Catharine Axley filming during New Years races in Huslia. Photo by Andrew Axley
Stricken with tuberculosis of the bone, he was eight and spoke only Denaakk’e the first time he was sent to a far-away hospital where all anyone spoke was English. He was shipped back a month later, as Turco tells it, because he wouldn’t stop crying. Warned he might never walk again, Attla went back for more treatment, returning home at 17 with a fused knee and a broken spirit, feeling disconnected to all that mattered until some caring elders and skilled dog men helped ground him and gave him purpose. The youth program named for his son was Attla’s way of giving back. A Yale graduate working on her master’s in documentary filmmaking at Stanford, Axley was looking for a thesis project when she first heard of Attla’s program. She already had several short films to her credit, including one about an elderly librarian’s 50-year quest to account for every man, woman, and child killed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, a regional finalist in the national Student Academy Awards. Axley pitched the story to her advisor, Kristine Samuelson, who, it turned out, had worked as a crew member on Spirit of the Wind, the 1979 fictionalized feature film based on Attla’s life. “When Catharine proposed to me this idea — she had a couple of ideas for her thesis project — but as soon as she
said the words ‘George Attla,’ I said, ‘Oh my gosh, Catharine, what an opportunity. If you could manage to connect with him, he’s a legend and has not been properly documented in recent times,’” Samuelson recalled. First Axley needed to get Attla on board. That, she figured, was a long shot. She was a student — living in California no less. She expected him to turn her down. Her initial contact was an email to Turco, whom Attla had asked to serve as a kind of firewall between himself and those asking things of him. Axley didn’t hear back. “Eventually I got his phone number and made the scary phone call.” When the phone rang at their home in Huslia, Turco picked up. “Here I am, someone not from Alaska, a young person calling and saying like, ‘Hey, I have this idea; I’d like to make a film…’ “I had heard that he can read dogs and kind of know what they are thinking, and that he could do almost the same with people. So I was really nervous. I also have a stuttering problem and that made matters worse.” Turco remembers hearing her pitch, hesitating a moment since Attla hadn’t slept well that night, then handing him the phone.
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