him kill the salmon. We put the fish on willows with lots of leaves on the shore. That kept them clean and a little cooler out of the sun.

Ughasht’ay! q’aghanshdnu!

54

q’u shitnilt’a...

gADI

CHAYI

chin’an.

Chida stayed in camp to cook breakfast. Sometimes I stayed to help her or other mothers who needed a babysitter. Before we left to get fish, we ate a piece of dry fish and tea. I loved helping them to take care of the fish. There was a fish trap was not very far from camp, maybe a few bends down.

The air felt so good and blew away the ts’is and other bugs.

When we got back to camp, Chida always asked how many fish we got. Dlin’a and I took turns telling her each time or we told her at the same time. I think our grandparents were proud of us. We ate the breakfast that Chida prepared, usually rolls and fried fish. We drank more tea. Our grandparents always gave some fish away to others who needed fish.

Then, the real work continued.

We piled the salmon on spruce bark and covered them with willows. Chida sat on the ground with a piece of spruce bark to cut the fish on. We handed her fish and she cut them pretty fast. We had to get as much done as possible before it got too warm or if it was raining.

qinaghelt’ach’ el ghuch’delt’a.

el k’eluch’ey

Chida cut eating fish with a bashla.

She was like an artist cutting the fish. She revered each fish. She carefully washed the fish with as little water as possible. She never wasted anything. She saved the heads for soup. The backbones were also smoked and dried for our dogs. We had to save as much dry fish as possible to survive the winter.

ch’vala 55

kuhchashga k’eshtl’a

dasgedi yighelyuyi

Throughout the day, my brother and I monitored the smoke under the fish rack. The smoke from alder also kept the flies at bay. We gathered more wood if needed throughout the day. Sometimes I would hang out by the fish racks to get a break from the ts’is. I made sure not to stay under the fish racks because the salmon blood and oil dripped. We learned the entire process of putting up fish.

After we put away the fish, Dlin’a cooked for the dogs and watered them. we had three dogs. after the fish backbones dried, we bundled them up 40 at a time and put them into a corner of the smokehouse out of the sun and rain. we would feed the fish to the dogs over the winter. we kept the fish as dry and cool as possible and away from the flies.

I learned how to cut fish. I also learned how to cook more on my own. Without my parents and younger sisters, I had to do more work. We got visitors sometimes.

When we had time, we would visit other people along the coast. We walked everywhere and sometimes made overnight trips. We started to pick berries toward the end of summer.

Chida taught me how to tan moose, caribou, rabbit and muskrat hides. She made fur hats, mittens, boots and shell bags. Sometimes she sold or traded the furs and things she sewed. We needed the money to buy some basic supplies from the trading post.

Chada told us stories about starvation days. You have to treat your food with respect because it may not always be around or easily caught. We were lucky to get salmon and be able to work on it. After Chida cut the fish, she put it into a tub. I carried the fish to the fish rack and hung them up. I also had to flip the fish over at the fish tails to make sure they dried on each side. Dlin’a hung the backbones and Sometimes he got to cut them up. I cut fish too if we had a lot.

Throughout that summer, our grandparents taught us a lot. They told us who we were, where we came from and prepared us for the future. It was never the same after that summer. Dlin’a and I were close, but he had more responsibilities as he was growing into a man. I also grew into a young woman after that summer with increasing responsibilities. I missed my family dearly, but still feel the spirit of my family with me.

As I reminisce about fish camp, I think about all of the changes that have occurred over the years.

I see that people do not know about Dena’ina. Anchor-

age has grown exponentially with roads over the places we lived and travelled. That summer fish camp after my parents’ and siblings’ death was the place where I learned a lot of the lessons that have helped me get through life. The hard work that summer helped me to build a strong work ethic that is still a part of me today.

I have seen a lot of change throughout my lifetime. Anchorage has grown tremendously from mostly traditional camping grounds to a bustling little city. The face of Anchorage has changed too. When I was younger, we mostly saw other Dena’ina people and Alaska Natives from the surrounding areas with the occasional white settlers here and there. Now, more and more of the lands are claimed by settlers from all over the world.

Dlin’a and I learned to rely on each other. My grandparents were our saviors and I feel honored to have been raised by them. I was a little resentful having to work so hard that summer, but looking back at it Chada and Chida really did us a favor. They taught us so much about survival and living off the land. I know they only taught us a quarter of what they knew. In a way, we probably kept them busy enough so they didn’t have time to dwell on the loss of their family members and friends.

Chada and Chida instilled a great respect for the land and animals. People don’t realize how really intelligent Dena’ina people are. Surviving off the land

Chiluq’a Ni’u k’nilaghi liq’a ghet’uts’i

takes a tremendous amount of knowledge and wisdom. I don’t know what the future brings, but if I am able to teach my grandchildren a quarter of what I know, they are sure to survive in the future ahead.

K’enchigija K’tsigha

ARTS

SECOND fridays @ the forum November 2014

Brian Adams photography Opening reception: 11/14/2014 December 2014

Kerry Tasker photography Opening reception: 12/12/2014

B

eginning in November 2014, the Alaska Humanities Forum joined a number of other popular yet off-the-beaten-downtown tracks of Anchorage visual art venues in shifting the opening receptions for its revolving, monthly art exhibitions from the first Friday of every month to the second.

We’re 161 East 1st Avenue, Door 15, in the Alaska Railroad historic freight shed along Ship Creek. Check akhf.org or visit the Alaska Humanities Forum on Facebook for more details.

January 2015

Linda Lyons painting Opening reception: 01/09/2015 February 2015

Katie Basile & Erica Rudy multimedia Opening reception: 02/13/2015 March 2015

Duke Russell & Ted Kim mixed media Opening reception: 03/13/2015 April 2015

Drew Michael sculpture Opening reception: 04/10/2015 May–August 2015

Ben Huff photography Opening reception: 05/08/2015 September 2015

Kesler Woodward & Peggy Shumaker painting and literary arts Opening reception: 09/11/2015 58

A L A S K A H U M A N I T I E S F O R U M W I NTE R 2014–2015

Drew Michael, APRIL 2015

Kerry Tasker, December 2014

Brian Adams, November 2014 A L A S K A H U M A N ITI E S F O R U M W I NTE R 20 14 –2 01 5

59

KISKA IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF JAPANESE OCCUPATION

RICHARD DAUENHAUER remembering a LANGUAGE WARRIOR

WEST CHESTER ORAL HISTORY OF A LONG-GONE NEIGHBORHOOD

(907) 272-5341 www.akhf.org

If you received this magazine in error, or wish to be removed from our list of Forum subscribers, please email mail@akhf.org, or call 907-272-5341.

161 East First Avenue, Door 15 Anchorage, AK 99501

WE DON’T WANT TO CLUTTER UP YOUR MAILBOX.

Daitoua

juneau empire

courtesy Augusta Reimer

ALASKA HUMANITIES FORUM Non Profit Organization U.S. POSTAGE PAID ANCHORAGE, ALASKA PERMIT NO. 519

FORUM

THE MAGAZINE OF THE AL ASK A HUMANITIES FORUM WINTER 2014–2015