Forum Magazine - Spring 2013

T H E M AG A Z I N E O F T H E A L A S K A H U M A N I T I E S F O R U M

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New Fiction by Eowyn Ivey | Ben Huff: The Last Road North | Tlingit Macbeth | General Grants

LETTER FROM THE CEO

Building Our Future

“D

emocracy demands wisdom” is a founding principle of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Wisdom is derived from sharing the gift of knowledge, fostering cultural understanding and preserving history.

I want to share with you just two of many meaningful stories from Alaska Humanities Forum projects that have personally inspired me since I joined the organization last fall. I believe projects like these have the power to create wisdom.

A LIBRARY FOR TONGA

Anchorage resident Kato Ha’unga had a vision to build a public library in Tonga, the remote island that was her homeland and a country that had recently been hit by a devastating tsunami.

From 2009-2012, Kato collected books in Alaska from any place and anyone she could. Her efforts over the last three years created a stockpile of nearly 50,000 titles. The next challenge was to get the books from Alaska to Tonga, about 5,900 miles away.

U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski helped secure transportation from San Diego to Tonga through a U.S. Navy humanitarian program called Project Handclasp.

The last part of Kato’s dream came true through her participation in the Alaska Humanities Forum’s Leadership Anchorage program for emerging leaders of non-profit, neighborhood and ethnic organizations. It’s designed to guide them to leadership through the lens of the humanities.

Joe Terrell, President and CEO of Bristol Industries, was a guest speaker at a Leadership Anchorage session. After hearing about Kato’s efforts he offered Bristol’s services to help with the last leg of the journey. Bristol helped coordinate with Totem Ocean Trailer Express and Carlile Transportation Systems to get the 17 tons of books from Anchorage to San Diego.

REVITALIZING EYAK

The Alaska Humanities Forum recently provided a grant to the Eyak Preservation Council. Chief Marie Smith Jones, the last known fluent Native Eyak speaker, passed away in 2008. The goal of this project is to revitalize Alaska’s most endangered language.

For the first time, descendants have easy and instant access to recordings of Eyak. The project also launched a “Word of the Week” feature on the new Eyak language website, and developed Language Learning Kits.

Based on the work of Dr. Michael Krauss, longtime head of the Alaska Native Language Center, and Guillaume Leduey, a young man from France who taught himself to speak Eyak using online materials at the age of 12, the Eyak language and culture is getting a second chance to flourish. (Search online for “Parlez-Vous Eyak?” for more information about Leduey’s impressive feat.)

The Alaska Humanities Forum is grateful for the opportunity to play a small part in this effort to save a language and positively impact Eyak culture.

As a final note, I want to thank all of you that donated to the Forum during the last eight months. We depend on your financial support and leadership in the ongoing efforts of our programs.

— Nina Kemppel, CEO

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A L A S K A H U M A N I T I E S F O R U M S P R I N G / S U M M E R 2013

ALASKA HUMANITIES FORUM 161 East First Avenue, Door 15 Anchorage, Alaska 99501 (907) 272-5341 | www.akhf.org BOARD OF DIRECTORS Joan Braddock, Chair, Fairbanks Ben Mohr, Vice Chair, Eagle River Evan D. Rose, Treasurer, Anchorage Dave Kiffer, Member-At-Large, Ketchikan Mary K. Hughes, J.D., Former Chair, Anchorage Jeane Breinig, Anchorage Christa Bruce, Ketchikan Michael Chmielewski, Palmer John Cloe, Anchorage Dermot Cole, Fairbanks Ernestine Hayes, Juneau Nancy Kemp, Kodiak Catkin Kilcher Burton, Anchorage Scott McAdams, Sitka Pauline Morris, Kwethluk Wayne Stevens, Juneau Hugh Short, Anchorage/Bethel Kurt Wong, C.P.A., Anchorage

STAFF Nina Kemppel, CEO Susy Buchanan, Grants Program Director Laurie Evans-Dinneen RURE Programs Director Larry Campbell Leadership Anchorage Director Lisa Butler, Finance Director Liza Root, Office Manager Matthew Turner, Special Projects Coordinator Carmen Davis, C3 Project Manager Jonathan Samuelson Take Wing Alaska Project Coordinator Veldee Hall RURE Sister School Exchange Project Manager Erika Quade, RURE/C3 Project Associate

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. ©2013.

Printed in Alaska.

T H E M AG A Z I N E O F T H E A L A S K A H U M A N I T I E S F O R U M

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FORUM 04

Cultivating Insight

The Forum’s 2013 general grants fund 32 inquiries into Alaska’s history, languages, literature and cultures

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The Last Road North From the Haul Road, Ben Huff’s photographs picture a unique Alaska dichotomy

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Remnants New fiction by Eowyn Ivey, author of the Pulitzer-finalist novel Snowchild

LET TER FROM THE CEO

Building the Future

By Nina Kemppel

INTERVIEW

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GR ANT REPORT

Anchorage Day of the Dead Celebration

The Witness: Ben Huff PROGR AM NOTES

ECCI Alumni Gathering PROGR AM NOTES

DONOR PROFILE

ABOVE

John Williams Sr., photographed in Yakutat

by Shoki Kayamori (page 11)

ON THE COVER

“Mile 330: musher’s truck, 2011”

by Ben Huff (page 26)

Anne Hanley, Playwright

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C3 Showing Positive Results GR ANT REPORT

GR ANT REPORT

Kodiak’s Filipino Community Stories

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FROM THE ARCHIVES

Tlingit Macbeth

Traveling by Story through Copper River Country GR ANT REPORT

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White House of the North

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The Forum’s 2013 general grants fund 32 inquiries into Alaska's history, languages, literature and cultures

CULTIVATING INSIGHT A

fiction-writing workshop in Barrow at the northern tip of Alaska. A book of photographs of World War II artifacts on volcanic Kiska island in the Aleutians, far west in the Bering Sea. A Tlingit language camp on Wrangell Island deep in the southeast Alaska Panhandle. The 32 projects in the humanities supported by the Alaska Humanities Forum with 2013 general grants represent the vast geography of our state and reflect its uniquely fascinating history, cultures and diversity.

On the following pages are summaries of each project, including its sponsoring organization or individual director, location and grant amount.

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A L A S K A H U M A N I T I E S F O R U M S P R I N G / S U M M E R 2013

Jennifer Kinney

IN SPITE OF ITSELF: The Stubborn Persistence of Whittier, Alaska *ENNIFER +INNEY s 7HITTIER s

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HITTIER, ALASKA is an enigma.

The town was built in the early 1940s as a port and military base during World War II. The location was chosen for its proximity to Anchorage, its year-round ice free port, its ring of mountains to guard against low-flying planes, and its endless fog, which would render it invisible to enemies most of the time. During the Cold War, the military built the Buckner Building, known in its day as the “city under one roof” because it contained a bowling alley, a theater and a jail in addition to housing soldiers. The Begich Towers, Incorporated, or BTI, were also built

at this time and are still home to more than 80 percent of Whittier’s population. The Buckner Building, in contrast, is an empty, rotting shell looming over the landscape.

This unique town, originally intended to accommodate a population of 3,000, is now home to fewer than 200 year-round residents. It can be accessed by road only by a 2.6-mile tunnel, wide enough for one lane of traffic to pass through at a time.

Whittier resident and photojournalist Jennifer Kinney intends to document Whittier’s peculiar character with a book of her photographs combined

with oral history stories from the town’s residents, and reproductions of historical documents.

“Like many of Whittier’s entrenched inhabitants, I arrived without knowing what I would find,” she said. “I took a job at a fish and chips restaurant out of curiosity about Alaska. And like so many inquisitive, solitary souls before me, I found a kinship with this place: not the most beautiful town in Alaska, nor the smallest, nor the most remote, nor even truly the strangest, but nonetheless the closest to the end of the road that many of us were willing to go.” ■

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DELTA DISCOVERY: Alaska History Lower Kuskokwim School District +USKOKWIM 2IVER $ELTA s

The Lower Kuskokwim School District (LKSD) is located in the Kuskokwim River Delta region of Southwestern Alaska, approximately 400 air miles west of Anchorage. The district is comprised of 21 villages spread over 44,000 square miles. Ninety-six percent of the approximately 4,140 students in LKSD are Alaska Native, predominately Yup’ik Eskimo.

Delta Discovery: Alaska History will produce a secondary level Alaska History curriculum designed to satisfy the state’s Alaska History graduation requirement. This interactive curriculum will be contextualized by the history of the Lower-Kuskokwim Delta and designed to be culturally relevant to students in the LKSD. The project will blend mainstream Alaska Studies course content with regional and local resources to create an integrated history with strong cultural connections. It will serve approximately 2,070 current and future high school students during the next five years.

KISKA – THE JAPANESE OCCUPATION OF AN ALASKAN ISLAND 1942-43 "RENDAN #OYLE s +ISKA s

This project, in conjunction with the University of Alaska Press, is a modern, photographic record of the remote Alaska battlefield of Kiska Island. In the summer of 2009, Richmond, British Columbia-based photographer Brendan Coyle spent 54 days camped on Kiska, surveying the island for signs of artifacts of the Japanese occupation (the first such survey of Kiska since 1951), and photographing his discoveries.

Currently, most published photographs of the evidence of World War II on Kiska concentrate on the Kiska Harbor area. Coyle, however, ventured all over the island.

“To me, the Japanese occupiers of

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Kiska have always been shadowy figures of this brief and most remote conflict of the Second World War. Our camp life was not unlike that of the Japanese occupiers and this gave us the opportunity to experience their simple and harsh existence firsthand,” said Coyle.

“Rather than photograph the usual relics in the Kiska Harbor area the survey took us well up into the highlands where we made several new discoveries and gained insight into the lonely life of the Japanese soldier posted to Kiska.”

Kiska – the Japanese Occupation of an Alaskan Island 1942-43, will be a hardcover book, approximately 400 pages in length, to include 250 high-resolution color photographs and 55 historic black and white photographs.

TAMANTA KATURLLUTA TALKING CIRCLE Homer Society of Natural History 0RATT -USEUM s (OMER s

Established in 1997, Tamanta Katurlluta: A Gathering of Native Tradition (The Gathering) is now a highly anticipated biennial event in Homer.

Every two years on Labor Day weekend, it brings together the Sugpiaq/Alutiiq cultures of the Kachemak Bay villages of Seldovia, Nanwalek, and Port Graham; the Dena’ina Athabascan and Aleut cultures of the villages of Kenai and Ninilchik; and cultural traditions from outside the region represented by featured performers.

Dozens of Native elders, traditionbearers, artists, dancers and drummers as well as hundreds of non-Native participants take part in the long weekend of culture sharing and community building.

A focal component this year will be a Talking Circle of elders and youth centered on a traditional method of communication within Alaska Native communities, wherein each person in the circle is allowed to speak without interruption. Discussion points will examine culture, arts, and issues affecting each of the cultural groups of Kachemak Bay and the Lower Cook Inlet, including resource management and tourism.

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The Talking Circle will be recorded and transcribed, with duplicate copies housed in the permanent collections of the Pratt Museum.

SHARING ALUTIIQ STORIES %LIZABETH / #ONNELL s +ODIAK s

For more than 17 years, the Alutiiq Museum in Kodiak has worked to preserve, share, and reawaken the traditions of the Alutiiq Sugpiat, one of Alaska’s least-known Native peoples.

“The Petroglyphs of Kodiak Island” and “Alutiiq Weavers” are each a series of videos created in 2010 by the Alutiiq Museum and Elizabeth O’Connell, who has been producing and editing programs for 25 years for ABC, PBS, and Discovery Channel. They were made to document and share the results of collections studies and archaeological fieldwork. Through the “Sharing Alutiiq Stories” project, these videos will be edited into television-length programs, making their content more widely accessible. The project will turn the videos into a television program which will promote knowledge of Alutiiq tradition by bringing it to a broader audience, answering questions such as: “What is a labret and why did people wear them?”

“How do you harvest and cure wild grass?” and “Did Alutiiq people really hunt whales with poison?”

The two half-hour programs will debut at a premiere at the Alaska Native Heritage Center in Anchorage, air on Alaska Public Television Service, be shown and archived at the Alutiiq Museum, and be available for purchase on DVD. STATEWIDE YOUTH ART AND WRITING COMPETITION F Magazine s 3TATEWIDE s

Junior, middle and high school students from around the state competed this year in the third annual Statewide Youth Art and Writing Competition organized and promoted by F Magazine, a quarterly arts, fashion and culture magazine that is a resident group at Out North Contemporary Art House.

Courtesy Alaska Jewish Museum

ON THE WINGS OF EAGLES: Alaska’s Contribution to Operation Magic Carpet !LASKA *EWISH -USEUM s !NCHORAGE s

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N MAY OF 1949, the Imam of Yemen decided to allow some 47,000 Jews to leave his country for Israel, then a newly formed nation. The Yemenite Jews had suffered persecution for centuries, and their departure, facilitated by various airlines of Britain and America, was said to fulfill a prophecy that they would one day escape “on the wings of eagles.” One of the airlines supporting their exodus was Alaska Airlines.

On the Wings of Eagles consists of an exhibit, to be displayed at the Alaska Jewish Museum in Anchorage, telling a story with three components.

In the words of project director Leslie A. Fried, “It is a timeline of events that

describes the rescue from 1948-1950 of more than 47,000 Yemenite Jews from Arab persecution and their airlift to Israel. It is the story of the transformation of Alaska Airlines charter pilots from merely flying people, animals, supplies and equipment around the world, to being participants in the largest humanitarian airlift in history, and it is about the fascinating history of the Yemenite Jews and their culture, which has remained unchanged since Biblical times. The exhibit will also explore the phenomenon of displacement; and the selflessness and empathy of one human for another.”

On the Wings of Eagles will be designed not only to document a

significant event in history, but also to help Alaskans understand the depth of the state’s cultural diversity. “Like the rest of the nation, Alaska is a mosaic of cultures and ethnicities that need to coexist under a spirit of tolerance and understanding,” Fried said. “Such understanding comes from a conscious effort to expose people to cultural diversity in an informed and comprehensive manner.” ■

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The contest allowed students to submit their work and have it curated by professional writers and artists. In March, Out North hosted an awards event at which the Out North gallery exhibited the work of winning student artists, and performance artists, actors and others with stage experience performed dramatic readings of the winning entries in the various writing categories.

The event was televised and streamed online by KACN-TV. Winning entries were also published in the spring issue of F Magazine.

First place winners in arts and writing categories will receive airfare, lodging and scholarships to attend Sitka Fine Arts Camp, a two-week summer arts intensive in Sitka.

TO PERPETUATE ELDERS’ KNOWLEDGE OF WRANGELL’S CULTURAL HISTORY 6IRGINIA /LIVER s 7RANGELL s

Although Tlingit people have inhabited Wrangell Island (Kaachxaana.áak’w) for thousands of years, there are no longer any fluent speakers of the Tlingit language among Wrangell’s approximately 2,400 residents.

This project aims to change that.

Since October 2012, Tlingit students in Wrangell have been studying basic Tlingit language two nights a week by gathering in the town’s Johnson O’Malley Classroom to listen to recordings of deceased bilingual elders.

This summer, the students will travel to project manager Virginia Oliver’s fish camp near “Old Town,” located 26 miles south of the present Wrangell town site.

They will be joined there by fluent Tlingit speakers and language instructors Ruth Demmert of the Kake City School District, and Florence Marks Sheakely, who teaches Tlingit at the University of Alaska Southeast.

Demmert and Sheakely will provide four days of intensive language instruction, focusing on Tlingit phrases covering weather, seasons, and food gathering. The phrases taught at the camp will be recorded, transcribed and printed

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on library binding for distribution to the Irene Ingle Public Library, and the James and Elsie Nolan Center, both in Wrangell, and the Wrangell Cooperative Association Tribal Council. The phrases also will be periodically broadcast on Wrangell’s public radio station KSTK. ALASKA TEEN MEDIA INSTITUTE RADIO STORY PRODUCTION 3PIRIT OF 9OUTH s 3TATEWIDE s

The Alaska Teen Media Institute (ATMI) functions as a teen newsroom where youth work as reporters, editors and producers, under the guidance of experienced journalists. This grant funds the production of ATMI-produced radio stories to be aired on the Alaska Public Radio Network’s statewide magazine segment “AK,” as well as local programs on Anchorage stations KNBA 90.3 FM and KNOR (Out North Radio) 106.1 FM. The goal of this project is to allow young Alaskans to analyze, interpret and exchange ideas about their communities and to bring to light topics and issues of interest to the youth of the state that might not otherwise be reported or discussed in adult-oriented media, especially from a teen perspective.

“Youth will not merely share the thoughts and ideas of their peers on a subject but explore the subject through research and interviews with community members and professionals,” stated project director Rosey Robards. “This exploration will allow them to provide a balanced discussion of various perspectives and in the process will not only educate the youth producing the stories but anyone who is willing to listen.”

ICEBOUND API Arts and Outreach 3TATEWIDE s

This grant supported the completion of ICEBOUND, a 90-minute documentary, eight years in the making, about the famed 1925 “Serum Run,” in which at

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least 34 men, and 150 dogs, relayed antitoxin across Alaska to save Nome from a deadly outbreak of diphtheria.

The film was launched with a major production grant from The National Endowment for the Humanities in 2007, and has received additional support from The Iditarod Historic Trail Alliance, Bering Straits Native Corporation, the Gottstein Family Foundation, and the Rasmuson Foundation. It debuted last November at the 2012 IDFA Film Festival, a major international documentary festival in Amsterdam. It has since been scheduled for broadcast on PBS, and internationally on the BBC, Arte (France), and ZDF (Germany).

“ICEBOUND tells this true story through the authentic voices of Alaskans, including the last surviving children stricken with diphtheria, elders from Nome and the Interior villages who were witness to the events, and descendants of the original mushers,” stated director Daniel Anker.

“The story of the Serum Run is a legend—an heroic testament to the human spirit, and to the indomitable achievements of the dogs of the far north. But beyond the legend, there is a tale that is far more complicated, filled with ironies, with tragedy, and with myth. The story of ICEBOUND encompasses a layered history that, while uniquely Alaskan, speaks to a fascinating moment in American culture.”

ACCESSING KODIAK’S HISTORY: Building a Digital Database of the Baranov Museum Archives Kodiak Historical Society +ODIAK s

The archival collection at the Baranov Museum began when the Kodiak Historical Society, which governs the Museum, was established in 1954.

For over five decades, the Museum has been accepting archival material from donors and purchasing documents and photographs dating from the 1880s to the present.

The archives cover the history of Kodiak Island as well as significant por-

1,000 CRANES FOR ALASKA BOOK PROJECT ,ESLIE 7ARD s 3T -ICHAEL s

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RAGEDY STRUCK the remote village

of St. Michael in June 2011 when a young man drowned. He was trying to “skip� his snowmachine across a pond when it stalled and sank.

At the time, Anchorage dancer and choreographer Leslie Kimiko Ward worried that her two-week artist residency at the village’s school would be cut short. Teachers told her that students might just stay home the following week, so she decided to spend her remaining time in St. Michael making 1,000 origami cranes. In Japan, these cranes are considered a sign of peace and reconciliation, and Ward wanted them to be a gesture of solace for the community.

Some of the students did return to school the following week, and they began to help. They invited friends

elsewhere to participate through social media. Soon, the story went viral and people all over the world began to make cranes, sending pictures to the school. The project tapped into an unexpected source of support, which was large enough to spark an international suicide prevention campaign.

Now, Ward plans to write a novel, which will, in her words, “explore, through research and narrative development, the concepts brought to bear by my experience living in Alaska and teaching in the rural villages. Chief among these are the issues of disconnection, rural isolation, suicide prevention, the influence of social media and the natural world.�

This book will be the next step in the continual evolution of the arts-based suicide prevention project “1,000

Cranes for Alaska.â€? It will be about “the story of connection and rural isolation that begins on a crumbling estate at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, winds its way past the earthy echoes of Japanese taiko drums in Seattle, through the cobblestone streets of Eastern Europe, to settle on the Alaskan tundra in a small native village tucked beside the Norton Sound, where an accidental tragedy inspires a global gesture of creative connectivity, and where one young woman discovers the voice inside her heart.â€? â–

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tions of the history of the Aleutian Islands.

The Baranov Musuem currently lacks a collections management system, making it difficult for any researcher to access material in a timely manner.

This project will catalog the document archives in a searchable, digital database, PastPerfect, so that museum staff, researchers and the general public can access and better utilize archived documents.

JOHN HAINES’ POETRY AND PROSE James Perrin Warren &AIRBANKS s

John Haines, who was a grantee and grants officer for the Alaska Humanities Forum in the early 1970s, was the first great literary writer to emerge from Alaska after World War II. He passed away in 2011, but his books and poetry remain in print at Graywolf Press and Wesleyan University Press. “Mr. Haines, who won a lifetime achievement award from the Library of Congress, found inspiration in the peaks of the Alaskan range that he could see from the cabin he built himself, in the butterfly he held in his hands, in the moose he shot and butchered,� wrote Douglas Martin of the New York Times. “He told of stones waiting for God to remember their names.�

The Alaska and Polar Regions Archive in the University of Alaska Fairbanks Rasmuson Library contains the world’s largest collection of Haines’ work. His notes, correspondence, essays, poems, and photos, which cover most of his adult life and literary career, are extensive enough to fill 35 boxes.

Project director James Perrin Warren, a scholar and professor at Washington and Lee University for nearly 30 years, will begin researching a booklength study of Haines’ career by working through all of the UAF archived material as well as any other material on Haines he can obtain.

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KING ISLAND FILM FOOTAGE OF FATHER HUBBARD: Window to the Past and Preserver of the Future Anaguina Productions +ING )SLAND s

In 1936, famed geologist and explorer Father Bernard Rosecrans Hubbard organized a major expedition to Alaska.

He traveled to King Island in the Bering Sea, where he recorded historic film footage documenting the lives of the Alaska Native people there. With him on this expedition was audio engineer Ed Levin, who made extensive audio recordings corresponding to Father Hubbard’s footage. These recordings, after resting in the Smithsonian’s National Human Studies Film Archive for many years, were rediscovered in 2000 when a gathering of King Island elders listened to them in Nome. The elders recognized the recordings, remembering Hubbard’s visit to their community decades earlier. They talked in detail about the footage and the audio recordings, sharing history that might otherwise have been lost with their passing.

This project will preserve their knowledge. Project Director Maria Williams and organizer Ted Mayac Sr., along with the remaining King Island elders of the community who remember Father Hubbard’s 1936 visit, are collaborating to clean up the 27 hours of film footage and re-assemble it with the audio recordings. Also they are editing footage of the June 2000 gathering of Iùupiaq-speaking elders, and adding English subtitles.

The final product of this project will be a 45-minute film, including the Father Hubbard expedition footage and audio, to be shown in Nome, Anchorage and Fairbanks.

POEMS IN PLACE Alaska Center for the Book &AIRBANKS +ETCHIKAN s

Poems in Place is a collaborative literary arts project between Alaska State Parks and the Alaska Center for

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the Book to create and place a poem in each of Alaska’s six regional State Park Areas. The project was inspired by the 2011 placement of the poem “What Whales and Infants Know� by Kim Cornwall at Beluga Point in Chugach State Park.

Phase One will place poems at Chena River State Recreation Area in Fairbanks and Totem Bight Historical Park in Ketchikan. Coinciding with the selected poem’s dedication in both Fairbanks and Ketchikan, the Alaska Center for the Book will hold a creative writing workshop near the location of the Poem in Place. The workshops will be open to students and adults from the community, and will be designed to inspire local residents to create poetry about their place.

Former State Writer Laureate John Straley and current State Writer Laureate Peggy Shumaker will teach the workshops.

BETWEEN PAST AND PRESENT: The Archaeological Collections from Unga Cave !LLISON -C#LAIN s 5NGA )SLAND s

The Unga Cave collection consists of 534 wood artifacts collected in the late 19th century from a burial cave on Unga Island, the largest of the Shumagin Islands in the eastern Aleutians.

In 1871, French explorer and ethnographer Alphonse Pinart collected 26 wood objects from the cave. These objects are now in the Chateau-Musee de Boulogne-sur-Mer, a castle in the French seaport of Boulogne-sur-Mer that houses the Boulogne museum.

William Healy Dall, a U.S. National Museum associate, learned about Pinart’s collection from Unga Cave in 1873; he subsequently visited the cave and gathered 508 additional artifacts for the National Museum of Natural History.

Between Past and Present: The Archaeological Collections from Unga Cave is the work of an interdisciplinary team of American, French, and Unangax researchers. With the support of this grant, two project staff members will travel to Washington, DC to exam-

PICTURE MAN: A Photographer and his Portrait of an Alaska Village Margaret Thomas 9AKUTAT s

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Susie Jackson, left, and Susie Abraham in Yakutat, in an undated photograph

by Shoki Kayamori. Courtesy Sealaska Heritage Institute

APANESE PHOTOGRAPHER

Shoki Kayamori was in many ways typical of the Asian immigrant men who sought new lives in America in the early 1900s. After landing in San Francisco, he wound his way to Seattle, where he worked in a dye works in Japan Town.

Then in 1912, Kayamori’s life took an unusual turn. Racism and labor strife drove him to Alaska, where he worked at the salmon cannery in Yakutat. He lived in the southeast Alaska town until his death in 1941.

While there, Kayamori became such an avid photographer that Yakutat children called him “Picture Man.” That nickname is the working title of a 100-page book-in-progress by Margaret Thomas, a former Alaska journalist who’s now a college librarian in Olympia, Washington.

The bulk of Kayamori’s photographs, about 700 black-and-white images, are housed on deteriorating glass-plate negatives at the Alaska State Library. Picture Man will include at least 50 of Kayamori’s photographs from the state library’s Kayamori Collection and other sources, as well as interviews with Yakutat residents who knew the photographer during his 30 years in the southeast fishing town. The book will also detail the photographic equipment and techniques Kayamori used and discuss the historical significance of his work.

Kayamori’s original negatives are in sore need of conservation. Since the 1970s, when the plates were last printed, humidity has caused the emulsions to crack and peel.

Thomas hopes this book about his life and work will focus new attention and resources on the deteriorating Kayamori Collection. ■

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ine the items collected by Dall, gather data to develop a photographic protocol for the project, and open dialogue with the Smithsonian Institution for a partnership in the project.

Between Past and Present is the first project to conduct anthropological research that directly links Unangan archaeological artifacts with the contemporary Unangan community through collaborative research.

VOYAGES OF THE LOST ALEUTIAN LEDGERS: 1865-2013 J. Pennelope Goforth 5NALASKA s

Last year, veteran Alaska journalist J. Pennelope Goforth finished “Bringing Aleutian History Home: the Lost Ledgers of the Alaska Commercial Company (ACC),� a multimedia project that preserves the historically vital contents of six ACC ledgers Goforth discovered by chance in a friend’s basement in Washington state. (The ACC dominated the fur trade in Alaska in the early decades after the United States purchased the territory from Russia; ACC managers and agents kept meticulous records.)

Voyages of the Lost Aleutian Ledgers: 1865-2013 is a nonfiction book-inprogress by Goforth that describes the 12,000-plus mile path through history traveled by the ledgers, treating them as characters in their own right in a narrative saga of adventure and mystery set in Western Alaskan history: the people, the culture, and the economy, as chronicled by the Alaska Commercial Company trading station agents living in Aleutian villages from 1875 through 1897.

The book will also contain full transcripts of the ledgers as well as selected images of significant pages such as listings of Alaska Native hunters and their village of origin, fur price schedules, and notable letters.

TRADITIONAL SONGS OF THE UPPER TANANA Northway Inc. 5PPER 4ANANA s

Interior Alaska’s Upper Tanana region is known for traditional songs, an important part of its indigenous Athabascan culture and heritage. Most of these were “grieving� songs, made when a loved one passed away and remembered for generations by family members. However, the Upper Tanana Athabascan language, spoken primarily in the villages of Northway, Tetlin and Tok (with a small contingent in adjacent areas of Canada’s Yukon Territory) is critically endangered, with fewer and fewer people able to understand the traditional songs.

According to project director Polly E. Hyslop, “Though many traditional practices continue...the language is dying with every elder and the meaning and words to the traditional songs are becoming less understood. Some songs are changing. This is an anguish to the remaining elders who know the songs.�

This project aims to help preserve the history of the Upper Tanana by collecting and preserving the traditional songs, many of which have been recorded. Employing a literacy team of experts who have studied the language of the Upper Tanana, as well as youth, elders and other community members, Northway Inc. aims to compile up to 20 songs into a songbook and CD. Original recordings of the songs will be used as much as possible. Elders will speak in Upper Tanana Athabascan about the songs along with offering English translations and guides to pronunciation.

CROSSCURRENTS: A Literary Confluence of Writers and Readers 49 Writers Inc. +ODIAK "ARROW s

49 Writers, Inc. was founded in 2010 to “support the artistic development of writers throughout Alaska,

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to foster a writing community, and to build an audience for literature.� During the last three years, 49 Writers has held workshops for writers in Anchorage, Juneau and Fairbanks that have featured presentations and instruction by well-known writers from Alaska and other states.

Now it’s venturing beyond the road system. As part of Crosscurrents, 49 Writers will host a daylong workshop in Barrow by Boise, Idaho-based fiction writer Alan Heathcock, who has gained wide acclaim for his 2011 short story collection Volt, and a workshop in Kodiak

by Alaskan poet and non-fiction writer Eva Saulitis, whose most recent book is Into Great Silence: A Memoir of Discovery and Loss among Vanishing Orcas.

Each author will also hold two community activities intended to promote lively discussion on questions pertaining to the ideas, values, and issues raised by the visiting author through his or her writing.

THE SHELDON JACKSON LEGACY: Oral Histories of Sheldon Jackson School and College Alaska Arts Southeast 3ITKA s

Sheldon Jackson College was originally founded on Baranof Island in 1878 as a Presbyterian mission “train ing� school for Alaska Native boys.

It was the oldest institution of higher learning in Alaska when it closed in 2007. The legacy of Sheldon Jackson College is controversial, owing to issues of mission, faith, politics, and its early role in federal government efforts to force the cultural assimilation of Alaska Natives. But its importance to Alaska history is undeniable.

The Sheldon Jackson campus now belongs to Alaska Arts Southeast (AASE), which has begun this project to “document and preserve the oral history of Sheldon Jackson, so that we can begin to understand the motivations, viewpoints and experiences of the people attending and working at the school, and the im-

Ando Masanobu and De Ching in Wei Te-Sheng's Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale.

2013 INDIGENOUS WORLD FILM FESTIVAL

Well GO USA

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!LASKA .ATIVE (ERITAGE #ENTER s !NCHORAGE s

HE NINTH ANNUAL INDIGENOUS

World Film Festival (IWFF), held over two days this February in Anchorage at the Alaska Native Heritage Center, offered screenings of more than a dozen full-length feature movies, documentaries, music videos and animation films. All were produced, directed or written by indigenous artists from Alaska and Pacific Rim countries.

Furthermore all IWFF films either focused on indigenous topics or featured indigenous actors in lead roles.

Full-length features included Taiwanese director Wei Te Sheng’s epic Warriors of the Rainbow, Seediq Bale, and Mesa, Arizona filmmaker Travis

Holt Hamilton’s mockumentary More Than Frybread, which follows members of 20 different Native American tribes as they seek to compete in the made-up “World Frybread Association” championship.

The festival was free and open to the public. “Indigenous World Film Festival films explore the rich histories and modern lives of characters rarely seen in cinema and aid in bridging the gap between the prejudices of the past and open-minded determination of the present and future,” said project director Steven Alvarez, Director of Arts and Education at the Alaska Native Heritage Center. ■

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pact the institution had on their lives.”

This project will involve interviewing at least a dozen primary source individuals, including graduates of the school from each of the last six decades.

These interviews will be filmed and all the material will be archived at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Oral History Program. Alaska Arts Southeast will also produce a short documentary film that will debut at a public event upon completion of the project, and then be available on the organization’s website.

Ultimately, AASE plans to place an interpretive exhibit on the campus that incorporates materials developed in the course of collecting these oral histories. “[Sheldon Jackson College] was not simply good or bad: in the complex history, there is a human story that needs to be told,” stated project director Rebecca Poulson. “The things that went wrong or that turned out to be harmful are especially important for us to understand. So many of the issues manifest in this place are central to our lives—issues of Native identity, faith and religion, power, crosscultural communication, and the nature of enterprises based on a shared vision.”

DOCUMENTING AND INTERPRETING THE COMPOSITION OF YUP’IK CEREMONIAL AND FESTIVAL SONG AND DANCE Calista Elders Council Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta

The ceremonies and festivities with song and dance that Yup’ik people of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta have practiced since time immemorial have served to bind the fabric of their society and supported their spiritual, physical and mental health. But now, at a fast rate, the indigenous people of the Y-K Delta are losing their elders who possess full knowledge of these traditions.

To help preserve this crucial knowledge, the Calista Elders Council held two days of gatherings with 14 Yup’ik Elders to document the composition and content of songs and dances corresponding to various ceremonies and fes-

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tivals. The elders detailed the songs and dances, and discussed their histories, uses and meanings.

The gatherings were recorded, and with this project the material will be transcribed and translated into English, then made available to tribal members and the general public. Dance groups will use them as guides to teach younger Yup’iks traditional songs and dances.

KACHEMAK BAY WRITERS’ CONFERENCE UAA-Kenai Peninsula CollegeKachemak Bay Campus (OMER s

Held annually in Homer since 2002, this nationally recognized writing conference features workshops, readings and panel presentations in fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and the business of writing.

“In the writing conference world, there are many conferences that foster a stratified environment — some participants having greater access to the faculty than others,” conference director Carol Swartz recently told 49 Writers interviewer Lynn Lovegreen. “The Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference strives for just the opposite, a completely non-hierarchical experience.”

This year’s keynote speaker is Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye, whose works include eight prizewinning poetry anthologies for young readers and the 2006 best-selling poetry book You & Yours.

ANCHORAGE READS Anchorage Library Foundation !NCHORAGE s

Anchorage Reads promotes community building, literacy and reading by encouraging Anchorage residents of different ages and varying backgrounds to read and discuss the same book. The program, now in its seventh year, also seeks to introduce new audiences to the city’s library system.

The 2013 Anchorage Reads selection is The Snow Child by Alaskan author Eo-

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wyn Ivey, who was recently nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in fiction for the book.

(See page 40 for the print debut of a new short story by Ivey.) The Anchorage Library Foundation promoted Anchorage Reads with a publicity campaign, book club kits, and a series of public events, including writer workshops, book signings and a family snowman-building day on the grounds of Loussac Library. (The title character in Ivey’s book is a “Snegurochka,” or “Snow Maiden,” that is half human, half ice and snow.)

KENAI MOUNTAINS-TURNAGAIN ARM NATIONAL HERITAGE AREA CURRICULUM PROJECT Kenai Mountains-Turnagain Arm Corridor Communities Association +ENAI s

The Kenai Mountains-Turnagain Arm (KMTA) National Heritage Area is one of 49 National Heritage Areas in the United States, designated by Congress as “places where natural, cultural and historical resources combine to form a cohesive, nationally important landscape,” according to the National Park Service.

With the support of this grant, the KMTA Corridor Communities Association developed Trails Across Time, an inquiry-based Alaska Studies curriculum that “recognizes that much of Alaska’s history is recent, and can still be found in the remains of old cabins and the stories of our elders.”

Trails Across Time consists of field trips and 10 interactive lessons for high school students. Each lesson will explore and highlight the history and culture of the KMTA National Heritage Area by giving students a mystery to puzzle through, inviting them to play “historical detective.” The hands-on lessons culminate in a final research project using primary sources.

Trails Across Time lessons are specifically cross-referenced to Alaska Studies curriculum standards and designed to satisfy the Alaska Studies graduation requirement. They are available as a free online resource for schools and students, including students who are homeschooled.

COMMUNITIES OF MEMORY PAST AND FUTURE: Enhanced Accessibility and Preservation through Drupal University of Alaska Fairbanks &AIRBANKS s

The digital branch of the University of Alaska Oral History Program, Project Jukebox, was established in 1981 and now consists of over 11,000 audio and video recordings of Alaskans providing insight into the state’s history and how they contributed to its heritage.

Project Jukebox makes these recordings available to the public online via websites organized around specific topics or communities, integrating the recordings with associated photographs, maps, and text.

Project Jukebox was originally developed in 1988. Many of the recordings on its “Communities of Memory” websites are currently in obsolete formats that will eventually render them inaccessible on the Internet.

This grant funds the conversion of recordings on five Communities of Memory oral history websites – Nome, Fairbanks, Unalaska, Kotzebue and Bethel – into the open source content management system Drupal, to ensure their continued online availability.

THE NATIVE HISTORY OF NOME WALKING MAP (Siqnazuami AÄ¡uituaqtut) Sitnasusak Native Corporation Elders #OMMITTEE s .OME s

Nome is famous as a gold rush town, but its historical and living significance as a center of indigenous cultures has rarely been documented, shared, or discussed. The Native History of Nome Walking Map (Siqnazuami AÄ¡uituaqtut, or “We’re Walking Around Nome” in Iñupiaq), will emphasize historic points of interest related to Nome’s Alaska Native history, and permit a greater understanding of Nome’s modern context by referring to its manylayered past. The map will be available online and distributed in Nome.

ARCTIC ENTRIES AUDIO PROJECT !RCTIC %NTRIES s !NCHORAGE

“MUSH THE HISTORIC IDITAROD TRAIL!” with Joe Redington, Sr., founder of the Iditarod .AN %LLIOT s !NCHORAGE s

Arctic Entries is a monthly live storytelling event that features seven Alaskan storytellers, each sharing a seven-minute story on a given theme.

“Our Arctic Entries show features true stories born from those moments when we close the door on eight feet of snow or the midnight sun, pull off our XtraTufs, and say, ‘You’ll never guess what happened...’” said project director, Emily Fehrenbacher.

This year marked the fourth September to May season of Arctic Entries. It has rapidly grown in popularity, drawing sellout crowds. Since its 2012 season, Arctic Entries producers have posted audio clips from the live shows to the Arctic Entries website. These clips have then circulated throughout Alaska and the country, giving the show an even broader audience. This grant supports the continued practice of archiving recorded Arctic Entries stories as well as the production of 10 one-hour radio programs of archived and edited storytelling events.

In 1973, Joe Redington, Sr., had a wild idea—a long-distance dogsled race across Alaska, from Anchorage to Nome, via the old gold rush trail and a mail route used at the turn of the last century.

By 1993 the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race was internationally famous. That year, at the age of 73, Redington traveled the Iditarod Trail, narrating the journey to Nan Elliott, who filmed and photographed the trip.

The latest technology at the time was used to film the footage, but now that film is deteriorating. Nan Elliott is beginning a project to transfer all the material to a digital format so it can be preserved and made available to the public.

ARCTIC CROSS $MITRY 4RAKOVSKY s "ETHEL

Arctic Cross is a feature-length documentary-in-progress that will explore and record the cultural and religious traditions of Yup’ik people of Russian Orthodox faith in the YukonKuskokwim Delta region. Structurally, the film will develop through interwoven character portraits. Filmmaker Dmitry Trakovsky began filming in the Bethel area in 2012 and plans to continue through this year and into 2014.

Trakovsky’s previous films include the award-winning 2008 documentary Meeting Andrei Tarkovsksy, which investigates the legacy of the late Russian film director.

THE VILLAGE MONOLOGUES *ACK $ALTON s 3TATEWIDE s

Performance artist and storyteller Jack Dalton’s vision for his Village Monologues project is to generate a collection of at least 100 monologues documenting the “severe challenges, but also hope and resiliency” of Alaska Native youth across the state.

Four interviewers will spend several years interviewing youths, then transcribing and editing the results into performance-ready monologues that are scrubbed of all identifying details to protect the anonymity of the interviewees. Dalton expects to perform the first 10 monologues by the end of this year.

“The final collection will be made available to any organization that feels it can successfully use the monologues for educational purposes,” stated Dalton. “The ultimate goal of The Village Monologues is to voice the true and uncensored stories of today’s Alaska Native youth, in hope that they feel truly heard, understood and respected, exactly as they are.” ■

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GRANT REPORT

Marco Carter

Anchorage Day of the Dead / Dia de Muertos Cultural Celebration

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orn in Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico, Anchorage artist Indra Arriaga can’t remember missing a single Dia de Muertos, or Day of the Dead, celebration. Arriaga had no trouble finding Dia de Muertos celebrations, which honor the dead through feasts, story telling and offerings, after she moved from Veracruz to Texas, and then California.

But when Arriaga relocated to Anchorage in 2004, she searched for a local Dia de Muertos public event and found none. The next year, she did something about it.

In a gallery not much bigger than a walk-in closet, she shared her personal three-tiered Dia de Muertos altar, draped in white cloth and set with offerings and items representing those she missed — photographs, toys, tequila, fruit, bread, coffee — and paper

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marigolds and incense to help guide the dead back to visit the living.

Since then, Day of the Dead celebrations, organized and hosted by Arriaga and a core group that includes Christina Barber and Claudia and Ryan Rodriguez-Zinn, have grown into one of Anchorage’s most remarkable yearly cultural events.

Last November 2, with the help of a $1,700 Alaska Humanities Forum minigrant, Arriaga and the group presented the eighth annual Day of the Dead at Out North Contemporary Art House, featuring food, music, performances and altars created by artists, community members, hospice workers and others. The event drew more than 400 people.

“It was the most packed I’ve ever seen Out North,” Arriaga said. “All ages, all colors and all sizes.”

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A concurrent First Friday show at the Alaska Humanities Forum exhibited shoebox-sized Dia de Muertos altars created by Begich Middle School students, and works by several local artists.

Just as Day of the Dead celebrations in Mexico vary in regional flavor, Anchorage’s is like no other, having evolved over the years into a rich multicultural festival. The last one included Tlingit songs and Taiko drummers along with a mariachi band, storytelling and Mexican folkloric dancing.

“It’s grown from one altar to 20, from no performances to many performances,” said Arriaga, who has a master’s degree in political science on top of showing her works from New York to the Anchorage Museum of History and Art. “It’s different every year. That’s one of the nice things about it. People participate when they feel they need to.”

Death is one thing every person on the planet has in common, she said. It transcends cultural boundaries.

“The beautiful thing about this event is that it’s a living event, it’s going to adapt to wherever it’s held. It makes perfect sense for this to reflect the community, which, let’s face it, is not all Mexican.”

Traditionally, the Day of the Dead is when the souls of the departed come back from the beyond to join families and friends in the land of the living. That explains why the whimsical skeleton figures associated with the day are dancing, riding bicycles and playing in mariachi bands. In some parts of Mexico, families gather in cemeteries to share food and decorate graves with candles, feathers and thousands of marigold petals arranged in patterns, their scent luring spirits back to their loved ones.

Marco Carter

“The beautiful thing about this event is that it’s a living event, it’s going to adapt to wherever it’s held.” — INDRA ARRIAGA Day of the Dead can be traced back at least 3,000 years to Aztec and Mayan times. Originally, it fell on the ninth month of the Aztec solar calendar, and festivities lasted the better part of a month, with the goddess Mictecacihuatl, the Lady of Death, presiding. Spanish conquistadors didn’t approve. In an attempt to convert indigenous people to Catholicism, the festival was moved to the beginning of November to coincide with All Saints and All Souls days.

The date may have changed but the meaning didn’t.

“We don’t necessarily think that when a person is dead, they’re gone,” Arriaga said. “You can die, your body can die, your soul can leave. But the final death is when nobody thinks of you anymore, when you’re no longer remembered.

That’s why this holiday is so important.

It’s cheating death a little bit.” ■

Marco Carter

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DONOR PROFILE

WHY I GIVE

Anne Hanley

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AKH F DON OR SIN C E 1995

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the Alaska Humanities Forum because the humanities allow us to connect our past with our future by telling the stories of people who came ahead of us.

SUPPORT

I don’t believe the arts should be divorced from our daily lives, and the Alaska Humanities Forum works to integrate not only the arts but also history and culture and language. Every year I’m interested in seeing all the various projects that people across the state undertake with help from the humanities forum, whether films or public events or archival work or school programs, it’s always an impressive range of effort.”

NNE HANLEY moved with her husband to Fairbanks from San Francisco in 1976.

Their plan was to stay one year. But Alaska has a way of luring young adventurers into permanent residency. In 2002, Hanley became the first playwright to be named Alaska State Writer Laureate. Today she still lives in Fairbanks.

Her most recent play is The Winter Bear. It’s about an abused and neglected teenage boy named Shadow from a village in the Interior. He’s contemplating suicide until he’s sent to live in a remote cabin with legendary Athabascan elder Sidney Huntington, who mentors him in using traditional culture to transform his despair into courage. Ultimately the two must face a deadly winter bear – one that hunts all winter rather than hibernates.

The Winter Bear was a hit last summer at the AKHFsupported Last Frontier Theatre Conference in Valdez. It has also been performed in recent years in Anchorage and Fairbanks during the annual Alaska Federation of Natives convention, as well as in Galena, a village on the Yukon River, about 270 air miles east of Fairbanks. Galena is home to Huntington, author of the classic Alaska memoir Shadows on the Koyukuk: An Alaskan Native’s Life Along the River.

Hanley spent considerable time with Huntington while she wrote The Winter Bear. The play exists “due entirely to the generosity of Sidney Huntington, who was willing to expose painful parts of his life to help others,” she said.

Three of Huntington’s sons committed suicide. Hanley said the goal of The Winter Bear is to use the power

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of storytelling to help change “the climate of fear and hopelessness that breeds suicide by changing the way young Alaska Natives see themselves and the way the wider culture sees them – not as helpless victims, but as heroes with the potential to turn their lives around despite incredible odds and powerful forces that lay in wait to destroy them.”

She was interviewed for this article on the eve of a two-week tour in May of The Winter Bear to other Interior villages. The tour was funded by $150,000 in grants from The Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium and Tanana Chiefs Conference. Hanley is also planning and fundraising for tours of the play to villages across the state along with a riverboat tour in 2014 to Upper, Middle and Lower Yukon villages.

For more information visit www.winterbearproject.com.

When you were Alaska State Writer Laureate you once said “We are all writers.” What did you mean by that?

I think too often we have a tendency to categorize people when it comes to creativity. This person is a writer.

That person is a sculptor. She is a dancer. He is a painter.

One of the aspects I love about Alaska is that I don’t find there is such a strong urge to create distinctions here. I have friends who do artwork and they raise chickens and they have jobs at the university and they’re serious dancers. I love the blend of things that people put together to define themselves in Alaska. I don’t think it’s that way so much in the Lower 48, where there’s far more stratifica-

A scene from the June 2012 production of The Winter Bear at the Last Frontier Theatre Conference.

Algiene

tion or segregation of the arts that I don’t find in Alaska.

As to writing and my saying that everyone is a writer, that goes to my belief that everybody has something worthwhile to express, and they have the right and the ability to express themselves by writing, and they ought to be able to develop that talent and to be able to use it at those certain times in their lives when it’s really important, whether that’s writing a love letter or creating a stand-up comedy routine or simply writing a piece to tell people, “This is who I am.”

We all have that need to express ourselves and to tell our stories, so in that sense we’re all writers.

Per capita, Alaska is home to at least as many great writers as any other state. Why do you think that is?

I think first of all there are simply a lot of extraordinary people in Alaska in general, so out of that comes a lot of extraordinary writers. We have great writers in Alaska because we have people with great lives. They come here to challenge themselves in a lot of ways, and they do so, and they write about it. For that reason they have a lot more to say than many writers in other states.

There’s an old joke in Hollywood that if there’s a really interesting news feature story in the Los Angeles Times on a Sunday, by Friday there will screenplays all over town based on that story. And that’s because, frankly, a lot of writers in a place like Hollywood don’t have very interesting source material to draw on from their own lives. Whereas in Alaska the writers have real stories.

Their own stories.

I’ve always felt that people outside of Alaska tend to look at Alaska writing as a regional kind of writing, when in fact I think there is great literature coming out

of Alaska by writers who place a premium on the values of self-reliance and humility, which aren’t on the front burner for writers in a lot of other places where amenities are more important than seasons and the land.

Why do you write?

I write because when I write I can ask questions about what I want to know. I can explore an issue, or try to get inside the life of someone who’s very different than me. Writing allows me to try to become that person. And that’s an incredible privilege and a great responsibility.

Also, writing is always simplifying for me. It’s always about making things simpler and getting down to the real stuff. Sometimes, often times, it’s very hard to do that in the rest of your life.

What were the greatest challenges for you in getting inside the life of Sidney Huntington to write The Winter Bear?

Shadows on the Koyukuk has always been just about my favorite book. Whenever people ask me, “Oh, I have to read one book about Alaska, the real Alaska, what should I read?” I definitely suggest Shadows on the Koyukuk. So I knew a lot of Sidney’s stories long before I started writing [The Winter Bear]. But when I thought about writing a play about Sidney, he’s just had so many incredible incidents in his life that I thought, “Oh, I’m going to end up with sort of a Masterpiece Theater-type plot,” you know, incident to incident to incident.

Always with a play, you want to find that singular theme or motivation where you can get to the heart of what’s really most important to a person. And I felt that with Sidney, mentoring young people was the central theme that he’d carried through his life, because he was helped and mentored when he was young. Sidney’s mother died when was still a little boy, and his dad was often gone, so it was people along the river [ed. note: Koyukuk River] who brought him up. People along the river really looked out for Sidney and helped him, both Native and white people. And in turn he then took on mentoring and helping young people as a primary responsibility in his life.

How did you get from deciding on the central theme of Sidney as mentor to creating the purely fictional character of Shadow?

Once I’d decided, “Well, what I really want to talk about is Sidney being a mentor,” it was a pretty quick

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“When you’re dealing with a subject like suicide, you can’t just send a DVD of the play to a village.”

— ANNE HANLEY

to me about his three sons who committed suicide. His daughter was there, and she was amazed, because their committing suicide was just not a subject that Sidney ever talked about. And I was very affected by that, because here was this icon, and also just a really tough guy, who was still so profoundly grief-stricken at the deaths of his sons who had killed themselves.

What are the strengths of live theater in addressing such a painful and complex issue as suicide?

step to creating this fictional young man, and it was important for me to have the character be purely fictional, to be a sort of composite character representing the great disaffection among young Native men.

I’ve often found in writing plays that it’s the structure thing that takes the most time. Once you get that down everything falls into place around it, like finding two puzzle pieces that fit together. With The Winter Bear, finding the piece about Sidney mentoring a young boy named Shadow was like that for me. Once those pieces were in place I was like, “Okay, now I can go with that.”

Creating their fictional relationship not only freed me but and also made the story, Sidney’s story, more compelling to young people, which is what I wanted.

What led you to write a play about Sidney Huntington in the first place?

It all started in 2008 with a group of young men in Fairbanks called Diigi Naii, who formed a sort of loose suicide awareness and prevention group, because they were really sick of so many suicides occurring among young people close to them. They held dances and rap events.

One of their members happened to be reading Shadows on the Koyukuk, and they came up with the idea of doing a play based on Sidney’s life. I heard these kids talking about this concept on the radio and I called them right away and said, “Well, who’s writing this play?” And they said, “Oh, we thought we’d all get together and sort of do it as a group effort.” And I said, “This is Sidney Huntington we’re talking about. This has to be done carefully, and is to be done right.” I volunteered myself. That’s how it got started.

What do you remember most vividly about meeting Sidney for the first time?

We were standing in front of a wall with pictures of all his children, and I was kind of asking him about the photos one by one. When we got to one of the pictures of one of his sons, he just started crying, and then he opened up

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When you’re dealing with a subject like suicide, you can’t just send a DVD of the play to a village. It’s not the same thing as presenting live theater, and then being able to sit down and have a conversation between the actors and the audience.

In 2010, we were scheduled to put on The Winter Bear in Galena. Just a few days before we were to arrive, a young man from Galena, 21 years old, committed suicide. I got a call from Sidney’s daughter, Agnes, who’d been setting up The Winter Bear in Galena and she said, “I don’t know if you should come. I don’t how people will react.” But we felt we really had to go ahead with the show, so we went, not knowing what to expect.

We put on the play and wound up having this incredible conversation with the people of the town. They were distraught, and they were ready to look at the issue of suicide in a new way, and to propose and consider new solutions, and to have a discussion they might not have engaged in with the same level of openness before. A number of people in our cast described experiences with suicidal feelings themselves, or talked about a close family member who’d committed suicide.

We were able to be together as people and use The Winter Bear as a catalyst for a very important discussion. You can’t do that in the same way with a public service advertisement or a lecture or a DVD. Live theater also predates DVDs by a few thousand years. It has the power of tradition.

Right. It’s real storytelling, and real storytelling is an oral tradition. And in a way, books and every other medium is a degradation of that real storytelling, because when you tell a story directly to a person, you’re tailoring that story for their specific, individual needs. So if you’re telling a story about hunting, it’s because they’re going to go out and hunt, so they’re eager for that knowledge and you’re eager to tell them your wisdom. That is powerful communication and really, writing it all down and putting it in a book or in a movie is a very distant sort of thing compared to that kind of storytelling. ■

Your support makes all the difference

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A LASKA HUMANITIES FORUM we tell the stories that define the culture, history and people of Alaska.

T THE

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

FRIENDS

Dot & Linne Bardarson Mary Frances Barker Brian Barnes Marsha E Bennett Barbara Brown George W. Brown Brenda L Dates Campen Ryan Choron Blanche Crandall James Culp Marie H. Darlin Richard & Nora Dauenhauer Ana Dittmar Louise Driscoll Sherry Eckrich Ann Fienup-Riordan Kay F. Gajewski Louise H. Gallop Clifford J. Groh, Sr. Anne Hanley Michael Hawfield Genevieve V Holubik Kelly Hurd Charles Huss Alice Johnstone Martha & Brett Jokela Barbara Karl Jun & Chiyo Kawakami Terrence Kelly J. Allen Kemplen Nina Kemppel Lynndeen Knapp Carolyn Sue Kremers Kyle A. Lewis Nancy Lord Mildred M. Martin

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 undersatand 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.

Kathrin McCarthy.

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GRANT REPORT

“People kept approaching us and saying, ‘I’m so glad these stories are finally getting told.’”

— MARIE ACEMAH

Kodiak’s Filipino Community Stories

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hen Marie Acemah moved to Kodiak three years ago so her son could grow up “in paradise,” she could easily see that Filipino Americans were an integral and vibrant part of the Kodiak Island community. That came as no surprise, since they comprise about 35 percent of Kodiak’s population.

What did surprise Acemah was how little documentation there was of the history and legacy of Filipino Americans working and living in Kodiak, a presence that dates back to the late 1800s.

As curator of education for the Baranov Museum, Acemah decided to help fix that. Through the museum, she proposed the “Kodiak’s Filipino Community Stories” project to the Alaska Humanities Forum. The Forum awarded the museum an $8,500 general grant in 2012.

In addition to her curatorial work Acemah is a multi-media artist and educator, and executive director of Media Action, an Alaska-based, culturalmedia nonprofit group. Its awardwinning film workshops for youth are offered throughout the state.

To get “Kodiak’s Filipino Community Stories” off the ground, Acemah and Media Action colleagues (and

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sisters) Hanna and Heather Craig allied with the Kodiak Island Borough School District and Kodiak Historical Society. The result was the creation of a two-week, intensive, for-credit, summer class for middle and high-school students in digital storytelling, with the mission of telling various pieces of Kodiak’s Filipino story.

Last summer, students chose topics ranging from discrimination to politics. They dug through Kodiak Daily Mirror and museum archives, and gathered historical photographs.

They conducted interviews with community members, Skyped with sources in the Philippines and conducted a video teleconference with Sen. Mark Begich, specifically for seventh-grader Marina Cummiskey’s project on the controversial J-1 work-visa program for foreigners. The students leaned the art of visual composition, wrote researchbased scripts, gathered footage, did storyboarding, edited film and spliced in audio to create their films, which average around six minutes each.

Among the films is “Remembering the Workers,” by seventh-grader Rey Jacob Roy, which outlines the segregation and other discrimination endured

by Filipino cannery workers, a story told through the lens of the NEFCO

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(New England Fish Company) vs.

Domingo court case, filed in the early 1980s against the Uganik Cannery.

“Filipinos in Politics,” by sophomore Jonas Anderson, explores the rise of Filipino community members in local politics, and includes interviews with former and current Kodiak City Council members.

“Education — The Filipino Experience in Kodiak,” by sophomore Blake James, takes on the Filipino community’s role in K-12 education.

“Over the last century, Filipino Americans have made countless rich contributions to Kodiak’s culture, economy and politics that have been grossly undocumented,” Acemah wrote to Forum by email from Northern Uganda, where she’s working on another film project. “Leading youth history projects on minority communities is a kind of social activism.

The youth and community are forced to think about class, race, privilege at the same time as documenting vital stories.”

Two hundred people showed up for the project’s debut screening. And in October, in honor of Filipino American History Month, the Baranov Museum hosted a reception showcasing highlights of the stories produced by

The canning line inside a Kodiak cannery in the 1940s.

Kodiak students interview the president of the Filipino-American Association of Kodiak, Mary Guilas-Hawver.

Kodiak Historical Society

the student filmmakers. The event also included a Filipino feast with bibingka, lumpia, pancit and other traditional dishes.

“The response has been overwhelmingly positive from the Kodiak community,” Acemah wrote. “People kept approaching us and saying, ‘I’m so glad these stories are finally getting told.’”

The student films are part of the Baranov Museum’s permanent collection, available for viewing via a touchscreen kiosk, which the AKHF grant helped purchase. The films can also be viewed online at: www.YouTube.com/ BarMuse. A gallery of photos from the project can be viewed www.flickr.com/ photos/baranovmuseum ■

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T’aakaa wsixixi heen x’eeshaa kat yax yatee Like a dropped bucket of water, Kaxeel’ Trouble splatters, Idakat kaa xoot koodach’eeshch Hitting everyone.

— Tlingit Proverb

Macbeth Tour Inreach Guide

“PAINTED ON THE BOX DRUM suspended above the stage are the figures of Raven and a human. Raven’s tongue connecting with the human’s represents the transference of power. It also can be seen as representing the Tlingit belief in the tremendous power of words. Words can hurt and they can heal, or be raised to the level of art as we see in the works of Shakespeare.”

— From Macbeth to Moieties: Shakespeare’s Macbeth Study Guide

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ransposing Shakespeare’s darkest tragedy — the tale of a murderous Scottish lord who chooses evil as a way to attain power — to the Tlingit culture of Southeast Alaska might sound far-fetched, but Juneau’s Perseverance Theatre did just that in 2004 with great success.

The play’s director, Anita MaynardLosh, spent 11 years in Hoonah. The more she learned of the Tlingit culture, the more connections she drew with Macbeth. “I can best describe the idea for this production as the creation of an original world, one that takes the plot, characters and language from Shakespeare while using symbolism, values and imagery based on the culture of Southeast Alaska’s indigenous people,” wrote Maynard-Losh. The production, she added, “is in no way meant to be a realistic depiction of life in 18th Century Southeastern Alaska, 11th Century Scotland, or Elizabethan England, but establishes a kind of alternate universe which combines elements of all of those. Or, as one of the actors said, ‘just imagine the Tlingit conquered Scotland and took over’.”

Jeffrey Herrmann was Perseverance Theatre’s producing director from 1999 to 2007. Now managing director of Wooly Mammoth Theatre Company, he spoke to the Forum from his Washington D.C. office where he keeps a poster from the 2004 production on proud display.

“At the very end there’s a big fight between Macbeth and Macduff and instead of swords they go off stage and get ready for battle. They come back onstage to enact the fight holding drums, and the fight was done as a drum battle, incorporating drumming from the Tlingit culture,” Herrmann recalled. “I remember the sound and physicality of it all, and the innovative approach to that scene. That’s what really sticks out for me.”

Under Herrmann’s watch, Perseverance Theatre received a $1,000 Alaska Humanities Forum mini grant

FROM THE ARCHIVES

to develop “From Macbeth to Moieties: Shakespeare’s Macbeth Study Guide” for students and teachers in association with their January 2004 production of Macbeth, which was performed by an all-Alaska Native cast of actors. A subsequent mini grant for $2,000 was awarded in 2005 when the production toured Alaska. The study guide was distributed free of charge to 375 teachers serving 7,500 Alaskan students at performances in Hoonah, Kotzebue, Sitka, Valdez and Anchorage.

The guide offers a synopsis and history of the play, and then a section about the Perseverance Theatre production and the extraordinary opportunity “to break down stereotypes, expand the definition of both Shakespearean performance and Native American art, celebrate the connections between diverse cultures, and create a uniquely Alaskan theatrical interpretation of a classic European text.”

Maynard-Losh explains the impetus behind her version. “The connections between Scotland at the time of the play’s setting and important aspects of Tlingit culture are many,” the guide explains, citing clan systems, connection with the supernatural, fierce warfare, and a value system that places the needs of the group over the needs of the individual.

The guide also includes a section on common phrases that are Shakespearian in origin (“salad days,” “green-eyed jealousy,” “knitted brows”), a detailed explanation of the matrilineal structure of Tlingit clans, and details of the production set designs, including a traditional Tlingit long house and the “Double, double, toil and trouble” witches’ cauldron portrayed as a potlatch dish. There are classroom exercises on distilling dialogue down to summaries, paraphrasing Shakespeare to modern English, and lyrics to an original Tlingit song composed for the coronation of Macbeth.

“We performed for a lot of school groups and did a lot of in school performances where the guide was distributed to students,” Herrmann recalls. “The kids loved it. We really highlighted the fights and drumming in the excerpts we performed. It was very powerful for these kids to see Alaska Native performers making Shakespeare their own. Whenever you honor somebody’s culture they are always appreciative of that effort.”

The attention the production garnered in Alaska was noticed on the national theater scene as well. In March of 2007, it debuted at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian with a few key changes. In Alaska performances the majority of the play was in English. During the week of shows at the museum, the production shifted to primarily Tlingit language.

When characters went against Tlingit values, such as putting individual gain above the good of the whole, they spoke in English. Otherwise the actors spoke in Tlingit with English subtitles.

Production composer George Holly, who also played the role of Lennox, told the Boston Globe at the time that Macbeth in Tlingit was much more than “a premiere of a different take on

a Shakespearean play; it’s a premiere of a language on the world stage.”

“This was a show that could only be produced in Alaska and only by a theater like Perseverance,” Herrmann said. “I remember [then former Alaska Humanities Forum president] Ira [Perman] and how excited he was about the concept and how honored he seemed to be on behalf of the Alaska Humanities Forum to be participating in this way. There has been a long association between Perseverance and the Alaska Humanities Forum, and this was one of the real highlights of that partnership.” ■

THE ALASKA HUMANITIES FORUM has been making grants to organizations and individuals for humanities-related projects throughout Alaska since 1972.

This recurring feature in Forum takes a detailed look at some of the more than 1,500 books, films, oral histories, exhibits, symposiums and other grant projects that were accomplished through AKHF funding, which in most cases was a “regrant” from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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The Last Road North P H OTO GR A P HS

BY B EN H U F F

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(page 26) mile 367: road and pipeline, 2009 (above) mile 316: waiting trucks, Chandalar Shelf, 2011 (right) mile 286: Steven and Alice, 2011 mile 173: outhouse, Finger Mountain Wayside, 2009

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(above) mile 249: Kevin, 2011 (right) mile 56: Griz, 2009 mile 175: sign, Old Man Camp, 2008

(front cover) mile 330: musher’s truck, 2011

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The Witness AN INTERVIEW WITH BEN HUFF

LASKA ROUTE 11, the James W. Dalton Highway, is known colloquially to Alaskans as the North Slope Haul Road, or just the Haul Road for short.

It was built in 1974 to be a supply route for the TransAlaska Pipeline and the Prudhoe Bay oil fields. From Livengood, Alaska, a tiny settlement about 80 miles north of Fairbanks, the Haul Road points north 414 miles to Deadhorse. Unpaved, it’s one of the most rugged, isolated and treacherous roads in North America.

The Haul Road’s few road signs bear the nicknames given to certain sections and features by truckers in decades past: the Roller Coaster; Oil Spill Hill; Beaver Slide; Oh Shit Corner.

The Haul Road crosses the Yukon River, the Brooks Range, the Arctic Circle, and the Continental Divide as it parallels the oil pipeline through spectacular wilderness, cutting the lone manmade groove between the boundaries of national parks and wildlife refuges

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to either side. These include Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge, Gates of the Arctic National Park and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). It passes through seasonally inhabited Prospect Creek Camp, site of the coldest temperature ever recorded in the United States: 80 degrees below zero on January 4, 1971. With grades as steep as 15 percent, the Haul Road’s altitude ranges from just above sea level to 4,739 feet at the top of Atigun Pass.

Featured in the History channel series Ice Road Truckers and the British Broadcasting Corporation show World’s Most Dangerous Roads, the Haul Road is driven by approximately 150 to 250 large trucks every day. Since opening to the public in 1994, the northernmost road in Alaska has also drawn adventur-

ous souls from all over the state, the Lower 48 and abroad. Few, if any, have driven it as often as professional photographer Ben Huff.

Roughly two years after moving to Fairbanks with his wife in 2005, Huff decided on a whim to drive up the Haul Road to the Arctic Circle, which is about 115 miles north of Manley Hot Springs. Driving back from that day trip, Huff yearned to drive the Haul Road again as soon as possible, this time all the way up to the shore of the Arctic Ocean, and to make photographs along the way.

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NCE WASN’T ENOUGH. Huff developed a serious Haul Road habit.

During the next five years, he drove it dozens of times, in all seasons, sleeping in his truck under the midnight sun and in noon darkness.

“The Last Road North,” a solo exhibit of his resulting photography, opened at the Alaska State Museum in Juneau earlier this year. Huff is currently at work on a book of photography and text of the same title, and shopping for a publisher.

This issue of Forum presents the print debut of a selection of photographs from “The Last Road North” on pages 26-31. Huff granted Forum the following interview in April.

“I went looking for the frontier that was promised and found a complex landscape, and a road that served as a physical and psychological line between wilderness and progress,” Huff writes of “The Last Road North.”

“I went, like the others, to drive as far as I could drive. To see for myself. I hitched my wagon to the great American need to point my wheels toward the Western horizon. When I ran out of West, I went North.”

Driving back to Fairbanks in summer of 2007 during your first trip on the Haul Road, what was going through your mind? What about it captured your interest enough to spark this project?

The Arctic Circle is a monumental geographic line, but it’s also very nondescript, and photographically not all that interesting. So on the way back to Fairbanks, I was really struck more by what I hadn’t seen than what I had — what does the Brooks Range look like, or the North Slope, the oil fields? Where were all those trucks going and why were they in such a hurry to get there?

Anytime you’re on the Haul Road you’re encountering trucks, lots of trucks, that are driving that particular road for one specific reason: they’re going all the way up. Very few vehicles on the Haul Road are going just part way, so turning around at the Arctic Circle, long before reaching the oil fields, felt like cutting short a mission.

So the original inspiration was really just this romanticism of imagining what was further up the road, wrapped up in this need to drive and see what there is to see.

Also, I’ve always driven long distances. I’ve driven all over the Midwest, all over the West. Being in a car and driving long hours has just always been part of my existence, and the Haul Road was the first place in Alaska I found that scratched that itch.

Once you’d driven the Haul Road two or three times, why did you go back? What did you find so interesting about a dirt and gravel road in the middle of nowhere?

I think mainly it was the conflict inherent to the relationship between the road’s purpose and the path

HE ONES I was really drawn to were the ones who were driving the Haul Road for the same sort of reasons I was — to see what’s up there.”

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Ben Huff makes a photograph on the Haul Road. Dave Hylton

it travels. The Haul Road is totally unique. There’s no other road like it anywhere in the world. It crosses the Arctic Circle, the Brooks Range, and the Yukon River; it traverses the heart of some of the most pristine and visually striking wilderness in the world, and it does all this for one reason and one reason only: oil.

That’s a fascinating dichotomy to me. I was always very aware of the fact that I was burning a ton of oil driving up and down this long road doing something that in the end of the day may not be worth a damn thing. At the end of the Haul Road I could sit in my car at the North Slope, burning oil to stay warm and comfortable, and watch the Porcupine caribou herd through my windshield.

How absurd is that? How fortunate, but also how completely ridiculous. That dichotomy, that absurdity, is representative of the complicated relationship between wilderness and oil in Alaska that is symbolized

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by the Haul Road, and that I wanted to sort of figure out and puzzle through as best I could in making these photographs.

How many trips did you make up and down the Haul Road?

Unfortunately I didn’t keep precise records. I wish now I would have. Practically every weekend for about five years, I was trying to head up the Haul Road. I made a push north I’d say about every two weeks.

Sometimes it was just a day trip where I only made it as far as the Yukon River [ed. note: about 55 miles up from the southern terminus]. But I made it to Deadhorse, all the way up, at least 10 times. And I turned around at Coldfoot, which is about halfway up, just south of the Brooks Range, about 20 other times, so I covered a lot of miles.

How did you decide when and what to photograph along the road?

What I was really looking for, paramount to everything else, was a sort of melancholy, after-the-boom, quiet feeling to the work. There aren’t any radio stations to listen to when you’re driving the Haul Road, and your cell phone doesn’t work, so it can be a very lonely environment when you’re by yourself, in a similar but at the same time very different way than when you’re hiking through a vast landscape. You’re alone with your thoughts, but engine noise is your constant companion, and you can’t let your mind drift completely, because it’s a challenging road to drive. It’s exhausting, and I kept coming back to wanting to make photographs that captured this certain road-weary, almost regretful feeling I found myself and others experiencing on the Haul Road, asking myself, “What does that feeling look like? What are the colors of that?

What are the shapes?”

Also, when I first started making photographs for this project I didn’t know exactly what I wanted, but I knew what I absolutely did not want, which was photographs of big, wide-open, mythical, sweeping landscapes that romanticized the view from the Haul Road. I didn’t want that because it was too easy.

What do you mean by “too easy?”

Well, the reality is, when you’re driving the Haul Road, the oil pipeline is basically either on your right or on your left, so it’s very easy to pull over, stand on the side of the road opposite the pipeline, and make a pretty, tourist-y photograph of a vast Alaska landscape that looks very similar to what you’d get if you were standing in the middle of the Brooks Range, 200 or 300 miles from the nearest road, vehicle or structure. I had no interest in letting myself or the viewer

off the hook by making photographs of vast, pristine landscapes where there’s a road and a pipeline just out of sight. I wanted the viewer to always know and for myself to be always rooted in the fact that even if you drive the Haul Road through all this incredibly beautiful wilderness, and you reach the edge of the Arctic Ocean, the fact is you drove there. I wanted that uneasy awareness to always be simmering in the background. That’s why, even with the pure landscapes I made for “The Last Road North,” there’s always a little bit of road showing at the bottom of the photograph.

There’s always at least a little touch of something in them that’s manmade.

The photos in “The Last Road North” were taken year-round. How is the Haul Road different in the dead of winter versus the summer, other than the obvious differences in weather?

Surprisingly, in a lot of ways it’s a lot easier to drive the Haul Road in the winter. It’s certainly faster, because the road doesn’t get all rutted up in the winter.

There are no washboards or potholes. And when it’s really cold, like 20 or 30 below, the surface actually gets kind of tacky, which is a safer way to drive. The flip side, of course, is that it’s often so cold on the road in the winter that if you get in trouble you can really be in trouble. But just the physical act of driving the road in the winter is actually kind of great. It’s serene, like you’re cruising along in a toboggan, even though it’s important to always keep in mind there’s danger there, lurking.

Did you ever go off the road or crash?

I did. I was very, very lucky in how it turned out.

One of the first winter trips I made, I ditched the car off the road into a snow bank in the middle of winter

KNEW what I absolutely did not want, which was photographs of big, wide-open, mythical, sweeping landscapes that romanticized the view from the haul road. I didn’t want that because it was too easy.”

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Where did you sleep? Did you camp?

I tent camped some in the summer, but I slept in my vehicle. In the winter I’d just have tons of sleeping bags and I’d find a place to pull over and go to sleep until the cold woke me up a couple of hours later, then I’d run the engine until the interior warmed up, and I’d just keep repeating that cycle, and of course burning more oil, until I felt like I could start driving again. It wasn’t the most restful sleep, but it did enable me to check every hour or two to see if the light was doing anything interesting, so that was a plus.

The people you met and photographed on the road whose portraits are part of “The Last Road North” — who were they? What were they doing there?

The ones I was really drawn to were the ones who were driving the Haul Road for the same sort of reasons I was — to see what’s up there. To bear witness.

Initially I was making photographs of the guys who work on the trucks and drive the semis on the Haul Road, and they are really interesting people in a lot of cases, but they were also there primarily to do a job, and some of them really didn’t want to be there at all.

They were on the road because a paycheck was waiting for them at the end.

I became more and more interested in making photographs of the people who were bumping along the road more or less just because they could, who were headed north for a reckoning of the space and the road for themselves. The seekers. I’d ask them why they were there and the most common reply was, “I don’t really know.” They couldn’t articulate a clear reason, but the light and the landscape and the moose they just saw were reason enough.

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Dennis Witmer

in February. It was dark, and I’d probably been behind the wheel for longer than I should have. I came over a high point and then around a corner and there was a snowdrift completely across the road that caught me by surprise.

Fortunately, a convoy of semis passed by, and one of the drivers spotted my car off the road. He popped me out, no problem. It was amazing how nonchalant he was about it, while I was a bit out of my head.

The act of going off the road, though, helped me put the road itself in a different perspective, in that I felt a little less alien and a little more part of the tribe. I felt like I’d earned a stripe in a way, like I was more a part of the culture of the road once I’d been confronted with these circumstances I couldn’t control and that at the time seemed pretty dire.

You describe the Haul Road as “a psychological barrier between wilderness and progress.”

How so?

First of all, I want to stress that this work’s not about politics and it’s not about oil. I didn’t want it to be too didactic because I don’t think that’s where the strength of the work resides. But I do also feel like the Haul Road for me really encompasses and represents a certain struggle between competing priorities that will determine the legacy of this state within the next 50 years.

On either side it’s bookended by state and national preserves and parks, wilderness spaces that are cut off from development, but that are the subject of a lot of pressure and political fights about whether to open them up for oil exploration. And there’s the Haul Road, driving straight up the middle of these lands, for the purpose of extracting oil from the North Slope.

The Haul Road is a bridge between the land we have left untouched and the land we are exploiting, and I don’t use that word exclusively in a derogatory way.

Just as I wanted to stay away from pristine landscapes, I also didn’t make photographs of pump stations or another heavy-handed images of infrastructure. I made very few photographs of the pipeline. I made very few photographs of the trucks. For the most part I wanted to stay away from the physical evidence of the industry but still allude to it in a way that reflects the ambiguity and internal conflict a lot of Alaskans feel when it comes to issues of wilderness versus resource extraction. I was always trying to pull back from being too specific, always trying to hit that sweet spot of photography, that gray area between fact and fiction that allows the viewer to come to their own conclusions.

In the end, I want my work to be read as sincere.

These photos as are as close as I know how. ■ www.huffphoto.com

PROGRAM NOTES

EDUCATOR CROSS-CULTUR AL IMM ERSION

Forum Holds First ECCI Alumni Gathering

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wo large whalebones arc in front of a frozen lake with authentic replicas of indigenous dwellings in the snowcap-wooded distance.

Dena’ina Athabascan people first settled this land many years ago. It is now home to the Alaska Native Heritage Center, and the ideal panoramic backdrop for the Alaska Humanities Forum’s first Educator Cross-Cultural Immersion (ECCI) program Alumni Gathering.

Attendees at the all-day event held Saturday, April 13 were greeted as they arrived by drumming, singing and dancing performed by the Acilquq Dancers. Many of the 75 teachers and staff members had not seen one another since they visited an Alaska Native culture camp as part of their ECCI experience, in some cases more than a decade ago.

Since the Educator Cross-Cultural Immersion program (ECCI) began in 2002 as part of the federally funded Rose Urban Rural Exchange program, the Forum has sent more than 340 teachers from urban school districts to 22 Alaska Native culture camps located across the state, from Anaktuvuk Pass to Sand Point to Kodiak to Klukwan.

Over the years, two key components of ECCI have remained constant: Alaska Native people willing to share their culture with teachers, and teachers committed to learning more about Alaska Native cultures in order to better serve their Alaska Native students.

ECCI teachers bring the knowledge they gain in culture camps back to their classrooms in the form of culturally responsive teaching strategies.

The ECCI Alumni Gathering was designed to re-inspire past participants while expanding their experience. Featured guests included Polly Andrews, a young Cup’ik woman who won the 2011 Alaska Native Oratory Society Statewide Competition. Andrews spoke of the meaningful work ECCI teachers are doing and reminded them of the importance of storytelling in Alaska Native teaching traditions. Martha Gould-Lehe, one of the founders of the Alaska Native Charter School, addressed developing curriculum for Alaska Native students.

Four ECCI alums demonstrated ways in which they have incorporated different learning and communication styles into their classrooms based on what they learned from working with elders

and youth in traditional camp settings.

Gwendolyn Holt, a teacher at Tyson Elementary in Anchorage, provided groups of teachers with bags containing ‘manipulatives’, items to create miniature fish drying racks, but no printed instructions. The members of each group had to work together to come up with a way to build their drying rack using string and sticks.

Participant Lori Chase, from West Valley in Fairbanks, spoke on the importance of stressing language preservation. Wasilla High teacher Carla Swick suggested that her peers bring elders and culture bearers into the classroom. She also gave an extensive list of Alaska Native authors and books as resources, from folklore to contemporary.

Dennis Drinka, a faculty member in the College of Business and Public Policy at UAA, spoke about providing a new rubric for his oral presentations — better allowing for silences and reflective thought — based on his culture camp experience in Allakaket last summer.

Each year, 30 ECCI teachers from the Fairbanks North Star Borough, Matanuska-Susitna Borough and Anchor-

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PROGRAM NOTES age School Districts, along with (in recent ECCI years) 10 faculty from University of Alaska Anchorage and Alaska Job Corps, embark on a journey that begins in Anchorage and then moves to the rural culture camps for gathering firsthand experiences and knowledge from Alaska Native elders, youth and local camp staff.

The program year culminates in a debrief session where participants unpack their experiences and share what they have learned with the whole group. For many teachers this is a rare opportunity to face personal challenges, stereotypes, and cultural misunderstandings.

The keynote speaker at the alumni gathering was Begich Middle School Principal Jeanne Fischer, a long-time supporter of the ECCI program, who praised the teachers for going beyond their comfort levels and examining their biases.

“You have accepted the challenge to bring back what you have learned to affect your practice,” Fischer said.

“There is power in your commitment... There is no better way for all of us to connect with others and to feel part of the larger society than to be grounded in, feel the vibrancy of, and build from our own cultures, backgrounds, and identities.

By traveling and learning in a new place, you have been inspired to learn and grow. In many ways, inspiration is the opposite of indifference. Inspiration drives us to care about something.”

The final event of the alumni gathering was a performance by members of AK Pride, a nonprofit arts organization for at-risk youth.

AK Pride founder Ma’o Tosi wore a pair of bright pink pumps, remarking that he’d just come from a fundraiser for a woman’s group that was called “Walk in Another’s Shoes.”

Tosi kept the pumps on, he said, because that theme struck him as perfectly appropriate for the work of ECCI teachers connecting our communities one teacher at a time. ■

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CR EATING CULTUR AL COMPETENCE OF RUR AL EAR LY CAR EER TEACHERS (C3)

C3 Showing Positive Results

T

HIS SUMMER , 30 newly hired teachers in two rural Alaska school districts will participate in the second year of the Forum’s groundbreaking C3 program.

This three-year pilot project, funded by the federal Alaska Native Education Program, seeks to improve teacher retention and student achievement in rural Alaska by providing new teaching hires with Alaska Native cultural orientation and immersion experiences at remote subsistence camps in their districts — a sort of crash course in rural Alaska and village life. (C3 also pairs teachers with mentors in the Alaska Statewide Mentor Project.)

Currently, C3 is focused within the Lower Kuskokwim and Northwest Arctic Borough School Districts. Fifteen teachers will spend 10 days at culture camps in each district, participating in traditional subsistence activities and experiencing cross-cultural learning and communication styles.

Retention of teachers who attended C3 camps last summer is encouraging: 27 out of 30 — 90 percent — are returning to districts that in recent years have averaged 80-83 percent retention of first-year teachers.

“After living and teaching in Northwest Alaska since the end of September, I think back to fish camp in Kiana and am very thankful for the experience. I am probably most grateful for learning some about the land and Inupiaq language. I valued walking/hiking on the tundra and learning the Iñupiaq words for various objects. Talking with and listening to [camp manager] Thomas Jackson, for example, taught me a great deal about tuttut (caribou) and how they walk on the tundra, making trails. This learning has transferred

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“After its first year, the C3 project is showing great results,” said Gary Baldwin, superintendent of the Lower Kuskokwim School District. “Teachers who participated seem to have a greater comfort in making the transition to village life, and they have bonded well with each other. I believe this experience has made them more successful in their first year, and will result in greater longevity with our district.”

Northwest Arctic Borough School District Assistant Superintendent Dr. Annmarie O’Brien said that despite last summer being one of the rainiest she can recall in the Northwest Arctic, where rain equals mosquitoes, “our new teachers treasured their C3 experience.”

“The attention to relationships and respecting other cultures, fundamentals of the C3 program, laid the foundation for a positive introduction to life in rural Alaska,” she said. “Not only did our new teachers bond with each other but they felt comfortable in their surroundings the moment they stepped off the plane. Best news of all: 88 percent signed on for a second year.”

Here’s what four teachers who participated in the first year of C3 had to say:

over to my teaching, as my students frequently line up on the “Caribou Trail” and walk like tuttut, one after another. Additionally, I am thankful for watching, learning, and participating in Eskimo singing and dancing. All in all, camp was a wonderful experience. I was exposed to many different activities and situations that helped me get a better understanding of Northwest Alaska and the Iñupiaq people who live there.”

Rachel Wheeler McQueen School, Kivalina

Running the Kobuk River on a day trip out of the C3 camp near Kiana, July 2012.

“When I look back on the Kiana camp, what stands out most for me is what I learned from the Native kids and the adults that were there. I had so much fun with the kids; they taught me how to play [the card game] Bong.

I was able to see them socialize and understand their humor is not so different from my own.

I loved seeing and hearing the Eskimo dancing and singing. It was beautiful and you could tell the kids loved it. I was able to understand what is important to them and am able to incorporate that into my lesson plans to help them learn more easily.

One of the most important insights that I gained was learning how their nonverbal communication works. It is swift and easily missed if you’re not paying close attention. If I would have come here not knowing any of that, I would most likely have been upset with the students for not answering me. I would have thought that they were ignoring me. In reality, the eyebrow raise means “yes” and the wrinkle of the nose means “no.” I catch myself doing it more and more each day I am here.”

Alaina Salo Buckland School, Buckland

“I think the one most valuable aspect of my C3 experience was simply the opportunity to become immersed in a culture that is so different than my own. The opportunity to be taken out of my comfort zone and be thrown into an environment that is so foreign allowed my learning curve for the Iñupiaq culture and of life in the region to rise exponentially. It was an unbelievably valuable experience that I will never forget.

Wyatt Moum Noorvik Elementary School, Noorvik

“The C3 experience gave me the confidence I needed to immerse myself in community activities, accept invitations, and feel comfortable eating the food and trying to learn the language. C3 helped me understand the importance of many Yup’ik cultural values that I see some new teachers ignore just because they don’t know.

The C3 experience gives new teachers an immense advantage from the perspective of mentally preparing them for the trials that they have ahead.”

Dana Olson Chaputnguak School, Chefornak

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Remnants N E W FI CTION

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BY

EOW YN IV E Y

ana was a little girl, memories just beginning to take hold, when she first saw the wild goats on the mountain. This is when they were still cloud wool, pulled from the sky, before they were blood and broken bone down a scree slide.

“Do you see them, Lana?” Her mother crouched beside her in the garden, her cotton skirt gathered about her legs, and pointed up the mountain. “Look there,” and Lana rested her cheek against the bare, outstretched arm and smelled warm skin and dust and onions. Her mother continued to point. “You see where the forest ends, where the green stops. Just above there, on the rocks.”

At first she saw only her mother’s hand. The dark spruce forest at the edge of the garden. The tall, rocky mountain. Then there was sun, blinding white in the sky.

“Oh, I see it! I see it!”

“No, love. Not the snow. Not at the very top. Bring your eyes down just a bit. There. Those are mountain goats.” And tiny white flecks formed on gray-blue stone.

“Let’s go see them,” Lana said.

“Oh, it is much too far. When you are bigger, maybe Papa will take you.”

For the rest of that August afternoon, Lana thought of nothing else. Her mother unearthed potatoes, turnips, and onions and gathered them in burlap sacks, and Lana sat at the garden gate and watched the tiny white spots in the arctic sun. She never imagined such creatures lived on her mountain – goats with wild blood.

More than anything she wanted to see one up close.

It looked to be such a pleasant climb, through mossy green pastures up to smooth cliffs. Not much farther than the meadow where she and her father, both with their knee-high boots and walking sticks, went to look for moose. If she could make her way to the meadow, surely she could go up the mountain. She’d leap along the cliffs, through the fog and snow, as if she had wild

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blood, too. The goats would come to her across the rocks, their shaggy white coats stirring in the wind, and she would stroke their muzzles, and maybe, if she were brave enough, she would climb upon their backs and ride them across the skyline.

“Lana, time to come in!”

Her mother stood in the shadow of the cabin door and tightened her apron at her waist.

“Is Papa coming home?”

“Not tonight, I’m afraid.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Perhaps.”

“And he’ll bring a caribou, won’t he? Can we cook some over the fire?”

“We’ll see.”

“Then he’ll take me to see the goats on the mountain?”

But her mother was already gone into the cabin. ◆

◆

◆

The land was hard, beaten by wind and lined in glacier silt. And it was narrow, as narrow as hand to mouth, so narrow Lana could see nothing at its end.

Even before she went to see the mountain goats, she knew she would leave Alaska someday. ◆

◆

◆

Her father had a funny, gentle way of beginning any conversation. A clearing of his throat. A pause.

“Well.” And then, “I’ve been thinking.” Then he’d smooth his short, white beard.

“Yes, Papa?”

Lana was 13 and beginning to know the limits of a life in a cabin beyond the train tracks, in the shadow of a mountain. But the goats had not lost their enchantment.

“You think maybe we should go after those billies?” her father asked. “You and me?”

“Really? We can go?”

“Sure. Sure we can.”

When the morning came, she was bleeding, only her second menstruation, and it ached in her pelvis and weighted her with a strange, new melancholy. She listened to the cold September rain splatter against the windowpane. Her father had started a fire in the

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woodstove, lit the lantern, and made her a cup of tea.

Their packs, bedrolls strapped across the top, were propped beside the door. She did not want to go. The mountain would be steep, and she would be cold and tired, and her father wouldn’t understand. She could stay home, beneath her quilt; her mother would bring her a hot water bottle and know everything without ever asking.

But Lana climbed out of bed, put her bare feet to the rough-cut wood floor, dressed in her loft bedroom above the kitchen, braided her long, blond hair, and climbed down the ladder. With her back to her father, she stuffed strips of cloth in the side pouch of her pack.

“Are you sure you want to go?” her mother asked.

“She’s a strong girl,” her father said, and handed Lana her rifle. “And you know how she’s always wanted to go after those goats.”

The mud sucked at their boots as they followed the log fence past the garden and through their yard in the damp gray. Lana gave one last wave to her mother, who watched from the kitchen window. In the spruce forest, they were buffered from the rain and wind, but still Lana hunched against the cold. The pack frame was stiff on her back and the rifle awkward at her side.

Her father led her through the trees, down into the moose meadow. They slopped through swampy water and jumped the deeper channels, balancing on one yellow-grass hummock after another. The rain slowed to an icy drizzle as they reached the foothills. Overhead, clouds trailed across the top of the mountain like strips of cloth caught in the wind. ◆

◆

◆

“And what is that thing, Robert? It looks like the hide of an abominable snowman.”

“No, no. It’s a mountain goat. Lana shot it herself, when she was just a girl.”

“Dear God — your wife?” The man looked from Lana to the woolly, white fur spread out in the apartment window seat.

They were celebrating Robert’s tenure at Seattle University. The man was Robert’s colleague in the mathematics department, and he had brought his fiancé, a finely chiseled woman with tailored slacks and a silk scarf at her throat. Lana had never met either of them before, and could not remember their names.

BY EOW Y N I V E Y

She poured more wine into the man’s glass, handed the woman an ashtray, and tried to smile like a hostess at ease in her own home.

“Lana grew up in Alaska, you know. And not in Anchorage or Sitka. In…” Robert snapped his fingers.

“You know — what was the name of that town where you lived?”

“Matanuska,” she said softly. Which wasn’t true either. It wasn’t really a town, and they didn’t live there.

They only went there for canned goods and catalog deliveries. How could she describe her home, the cabin and garden carved out of the earth, her mother smelling of onions and blueberries? Her Papa, old for as long as she could remember, his face scarred by frostbite? The sun shining on the mountain?

“And you brought that thing all the way down here with you?” The woman flicked her cigarette at the ashtray. “What on earth for?”

“Don’t you see?” the man said and laughed. “It’s her albatross. She’s doomed to carry it with her, wherever she goes.”

Lana felt her cheeks flush.

“It is an awful thing, isn’t it?” the woman said, gesturing with her cigarette toward the window seat.

“I’m sorry, dear. But really.”

“So is the territory up there as lawless as everyone...” the man began.

“Territory for not much longer,” the woman interrupted. “They’re seeking statehood, I hear.”

“How the hell do you form a state out of icebergs and Eskimos?” the man asked.

Lana didn’t speak up, and no one seemed to notice. She was relieved when the conversation turned elsewhere, to university politics and literature and psychoanalysis. This is what had drawn her here. The broadness of it all. People with questions and experiences and a desire to know the world. People who contemplated and debated, argued and then laughed and toasted each other with stemmed glasses. Robert and the woman discussed a new exhibit of Deeter Aube’s paintings in Seattle. The man offered Lana a cigarette, and when she politely declined, he told her about his travels through the tobacco country of the Deep South. She overheard Robert talking about Churchill’s resignation and Eisenhower’s ill health.

And then the man asked her about the nearby teaching college she had attended, asked if a certain profes-

sor was still there. As they talked, the sun descended to the horizon and its light poured across the Pacific Ocean and into the small apartment, where it glinted off wine bottles and earrings.

After the couple left, Lana put the glasses and hors d’oeuvre plates in the kitchen sink, emptied the ashtray, and went to the window seat. The sky and ocean were gone to the night, leaving just her reflection in the glass. She looked away from her own eyes, and rolled up the goat skin. She would hide it somewhere.

She went to the bedroom, knelt on the carpet, and slid it beneath the foot of their bed.

“I’ve received a letter from Mama,” she said. Robert was at his bureau, loosening his tie. “I don’t think she is well. It is too much work for her, without Papa. I was thinking, perhaps we could go…”

“She is always welcome here,” Robert said. He said it decisively, without warmth. Lana was 24 and knew she would not see her mother again. ◆

2

◆

There were no gentle pastures on the mountainside. As Lana followed her father through the September rain, she bruised her shins on alder boughs and snagged her hands on devil’s club spines. Down in the dark creek bottoms, she stepped over bear tracks in the mud.

For a time they followed a rocky, dry creek bed up the side of the mountain. It was easier than breaking through thick brush, but Lana had to walk with her eyes down, placing her feet carefully on the boulders so she wouldn’t trip. The pack threatened to topple her.

As she struggled over a fallen cottonwood tree, her father gave his hand and helped her across.

“You’ll be off somewhere, won’t you?” he asked.

Lana was surprised by the question. It had only recently occurred to her that there was a somewhere, and that she would, when she was much, much older, seek it out.

“I think so, Papa,” she said. “But not for a long time.”

He turned away and shifted the pack on his shoulders.

“It won’t be so long,” he said.

They walked in silence for a while. Lana looked at her father’s back and wondered if he was angry or hurt.

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He cleared his throat but didn’t break stride. “It was your mother,” he said. “She always was the smart one.

She said you had faraway eyes, even when you were a baby. She said you’d want to go farther than the train could take you.

“Soon as you were born, she started putting away some, just a bit here and there. Fur money when we could spare it. Then there was what she got when her folks died. I wish there was more, but it’ll be enough to get you somewhere, when the time comes.”

Lana felt just as she had when was three years old and wandered off into the forest alone. She had been following a chickadee as it flitted from spruce tree to birch branch, and she only wanted to look into its small black eyes. She knew that she was venturing farther than she should. When at last she stopped and looked back, she could not see the cabin or her mother. It was a terrifying, thrilling sensation.

“I don’t have to go right away, do I?” Her father laughed his rare, gentle laugh.

“No, Lana. You don’t have to go right away.”

They walked in silence for some time, and when her father spoke again, she could only just hear him.

“Me and your mother – we’ll miss you.” ◆

◆

◆

Lana did not tell Robert when she first learned she was pregnant. She should have been joyous. It was what they had planned, and she knew Robert would be pleased, but instead she curled up in bed with her clothes still on and slept all afternoon. That is how she spent the next few days, sleeping whenever she could with the curtains drawn and the apartment silent.

Perhaps it was her mother’s death. She had not traveled to Alaska when she got the news. Robert said it would be a financial hardship to send her, and Lana did not argue. In some way she was frightened to return to a place still so raw and wild in her mind. But as she slept through the days, she dreamed of the old cabin and her mother and father. She dreamed she picked cranberries on the tundra while her father watched for caribou. She dreamed she snowshoed along the river. She dreamed of northern lights and bluebells and salmon fillets in the smokehouse, of a cottonwood-scented breeze in her hair and goat meat on her tongue. Hand to mouth. Often she cried in her sleep.

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The rest of the pregnancy she searched. The urge was strong, as if something depended on it. She walked to the butcher’s stand in Pike Place Market and surreptitiously sniffed the cuts of beef until she was caught.

“We don’t sell tainted meat here,” the man barked at her. She did not understand it herself, so left without explanation.

Another day she walked through the rain, following something unseen through the streets of Seattle.

It was faint in the ocean air. She walked past department stores and boardwalks until she came to a little wooded creek. There she found a cottonwood sapling.

She took a handful of the sticky leaves and crushed them in her palms and breathed in their fragrance.

But it wasn’t enough.

When they brought the baby home from the hospital, she waited until the next day, when Robert returned to work, before she pulled the hide out from under the bed. She was still sore and shaken from the delivery, but she crouched on the living room floor and unrolled it in a patch of afternoon sunlight. As she lay there, her son cradled in goat wool, she kissed his tiny, soft ear and wished that her breath could be like the breeze down from the mountaintop. She wished her son could know that cold brightness. ◆

◆

◆

When Lana looked up to the sky, she saw that the clouds had broken up and she caught pieces of blue.

The rain had stopped.

“Is it snowing up there?” she asked her father.

“Most likely.”

“Will we camp in the snow?”

“Most likely.”

She could no longer see the full height of the mountain. They were too much a part of it now as they scrabbled up its side. The mountain was reduced to crumbling slate, mossy boulders, damp rock over their heads, cold dust on their hands.

Around midday, they climbed out of the creek valley and emerged on the fine edge of sky and rock. Lichen curled at their feet. The valley far below them was a braid of water and spruce flatlands. She was trying to spot their cabin when her father suddenly crouched down beside her and gestured for her to do the same. Then he pointed.

BY EOW Y N I V E Y

The goats would not come across the rocks to her. She would never pet them or tame them. She knew why she brought her rifle. ◆

In the water, the wool was like cold silk, but when she pulled it out it was as heavy as stone.

3

◆

They camped that night against a rock face.

The goats had disappeared over a ridge, and night was coming.

“Tomorrow. When it’s just getting light. Then we’ll go after them,” her father said. “We don’t want to get caught out tonight.”

The sky spit a sleety snow. Her father started a campfire and fed it twigs. Lana walked down a ravine, out of sight of their camp, and went behind a willow bush to clean herself. She had never felt so alone and strong, so entirely of her own. Walking back, she watched the smoke rise from the fire and mix with the falling snow.

Her father was a gray shadow. ◆

◆

◆

“Lana? Lana.” Her father whispered at her through the tent door. “Daylight’s wasting.”

She had not slept well. The canvas tent flapped in the wind, sometimes so hard she feared they would tumble off the mountain. Her father snored loudly beside her.

The ground was rocky, and she shivered inside her bedroll. It was only near dawn, when the wind stopped, that she had finally fallen asleep.

She crawled out of the tent, still wearing yesterday’s clothes. A heavy, wet snow fell on the hillside and tent.

The fire was out. Her father handed her a tin cup of cold water and a biscuit.

“Do you see them, Lana?” He pointed to the cliff face.

Several hundred yards away, through the snowy fog, two mountain goats walked along the cliff face. The animals seemed to hang impossibly on the sheer rock.

No trees or shrubs grew, and Lana could see no ledge or break in the rock. And yet the goats traveled as if along an easy path. They were larger and more impressive than Lana had imagined, their chests the size of a bear’s and large, muscular humps over their shoulders.

Their thick, white fur crested along their backs and narrowed at their legs as if they wore shaggy knickers. One stopped and put his muzzle to the rock as if grazing. The

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other turned its long, narrow head down toward Lana and her father.

“They’re so close,” she whispered to her father.

He nodded. “But not close enough. It’ll take us some time to get to them. We’ll circle up and around, so they don’t wind us.”

They left camp with little more than their rifles, a canteen, and a length of rope. Lana tucked her braids under her coat collar.

“Keep your calm, when we’re up on those rocks,” her father said. “It’s easy to scare yourself, when you look back down. Just keep your calm.”

They moved in silence along the base of the cliff face until they came to a slide of broken rocks that funneled off the mountain. Her father nodded upward and began to climb.

Several times Lana doubted whether she could go on. Again and again she slid backward down the loose rocks. There were no roots or branches to grab. Her hands caught on the sharp rocks. When she stopped and looked back, the height caused a sickening, falling sensation.

At last they climbed onto a solid ledge. They were not far from the mountain’s summit. Her father held a finger to his lips and beckoned to Lana. They crept along the side of the mountain, lichen-covered stone beneath their feet, until they neared the end of the ledge. Her father got down on his hands and knees, his rifle slung over his back. Lana did the same. Side by side, they crawled on their bellies to the edge of the precipice and looked down. The goats were almost directly beneath them. Her father nodded to her rifle. Lana slid it off her shoulder and pulled back the steel bolt to load the cartridge into the chamber. Her hands shook.

“Shhh,” he mouthed. “Steady. Take your time.”

Her father reached over her and helped her brace the rifle stock against her shoulder. Still prone on the ground, Lana closed one eye and looked down the barrel, through the iron peep sights. The snow fell harder.

The larger of the two goats shook itself and breathed hard through his nostrils. She aimed for his front shoulder, the heart and lungs, as her father had taught her. The goat turned its head to the side and rolled its solid black eyes up at Lana.

Her chest tightened until it seemed to stop her heart.

She let out the last bit of her breath and squeezed the trigger.

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The shot rang off the cliffs so she thought she had missed and that the bullet ricocheted. But then the goat stumbled, fell to its front knees, struggled to rise to its feet.

“Again,” her father whispered urgently. “Shoot again.”

Lana chambered another cartridge. Her fingers were numb. She took aim and shot again. This time the animal jumped as if hit with great force, and then it fell off the ledge, disappeared into rock and snow.

The other goat trotted away across the cliff.

“Papa! Papa!” Lana cried. She stood and her knees nearly buckled. She was afraid she might cry or vomit.

“Steady.” Her father put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed gently. “You did good. Two clean shots.

It’s down, down the mountain. We’ll find it.” ◆

4

◆

She slid along the broken rock so quickly that her hands bled from trying to slow her fall and her legs trembled. Above her, her father stepped more carefully and called down to her, “It’s all right, Lana.

We’ll find it. You’ve got your goat.”

When they reached the bottom of the slide, her father studied the mountain above them until he was fairly certain he knew where the goat would have fallen. They walked to a deep cut in the side of the mountain where alders grew thick and twisted. Her father led her up into the thicket and there, at the bottom of a crumbling cliff, the mountain goat lay as still as the fallen snow. ◆

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◆

The creek water was cold enough to burn, but Lana plunged the hide in again and again, and watched the goat blood wash downstream. In the water, the wool was like cold silk, but when she pulled it out it was as heavy as stone. ◆

◆

◆

“Mother, I really don’t see why you have to lug this along. I can store it in the attic.”

Lana’s grown son carried the goat hide in a large bundle under one arm, and pushed her wheelchair

BY EOW Y N I V E Y

awkwardly down the hall with the other. This was supposed to be one of the best nursing homes in the Pacific Northwest, and Lana was to stay here only long enough to recover from her hip surgery. She knew otherwise. She was 76 years old. There was talk of bone cancer and her inability to survive treatment.

This is where she would die. It might take some time, but she would not return to her apartment, or to her son’s home.

“I just worry about her,” she overheard her daughter-in-law say. “She has gotten so frail. And so confused. I really think she’ll be safer there, where someone can look after her 24/7.”

Since Robert had died and she moved in with her son, she had made stupid mistakes. Left the bath water running until it flooded the bathroom. Lost her way when she wandered down to the little creek by her son’s house. The entire neighborhood was called out to look for her. Then, when she fell on an icy walkway and broke her hip, and the doctors found signs of cancer, the decision was made.

“I’d like it on my bed, Bob,” she told her son. “If you would, please.”

He set down the goat skin. The room was institutional and smelled of latex and bleach and urine, not so different than the hospital room where she’d spent the past few weeks. It made her son uncomfortable, she could see. He jingled change in one pocket and glanced again and again toward the door.

“I’m sure somebody will be in here pretty soon, to help you get settled,” he said. “I should get going. The traffic this time of day, you know.”

Two college-age girls in white slacks, pastel smocks, and quiet shoes came not long after he left. They were complaining to each other about someone at the nurses’ station, about how they were short staffed for the night and one of them would have to work a double shift. They did not introduce themselves or make eye contact with Lana. She could have been a TV tray.

They stood on either side of her wheelchair and talked across her as they changed her into a nightgown, though it wasn’t yet 7 p.m. Then they lifted her onto the bed. One of them wrinkled her nose at the mountain goat hide, and the other one laughed. “… nasty old thing …” she heard one of them say as they went down the hall. Lana was unsure if they spoke of her or the goat skin.

She slid her bare feet under the sheet and unrolled the hide across her legs and lap. Its smooth, steady weight was a comfort. She was an old woman. Her feet were swollen and useless. Her hands were knotted like the burls on an old tree. Her skin bruised too easily and tore like tissue paper. And yet, when she closed her eyes and put her hands down on the shaggy wool, she was still Lana.

All these years she wondered if the man had been right, if she bore it like the ancient mariner with the albatross at his neck, in shame and wonder at what she had done. She had hid it from strangers and unrolled it beneath her baby’s naked belly only when she was alone. She kept it in her husband’s house because she had no other place for it. She brought it here, to her death, even as she left behind pearl earrings and photographs and cookbooks.

It was only now, her life unwound like a strip of cloth caught in the wind, that she knew the truth. It was her. A last remnant. Mountain wool laid out over rock. Wild blood on snow. The solid eye and the fall.

All this time, her one true self. ■ Eowyn Ivey lives between Chickaloon and Sutton with her husband and their two daughters. She is writing a second novel.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Eowyn Ivey grew up in the Matanuska Valley in a home on Lazy Mountain without running water. Her 2012 debut novel, The Snow Child, spent six weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list for fiction. It was also a bestseller in Norway and throughout the United Kingdom, and was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in fiction. The Snow Child is the 2013 selection for Anchorage Reads, a literacy and community-building program of the Anchorage Public Library. Anchorage Reads is supported in part by a 2013 Alaska Humanities Forum general grant (see story page 14). The Alaska Humanities Forum hosted a Meet the Author reception for Ivey in February of this year, and is proud to present her new short story, “Remnants.” These pages mark the first time it has appeared in print.

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GRANT REPORT

Kenny Lake homesteader Marion Lightwood and her husband Sam.

“We are on the edge of losing the last generation of original homesteaders and the last generation of (fluent) Ahtna Native speakers.”

— KRISTEN CARPENTER

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Traveling by Story Through Copper River Country

T

he seasoned voices of Kenny Lake homesteaders and other longtime residents tell of being drawn to a place with “more trees than people” and how hard it was to “prove up” on their land.

“How do you water your garden if you don’t have a well?” Sharon Faverty asks. “How do you take care of your animals when it’s 60 below?”

Marion Lightwood tells of chopping a hole in the lake, leading her livestock there to drink, and how she lost a pig in that water hole one winter.

These and other stories are helping to create the collective voice of the Copper River Basin, giving Alaskans and visitors to the state a deeper appreciation of the region. That’s the goal behind “Traveling by Story Through Copper River Country,” an ongoing oral history project launched by the Copper River Watershed Project (CRWP).

A L A S K A H U M A N I T I E S F O R U M S P R I N G / S U M M E R 2013

This gathering of stories was launched in 2012 with an $8,000 Alaska Humanities Forum (AKHF) general grant. Talking circles held at Kenny Lake, Slana and at a Copper River Native Association Elders lunch resulted in four new oral history recordings, transcripts and interpretive texts for each talking circle.

Kristen Carpenter, CPWP executive director, feels a sense of urgency about this project. Sam Lightwood, one of the homesteaders interviewed by staff writer Wendy Erd, passed away at 88 several weeks after she recorded his story.

“We are on the edge of losing the last generation of original homesteaders and the last generation of (fluent) Ahtna Native speakers,” Carpenter said. “That is one of the key reasons we wanted to do this.”

The 26,500 square-mile Copper

River watershed, an area the size of West Virginia, includes communities with populations from 2,500 to 35, and stretches from Mentasta Lake to Cordova with many wisdom bearers and colorful characters between.

An audio collage that weaves together snippets of the Kenny Lake interviews tells the bigger story of a time and place when people of different religious, cultural and political beliefs were bound together by what they had in common, the struggle to survive on the edge of wilderness, rather than polarized by what they did not In addition to the four oral histories, the AKHF grant helped fund the research of existing oral histories from the area. The CRWP plans to post selections from these recordings on its website during the next phase of the project, to give voice to the organization’s mission.

The CRWP was founded in 1998 out of concern for the health of the watershed’s lakes, rivers and hundreds of tributaries, as well as its communities, economies and cultures. With growth and change inevitable, the CRWP works for sustainable development.

The audio collage from the first phase of the project, the Kenny Lake stories, is posted on the CRWP website (www.copperriver.org). Future phases of the project will make audio and video recordings available through the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park headquarters in Copper Center and the University of Alaska’s Project Jukebox oral history collection, as well as schools, libraries and other public outlets. ■

“Carlson’s Mail Truck,” Kenny Lake, 1919.

George B. Nelson Papers, UAAHMC-0187, Archives and Special Collections, Consortium Library, University of Alaska Anchorage

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GRANT REPORT

White House of the North: Stories from the Alaska Governor’s Mansion

S

ince making its public debut on New Year’s Day in 1913, the Alaska governor’s mansion has become a storehouse of 100 years worth of stories of the families who’ve lived within its 26 rooms. Over the years there have been weddings, births, rises to power and falls from grace, bigwigs wined and dined, and children who have made mischief. Like a young Dennis Egan, son of Gov. Bill and Neva Egan, lobbing water balloons from the mansion’s upper balcony and then sliding down its laundry chute.

As author Carol M. Sturgulewski discovered, these and other tales are squirreled away in everything from public records to diaries to the household plumbing. With help from the Alaska Humanities Forum, she’s woven these elements together in White House of the North: Stories from the Alaska Governor’s Mansion.

The book is a rich blend of Alaska history, politics, First Family stories and anecdotal gems. Like First Lady Bella Hammond once being mistaken for the gardener, and, in 1968, First Lady Ermalee Hickel being asked a favor by a rather noteworthy houseguest.

“I stood there at the ironing board and thought, ‘In my wildest dreams I never though that I’d be married to a governor and pressing Charles Lindbergh’s pants,’” she recalls.

The Alaska Humanities Forum awarded Sturgulewski a $1,500 minigrant last year to help cover photo rights and reproduction costs. The book features 75 photographs gleaned from state archives, museums, libraries, private collections and photo albums.

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The pictorial story drops in on First Families through the years — including a Normal Rockwell-like scene of a girls’ slumber party during the Knowles Administration — to a portrait of the exterior of the house all spiffed up for Christmas.

Sturgulewski was living in Anchorage and the mother of three young boys when her parents, Frank and Nancy Murkowski, moved into the governor’s mansion in December 2002.

The first time she walked through its doors was the day before her father’s inauguration, when outgoing First Lady Susan Knowles invited members of the Murkowski family over to show them around the 14,000 square-foot residence.

The next day, after the inaugural formalities, the whole Murkowski gang — and there were a lot of them, six adult children and all their children — returned to the mansion to celebrate.

“My dad carried my mom over the threshold,” Sturgulewski recalls. “From there, we all poured into the house.

There were about 40 of us — brothers and sisters and cousins and kids and grandkids. My mother is a wonderful piano player, and she sat down at the piano in the ballroom and played old family songs for us. We were all singing and dancing and all dressed up and just a little giddy. Then we all spent the night. There were people on beds, on the floors, kids in sleeping bags everywhere. It was just a very fun, exciting event.”

But it wasn’t her personal connection to the governor’s mansion that drove Sturgulewski to create the book.

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“In my wildest dreams I never though that I’d be married to a governor and pressing Charles Lindbergh’s pants.”

— FIRST LADY ERMALEE HICKEL

Alaska State Library, ASL-Juneau-Gov-Mansion-Interior-09

Her mother is a founder of the nonprofit group Friends of the Alaska Governor’s Mansion Foundation, which among other missions raises funds for the mansion’s upkeep and preservation.

(The mansion has a life-long history of maintenance woes, from a collapsed veranda during World War II, to a nasty plumbing failure that had sewage dripping into the ballroom chandeliers and elsewhere during the Palin administration.) The foundation commissioned Sturgulewski to write the book in time for the mansion’s 100th birthday.

“When I was first approached with this idea, I thought, ‘I’m sure there’s enough here to make a nice magazine story.’ They said, ‘Oh, no, no, no. You don’t understand.’ They pulled out all these files and photographs and things sitting on shelves and piled in boxes.

Nobody had ever pulled it all together.

There were so many threads to follow. I wound up being absolutely fascinated.”

Take the story of Gov. John F.A. Strong (1913-1918), who entered office with strong popular support. During her research, Sturgulewski came across a mention that when Strong resigned in 1918, very few saw him off at the docks.

“That’s odd,” she thought.

Sturgulewski dug though newspaper archives and discovered what she’d never come across in history books: that Strong wasn’t an American citizen, that he’d lied about his military service and, though married, had another wife and three children in Canada. He was an “alien, wife deserter, perjurer, fourflusher, demagogue, etc.; all that and more,” one newspaper proclaimed.

The governor’s mansion belongs to the people of Alaska, but few get to see inside. White House of the North opens the doors and invites the reader to wander around not only the mansion but also the colorful lives of its residents over the course a century. ■

Neva Egan plays the Hardman grand piano in the ballroom in 1962. At left is a painting of the signing of the Alaska Purchase Treaty, above the table on which it was signed. Both the painting and the table are now in the state museum.

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ALASKA HUMANITIES FORUM

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

161 East First Avenue, Door 15 Anchorage, AK 99501 (907) 272-5341 www.akhf.org

FORUM

GENERAL GRANTS 2013

TLINGIT MACBETH

BEN HUFF THE LAST ROAD NORTH

EOWYN IVEY NEW FICTION

THE MAGAZINE OF THE AL ASK A HUMANITIES FORUM SPRING / SUMMER 2013