special section
Alaska Native Corporation Review
Alaska Native Brotherhood 100 Year Anniversary A century of progress BY WILL SWAGEL
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Alaska State Library – Historical Collections
Alaska Native Brotherhood founding fathers in 1912. From left, Paul Liberty, James Watson, Ralph Young, Eli Kalanvok (Katinook), Peter Simpson, Frank Mercer, James C. Jackson, Chester Worthington, George Fields, William Hobson (an early member), Frank Price. Seward Kunz is not pictured (nor is Marie Moon Orsen).
he Alaska Native Brotherhood is celebrating its 100th anniversary at their Grand Camp convention in October in Sitka, and a number of Alaska’s top leaders are expected to give speeches or send congratulations. After all, there is no organization more central to Alaska Natives’ fight for citizenship and self-determination than the Alaska Native Brotherhood and its partner organization, Alaska Native Sisterhood. ANB members believe their organization is the oldest Native fraternal organization in the United States. In a 1971 letter to the Anchorage Daily News, ANB Grand Camp president Frank Peratrovich, a state and territorial legislator and the brother-in-law of civil rights pioneer Elizabeth Peratrovich, objected to an article that referred to ANB as primarily a social organization. He listed some of ANB/ANS’s accomplishments: claiming Native citizenship and voting rights, school desegregation, the extension of workers’ compensation, pensions and aid to children to Alaska Natives, along with protections against discrimination. ANB’s lobbying is credited with helping form Alaska’s sophisticated Native
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health consortiums and facilities. And with land claims: “It can be argued with documentation,” says Gerry Hope, president of Camp #1 in Sitka, that ANB and ANS played a critical role in the negotiations for and passage of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act and the birth of Alaska Native Corporations.
History in the Living Room
Bertha Karras, a lifelong resident of Sitka, was personally changed by the activities of ANB/ANS. She was in the first group of Native students to attend the newly desegregated public schools. The same went for the churches and even the local movie theater, which had separate sections for Natives and whites. Karras remembers her mother, Annie Jacobs, and her brother, Mark Jacobs Jr., both active ANB/ANS members working to get decommissioned WWII naval air base buildings to be used for Native health care and education. Today, the Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium, a campus of UA-Southeast, and the state-run boarding school Mt. Edgecumbe High School occupy the site. Dennis Demmert, of Klawock, also saw history occurring in his living room
when local ANB/ANS members came to his home for meetings to discuss land claims and other issues. Demmert has served a one-year term this past year as ANB Grand Camp President, representing all the local camps. Demmert spent two decades teaching Native history and education at UA Fairbanks and can quote from memory the legislation behind a century’s worth of Native progress. In 1912, a dozen men and one woman from the Sheldon Jackson Training School (later SJ College) started ANB during and after an educational conference they attended in Juneau to discuss important issues with Alaska educators and one another. The group of young Native leaders wrote a charter for ANB that required members to speak English, be Christian, take a sobriety oath, and dedicate one’s life to service. They established the first ANB camp—Camp #1—in Sitka. In a speech last year to the ANB Grand Camp held in Klawock, UA Anchorage history professor Stephen Haycox commented on the conditions faced by early ANB members. “At the time, their best thinking was that education and acculturation were
www.akbizmag.com • Alaska Business Monthly • September 2012