Forum - Summer 2015

S U M M E R 2 015T H E M A G 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

SILENT FILM REVIVAL | MAPPING ANCHORAGE HISTORY | 9TH AND P: AN ORAL HISTORY

A L A S K A H U M A N I T I E S F O R U M S U M M E R 20152

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ALASKA HUMANITIES FORUM

BOARD OF DIRECTORSJoan Braddock, Ph.D., Chair, Fairbanks

Catkin Kilcher Burton, Vice Chair, Anchorage

Elizabeth Qaulluq Cravalho Secretary, Kotzebue

Evan D. Rose, Treasurer, Anchorage

Dave Kiffer, Member-At-Large, Ketchikan

Jeane Breinig, Ph.D., Anchorage

Christa Bruce, Ketchikan

Lenora Lolly Carpluk, Fairbanks

Michael Chmielewski, Palmer

John Cloe, Anchorage

Dermot Cole, Fairbanks

Renee’ Duncan, Soldotna

Ernestine Hayes, Juneau

Joshua Herren, Anchorage

Scott McAdams, Sitka

Pauline Morris, Kwethluk

Wayne Stevens, Juneau

Kurt Wong, Anchorage

STAFFNina Kemppel, President & CEO

Christina Barber Curator of Special Exhibits & Programs

Myles Creed, ECCI Program Manager

Carmen Davis, C3 Program Manager

Kitty Farnham Leadership Anchorage Program Manager

Veldee Hall, RCCE Program Manager

Nancy Hemsath, Office and Projects Manager

Nate O’Connor Take Wing Alaska Project Coordinator

Lauren Rocco, RCCE Program Director

January Scott Take Wing Alaska Program Director

Megan Zlatos, Grants Program Manager

FORUM MAGAZINE STAFFEditor David Holthouse

Art Director Dean Potter

Contributors Debra McKinney, Katherine Ringsmuth, Nathan Shafer, Dawnell Smith, John Haile Cloe, Megan Zlatos, Duke Russell, Ted Kim

The Alaska Humanities Forum’s programs create opportunities for

Alaskans to strengthen our bonds to our culture, heritage, and history in com-munities across the state. The Forum creates venues for all Alaskans to think critically and creatively about ways to address current issues and to find common ground to help us celebrate the great diversity of Alaska. Consider-ing the complex challenges facing our state, our humanities programs provide venues for encouraging citizens to be creative and informed about navigat-ing the difficult decisions ahead, and to honor the cultural richness that makes Alaska a great place to live.

ALASKA DIALOGUESOver the last eight months, the Alaska

Humanities Forum, Institute of the North, and Northern Leadership Center have partnered in an effort to intro-duce a reformatted Alaska Dialogue process. The new quarterly format for the Alaska Dialogues is designed to create increased access to discussions on issues that are important to Alaskans and develop the next generation of civic leaders in our state. The discussion will be held in multiple communities across the state, focusing on key policy and humanities issues within that region.

In January, the first reformatted Alaska Dialogue took place in Juneau with a focus on leadership within state and local governance. More recently, the second Alaska Dialogue took place in Kotzebue in late May and focused on community engagement across our state. Wider access to the new Alaska Dialogues is being facilitated through distance technology, enabling satellite groups from around the state to partici-pate in these key discussions.

MAGNETIC NORTHAnother new endeavor I’m pleased to

announce is Magnetic North, a partner-ship of the Alaska Humanities Forum

and Rasmuson Foundation to produce a series of short documentary films that tell the stories of six living pioneers whose actions and ideas helped define the history and spirit of our young state. Production on the series will begin later this year.

BEING ALASKANIn an additional but quite different

effort related to exploring the charac-ter of Alaska, the Alaska Humanities Forum in May hosted an impromptu First Friday event inside the Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport. The theme of the event was “Being Alaskan.” Six performers shared their perspec-tive on what it means to “be Alaskan” through song, spoken word, and operatic verse, while Alaska Humanities Forum staff and volunteers collected and live tweeted more than 100 stories from individuals at the airport on what “Being Alaskan” personally meant to them.

The airport event drove a social media campaign in which more than 11,000 Alaskans shared their impressions on what it means to be Alaskan to the Twit-ter accounts “Humanitiesinak” and “Be-ingAlaskan.” The Forum looks forward to partnering with other organizations in the future to share the humanities with new audiences in unconventional venues.

DONORSOn a final note, I would like to per-

sonally thank all of the supporters of the Alaska Humanities Forum for their donations and contributions. Every dollar you provide in support of our organization is dedicated to the long-term success of our programs and the positive impact the humanities can have in Alaska.

Thank you for your support.

—Nina Kemppel CEO

Being Alaskan

LETTER FROM THE CEO

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 contribu-tors 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. ©2015. Printed in Alaska.

T H E M A G 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 S U M M E R 2 015

5 The Cheechakos Project Anchorage Fine Arts Society revives 1923 silent film, a landmark in Anchorage history

12 Enriched Lives The 2015 Governor’s Awards for the Arts and Humanities

14 Stories from the Sky Lecture series covers 100 years of Anchorage aviation

16 2015 General Grants This year the Forum awarded $98,069 to 16 different projects

24 Cultivating Stories The Alaska Humanities Forum and 49 Writers expand partnership

25 Alaska Women’s Giving Circle Leadership Anchorage graduates drive groundbreaking nonprofit funding effort

28 Tents to Towers A century of maps of Alaska’s largest city

34 For the Fallen Poets of the Great War

38 ‘So we did.’ Oral history by Gayle (Strutz) Ryan and James “Bud” Ryan

46 Mudcakes and Shrew Augmented reality returns with a narrative set during the Good Friday earthquake

56 Free Range Art Duke Russell and Ted Kim collaborate

58 Second Friday @ the Forum Reviewing last season’s activities and looking forward to next

COVER: ‘Owl Rider,’ collaborative artwork by Ted Kim and Duke Russell. See page 56.

ACCESS THE PAST: Paul Boskoffsky, hereditary chief of Kanatak, is the subject of a Forum-supported documentary film about the now-abandoned Sugpiaq village. See story page 17.


Moviemaking history: The crew of The Cheechakos used hand-cranked cameras and giant mirrors to soften the shadows.

A L A S K A H U M A N I T I E S F O R U M S U M M E R 2015 5

ANCHORAGE CENTENNIAL GRANT REPORT

Anchorage Fine Arts Society revives 1923 silent film, a landmark in Anchorage history

By Debra McKinneyTHE CHEECHAKOS PROJECT


nyone living in Anchorage in 1923 oblivious to The Cheechakos must have been living under a still.

the arrival of movie stars and a film crew that spring was a seismic event in the still wet-behind-the-ears, backwater-of-a-town. The Anchor-age Daily Times extended a banner-headline welcome with the promise of “jollification” to come. And jollification did when half the town showed up for a “monster public reception” that included performances by the cast and dancing to a six-piece orchestra at a brand new movie studio built on Third Avenue.

Following a series of silent films about the Far North shot nowhere near the Far North, The Cheechakos was the first full-length motion picture filmed entirely on location in Alaska. With the plot set in the Klondike gold-rush days, the silent-film melodrama had it all — kind-hearted prospectors, a gambling scoundrel, a shifty-eyed henchman, a wrist-to-the-forehead damsel in distress, and a cherubic child with a dinner-plate face and finger-tight curls.

“Stupendous Epic of the Frozen North,” it was billed. There were fistfights, pistols, knives, and whips. An explosion, a fire, a raging river, a calving glacier, and a dogsled version of a car-chase scene. And in the end, there was Mother Nature serving the villain a heaping helping of exactly what he deserved.

During five months of filming with hand-cranked cameras, hundreds of Anchorage residents were cast as extras in such scenes as frolicking at a dance hall and climbing the Chilkoot Pass, filmed on the Bartlett Glacier south of Portage. And when the lead actress bid

Alaska adieu and headed back to Hol-lywood, Anchorage sent her home with a brown bear cub as a souvenir.

The nine-reel movie premiered in December 1923 at Austin “Cap” Lathrop’s Empress Theatre on Fourth Avenue. School let out early that day and city officials lifted the curfew so kids could attend the matinee and evening shows, where, according to the paper, they “wildly acclaimed” the vil-lain’s demise and “shouted in glee” as the hero rescued the girl.

The Cheechakos was the most fun Anchorage had ever had.

But that was some 90 years ago. The once elegant Empress, built in 1916, is long gone, its most recent incarnation, the Anchor Pub, torn down just last year. Today, few Alaskans have heard of the film, and even fewer realize its significance in Alaska history. Chris Beheim aims to fix that.

Beheim has been, he would admit, obsessed with chasing down the story behind the film and its aftermath, using everything from genealogical research for tracking down child-star Baby Margie’s son to doing hard time parked in front of microfilm machines. And now, through the Anchorage Fine Arts Society, a nonprofit founded by his wife Beverly, he’ll be sharing all he’s learned.

The Cheechakos Project will reunite Anchorage with its first movie, as well as celebrate the city’s early days through music, films, photographs, and historical documents, a project made possible through a $29,000 Anchorage Centennial Community Grant, funded by Rasmuson Foundation and adminis-tered by the Alaska Humanities Forum.


A NEW SCORESilent films used “inter-titles” to

convey dialogue and explain the story-line, with some, like The Cheechakos, using hand-painted backdrops behind the words. Famed Alaska artist Sydney Laurence got that job. And silent films were never actually silent, but ac-companied by a pianist, organist or, in larger theaters, an orchestra playing music fitting the mood of each scene, from joyful times to impending doom. Rarely would music be composed for a specific film, Beheim explained. Rather, movie theaters would be provided with cue sheets — “Dramatic Tension No. 2” here, “Love Theme No. 1” there. Major theaters had libraries of sheet music to pull from, while at smaller theaters with smaller libraries, musicians were more likely to improvise in places.

Although The Cheechakos sur-vived, its score is lost. As part of The Cheechakos Project, Beheim’s brother Eric, a nationally known expert on the topic, created a new score. The Anchor-age Symphony Orchestra will premier this score at a public screening of the film on July 16.

Eric Beheim has been a fan of films — silent films in particular — for as long as he can remember. As a college music major, he stumbled upon some silent-film sheet music at a secondhand store in Columbus, Ohio. After that he went looking for it. His collection grew exponentially in 1981, when he acquired a historical theater’s entire library. A few years later he started his own small, silent film orchestra. These days he works with noted film pres-ervationist David Shepard providing scores for some of Shepard’s silent-film video releases.

Besides the screening and new film score, The Cheechakos Project has several other components. (New York film distributors changed the spell-ing of the film to Chechahcos for a

The Cheechakos cast and crew filmed a high-speed dogsled chase scene in Mount McKinley National Park, as it was called at the time. Harry Karstens, the park’s first superintendent, is pictured with his dog sled team in the photo below, standing on the right. Karstens was the film’s unofficial stunt man, driving the dogs in the wild action sequence.

reason Beheim can’t nail down, but he’s reverting to the original one.) There’s a work-in-progress website, Cheecha- kos.org, plus a series of musical perfor-mances with a mobile exhibit about the film. And “An Evening at the Empress Theatre” is coming that will recreate the 1920s movie-going experience. This event will feature silent films, includ-ing Buster Keaton’s The Frozen North, with another musical score arranged by Beheim’s brother and performed by the resurrected Empress Orchestra, as well as newsreels Beheim put together using historical footage, archival pho-tographs, and newspaper headlines of the day.

The Cheechakos Project is also col-laborating with Cyrano’s Theatre Com-pany for its own Anchorage Centennial project, the staging of ten “living news-papers” plays, featuring the headlines, stories, and colorful characters of the day, one of which will be about the making of The Cheechakos.

FRAGILE FILMBeheim, a clarinetist with the An-

chorage Symphony Orchestra and a board member, is among those behind the symphony’s Silent Film Night, an annual event showing such classics as Buster Keaton’s The General and Char-lie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, accompa-nied by the orchestra. But even Beheim hadn’t heard of The Cheechakos until about five years ago.

His infatuation with the film began the way these things often do, with a Google search. After several years of helping put together Silent Film Night, he started wondering whether any had been made in Alaska. A search for “Alaska silent film” led him to a site called John’s Alaska Railroad Web Page, the discovery of The Cheecha-kos, and the role the railroad played in getting the cast and crew to the remote filming sites. That site led him to Elizabeth Tower’s book on Cap Lath-rop, Alaska’s First Homegrown Mil-

lionaire, which led him to her papers in the UAA/APU Consortium Library Archives, which led him to what is now a full-blown mission.

The research has been tedious at times but he’s used to that. Being a retired forensic scientist and former di-rector of the state crime lab hasn’t hurt.

“It’s just like an investigation, really,” he said. “You find one little clue and then add to it. I just really got caught up in it. It’s an obsession. And I still have more detective work to do.”

Cap Lathrop’s nephew donated a 16mm copy of the film to the Univer-sity of Alaska Fairbanks in 1971, and it was thought to be the only one in exis-tence. But after UAF archivists received a grant to restore it from the National Film Preservation Foundation, a higher quality, 35mm copy was discovered at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art, and, in 2000, that copy was restored instead.

Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation

On location: The final scenes in The Cheechakos were filmed on Childs Glacier.


‘TALKIES CAME AND NO ONE WANTED SILENT FILMS ANYMORE. WE ARE VERY FORTUNATE THAT THE CHEECHAKOS SURVIVED.’


estimates that more than 90 percent of American films made before 1929 are lost, Beheim learned.

“The film was very fragile,” he said. “It was nitrate film, highly flammable, and they just burned up a lot of it because it was a safety hazard. Then the talkies came and no one wanted silent films anymore.

“We are very fortunate that The Cheechakos survived.”

NO FAKE SNOWLathrop, Alaska’s most prosperous

entrepreneur; George Edward Lewis, an adventurer turned minister turned adventurer again; and Lewis Moomaw, a Portland-based writer and director, created the Alaska Moving Pictures Corporation to produce, write, and film The Cheechakos. Until then, films about the Far North were based primarily on the books and short stories of writers like James Oliver Curwood and Rex Beach, and screenwriters’ wild imagi-nations.

“Films about Alaska were extremely popular, but they were filmed in Hol-lywood or if they really wanted snow they’d go up to Truckee,” Beheim said. “And if there was no snow, they’d spread out salt.”

Alaskans didn’t think much of that.“Sourdoughs Rise Up: Nursed

Wrath Warms Resentment Over Faked Alaskan Scenes to Boiling Point,” reads a headline Beheim found in the Los Angeles Times.

The Cheechakos would show the world the real deal.

Lathrop’s film company built a 7,000 square-foot movie studio with eight dressing rooms near what was then the Anchorage Elks Club, now the Snow Goose Restaurant, and a replica of a gold rush town not far from where Si-mon & Seafort’s is today. In one scene, after a fire breaks out in the dance hall, this movie set is torched as the whole town burns down.

A city fire engine was standing by in case things got out of hand. A notice in the paper referred to it as “the burn-ing of Rome, in a miniature form,” and asked residents to stay away.

In addition to Anchorage, the crew

filmed in Mount McKinley National Park, as it was called at the time, and in other remote locations accessible only by train. Harry Karstens, who guided the first successful climb of Denali in 1913 and was superintendent of the park, served as a stunt man, driving the park’s sled dogs in a high-speed chase scene.

Girdwood stood in for Skagway. To film a night scene there, with film speed being sluggish in those days, the crew shot off giant radium flares and rockets to light up the night sky.

Among other purple-prose gems, Beheim found an article in the Anchor-age Daily Times rallying volunteers for a train excursion to shoot the Chilkoot Pass scene.

“Think of it: Get your picture ‘took’ for nothing! This same picture will be flashed on a thousand screens and viewed by a million movie fans and husbands. Nothing like this opportu-nity has ever been given the people of Anchorage.

“Every business house in Anchorage should be represented; every citizen who can get away from the rut of life, every husband who can duck beat-ing carpets and escape the terrors of house-cleaning days, every grouch dissatisfied with life, and every loyal Anchorageite should either go on this excursion or send a representative.”

The effort generated a trainload of stampeders, some of whom had climbed the real Chilkoot Pass 25 years earlier.

The long-since defunct Copper River and Northwestern Railway took the cast and crew from Cordova to shoot scenes at Eyak Lake and the Copper River’s Abercrombie Rapids as a fill-in for the Yukon’s White Horse Rapids. The final scenes were filmed on the Childs Glacier, where President War-ren Harding showed up at the movie set after driving “the golden spike” in Nenana to signify completion of the Alaska Railroad. And where lead ac-tress Eva Gordon fell into a crevasse — not part of the script — and was stuck for four hours.

Extras, extras: Many Anchorage residents in

1923 worked as extras in The Cheechakos, including

in this dance hall scene, filmed in a 7,000 square-

foot movie studio built next to what’s now the Snow

Goose Restaurant.


The mishap didn’t taint her impres-sion of Alaska, which she left with “deep regret.”

“Never in any part of the earth—and I have circled the world five times—have I met with such unaffected wel-come, such kindness from the heart, as was bestowed upon me by the people of the north…,” she told the Los Angeles Times upon her return to Hollywood. She did, however, note that the four-month-old brown bear cub Anchorage had given her as a farewell gift was in dire need of some manners.

STUPENDOUS GRANDEURAfter showing around Alaska, the

film hit the states, including a private showing for the Interior Department in Washington, D.C. so cabinet members and government officials could see what Alaska actually looked like. Prior to opening in theaters around the country, a preview gala was thrown at the Ritz-Carlton in New York City, with dinner and dancing in the Crystal Ballroom to the famed Paul Whiteman Orchestra.

As a promotional stunt, a young woman dressed in furs with a giant malamute in tow showed up at media and movie-trade offices to hand-deliver fancy invitations garnished with a small gold nugget. The extravaganza drew nearly 1,000 newspaper and magazine writers, industry representatives, and others.

The reviews were overwhelming positive, Beheim said. One reviewer called it “a stirring story, given a set-ting of stupendous grandeur.” Another promised “drama and romance and thrills.” But not all were impressed with the plot or acting. One found it hokey. For the most part, the highest praise went to the scenery — a “scenic master-piece” even.

Although the film went off to travel the world, it was a commercial dud for Alaskan shareholders who never saw a return on their investments. Some blamed the film’s unpronounceable name. Whatever the reason, that was the end of Cap Lathrop’s foray into the movie-making business. The movie studio his company built on Third

Avenue, that he’d hoped would become “Hollywood of the North,” became a community center instead, used for everything from an exhibition hall for the Western Alaska Fair to basketball.

Although The Cheechakos fell into obscurity, in 2003 it was deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the Library of Congress, and was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

Now that it has a new score, Beheim has high hopes for The Cheechakos’ comeback: that it will be seen and appreciated by Anchorage audiences and well beyond for years to come. If it were up to him, there would be a public showing every year.

And why not? As the Anchorage Dai-ly Times put it in 1923, “Alaska money, brain and brawn made The Cheechakos possible. Truly it is Alaska’s own.” ■

Debra McKinney is co-author of Beyond the Bear and a freelance writer living on Lazy Mountain near Palmer. www.debramckinney.com


The 2015 Governor’s Awards for the Arts and Humanities

Next year will mark the 15th annual Governor’s Awards for the Arts and Humanities, a yearly celebration of indi-

viduals and organizations from throughout the state for their meaningful impacts on the arts and humanities in Alaska.

The awards are jointly sponsored by the Alaska State Council on the Arts and the Alaska Humanities Forum, and coordinated with the Office of the Governor.

This year’s award presentation took place in January at the Juneau Arts and Culture Center. Several hundred attendees joined Governor and First Lady Bill and Donna Walker to recognize the honorees.

Award presentations alternated with live entertainment by the Juneau Giant Puppet Project, Momentum Dance Collective, the Alaska Youth Choir, spoken word artists Christy NaMee Eriksen and Ziggy Unzicker, and the experimental world-music/hip-hop group Yadi Di?.

The evening’s program also included a live demonstration of the groundbreaking video game Never Alone, or “Kisima Inŋitchuŋa,” which was developed by the Cook Inlet Tribal Council, together with E-Line Media, using a new collaborative process. It partnered elders, traditional storytellers, cultural ambassadors, historians, and youth from communities across Alaska to produce a video game that reflects the deeply-held Iñupiaq values of interdependence, resilience, accountability, and respect. Storyteller Ishmael Angaluuk Hope, who helped write the story of Never Alone, narrated gameplay footage.

This year’s Governor’s Awards for the Arts awardees were educator Leslie Matz and two organizations: the Sitka Fine Arts Camp and Sealaska Heritage Institute. Frank Soos was inducted as State Writer Laureate.

Following are short profiles of the four Alaskans honored this year for their distinguished service to the humanities.

Allison Akootchook Warden (AKU-MATU) is an Iñupiaq Eskimo interdisciplinary artist with a passion for the self-determination of indigenous peoples. Born and raised in Fairbanks, she has close ties to Kaktovik, in the far northeastern corner of Alaska.

She raps under the name AKU-MATU and is an “Artist in the Schools” for the Alaska State Council of the Arts, giving workshops to youth, empowering them through the use of theatre and music.

She has performed as AKU-MATU at Columbia University twice as part of concerts held by the Department of Ethnomu-sicology. Her one-woman focus on the effects of cli-mate change, “Ode to the Polar Bear,” has traveled extensively across Alaska. It was reworked into a longer piece, “Calling All Polar Bears,” which debuted at Pangea Theatre in Minneapolis, Minne-sota as part of a National Performance Network performance residency grant.

In 2013, Warden formed her cinematic funk-fusion band, Yada Di?. She has long worked to empower young people by partici-pating in programs such as Take Wing Alaska, First Light, ANSEP, and the Artists in School program.

She has been an Artist in Residence at Mt. Edge-cumbe High School, the Bunnel Street Art Center, Sheldon Jackson Mu-seum, and the Anchorage Museum.

Enriched Lives


Dr. Talis Colberg is a third generation Alaskan born in the Territory of Alaska in 1958. He is a history teacher at the University of Alaska Mat-Su College, where he teaches Eastern and Western Civilization. Dr. Colberg is also an attorney and dedicated public servant. In 2010, Chancellor Fran Ulmer appointed him director of the Matanuska-Susitna College.

When he earned his Ph.D. in Northern Politi-cal History and Culture at the University of Alaska Northern Studies program in 2008, the title of his dissertation was “M.D. Snodgrass: The Founder of the Alaska State Fair.” His focus on the impact one Alaskan can have is just one example of Dr. Colberg’s longstanding engagement in the hu-manities.

As a member of the board of directors of the Alaska Humanities Forum, Dr. Colberg was twice elected board chair. In 2006, Governor Sarah Palin appointed him at-torney general of Alaska, a post he held until his resignation in 2009. At the time, he was one of only two state attorneys general with a Ph.D.. Dr. Colberg has twice been elected to the Matanuska-Susitna Borough Assembly and as borough mayor. He has been president of the Alaska State Fair board, the Palmer Rotary Club, and has been a member of the Matanuska-Susitna Valley State Park Citizen Advisory Board. ■

Dr. Aldona Jonaitis is an internationally acclaimed scholar of Northwest Coast art and a dedicated museum administrator. Her books and monographs are essential reading for students and exhibitors of the art of southeast Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. Work on her current book is in collaboration with Sealaska Heritage Institute (SHI), and she has partnered with SHI on other projects, including co-directing planning for exhibits in their new Walter Soboleff Center.

Director of the Univer-sity of Alaska Museum of the North in two terms totaling 20 years, Dr. Jonaitis presided over the expansion of the museum and is now engaged in ensuring its long-term success as a world-class museum. The museum is a multifaceted system of exhibits, collections, and educational programs de-veloped to stimulate curi-osity and learning among students and visitors of all ages and backgrounds.

Dr. Jonaitis’s scholarly works have had a pro-found effect on the way Northwest Coast artwork is exhibited. She has also delved into the complex legacy of anthropologist Franz Boas, exploring and discussing difficult topics in the history and practice of anthropology.

Before her work in Fair-banks, Dr. Jonaitis was vice president for public programs at the American Museum of Natural His-tory and chaired the art department at SUNY at Stony Brook.

Annette Evans-Smith (Athabascan/Yup’ik/Alutiiq) is president and CEO of the Alaska Native Heritage Center in Anchorage. ANHC shares and perpetuates indigenous Alaska cultures and traditions through celebration and education. It is a center of activity and learning for Alaska Native people, non-Native members of the Alaska community, and visitors from around the world.

Under her leadership, the center, with the sup-port of key philanthropic partners, undertook a multi-year project to implement a comprehen-sive strategic initiative. This initiative produced a revised mission and a five-year strategic plan that has set ANHC on the path to long-term sustainability.

Evans-Smith began her tenure at ANHC in 2003 as Vice-President of Community Relations and Development. Appointed President and CEO in 2011, her devotion to Alaska Native languages has resulted in pioneering ANHC initiatives, and helped the Anchorage School District Title VII Native Education program offer nine indigenous languages.

She is a trustee for Western States Arts Feder-ation, serves on the Alaska Native Arts Advisory Panel for the Alaska State Council on the Arts, and chairs the Alaska Native Language Preservation & Advisory Council.

The Alaska Humanities Forum will begin accepting nominations for the 2016 Governor’s Awards for the Arts and Humanities on August 1, 2015. Alaskans statewide are invited to nominate individuals and organizations for their commitment to enriching the civic, intellectual, and cultural lives of all Alaskans through work in the humanities. The 2016 awards will introduce a new category: Alaska Studies Teacher of the Year. For more information, visit akhf.org and click on the “Governor’s Awards” tab, or contact the Forum at 907-272-5341.

Call for nominations for 2016 awards

Dr. Talis Colberg.

14

Two years before Anchorage erupted into existence on the shores of Ship Creek a century ago, a sight

to behold puttered across the skies above Fairbanks — an internal combus-tion engine with double-decker wings, a long, pointy tail, and a whirligig of a nose.

Sponsored by local businessmen, pilots James and Lily Martin had shipped their biplane in pieces to Fair-banks from Seattle via ocean steamer, railroad, and riverboat, reassembling it in time for the city’s Fourth of July celebration in 1913. The barnstormer couple introduced Alaskans to aviation. Few of those looking up, mouths agape, could have imagined how profoundly flying machines would alter their world. Delivering mail in hours rather than the weeks it took dogsled teams was just the beginning.

“There’s no other state that has so been built and dependent on aviation,” said Orin Seybert, who founded PenAir in 1955. “Alaska’s aviation history is unmatched in the entire nation.”

There’s no better time than Anchor-age’s 100th birthday to reflect upon that legacy. Backed by a $17,700 Anchorage Centennial Community Grant, the city’s aviation community dug into archives and their own memories to put together, “Flying Past: 100 Years of Anchorage Aviation,” a monthly lecture series drawn from the stories, photos, films. and artifacts at the Alaska Avia-tion Museum. Located near the airport at the Lake Hood Seaplane Base, the museum documents how aircraft evolved from novelty contraption to the workhorse and lifeline of Alaska. The lectures emphasized Anchorage’s role within that bigger story.

About a decade after the Martins packed up their biplane and headed home, officials in the newborn town of Anchorage declared a holiday so residents could help clear brush and pull stumps, turning what had been a firebreak into the town’s first airstrip, known today as the Delaney Park Strip. This at a time pioneer aviators flew into the unknown without weather forecasts or charts, often over vast landscapes with no landmarks, using compasses, the sun, and their own intuition for guidance. The earliest of them flew in open cockpits in temperatures deadly below zero; some took off and were never seen again.

Russel Merrill was one of them. Although he was the second to fly to Alaska from the states, he racked up many firsts, including the first to fly across the Gulf of Alaska, the first to fly

ANCHORAGE CENTENNIAL GRANT REPORT

Stories from the SkyLecture series covers 100 years of Anchorage aviation

By Debra McKinney


across the Alaska Range, and the first to land a plane at night. That time, he’d flown to Ninilchik to pick up a school-teacher on death’s door from a gunshot wound, and arrived back in Anchorage after dark. Unable to see well enough to land, he circled and circled until residents realized the situation and built bonfires and aimed automobile headlights to illuminate the strip.

Merrill was lucky that time, but it didn’t last. On Sept. 16, 1929, he took off headed north toward Bethel and never arrived. Fabric thought to be from the tail section of his plane eventually washed up on a beach in Cook Inlet. Three years later, Anchorage’s Merrill Field was dedicated in his honor.

Such stories, most with much better endings, were woven throughout the Centennial lecture series. And Anchor-age has no shortage of storied aviators to tell them.

Seybert is one of the project’s culture bearers, a man who soloed on his 16th birthday, had his commercial creden-tials by the time he was 18, and has logged more than 30,000 hours since, primarily throughout the Alaska Pen-insula and the Aleutian and Pribilof islands. The project’s other aviation expert is Susan Bramstedt, who spent 45 years as the public affairs director for Alaska Airlines.

The series launched in September 2014 with the dedication of a ‘60s-era Merrill Field control tower cab, which had been sitting behind the museum’s restoration hanger for years, waiting for permits and funding to build a base beneath it. Afterward, George Pappas and Oren Hudson, two of the mu-seum’s newest Hall of Fame inductees,

talked about the evolution of runways from the park strip to the Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport.

Topics covered in subsequent months included the birth of Alaska’s com-mercial airlines, what aviators wore to keep from freezing to death in the days of open cockpits, the Iditarod air force, and the military’s stamp on aviation history from WWII to JBER.

Don Brugman, who was the head cargo man for several air carri-ers through the years, told stories about strange freight shipped around the state and to the Lower 48, none stranger than two beluga whales cap-tured near King Salmon bound for San Diego’s SeaWorld.

In January, members of the Alaska Chapter of the Ninety-Nines drew the biggest crowd to date, about 75, for their Women in Aviation presentation. Commercial pilot Erika Bennett talked about some of Alaska’s most accom-plished women aviators, then turned the session over to the stories and experiences of Jamie Patterson-Simes, a master flight instructor; Audrey Cole, an Alaska Airlines pilot; and Aimee Moore, who herded reindeer by heli-copter on Alaska’s Seward Peninsula.

In February, Rob Stapleton, Francine Lastufka Taylor, and Jarod Hoogland put on a historical film fest, which included footage of Merrill taking off from and landing on Spenard Lake (now Lake Hood). And the only known footage shot in Anchorage of famed aviator Wiley Post and humorist Will Rogers, who stopped by Merrill Field on Aug. 14, 1935, about 24 hours before they crashed and died near Barrow. This footage, which easily could have been lost forever, showed up in a rusty box with several other 16mm film reels at a garage sale in California. The father of the man who snagged the films sent it to the Alaska Moving Image Preser-vation Association in 2005 — to great fanfare.

The series finale took place May 18, when Stapleton — pilot, photographer and author of Alaska’s Bush Pilots: Im-ages of Aviation — presented “Legends

in the Air,” a talk about Bush pilots, their planes, and their ways. He told stories of Bob Reeve coming to Alaska as a stowaway on a steamship in 1932, of Joe Crosson making the first landing on Mount McKinley that same year, of close calls and even closer ones.

The final lecture included a display of large, framed historical photographs, gleaned from the museum’s photo archives, which Stapleton estimates at around 10,000 images. As part of the project, the talk and photo display will travel to Anchorage schools so stu-dents can learn about this vital piece of Alaska’s heritage and the critical role aviation has played in the growth of the state.

Orin Seybert, who has 60 years of flying under his belt, admitted being skeptical that the free lectures, held at the museum, would draw enough people. Erika Bennett wasn’t. Attract-ing an audience wasn’t a problem.

“The general public is still enamored with aviation,” she said. “As common-place as it is, you would think people would be blasé about it. But it’s magic to a lot of people. And the stories that come out of aviation are typically hair-raising. Nobody wants to hear about the uneventful flights.” ■

Debra McKinney is co-author of Beyond the Bear and a freelance writer living on Lazy Mountain near Palmer. www.debramckinney.com

‘Alaska’s aviation history is unmatched in the entire nation.’

— ORIN SEYBERT

Oren Hudson, Alaska Aviation Museum Hall of Fame inductee, spoke about the evolution of runways in Alaska at the September “Flying Past” lecture.

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2015 GENERAL GRANTS

From a documentary film about the abandoned Sugpiaq village of Kanatak on the south side of the Alaska Peninsula, to a bilingual printed compilation of traditional Yup’ik storyknife tales and drawings in Kwigillingok. From a large-

scale poetry installation at Fort Abercrombie State Historical Park in Kodiak, to a community forum on homelessness in Anchorage.

The humanities projects supported by 2015 Alaska Humanities Forum General Grants are based in communities large and small throughout our state, and represent a dynamic variety of creative disciplines and lines of enquiry.

This year the Forum awarded a total of $98,069 to 16 different projects. On the following pages are short profiles of each grant project, including its sponsoring organization or individual director, location, and grant amount.

2015 General Grants


A Better World for All: Movers and Shakers in the Early Jewish Communities of AlaskaAlaska Jewish Museum Anchorage • $7,000

This summer the Alaska Jewish Museum will open an exhibit detailing Jewish his-tory in Alaska, including stories about 19th century Jewish traders, the Jewish lobby for the purchase of Alaska from Russia, and the founding of the Alaska Commercial Com-pany (ACC). The exhibit will also profile five Jewish individuals who contributed to early Anchorage’s commercial, social, cul-tural, and political structures.

Those five individuals are Zachary Lous-sac, creator of a foundation to promote cul-tural, educational, and recreational activi-ties for Anchorage youth, as well as a trust fund to build the Loussac Library; Leopold David, the first elected mayor of Anchorage after its incorporation in November of 1920; David Green, philanthropist and founder of David Green Master Furrier; Jacob Gott-stein, one of the first wholesale grocers in Anchorage and a fighter for social justice; and Ike Koslosky, who participated in the first stampede to the Klondike in 1879, and established a mercantile store, a trading business, and a fur-buying business in 1921.

The exhibit will incorporate a research room and photo gallery, workshops and lec-tures, a program for teachers in Anchorage to dialogue about their history curriculum, and, at the Jewish Museum, photographs, documents, audio, film, and artifacts. The exhibit will be permanent, as well as repli-cated on the Jewish Museum’s website. The opening date is scheduled for June 14, 2015.

I am Inuit: A project to highlight the human dimension of the ArcticInuit Circumpolar Council AlaskaPoint Hope, Wainwright, Nuiqsut, Kaktovik, Buckland, Noorvik, Noatak, Ambler, Shishmaref, Brevig Mission, Elim, Shaktoolik, Mountain Village, Hooper Bay, Kipnuk, and Tuluksak • $5,000

“I am Inuit” will document life, culture, and society using photos and short stories in sixteen villages to highlight the human dimension of the Arctic, with award-win-ning Iñupiaq photographer Brian Adams traveling to each village between August

2015 and March 2016. A book consisting of Adams’ work is planned for publication in May of next year. In 2013, Adams pub-lished his first book of photography, I Am Alaskan. The project will also disseminate photos, quotes, and short stories via social media.

The United States holds the chairman-ship of the Arctic Council during 2015 to 2017, and “I am Inuit” is part of the Inuit Circumpolar Council-Alaska’s (ICC-AK) effort to showcase the importance of the Arctic to the general public (the Inuit Cir-cumpolar Council is a Permanent Par-ticipant of the Arctic Council). The project intends to broaden the image of the Arctic from that of polar bears and mineral re-sources to include the indigenous people who have thrived in the Arctic environment for thousands of years.

A book release event is planned in An-chorage once the project is completed, and public events regarding the project will be advertised via social media and the ICC-AK website, ICCAlaska.org.

Kanatak Documentary FilmAnna Hoover Kanatak, Egegik, Naknek • $8,000

The Sugpiaq village of Kanatak, on the south side of the Alaska Peninsula, was once a thriving hub, home to an oil and gas boom from the 1920s until the late 1940s. When there was no oil left to recover, com-merce quickly left the village, and its inhab-itants later followed.

Filmmaker Anna Hoover is a lifelong summer resident of the nearby village of Egegik. “I always heard about it growing up,” she says. “Their community isn’t a place where people live now. I had the op-portunity to visit Kanatak, camp there and stay there, and I have the honor of work-ing with [Paul Boskoffsky], who’s the he-reditary chief [of Kanatak] — his father and grandfather were chiefs in the town, and he’s sharing with us the history of this place.”

For Hoover’s documentary film, she will travel with Boskoffsky to Kanatak to tell the story of this abandoned village. “Time is of the essence. Paul will be 80 years old this summer — he still makes the trek, and wants to do it one last time this year. There’s

For information on applying for a 2016 general grant, visit akhf.org.

Bonnie Dillard, of Kodiak, used pieces of plastic marine debris to make this fish ornament for the Capitol Christmas Tree, to be exhibited in Washington, D.C. this winter. (See page 20.)


the potential for [Kanatak’s history] to not be carried on in much detail; I want to help keep the story as whole as pos-sible,” she says.

“The people living in this region con-tinue life in a transitory space as de-velopment marches on. With internet access to tempt and entice youth into a whole plethora of distractions, now, more than ever, it is important to record stories that access our past. Without this project giving voice to this oth-erwise quiet history, the remnants of changing time will remain only in faded image and text.”

Kotzebue Communities of Memory Project JukeboxUniversity of Alaska Fairbanks Kotzebue • $9,995

The Alaska Communities of Mem-ory Project, an oral history endeavor in nine communities across Alaska, took place between 1994 and 1996, funded by the Alaska Humanities Forum. They provided an opportunity for residents to share memories and reflect on their communities. To date, six of these – Nome, Fairbanks, Unalaska, Juneau, Bethel, and Homer – have been digi-tized for presentation on the University

of Alaska Fairbanks’ Project Jukebox website at jukebox.uaf.edu, with sup-port from the Alaska Humanities Fo-rum. The 1994 Communities of Mem-ory meetings from Kotzebue will be the latest Project Jukebox endeavor.

“This project is very important to us as the videotapes made of these commu-nity meetings in 1994 have been buried in a filing cabinet drawer for 20 years, and it is time they were made publicly available, as that was their original in-tent,” says project director Leslie Mc-Cartney. “The stories include soldiers’ stories by the men from the Kotzebue area who served their country, and those of their family and the hardships they faced in staying home and trying to live their transitional subsistence life-style. Making these stories available will educate all those in Alaska and around the world of the little-known contribu-tions these citizens made to their coun-try, and how these events profoundly af-fected their community members.”

Sixteen hours of videotape will be digitized, with up to four hours of re-cordings selected for the Kotzebue Communities of Memory Project Juke-box site. Kotzebue’s Communities of Memory meetings were unique in that

the participants focused on the experi-ences of their men in war. Twenty-seven people participated in the 16 hours of video.

The Kotzebue installment on the Project Jukebox website is expected to be live by March 31, 2018.

The Lives of Our EldersEsther A. IlutsikNew Stuyahok • $10,000

Native Elders Nick Gumlickpuk and Alexie Gust of New Stuyahok in Southwest Alaska are the subjects of this oral history project for the South-west Region School District. There is a limited amount of printed material from the region for students to study and learn about their history and Yup’ik self-identity, thus the resulting publica-tion will capture these elders’ historical perspective for students in the region. Gumlickpuk is a keeper of traditional Yup’ik celebrations and legends, and Gust is one of the last New Stuyahok Yup’ik dancers who know the apallut (lyrics and songs) as directed by the apallirturta (dance director).

2015 GENERAL GRANTS

Oral histories from Nick Gumlickpuk (top) and Alexie Gust, both of New Stuyahok, will be published in Yup’ik and English.

A location from Anna Hoover’s documentary on Kanatak.


This project will also give retired edu-cator Margie Hasting firsthand experi-ence interviewing elders, with the help of Yup’ik linguist Marie Meade, in order to continue a series of elders’ stories in the region.

“We are excited about this project, as it will enhance the historical experienc-es of our elders who live in our villages,” says project director Esther Ilutsik. “The end product is a book published both in Yup’ik and English, and will be utilized by our Yup’ik Studies program at all our six school sites. The book will also be available for our community members so that they can have a good historical understanding of the lives of our elders.”

Living with Loss: Dialogues for Community and the End of Isolation in Sitka, AKBrave Heart Volunteers Sitka • $4,500

Brave Heart Volunteers is a non-profit based in Sitka that aims to pro-vide support and educational services for caregivers and individuals facing illness, isolation, end of life, or grief. The Living with Loss public dialogues are part of their educational mission. The project will take place over several months and include three public dia-logues hosted by the students at Pacific High School in partnership with the Is-land Institute of Alaska. It will engage teenagers and older adults throughout Sitka in intercultural and intergen-erational dialogues about isolation and community.

With a partner, students will be re-sponsible for conducting interviews with the elders who participate in the dialogues, asking questions and docu-menting their stories to create radio pieces that both share these elders’ perspectives and how the students feel these stories are relevant to their lives today. At the end of the semester, Brave Heart Volunteers and the Island Insti-tute will host a public exhibit featuring the discoveries and stories unveiled by the dialogues through audio and photo-graphic media.

“This project is exciting because there

are two marginalized groups here, older adults and youth, who are coming to-gether, and I think they can teach each other and the rest of us so much about what it means to experience isolation in our community, and from that, maybe we can learn more about how to foster connection,” says project director Zack Desmond.

Northern Voices on HomelessnessUniversity of Alaska Anchorage, Department of AnthropologyAnchorage • $2,434

The Northern Voices on Home-lessness event held March 7 was a com-munity forum at the Loussac Library that brought together professional so-cial service workers, academics who research homelessness, concerned com-munity members, policy advocates, and people who have experienced homeless-ness themselves. Additional partici-pants used the library’s OWL network to videoconference in from Juneau, Ko-diak, and Nome.

Rebecca Barker, outreach coordina-tor for the project, explains, “The idea of homelessness can evoke different things to different people—some people think of those who struggle with addic-tion or mental illness, others work with survivors of abuse, others focus on the working poor, and others on youth. We wanted to see discussion across profes-sional disciplines, from direct service delivery to quantitative, policy-oriented research to more narrative-based re-search. There are a ton of dedicated, hardworking, smart people working on helping and surviving homelessness all over the state. Sometimes they are too busy working to talk about what they do. However, we believe that getting together and respectfully exchanging ideas with different parts of the com-munity is essential for creating mutual understanding, which is essential for creating effective policy.”

The data and insights were collected in poster form, and recordings of the event will be broadcast on the radio and online. The results of this initial forum will be used in a future proposal aimed

at developing a Network on Northern Homelessness, to include academics, professional service providers, city, town, and village residents, and indi-viduals with previous or current experi-ence living in homelessness.

Oral History of the Bench and BarAlaska Bar Association Historians Committee • Anchorage, Fairbanks, Juneau • $4,400

The Alaska Bar Association His-torians Committee is engaged in an on-going effort to obtain, transcribe, cata-log, and present personal oral histories of judges and prominent attorneys in Alaska for the benefit of the public of today and historians of the future. The recordings and transcripts are avail-able to the public via the Alaska Law Li-brary. Other programs, including Proj-ect Jukebox at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, use the transcripts and re-cordings for educational purposes.

This project uses both preexisting oral histories and committee member interviews with prospective oral his-tory subjects. “Our project collects the oral histories of judges and lawyers at or near the end of their careers,” says project director Mike Schwaiger. “The

Judicial portrait of Justice Warren Matthews, circa 2006.

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hardest part is just getting these folks to sit down and talk for a couple of hours—many feel that they aren’t im-portant enough, that they won’t have good stories, or that it’s too early to start reflecting on their careers. They’re wrong. There’s a saying in collecting oral histories: run—don’t walk—to take an oral history. Too soon folks lose the ability to tell us their stories, so we have to make sure we get them when we can.

“Once we get them to sit down, we get a lot of great stories from impor-tant figures and colorful characters. For our interviewers and today’s audience, these stories are interesting, moving, or fun. I know I felt very moved hearing one judge speak about the pain he had to endure silently when being dragged through the mud in newspapers and courtrooms for years. For historians of the future, [these oral histories] are im-portant data for historical arguments about our legal system. Who knows how historians of the future will think of this era of Alaska legal history?”

Our Sustenance LifeLaRece Egli King Salmon, Naknek, South Naknek, Kokhanok, Sitka • $6,400

Our Sustenance Life is a narrative project that will integrate digital media with stories, people, places, and objects of Bristol Bay to explore the rich social connections and environmental factors that fuel its culture. The project will include maps, books, audio, and video to illustrate the evolution of traditional food and culture in Bristol Bay. A web-site (OurSustenanceLife.com) will be paired with a permanent media display at the King Salmon Visitors Center, in-cluding objects, literature, and printed materials, as well as digital content from the website. Interactive stories will ex-plore the cultural influence of migra-tion, social integration, economic devel-opment, and adoption of technology on how residents of Bristol Bay learn, eat, and laugh.

“Our Sustenance Life is a shift toward bringing back ancient wisdom and re-envisioning it with digital media to cap-

ture the significance of the rapid-fire times we live in,” says project director LaRece Egli, who moved back to her hometown of Naknek. “My continued research has revealed that there is much work to be done to preserve my home. This work is as compelling as the Bristol Bay landscape and I cannot leave it un-done. A sustainable food-centered life is not only possible here, it is the key to safe passage of our brilliant and layered culture into the future.”

OurSustenanceLife.com is expected to launch in September.

The People’s TreeAlaska Geographic Locations statewide • $8,740

The annual Capitol Christmas Tree exhibit in Washington, D.C. features trees and ornaments highlighting a particular national forest; for 2015, Chugach National Forest was selected, making this the first time Alaska will be represented.

Alaskans statewide will be making ornaments for the exhibit expressing their ties to the land and their cultural heritage. Students and youth across the state will be employed as project man-agers for events in their communities where the ornaments will be made, and two will be selected to attend the tree lighting ceremony in Washington, D.C.

“It’s up to [the students] to make it work,” says Betsi Oliver of Alaska Geo-graphic, the sponsoring organization. “They’re capable of this responsibility if they’re given the opportunity to rise to the challenge; it’s not a job at Dairy Queen. We’re identify-ing students in small communi-ties around the state now, and they’re getting paid to facilitate or-nament-mak-ing activities at events. They have

really strong connections to what it means to be an Alaskan. They’re not just staring at screens; they’re connected to the wilderness spaces. It shows that kids care about outdoor spaces, and will be stewards and recreationists.”

There will be 40 to 60 events held statewide for various Alaska audiences to participate in ornament-making, leading up to the lighting of the People’s Tree in Washington, D.C. in Decem-ber. The capitol will feature the Capitol Christmas Tree and 70 additional trees in parks and offices around the city, all decorated with ornaments made by Alaskans. Information on the Capitol Christmas Tree exhibit can be found at capitolchristmastree.com.

Poems in PlaceAlaska Center for the Book Caines Head State Recreational Area, Seward, and Fort Abercrombie State Historical Park, Kodiak • $5,000

The Alaska Center for the Book’s “Poems in Place” project has been work-ing toward placing poems by Alaska writers in each of the seven regions of the Alaska State Park system since 2013. Inspired by the installation of Kim Cornwall’s poem “What Whales and Infants Know” in Chugach State Park in 2011, poems have now been installed at Chena River State Recreation Area north of Fairbanks, Totem Bight State Historical Park in Ketchikan, Inde-pendence Mine State Historical Park at Hatcher Pass, and Lake Aleknagik State

Recreation Site/Wood-Tikchik State Park near Dillingham.

The project will be completed with the 2015 selections of po-

ems for Caines Head State Recreational Area in

Seward and Fort A b e r c r o m b i e State Historical

Park in Kodiak. “Poems in Place”

invites Alaskans to submit original poems or nominate a poem

2015 GENERAL GRANTS

People’s Tree ornament made by Maria Shell of Haines.

continued on page 22


W HEN CATHARINE AXLEY began filming her documentary

on legendary sprint musher George Attla of Huslia, Alaska, last November, she couldn’t have known her subject would pass away mere months later, on February 15 at 81 years old.

In Axley’s words, “I met George Attla for the first time this past summer, after coming across an article about his most recent work. I was totally transfixed by how this world champion dogsled racer was embarking on a new mission late in life of using dog mushing as a form of cultural revitalization for young people in his village and in villages throughout Alaska, and knew I had to meet the man himself. Immediately it became clear to me that his work today could be an inspiration for and have a huge impact on communities seeking to revitalize their own unique cultural traditions, and that a documentary film could share this with audiences across the state, country, and world. I soon learned that George was also going to be training one young man from Huslia to compete in this year’s winter sprint races. This developing mentor-mentee

relationship was a perfect way to share George’s work through film and address the importance of passing down Native knowledge and history to today’s younger generation. What’s more, George’s young mentee, Joe Bifelt, was also going to be balancing distance education classes as an enrolled sophomore at UAF. I thought it would be really interesting to share this side of Joe to understand both the opportunities and obstacles for rural students who are pursuing distance education and provoke audiences to consider and challenge the ways in which society tends to place varying values on different sources of knowledge.

“I began filming in November, choosing an observational approach to document the natural interactions and mentoring between George and Joe and to capture the incredible spirit of the community of Huslia and their dedication to revitalizing tradition. I returned over New Year’s to film the community’s festivities and annual dog sled races, where Joe raced George’s dog team. After this film shoot, George’s health began to decline rapidly, and we soon learned that he had bone

cancer. It was a very difficult time, and I made two additional trips north to film Joe as he took on a whole new set of responsibilities without his mentor present. In mid-February, George passed away.

“As George’s health was declining, and then after his death, an incredible team of family and supporters came out to continue to support Joe. The generosity of this team was awesome, and everyone was determined to carry on George’s goal of getting Joe to race to honor our beloved musher. The Fur Rondy [sled dog race] was cancelled due to warm weather, so the team geared up to race in the Open North American Championship race in Fairbanks. I was so proud of Joe’s determination and perseverance in the face of so many challenges. I am so honored to share Joe’s journey and growth over the past six months through the film. With George’s passing, the film project has become a way to ensure that George’s work can be shared with others and that his mission can be carried on into the future.”

For updates on the film’s progress, visit facebook.com/AttlaDocumentary.

Attla: The Making of a ChampionCatharine Axley Huslia, Fairbanks, Anchorage $2,000

George Attla watching video of a sled dog race.


by an Alaskan that resonates with the particular state park chosen for the in-stallation.

The project’s goal is for Alaskans to see themselves and their place with new eyes, encouraging residents to explore their relationship to the land, to lan-guage, and to each other. The installa-tions are seen by thousands of state park visitors every year.

The winning poems for 2015 will be announced on May 31, after a blind judg-ing process involving the Poems in Place committee members, park rangers, and local advisors. The two new poem instal-lations will be dedicated in September. Details are available at alaskacenter-forthebook.org/poetry-in-place.

Resurgence: Alaska Native Drum Traditions — A Special Documentary Presentation of EarthsongsKoahnic Broadcast CorporationAnchorage • $3,500

“Earthsongs” is the weekly public radio program of contemporary Native American music, carried by 97 radio stations across 18 states and in Canada. “Resurgence: Alaska Native Drum Tra-ditions” will spotlight Alaska Native, particularly Iñupiaq, drum traditions in a special radio documentary.

Alaska Native drumming, dance songs, and dances are important in vil-lages throughout Alaska. These tradi-tions provide links to famous events,

customary subsistence practices, spiri-tual ceremonies, social commentary, and humor. Missionaries, educators, and officials targeted these traditions in the 19th and 20th centuries and of-ten sought to eradicate them. Songs, dances, language, and ceremonial prac-tices were sometimes practiced and pre-served in secret, or were lost.

Starting in the 1960s, Native solidar-ity and civil rights movements, as well as greater economic and political power for Native people, led to a renaissance in traditional music and dance practices. This project will spotlight primarily Iñupiaq drum traditions, and provide an introduction to the sounds and tra-ditions of Alaska Native music for gen-eral audiences. It will also provide his-torical and social context to examine why it was so important to reclaim these traditions.

“Resurgence: Alaska Native Drum Traditions” is expected to be completed and distributed in early 2016.

Yup’ik Storyknife TalesAgnes Lewis DavidKwigillingok, Kongiganak, Bethel, Anchorage • $9,600

“I grew up in Kwigillingok, Alaska hearing my grandmother’s oral tales,” says Agnes Lewis David, a Bristol Bay village elder. “Often people with sto-ryknives would repeat these stories by carving symbols into the mud or snow. These stories and the ways they were im-parted to us are both part of my Yup’ik Eskimo heritage. I applied for this grant in hopes that the younger generation would learn these stories (which are much like fables), but also so that they might know about our tradition of us-ing storyknives as a means of passing along our culture and values.”

David is embarking on a project to compile and publish bilingual and bi-cultural books to preserve these Yup’ik oral tales, with illustrations of the storyknife drawings, the old Mora-vian Yup’ik writing system, the newer Yup’ik system of writing (developed by the Alaska Native Language Center

Independence Mine, Augustby Tom Sexton

I like to think the miners looked up and sighed when they emerged from the maze of tunnels and saw the moon rising overhead as bright as the gold they blasted from the unwilling rock, gold that kept their families from the cold.

I like to think one or two stooped to pick a handful of berries for their children while they followed the moon’s light down to the boomtown they called home, berries as ripe as the full moon now spilling its light like honey from a spoon.


2015 GENERAL GRANTS

at UAF), and an English translation. In Yup’ik culture, young girls would sketch images into snow or mud with “storyk-nives,” originally made of wood, bone, or ivory, to illustrate the oral stories passed on to them, stories that depict traditional Yup’ik values and morals.

The storyknife tales books will be dis-tributed to village schools and libraries, as well as at public forums.

Supporting and Sharing Youth StoriesStory Works AlaskaAnchorage • $9,500

In 2014, Story Works Alaska con-ducted a series of workshops at West High, helping teens produce over 250 true, personal stories. Five other schools subsequently requested the program for 2015, and now classroom workshops can be requested online (StoryWorks AK.org).

Story Works is developing free, on-line storytelling lessons for teachers to use in their classes, which are expected to be available by spring of 2016.

On April 1, eight storytellers, one

emcee, and five musicians shared the stage at Service High for “Stories of Our Youth,” an all-student storytelling event.

With support from the Alaska Teen Media Institute (ATMI), some students recorded their stories, and while some chose to keep their recording private, others were submitted to “In Other Words,” ATMI’s student-produced pro-gram on KNBA 90.3 FM, or the Story Works website. Several students retold their stories live at the Alaska Center for the Performing Arts as part of Arctic Entries, with their stories archived on-line (arcticentries.com).

“As a former classroom teacher, I find it exciting to be part of something that brings community energy and engage-ment into the classroom,” says project director Regan Brooks, “and to see that energy coming back out—in the form of student storytelling events and youth sharing stories at Arctic Entries or through the Alaska Teen Media Insti-tute—has been even more wonderful.”

Story Works has worked with more than 700 students in just over a year. “One of the reasons I enjoy bringing Story Works to my students is that it enhances our classroom community and builds morale,” says Rachel Kit-toe, an English teacher at West High. “It also really helps students learn how to think about structure and editing. The process of crafting a story to tell verbal-ly is very similar to the writing process and, as we work, I can see students learn how to transfer these skills. The Story Works volunteers did a phenomenal job of positively supporting students while holding them to a high standard. The students, though a little scared at first, really enjoyed themselves by the end, and came closer together as a learning community.”

TALKeetna Talks and Community QuestingNorthern Susitna Institute Talkeetna • $2,000

The Northern Susitna Institute (NSI) will host a series of “TALKeetna Talks” during July and August to pro-

vide a forum for experts in various fields to share their knowledge and under-standing of the Talkeetna area’s history and culture, from pre-contact Dena’ina to the Fairview Inn and beyond. Sched-uled speakers include Dave Johnston, Colby Coombs, and Brian and Diane Okonek on Alaska Range mountaineer-ing; Jonathon Durr on area Dena’ina archaeology; Sue Deyoe on the history of Talkeetna (the first 99 years); and Al and Lelani Kingsbury on Northern Susitna Valley agriculture.

NSI will also hold a weeklong “Quest-ing” workshop in early August, led by Delia Clark, co-author of Questing, a Guide to Creating Community Treasure Hunts. To complete a “Quest,” people follow maps and clues and decipher riddles to find treasure boxes hidden in natural and cultural locations in a par-ticular region. Clark’s workshop will

use field trips, talks, hands-on activities, local experts, and resource materials to introduce participants to the concepts of place-based education and the me-chanics of Quest development.

“We’re particularly excited to blend our passion for place-based learning with a deeper journey into Talkeetna’s history,” says NSI Executive Direc-tor Betsy Smith. “A clue-based Quest through our community will be a very hands-on way to explore the upcoming centennial of a community with a repu-tation for the offbeat.”

Information on TALKeetna Talks and the Questing workshop can be found at northernsusitnainstitute.org. ■

Sam Bernitz tells his story live at the Alaska Center for the Performing Arts as part of Arctic Entries.

The Fairview Inn will be the among the subjects of a TALKeetna Talk on the town’s history this summer.

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One chilly Saturday morning in February, the Alaska Humanities Forum welcomed a small group of

Alaska writers with coffee, tea, copies of Forum magazine, and a warm space to convene. Deb Vanasse, author of Cold Spell and Out of the Wilderness, led the class through the ins and outs of publishing, and her students described their projects. One student was editing a collection of inherited memoirs; another was several drafts into a genre-defying romance; yet another was writing an adventure travel memoir.

“Ready to Publish” marked the first 49 Writers workshop hosted by the Alaska Humanities Forum, followed by workshops on writing the three-dimensional novel or memoir, historical research resources for writers, publishing on Kindle, and writing in 360 degrees. Robin McLean, two-time finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Short Story Prize, will lead a Forum-hosted workshop, “Breaking Your Pattern,” on July 14th, exposing students’ unconscious writing habits and providing tools to enliven writing when stuck or bored.

49 Writers began as an online collaboration between two authors, Andromeda Romano-Lax and Deb Vanasse, but quickly grew into a statewide community of Alaska writers. In 2010, the organization expanded beyond the virtual walls of the blog into a brick-and-mortar building in Anchorage, providing the space for workshops and classes. Though the 1917 house offered a cozy atmosphere and stunning views of Cook Inlet, the classes were beginning to outgrow the facility by 2014. The Alaska Humanities Forum saw a perfect opportunity to invite a new audience into its Ship Creek location.

The mission of the Alaska Humanities Forum is to tell the stories and impact

the lives of all Alaskans. A vibrant writing community supports that mission by cultivating stories that enrich the popular vision of Alaska, combating stereotypes. All too often, visitors to the state come expecting igloos, ice road truckers, and freezing weather all summer long, but local writers promote a more diverse image. They introduce the world to Alaska’s poetic vocabulary: break up, ice fog, muskeg, moulin, Outside, termination dust.

“49 Writers is a small, but expanding, organization. By partnering with the Alaska Humanities Forum, we are able to bring new literary programs to more regions of the state. For example, the Machetanz Arts Festival invited 49 Writers to add a literary component to their program for the first time. Support from the Forum helps make that possible,” said Morgan Grey, former Executive Director of 49 Writers.

Though this is the first year that

the Alaska Humanities Forum has hosted 49 Writers workshops, the two organizations have collaborated extensively in the past. 49 Writers received an Anchorage Centennial Community Grant at the end of 2013 to host memoir-writing workshops at local senior centers. The classes were well attended and received. This year, 49 Writers is publishing a collection of short memoirs about the city, many of which started in those workshops.

The Forum has also sponsored the Crosscurrents series, which unites authors on stage for lively, moderated discussions. These events, which take place in southcentral and southeast Alaska, ask big questions: What is the writer’s responsibility in truth and fact versus memory? In the age of information, do stories still matter? What is the “real” Alaska and how does Alaska literature define it?

On the surface these questions explore writing, but as the conversations develop, they bend more towards the universal: human experience, human identity, and human values. What begins as a discussion on art and craft quickly becomes a discussion about the humanities. This year, the April Crosscurrents panel featured Eva Saulitis, a 2014 Governor’s Award Recipient for Distinguished Service to the Humanities, and Frank Soos, the current Alaska Writer Laureate. They discussed how writers appear on the page and who they really are.

49 Writers has also collaborated on grant projects led by other groups. Alaska Book Week, led by the Alaska Center for the Book, promoted literacy and featured panel discussions, author interviews, live readings, and book fairs statewide. 49 Writers played a key role in connecting to authors and marketing

Cultivating StoriesThe Alaska Humanities Forum and 49 Writers expand a creative partnership

By Megan Zlatos

What Does a House Want? author Gary Geddes will co-lead the 49

Alaska Writing Center’s Tutka Bay Writer’s Retreat in September.


Alaska Women’s Giving CircleLA 9 graduates drive groundbreaking nonprofit funding effort

events through their extensive networks. The 2015 Alaska Book Week will take place October 3rd through 10th.

49 Alaska Writing Center will reprise its popular Tutka Bay Writer’s Retreat with a focus on mastering the most fundamental element of writing: the word. The September 11th-13th retreat will be led by the husband-wife team of Ann Eriksson and Gary Geddes, two authors known for their deft command of the language. Geddes, author and editor of 45 books, has been praised for bringing “deadly accuracy in language and form” to his 2014 release, What Does a House Want?: Selected Poems. Eriksson, an ecologist by training, is known for a “keen eye for microscopic detail,” demonstrated in her four published novels. The two will offer separate genre workshops and joint craft sessions.

The Tutka Bay Writer’s Retreat launched in 2010, aiming to provide a quiet place apart to write and convene as writers. As Deb Vanasse blogged a few months before the inaugural weekend, “Retreats are good for us all. Especially writers. If a few hours in a coffee shop or a weekend of getting things done at the cabin yield new ways of seeing and knowing, how much more will unfold in a full weekend of intentional writing-focused retreat?”

Writing requires a constant balance: between living and reflecting, between community and solitude, between listening and storytelling, between presence and retreat. The result is a heightened awareness of human experience, the heart of the humanities. “Life is where our stories find us,” wrote Deb Vanasse in another blog post. “Retreat, be it for a week or a day or a quarter-hour, is where we find them.” ■

What is the “real” Alaska and how does Alaskan literature define it?

The Alaska Women’s Giving Circle (alaskawomensgivingcircle.org) is a philanthropic organization founded by

two Leadership Anchorage 9 graduates, Tlisa Northcutt and Krista Scully. Born of a discussion

on social capital at a Leadership Anchorage Saturday session, the Giving Circle is a group of women who make an annual minimum donation of $500, pool the money, ask for project proposals from members, vote on the proposals, and then issue grants to Alaska nonprofit organizations.

During their Leadership Anchorage program in the fall of 2005 and spring of 2006, the cohort discussed the article, “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital” by Robert Putnam. “The premise was that social capital was on the decline, and we were asked as a group to think about it from our lens and comment if it was true or if we had a different point of view,” Northcutt says. “I commented that from a fundraising perspective, I disagreed because women’s giving circles were on the rise, and a group of women pooling resources to make a difference was the definition of social capital.”

Scully agreed, and the two continued to discuss the concept. “We didn’t want to start a new nonprofit, but we needed infrastructure to accept [funds] as charitable,” Northcutt says. After studying other giving circles and soliciting advice, they partnered with the Alaska Community Foundation, which provides the nonprofit framework they needed.

By the winter of 2008, the Alaska Women’s Giving Circle had amassed $11,000, and the members met at the BP Energy Center in Midtown Anchorage to vote on distributing the funds.

“Because it was pooled money we could make greater gifts than we ever could individually,” says Scully. “The first night we met to vote, we didn’t know what it would look like. Tlisa and I have different working styles—I wanted a little more creative and fluid voting process, and Tlisa wanted to give them [proposals] grades. We got together and we told people, ‘You get one piece of paper and you can do whatever you want on that piece of paper.’ The pitch couldn’t exceed one piece of paper, and there were five minutes of questions—we had to get what your project was about.”

After a potluck dinner and hours of discussion, the Giving Circle members voted. “At the end, we all just looked around the room, and said ‘We just made history,’” Scully recalls. “It felt really momentous and exciting; I was really proud of us and everyone.” The Eva Foundation, which helps victims of abuse with recovery, received $5,000; the now-shuttered Mary Magdalene Home, which provided housing and counseling for sexually exploited women, received $4,000; and Bean’s Café, which feeds hungry people daily, received $2,000.

The group took a hiatus in 2012 due to Northcutt’s and Scully’s busy

LEGACY OF LEADERSHIP ANCHORAGE


LEGACY OF LEADERSHIP ANCHORAGE

schedules (Northcutt is the Associate Athletic Director for Development at UAA; Scully is the Pro Bono Director for the Alaska Bar Association), but solved that issue by bringing in other women in leadership roles (what the two call the “hit by a bus plan”). Since the first grants issued in January 2009, the Alaska Women’s Giving Circle has provided nearly $50,000 to 22 different organizations.

“Part of what drove us was the ability to provide funding to dark horse projects and organizations that couldn’t compete for grants, had no staff, or didn’t have the skill set for grant proposals,” Scully says.

“Our little gifts could make an actual difference,” Northcutt adds.

In 2011, the Alaska Women’s Giving Circle was the first funder of Run Like a Girl, now a chapter of Girls on the Run, which inspires pre-adolescent girls using running as a catalyst for confidence.

In 2013, the Giving Circle made its first grant to Running Free Alaska, a program at Hiland Mountain Correctional Center. Running Free Alaska encourages women inmates to make healthy life choices by running at the prison (there are lots of runners in the Giving Circle). But prison-issued Keds aren’t ideal for running, so the Giving Circle’s initial gift of $3,500 went toward running shoes, in partnership with Skinny Raven Sports. The following year another $3,000 went to Running Free Alaska for sports bras and more shoes.

“We were missing art,” Northcutt says. “We’re all here because we want to live in a vibrant community.” Thus, in the 2015 round of grants, $1,000 went to Cyrano’s Theatre Company to fund a production of Eve Ensler’s play “Emotional Creature,” which the San Francisco Chronicle described as “a collage of monologues, chat sessions—about body image, dieting, sex, abortion—and lively dance breaks.”

“We want to create and support a community that we love and live in,” Scully says. “When I talk to people about [the Alaska Women’s Giving Circle], I don’t think it’s noble—I think it’s necessary.”

“I gave and gave significantly to a lot of organizations,” Northcutt says. “This is a lot more impactful. It gives you ownership, helps you find your passion. When you buy into a group like this, you buy into things that aren’t your top priority—we’re coming at it collectively.” ■

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

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

We couldn’t do any of this without you.Your annual contributions support programs like the

Sister School Exchange that promotes cross-cultural understanding and appreciation between Alaska’s youth; and Take Wing Alaska, which provides direction and support for rural teens preparing for post-secondary pursuits. Your support allows Leadership Anchorage to develop our next generation of leaders at the community, state, and even national level.

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

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

We couldn’t do it without your support

FRIENDSTara AlvarezJane AngvikTam Agosti-GislerDot and Linne BardarsonMary Frances BarkerMarsha E. BennettBarbara BrownBrenda L. Dates CampenLenora Lolly CarplukBlanche CrandallEmily CohnLauryn CyrusAnna DaltonMarie DarlinNora DauenhauerShannon DautAna DittmarLouise DriscollRenee’ Duncan

Ian DuttonMelinda EvansLaurie Evans-DineenSherry EckrichWendy Erd and Peter Kaufmann Ann Fienup-RiordanVictor FischerSteven FleischmanPauline FredricksonLinda FreedKay F. GajewskiRebecca GallenAnjuli GranthamHeather and Joshua HarrisJosh HemsathMichael HawfieldHenry HaysJoshua HerrenDewey HoffmanJennifer Howell


Elayne HunterMarie HusaKelly HurdRoss JohnstonMartha and Brett JokelaKaren JordanBarbara KarlJun and Chiyo KawakamiTerrence KellyJ. Allen KemplenCarolyn Sue KremersNancy LordCheryl and Mark LovegreenMildred M. MartinJordan MarshallNancy M. MendenhallPeter MetcalfeDrew MichaelKenneth MillerStanton MollElisabeth MooreheadRobert MorrisGlenna L. MuncyPeter NeyhartJames and Irene NorcrossAdam OttaviBruce and Meredith ParhamDavid and Angela Matz PayerLee PostVirginia and Robert PotterCharles ReynoldsJames RenkertSigrun RobertsonLorraine (Alice) RyserClifford and Marjorie SalisburyJuan San MiguelShirley SchleichLaura SchueKrista ScullyWendell ShifflerSean StithamKatherine SmithJim StrattonRobert StrickBrit SzymoniakFrancine TaylorJonathan TeetersAlan TrautJoan UttDeidre C. WattAmanda R WattTonja J. WoelberMegan Zlatos

SCHOLARSWilfred and Sharon AbbottRoland and Virginia AdamsShawn AspelundSharon BaringCynthia BergerMary Margaret and

Charles BinghamJoan Braddock

Jeane BreinigLisa ButlerAnnie CalkinsLaMiel Chapman and

Waltraud BarronMichael ChmielewskiDermot ColeCarol S. ComeauJerry and Sandy CoveyCarmen DavisSharon DavisBrenda and George DickisonSusan ElliotMelinda EvansRobert EastaughKitty FarnhamPat Branson and Gordon GouldJoe GriffithErnestine HayesAnne HanleyStephanie HerrenCaitlin HolmanMary HughesKaren L. HuntTim and Donna HurleyM.E. and D.P. InmanSara JackinskyMartha JokelaDiane KaplanStephanie KeslerDave KifferJames and Mary Lou KingJanet R. KleinJenifer KohoutMarc and Sandra LanglandDavid and Marilyn LeeCindy ListerBarbo LyonPeter MaassenBlythe MarstonScott McAdamsJoe and Kate McPageLarry MerculieffDavid and Janet McCabeDennis McMillanJo and Peter MichalskiBen MohrPauline MorrisJohn MouwAnthony and Lynette NakazawaPeter NeyhartDavid NicolaiBecky PattersonJim and Susan PfeiffenbergerJohn R. PughJohn and Carolyn RaderAngela RamirezJohn RoderickKathy RuddyTim and Alice SamuelsonGregory SchmidtAlan SchmittKen and Liz Sherwood

Michael SmithJohn StalveyWayne StevensArliss SturgulewskiCharles TobinAlex TurnwallShelley WickstromVicki WisenbaughCharles WohlforthKurt WongShelly WozniakSheila WyneNancy Yaw Davis

PATRONSChrista Bruce Catkin Kilcher BurtonElizabeth Qaulluq CravalhoHeather DayMonica Garcia-ItchoakGeorge and Aase HaugenLora JorgensenNancy KempMary KemppelStephanie KeslerSteve LindbeckBarbro LyonJohn MurtaghHarry and Leslie NeedMia OxleyDean PotterLibby RoderickChellie SkoogRayette SterlingLowell ThomasJim Ustasiewski and Mary Irvine

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GIVING IS EASY


Department of Interior General Land Office Anchorage Townsite with South, East and Third Additions, 1915-1920.

On July 10, 1915, the auction of town lots commenced. Within a few days, 655 lots were sold for a total of $150,000. The Alaska Engineering Commission poured concrete sidewalks and installed a power plant for electricity. By 1917, nearly 7,000 people lived in Anchorage, many of whom were immigrants from Greece, Russia, and Scandinavia seeking work on the railroad. The Anchorage Museum.


F illing four galleries at the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center, the Anchorage Centennial

exhibit City Limits tells the story of Anchorage’s development on the Cook Inlet landscape.

“Emerging from Dena’ina country into a railroad camp in 1915, Anchor-age has transformed from a small town of tents into Alaska’s urban center,” reads the exhibit program. “The hub of both the Pacific Rim and the circumpo-lar North, the area is now home to one of the most diverse communities in the nation. City Limits examines how this global position has shaped the commu-nity culturally and economically.”

Central to the exhibit are historic maps drawn from Tents to Towers, a recently completed Anchorage Centen-nial Community Grant Project, direct-ed by Dr. Katherine Ringsmuth, former Senior Curator of the museum’s Alaska Gallery.

Dr. Ringsmuth and her team col-lected more than 300 historic maps of Anchorage from public and private ar-chives statewide, with an emphasis on maps that showcase the unusual and provoke critical thought.

Five Tents to Towers maps are repro-duced on these pages, along with their accompanying detailed captions.

City Limits will be on display at the Anchorage Museum through October 11.

TENTSTO

TOWERSA Century of Maps

of Alaska’s Largest City


Anchorage 2035, 1983.

This map first appeared in an issue of the quarterly Alaska Geographic magazine entitled, “Anchorage and the Cook Inlet Basin.” The map, illustrated by Sharon Schumacher, takes a humorous view of Captain Cook’s return to Anchorage in 2035. Many of the tongue-and cheek predictions reflect issues that were relevant in the 1980s, such as moving the state capital to Willow. Other predictions — shrinking glaciers, vanishing wildlife, alternative energy sources, and the expanse of Mat-Su Valley — are issues uncannily pertinent to us today. If Captain Cook did return to Anchorage, perhaps most surprising to him would be the city’s diversity. Anchorage residents embody the distant places Cook explored on his voyages around Pacific Rim. Alaska Geographic Society, 1983.

TENTS TO TOWERS



Richardson’s Map of the Cook Inlet and Copper River Gold Fields, 1898.

The presidential election in 1896 pitted William McKinley, an advocate for the gold standard, against William Jennings Bryan, a supporter of free silver. McKinley’s victory made gold the standard for America’s money supply, which drove miners deep into Alaska after the Klondike strike in 1897. Within a year, merchants made maps showing routes to gold fields, including the gold mining in the Chugach foothills along Turnagain Arm, across from Hope and Sunrise. This map also shows two villages along the Knik Arm—Kitakh and Zoluiat. Elmer E. Rasmuson Library, Rare Maps Collection

Ahtna Sketch Map Annotated by Allen, 1885.

While serving as a U.S. Army officer tasked with exploring vast regions of Alaska, Henry T. Allen made maps from information acquired from Alaska Natives. This map shows the trail route connecting the Copper River to Cook Inlet, following the Matanuska River. Henry T. Allen, Report of an expedition to the Copper, Tananá, and Kóyukuk rivers, in the territory of Alaska, in the year 1885, Government Printing Office, Washington D.C., 1887.


‘This is what I remember.’ The Herb McKinney Spenard Map, circa 1950s.

Spenard resident Herb McKinney’s father was one of the first homesteaders to settle along what is now Fireweed Lane. This hand-drawn map depicts McKinney’s memory of the Chester Creek area in the 1930s and 1940s, prior to its flooding to create Westchester Lagoon in the early 1970s. It shows old wagon roads, names of early residents and locations of homesteads, even the site of the “Forest Park Golf Course,” which no longer exists. Archives and Special Collections, Consortium Library, the University of Alaska Anchorage, HMC-0529.

TENTS TO TOWERS


Nowhere is the link between the humanities and warfare more evident than in the works of the British War Poets of World War I.

Theirs is not media entertainment and embellishment, but the actual brutal business of killing and destroying, a deep cry for understanding.


The Presidential appointment of William “Bro” Adams last July

as the tenth chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities provides an opportunity for better understanding the relationships between the humanities and the military. Adams, from an affluent family, dropped out of college, enlisted in the Army, graduated from Officer Candidate School, served a combat tour in Vietnam, and like so many others, experienced an epiphany in combat that helped shape his life.

“It made me serious in a certain way,” he said in a recent interview.

“And as a 20-year old combat infantry advisor, I came face to face, acutely, with questions that writers, artists, philosophers, and musicians examine in their work, starting with, “What does it mean to be human?”

Since Adams’ appointment, the National Endowment for the Humanities has started “Standing Together: The Humanities and the Experience of War.” This new initiative seeks to help those who never served in the military deepen their understanding of the wartime experiences of Americans in the armed services. As part of the national program, the Alaska Humanities Forum plans to work with combat veterans to articulate the experiences of their military service overseas and of returning to Alaska.

Poetry, especially by those intimate

with the shock of combat, provides one clear means of understanding the connections between the humanities and warfare. Nowhere is this more evident than the works of the British War Poets of World War I. Theirs is not media entertainment and embellishment, but the actual brutal business of killing and destroying, a deep cry for understanding.

Like most wars, the Great War began with euphoria and ended in disillusionment and bitterness. Both sides expected a quick victory. Instead, the war turned into a protracted ordeal of trench warfare whose lines barely moved during the next four years. It cost more than 37 million casualties including 8.5 million killed, one of the deadliest wars inflicted on mankind.

World War I is noted for its outpouring of literature, poetry and music, a perhaps strange paradox given its misery and carnage. The merger of warfare and the humanities on such as scale has never been achieved since.

The British war poets stood out. The following are excerpts from five of the approximately 66 recognized Great War poets, contrasting the beginning, middle, and ending periods of the Great War. The first two, Lawrence Binyon and Rupert Brooke, represent the beginning and its promise of high adventure and glory.

W.N. Hodgson represents the middle period and the beginning of disillusionment when the battle lines

had stalemated, with massive casualties resulting from Nineteenth Century tactics being applied against Twentieth Century military technology.

Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon represent the war’s final period. Both men served in the trenches, suffered in mind and body, and became openly opposed to the slaughter.

‘AGE SHALL NOT WEARY THEM’Lawrence Binyon, a 45-year

old art historian, is said to have sat down on a cliff overlooking the north Cornish coastline and the sea beyond in mid-September 1914 and composed “For the Fallen.” The poem followed a succession of battles during the opening days of the war in which the British Expeditionary Force had been decimated. The London Times published the seven-verse poem and it became an instant classic, particularly its fourth verse, often read at memorial services and chiseled on war memorials:

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

Binyon was the product of St. Paul’s School, London, and Trinity College, Oxford, and was steeped in

For the FallenPoets of the Great War

By John Haile Cloe


the humanities. Too old to enlist, he served as a volunteer orderly in a British military hospital, tending the wounded. Afterwards, he continued his distinguished career, dying in 1943.

Rupert Brooke was educated at King’s College, Cambridge, was president of the Cambridge University Fabian Society, and made friends among the Bloomsbury set of writers. Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, helped secure a commission for Brooke in the Navy at the outbreak of war.

Before going off to war, he wrote a series of sonnets in 1914. The first line of the first verse of “The Soldier” stands out.

If I should die, think only of me:That there’s some corner of a former fieldThat is forever England.

Handsome, privileged, well-liked, and articulate but not yet experienced in war, Lieutenant Brooke was posted to Greece in preparation for the Gallipoli Campaign to clear a way through the Dardanelles from the Aegean Sea to the Black Sea. He died of sepsis in April 1915, and was buried on the Greek island of Skyros, where he remains today.

‘HELP ME DIE, O LORD’H.W. Hodgson was the son of an Anglican bishop and

deeply religious. He attended Dunham School, where he made a reputation as an athlete. He entered Oxford in 1913 and planned to become a student in the classics. With the outbreak of the war, Hodgson gave up his studies for a commission in the British Army. He served in the trenches, and was decorated for valor.

On the eve of the Battle of the Somme, Hodgson wrote a short three-verse poem, “Before Action,” expressing his hopes and fears for the next day. At the time, Britain’s regular and reserve army had been destroyed in previous battles and a new volunteer army had been raised. Those who served in it were referred to as “The Pals” since they had enlisted, trained, and served together, forming close-knit unit cohesion.

Half-trained, they were committed to a battle that would go down in history as Britain’s worst military disaster, as British troops advanced slowly in line formation toward well-prepared German machine gun positions.

Hodgson, combat wise and aware, ended each verse with a refrain:

Make me a soldier, LordMake me a man, O LordHelp me die, O Lord

Lieutenant Hodgson was among the 20,000 killed during the morning of July 1, 1916.

‘MINDS THE DEAD HAVE RAVISHED’Siegfried Sassoon, born 1886, came from a family of

wealth and privilege. He was educated in a series of prep schools and attended Christchurch, Oxford, where he read

AFTERMATHSiegfried Sassoon (1886–1967)

Have you forgotten yet? ...For the world’s events have rumbled

on since those gagged days,Like traffic checked awhile at the

crossing of city ways:And the haunted gap in your mind

has filled with thoughts that flowLike clouds in the lit heavens of life;

and you’re a man reprieved to go,Taking your peaceful share of Time,

with joy to spare.But the past is just the same,— and

War’s a bloody game. ...Have you forgotten yet? ...Look down, and swear by the slain

of the War that you’ll never forget.

Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz,—

The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?

Do you remember the rats; and the stench

Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench,—

And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?

Do you ever stop and ask, “Is it all going to happen again?”

Do you remember that hour of din before the attack,—

And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then

As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?

Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back

With dying eyes and lolling heads,— those ashen-grey

Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?

Have you forgotten yet? . ..Look up, and swear by the green

of the Spring that you’ll never forget.


history, but dropped out. He then lived off his father’s money and spent his time among books, at the piano, playing tennis, and hunting. He became a humanist and began self-publishing his poetry.

Motivated by patriotism, Sassoon joined the British Army in early August 1914, saw extensive service on the Western Front as a junior officer, and was cited for bravery. As the war dragged on, he began expressing anti-war sentiments, sending his commanding officer a letter entitled “Finished with the War, A Soldier’s Declaration.” He threw his Military Cross in a river. Rather than court-martial him, the Army sent Sassoon to a convalescent home where he was diagnosed with shell shock, better known today as post traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. His many poems stress the horrors and bitterness of war. The one from “The General” is but an example.

Good-morning: good morning, the General saidWhen we met him last week on our way to the line.Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ‘em dead,And we’re cursing his staff, the incompetent swine.

Following the end of the war, Sassoon had a successful literary career but troubled personal life. He died at age 80 in 1967, honored by his nation.

Wilfred Owen, like Sassoon, was one of the leading poets of the Great War. He came from a somewhat impoverished background. He attended two Anglican schools but failed to gain admission to college. Owen enlisted in the Army in October 1915 and was commissioned an officer. Like Sassoon, he saw extensive combat. Also like Sassoon, he was diagnosed with shell shock. The two became friends while in convalescence together.

Mentored by Sassoon, Owen used the time to write poetry, which helped in his recovery. In a line from “Mental Cases” he expressed the impact of war on minds. “These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished.”

Owen did not survive the war. Deemed fit for duty, he was sent back to the trenches and was killed in action at the age of 25 shortly before the November 11, 1918 armistice. His mother, to whom he was devoted, received the death notice the day the war ended. He is listed among the 16 Great War poets etched into the floor of Westminster Abbey’s poet’s corner. The inscription surrounding the list is drawn from Wilfred’s correspondence, and reads, “My subject is War, and the pity of War. The poetry is the pity.”

The Great War poets sought to understand war and its aftermath through the lenses of humanities.

With the Standing Together initiative, the National Endowment for the Humanities and state humanities councils, including the Alaska Humanities Forum, seek to do the same. ■

Alaska Humanities Forum board member John Haile Cloe is a retired military historian, author, and Vietnam War combat veteran.

BEFORE ACTIONWilliam Noel Hodgson (1893-1916)

By all the glories of the dayAnd the cool evening’s benisonBy that last sunset touch that layUpon the hills when day was done,By beauty lavishly outpouredAnd blessings carelessly received,By all the days that I have livedMake me a soldier, Lord.

By all of all man’s hopes and fearsAnd all the wonders poets sing,The laughter of unclouded years,And every sad and lovely thing;By the romantic ages storedWith high endeavour that was his,By all his mad catastrophesMake me a man, O Lord.

I, that on my familiar hillSaw with uncomprehending eyesA hundred of thy sunsets spillTheir fresh and sanguine sacrifice,Ere the sun swings his noonday

swordMust say good-bye to all of this; -By all delights that I shall miss,Help me to die, O Lord.


‘So we did.’

ANCHORAGE CENTENNIAL ORAL HISTORY


Gayle (Strutz) Ryan was born in Anchorage in 1924, the third child of Louis and Aline Strutz. She grew up in Anchorage as the town itself grew from a tiny, rough outpost to a small yet bustling city. Their family home at 9th and P was a lively hub of activity and still stands at the west end of the Delaney Park Strip.

James “Bud” Ryan was born in Connecticut in 1923. He later moved to Long Beach, California with his family, then came to Alaska when he was 16 to work at Emard’s cannery at Ship Creek.

James and Gayle met at the cannery in summer of 1940. This September, they will celebrate their 72nd wedding anniversary.

GAYLE (STRUTZ) RYAN

M y father came up to Alaska first, in November 1919. He was in the service and had been stationed at Ft. George

Wright near Spokane. My mother is from Missoula, Montana, but she was working for the Northern Pacific Railroad in Parkwater, Washington. They met at a dance in Spokane. My father came up to work security on the railroad. It had just been finished, and his whole outfit [Company B, 21st Infantry] was moved up to Anchorage. They were the first military in Anchorage. And then he decided he was in love with my mother.

My mother was an old cowgirl in Montana so she was rough and tough. She booked passage with a girlfriend, Mary Peterson. And Mary was as adventurous as my mother was. So they somehow got to Seattle and booked passage to Seward, and then of course the railroad was already built, so the rest of their voyage was by rail to Anchorage. By the next April my father had talked her into getting married. So they did. Shortly after that my father retired from the service; he was ready to get on with the rest of his life. My father was somewhat of a blond redhead

THIS ORAL HISTORY of early Anchorage residents, and the accompanying photographs, is one of several family histories and photo albums featured on the official Anchorage Centennial website, anchoragecentennial.org, created by the Anchorage Centennial Committee and the Alaska Humanities Forum. To view the other histories and photo collections, or to add your own, navigate to the site, then click on “Family Albums.”


and was a great adventurer. He’d do anything, go anywhere. He didn’t waste time and was a very good father.

My folks lived down near the old Alaska Engineering Commission (AEC) hospital on Second Avenue. Pretty soon, about 14 months after my oldest sister Clella was born, along came JoAnn, and she was born at that hospital. Then I came next about 14 months later. Then about 14 months after that, Ermalee came [Ed. note: Ermalee later married Walter J. Hickel and became First Lady of Alaska when he was elected governor]. My mother had always wanted five boys. Well, the first four were girls and she was getting disappointed. She had her favorite little boys in the neighborhood and got along with the most mischievous kind. So she did eventually get two boys, Lloyd and Richard. I asked her one day why she didn’t have more children. She said “I found out what caused it.” I suppose all women say that.

When they’d had the first three little babies, it was time to find a bigger place. So they were looking around and had missed out on the bal-lots that were passed out for certain lots at the auction. But they found this nice little bungalow out on the end of 9th Avenue, at 9th and P. I think it was built in 1918. Of course there wasn’t another soul in sight for years. Just us on that little corner lot.

My father, when some other relative would come to town and didn’t have a place to stay — up went another little shed. My father was always building some shanty and people started calling it “Louis-ville.”

One of my earliest memories is of going to school. We walked the whole way. We didn’t have any school buses. I think it was about 13 blocks — to about where the performing arts center is now. We never had a storm that could keep us inside. Never. Our schools were never closed down because of bad weather.

In summer, we lived at the beach almost. Our house was above the railroad tracks and it was right down to the sand. Our folks always had a net out during the seasons. And so we would go down there and pick the fish out of the net.

We were barefoot, we didn’t have any boots. Mother would can the fish, hundreds of quarts of salmon. We were down in the mud and clay and there’s that green moss on top. That was good skidding stuff. We could go down there and put on our worst duds and run and slide right across that green moss. That would carry you a far distance.

We kids would also walk the railroad tracks down to Chester Creek and one time we decided we were going to cross the creek. We used to cross on the trestle up top, that was fun. And when a train came we would just sneak down underneath, crawl to the end of the trestle and sneak under and have the train go over the top. Sometimes those trains were awful long. Around 4th of July a group [of Dena’ina people] from Tyonek [Tebughna] would come and camp. That was all part of the fun.

For us, 4th of July also meant having a real ice cream at Hewitt’s downtown during the

parade. And I ran in races. My mother always picked out really different kinds of food and we’d eat out on the front lawn in between foot races down on the ball park. Between the foot races and the bike marathon we were downtown a lot, fooling around. During Fur Rendezvous all the high schools would get together for sports. High schools from Fairbanks to Juneau would participate in hockey and basketball and skiing. And there’d be a big dance.

They used to have dances at the Finn Hall all the time, some old guy playing his accordion. Anyplace with music was a dance, we didn’t care what it was. The Elks had their young men’s group called the Antlers and they’d have a dance at the Elks Hall on one Friday night. And then the Rainbow Girls, which were the Masons, they had the whole Masonic hall for their dances on the alternate Fridays. So we had a dance almost every weekend.

I remember my mother helping serve lunch to the Matanuska Valley settlers when they came through, I think in 1935. On that day they all got off the boat in Seward and rode the train to Anchorage and ate their lunch. They really didn’t know where they were going, that was my

THEY FOUND this nice little bungalow out on the end of 9th Avenue, at 9th and P, that was built in 1918. Of course there wasn’t another soul in sight for years. Just us on that little corner lot.

Page from family scrapbook showing photos of “the gang” at the Strutz house on P Street and out and about in Alaska with family and friends in the early 1940s.



thought. “You don’t know where you’re going and I’ve been up there and I haven’t seen any homes there, not many.” I felt sorry for them. Imagine me, in this clopper’s home worrying about someone who didn’t have a house.

JAMES “BUD” RYANOne day in 1940, not long after I got to

Anchorage the first time, I was out in front of Emard’s cannery throwing a football around while we were waiting for the fish to come in. That’s when I met Gayle, and I’ve known her ever since.

My older brother Johnny had gone up the year before. He always wanted to go to Alaska and had been to all the other states. So he took off in 1939, hitchhiked from Long Beach to Seattle and then went steerage because we didn’t have any money. No one had money in ’39. When he got to Seward he had a sleeping bag and a toolbox and his rifle and started walking up the railroad to Anchorage. He settled to sleep on a stack of railroad ties and the next morning a train pulled

up to take on water. Johnny stood up and the fireman asked if he had ever shoveled coal. So he said “That’s my specialty” and the fireman said, “Throw your stuff aboard,” and that’s how he got to Anchorage. It just so happened the cannery had a serious breakdown and no one on the machinist crew could weld, but Johnny could, so he came along just in time. The superintendent arranged for him to come back the next year, and I came up too. He was a machinist, and I was a machinist helper.

Johnny had a motorcycle. A 74 cubic inch Harley. It was the second largest Harley made at that time. He built racks to put his toolbox on and we each had a footlocker. I rode on the buddy seat behind him as we drove up to Seattle, sleeping alongside the road. We got a ride from there on the cannery tender, the Smith. It was 110 feet long with a wooden hull and had been a WWI sub chaser. We got up to Anchorage and I went to work. There was a local kid that was the machinist helper but he quit to work in the store uptown and that’s how I got the job in 1940.

James Ryan and Gayle Strutz were married at the Episcopal church in Anchorage in 1943. (Left to right: Ermalee Hickel, June Reese, Becky Robinson, Gayle, Bud, Royal English, Rosemary O’Neill, and Shirley Osbourne).


GAYLE (STRUTZ) RYANWorking at the cannery was the job. You had

to be 16 and my birthday was the 26th of May so I’d just made it that year. We were hand-packing king salmon. My sister JoAnn (who later married Johnny) was standing right next to me and for a while so was Ermalee. We were just lined up. You’d cut the salmon in steaks, just the width and height of a tuna can. And you’d slice the steaks and throw them in a bin in front of you. So you’d take a steak out and take a couple of half-pound cans off and cut a certain way at that steak so you didn’t have any skin on the outside. Anyway, so that was the hand packing the kings.

If the one-pound can came out and it didn’t weigh enough it was kicked off to the light side and went down to another table. There were these women standing there and they were the patchers. They had little chunks of salmon they had stacked there and they put the cans there and add a little bit. They had to stand there and weigh until the can was right.

My best buddy since I was in first grade was Albert “Bud” Bailey. Our families were good friends. When it came time to work at the can-nery, he was there working on his older brother Stan’s boat. One day he was there and they had just docked and what’s his name here [indicating Bud next to her] was there on the docks with a bunch of us guys and I said, “Oh, I have a friend I want you to meet, Albert, he’s just up from Long Beach.” And that’s how he met Albert, and Albert was our best friend forever. It was Bud Bailey and Bud Ryan. They liked all the same things and had the same goofy attitude. When Albert died of a heart attack, James was invited to go to the funeral and spread the ashes in the arm outside of Seward.

JAMES “BUD” RYANWhen I first saw Anchorage it was a little tiny

town with all dirt roads. One day we were wait-ing for fish to come in at the cannery so I asked Johnny if I could use the motorcycle and he said I could, so Gayle and I went riding out toward Palmer. We stopped at a little lake about seven

or eight miles out of town and lo and behold the motorcycle had a flat tire on the back. With just the small tools under the seat I was able to take off that wheel and then take the tire off and get the tube off. I found the nail sticking through the tire and was able to pull that and patch the tube, pump it up and go down to the lake to check it in the water. It was still good so I got the thing back together, put the wheel back on the frame and hooked the chain back together. All this time looking at my watch ‘cause I knew Johnny was going to be mad since I was supposed to be at the cannery to work when the fish came in. He was upset but I told him what happened. I think he kind of doubted my story, but that’s what hap-pened and we got back to work.

At the cannery, we had an oil pump that Johnny developed with the superintendent of the cannery whereby there was a pump that would pump 10cc of fish oil into the can, which made it super special for the New York market, and that’s where this was all going.

GAYLE (STRUTZ) RYANThat flat tire on the way to to the lake wasn’t

the only motorcycle mishap. One day he (Bud) wanted to take me on a little ride. We had some time off from the cannery, so I got on the back of the motorcycle and we started up C Street, and C Street is pretty steep. So we got about a quarter of the way up the hill and I don’t know what happened, the driver fell asleep or something. He says now he had to shift down and missed it so he had to start all over again. I remember walk-ing up that hill. He quit showing off after that.

So we met in the summer of 1940 when we were both 16 years old. That first year he bought me an ivory bracelet with gold nuggets, which he gave me for my 16th birthday. James went back and forth from Alaska to Long Beach each year because he didn’t like the cold weather. I gradu-ated from high school in Anchorage in 1942 and James graduated from Long Beach in 1943. That’s the year we got married. We were both 19.

We got married at the Episcopal church in Anchorage. James was Catholic, but I wasn’t yet. My mother bowled with the Episcopal priest and

ONE DAY IN 1940, not long after I got to Anchorage the first time, I was out in front of Emard’s cannery throwing a football around while we were waiting for the fish to come in. That’s when I met Gayle, and I’ve known her ever since.


called him up to ask if her kids could get mar-ried there. So we did. A while later, Father Walsh saw us at Providence Hospital, grabbed James and said, “Aren’t you Catholic? With a name like Ryan? Come see me and get married in the church.” So we went to the little church off the alley behind the cathedral and got married again. This year [2015] we’ll have our 72nd anniversary.

JAMES “BUD” RYANThe third year I worked for the cannery they

found it was cheaper for them to fly us up there and put us to work for a week, than to have us on a boat for a week. I’ve always gone where work is. I came back to Alaska because of Gayle.

I was drafted and went through boot camp out at Fort Rich. I was in the service when we got married and worked with an engineer group and the drafting department.

GAYLE (STRUTZ) RYANLife in Anchorage wasn’t that much different

during the war. I remember they’d say Japanese planes are attacking Attu and they’d let the school out. And we were walking home and would see an airplane and shout, “Oh, there’s one! Hide in a ditch.” We weren’t really scared. When I was working at the U.S. Corps of Engineers I did the steno stuff with earphones and typing the radio phones. I heard all the talk, the chatter going on back and forth during the Aleutian invasions; it was interesting.

JAMES “BUD” RYANI got out of the military in November 1945.

It was a birthday present. I had the first surplus Jeep in Alaska. The first sergeant in this outfit was a friend of mine and he told me when they surplused his Jeep and so I went out there right away and got in on it so where I was the first bid-der and maybe the only bidder. I got it for I think $150. When Gayle and her girlfriend were driving around town the MPs pulled them over and made a big thing about it because they had these six big

numbers across the hood. So they told Gayle they wanted to see me. So I stopped in at the police station and they talked about those numbers and I told them “You rest assured those numbers aren’t coming off. They’re my favorite numbers and they’re staying right there.” I was supposed to paint them over and I didn’t.

After getting out of the service we didn’t stay too long and were one of the first cars over the highway, with Gayle’s folks with us. It was 1946 and our first child, Abbe, was a baby. We came out through the ruts and the mud. And I can remember we were at Burwash Landing, in the Yukon by Kluane Lake. You couldn’t get tires after that and at Burwash Landing we bought one just as a spare. Never used it. But somewhere a rock hit my gas tank and it started dripping, so when we got to my brother-in-law’s place at University of Oregon, we took the gas tank off the

car, soldered it and put it back on. That was the end of the drip. Our son, Joe, still has the military trailer we loaded all our stuff into when we came out the highway.

When we came on out the highway, we came to Oroville [California] because my folks were here. We were just kinda coming to visit them and hadn’t made up our minds where we were going. A realtor showed us a house and Gayle liked it and we bought it and moved into the rock house, where we lived for 54 years. We often went back and forth between Alaska and California, because it was our home and where so many of our friends and family have lived, or live now.

The cannery is gone now; I was down there with my younger brother Pat the last time I was up there and they filled that all in where the can-nery was. It’s something to think about how An-chorage was when I first saw it in 1940, compared to now. Holy mackerel.

GAYLE (STRUTZ) RYANThis whole life is an adventure and Alaska is

always my home. ■

I REMEMBER MY MOTHER helping serve lunch to the Matanuska Valley settlers when they came through, I think in 1935. They really didn’t know where they were going, that was my thought. I felt sorry for them. Imagine me, in this clopper’s home worrying about someone who didn’t have a house.


‘Mudcakes and Shrew” is a story set in Anchorage during the Good Friday Earthquake

of 1964. It is the third installment of four for Anchorage Narratives, an augmented reality and interactive print based project being produced for the Anchorage Centennial Celebration.

Anchorage Narratives at its heart is a historical fiction project. Every one of the four authors writing about the Anchorage time periods (1915, 1919, 1964, and 2015) were picked for a combination of their talent and who they are as individuals. We wanted authors to tell stories about people who are not totally unlike them.

Dawnell Smith is the author of this story (she is also known by her rollerderby handle: Wickedspeedia). She is a mother, advocate, poet, and academic—just like the main character of this story. Dawnell has always struck me as the kind of kid who came home on long summer days covered in dirt and grass stains, smelling of sweat, and

full of tales about the neighborhood. Our main character, Meg, is cut from the same cloth as Dawnell. They both collect rocks everywhere they go. They wrestle with dogs and run down hills.

The JC Penney building is iconic in the narrative of the 1964 earthquake. It was broken in half, along with much of 4th Avenue and the Turnagain area. Penney’s is an ancillary part of the story in “Mudcakes and Shrew.” The main character has a day job there, and we use the company conceptually. The layout for this story includes restored, digitally enhanced images taken from the 1964 JC Penney Summer Catalog, which was the catalog that came out right after the earthquake. There are also a few images reconstructed from the Anchorage phonebook of 1964, scattered about for good measure. While not used in their original formats or contexts, none of the images are fictional and they are all from those two sources.

— Nathan Shafer

THE NEXT TEN PAGES are recreations of historical and ultimately obsolete formats (the catalog and the phone book). The interactive print here is designed for usage with smart phones and tablets. There are augmented reality elements nested within the design of the story. Dawnell’s story also continues on in the augments, with memories of Meg’s uncle Mudcakes and his tall tales. TO VIEW THE AUGMENTS on your smart device, download the free Junaio Augmented Reality app and scan the QR code on this page. After scanning, give a couple seconds as the channel called Mudcakes and Shrew loads. When it is loaded, hold your device over the pages designed to look like an old school Penney’s catalog in this story and images, audio and video will appear.

Augmenting the Earthquake

ANCHORAGE NARRATIVES 3

The Anchorage JC Penney store was heavily damaged by the 1964 Good Friday earthquake. This photo is dated March 31, 1964, four days after the disaster.

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room of JC Penney, watching the second hand of her watch and waiting for her shift to end. Now she stands before the shorn side of the year-old building, its innards as frayed and torn as a hand-me-down, its wall now the slab fallen cars below.

Her legs still quivering, her heart pound-ing, Meg looks for her handbag, her cardi-gan, the bag with the Good Friday gift for her daughter. She cannot remember where she left them, how she cleared the building, where she might have dropped her things, who else she might have passed as she headed out of the store just after 5:30 p.m. as the boy, maybe 16, walked in, and young men got into the elevator after she got out.

She remembers thinking a migraine was coming on because she couldn’t steady herself, but the ground kept shuddering, the tremors kept resonating through her bones. Walking now, she moves quickly toward 4th Avenue where she parked the car. All

around, the wake of the earthquake settles – upturned asphalt, shattered windows, buildings split in half or sunken in, people screaming and running for help or news or salvation.

A woman yells from the pawnshop across the road. “Have you seen my son?”

Meg shakes her head and says nothing. Ahead, 4th Avenue distorts into view – the asphalt split clean across and thrust up from the other. The fissure turns her stomach: When she headed to work that morning, she left her child at home with a fever.

Thinking only of getting to her, she strides south, blood dripping down her calf and bits of busted up building sticking to her white button-up blouse. Better to hoof it and beg for a ride than waste time trying to get the car. The residual snow and ice make walk-ing difficult, but Meg plows ahead, plots her course, relieved that she wore her old Ox-fords rather than heels.

MUDCAKES’ FIRST STAY with Meg’s fam-ily forged a lifetime of longing for the North in the child. In his month-long yarn, he told her of gold and glaciers, fertile landscapes and cruel luck, and his words clung to the 11-year-old’s imagination like the Midwest dust. Decades of living went by before Meg finally pointed her compass north – twenty years of dragging herself out of the desert, out of the prairie, out of a marriage that left her curled up in the cellar with a child quak-ing against her chest – but she made it to Alaska at 33, with her own child’s arm in one hand and a bag of clothes in the other. She came looking for work where people running from something could find it. Good work, she heard – the work of building roads and driving deep into the land for the good and plenty.

A year older now but just as poor, Meg senses the unraveling of all that promise as she surveys the dust and desolation of 5th Avenue, Anchorage. Five minutes of rum-bling splintered her foundation – five min-utes of undoing on Good Friday, 1964.

Minutes before, a deafening shift in the ground, the air, the very balance of gravity against force left Meg and everyone around her clutching their bellies, their loved ones, the walls, their cars, the places where solid objects had once been, as they prayed, or talked to themselves, or covered their ears, or flashed back to what they meant to say and didn’t, or, like her, struggled to leap from dumbstruck to action.

An hour before, she had been sorting the jersey dresses and Arnel skirts in the fitting

MUDCAKES and SHREWBy Dawnell Smith

ANCHORAGE NARRATIVES 3

AS A GIRL, MEG LOVED STORIES where fate goes from bad to worse, from unlucky to cursed, because that’s how Mudcakes got his name. He said he climbed the Golden Staircase in the rain only to stumble back down a few days later with nothing but cakes of mud to his name. He never staked a claim, he said, but he claimed the name.

Years later, Meg asked him why he didn’t leave Alaska sooner. “I guess everyone needs a sign before giving up or moving on,” he said, pausing for a moment to remember the question, or catch his breath, or conjure up a tale. It was always hard to tell.

“Mine appeared on a clear August day made sane by the wind. The bugs were down and the cold had not yet set in. I was gnawing on dried meat in the hills above Anchorage, high enough to see the smallness of the city, when I noticed this low gnawing sound, wet and rhythmic and barely audible, irritating to the ear, actually, like

settles – upturned asphalt, shattered windows, buildings split in half or sunken in, people screaming and running for help or news or salvation. A woman yells from the pawnshop across the road. “Have you seen my son?” Meg shakes her head and says nothing. Ahead, Fourth Avenue distorts into view – the asphalt split clean across and thrust up from the other. The fissure turns her stomach: When she headed to work that morning, she left her child at home with a fever. Thinking only of getting to her, she strides south, blood dripping down her calf and bits of busted up build-ing sticking to her white button-up blouse. Better to hoof it and beg for a ride than waste time trying to get the car. The residual snow and ice make walking difficult, but Meg plows ahead, plots her course, relieved that she wore her old Oxfords rather than heels.

water dripping. It got louder and louder until I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I tracked it down.”

Mudcakes stood up then, cast an eye at Meg and curled his lip, pointed his finger. “There, on the ground, I saw a dead coy-ote with its belly quivering like a man with a losing hand and no money to pay up. I got closer and saw a hole in its skin. Then all at once a small beady-eyed head pops out, pulls out its body, licks its legs, and runs out of sight.”

Mudcakes leaned on his cane with a far-away squint and a sigh. “That was my sign, you see – the shrew eating its way out of the coyote’s belly.”

FOLKS TOLD MEG A PERSON COULD make a good life in Alaska by working hard, keeping a level head, and seizing the right

opportunity. She planned as much, and gathered notes from people she worked with and for in St. Louis, Tucson, and Se-attle. She prized one letter most:

Dear Sir,If you need someone who is hard working,

has a gift for science, and a good grounding in geology, hire Megan Honor Ransom. She will not disappoint.

Sincerely, Dr. Grove Buckland

But in the end, she and her daughter stayed in a cheap hotel and a dingy apart-ment their first months in Anchorage, using her meager savings and short-term jobs to make ends meet. Her big break hadn’t come yet, so she cleaned rooms and ran errands. She watched children. She sold flowers for

an old couple who grew them all summer. The months dragged on and her reserves had all but run dry when she was offered a job selling clothes at the new JC Penney building.

Only then did she call the phone number Mudcakes had given her years before, “If you ever make it north, Meg, look up this woman,” he said. “Alice Dunn. She’s a good one, prickly as devil’s club, but exactly the right friend if you know how to stay out of her way. I knew her some time ago. She’ll set you up if she can.” Meg held onto that scrap of paper through four moves and when she finally dialed, the voice on the oth-er end sounded steady, crisp, and familiar.

“So Meg Ransom,” said Alice Dunn after Meg explained their connection. “Just how did you go about avoiding this call for so long?”

Meg wasn’t one to carry on, but she spoke directly. “Well, ma’am. I’ve learned that it rarely pays to begin an acquaintance at the point of need.”

“Well said,” Dunn replied. “And yet it sounds like you might have some need?”

“Well,” Meg said. “I’m a woman with a child in a place I hardly know, so of course it helps to meet people.”

The two women met for a picnic lunch on a hot August day on the grassy rise of Romig Hill, a ski area during the winter and a good place to sun bathe on a clear summer day. Meg’s daughter wore a crop top and blue shorts. Alice showed up in pants, and none too clean either. Meg breathed a sigh of relief. She learned by then that people could judge harshly on the quality of one’s clothes. Meg wore the only clothing she bought since arriving – a simple, pressed summer dress she found at an estate sale.

Meg introduced herself and her daughter Flora. A pensive child, Flora offered her hand and said, “Good to meet you, Mrs. Dunn.”

“Oh, child, just call me Alice. I haven’t been a missus in some time and, besides, first names are easier to remember.” The three sat on a light blanket with the sun at their back. “So Flora, what have you been doing when not going to school?”

“I’ve been reading a lot, I guess, and drawing, listening to music. And, to be hon-est, I’m not used to being called Flora, ei-ther.”

Alice nodded and raised an eyebrow. She kept a stacked bun of black hair high on her head. “So what are you used to being called?”

Flora smiled mildly. “Shrew.”

Alice tilted her head slightly and smiled back. She asked simple questions about the route of their journey, the places they had lived, the work Meg found, the children Shrew met, and, too, shared a few things about herself, like her position with British Petroleum, her love for fishing, the loss of her husband in a military cargo plane that disappeared in 1952.

After almost an hour of conversation on the grass, Alice looked at her watch and stood, with Meg and Shrew following suit. “Well, here’s what I need from you, then. I would like you to stay in my home for six months starting in October while I go back east to settle some business. I need the plants watered, the house occupied, and the cat fed.” She peered down at Shrew. “Is that something you can do?”

The girl nodded as Alice continued. “My cat means everything to me, you see. I found her as a kitten on a street corner. I called her ‘Here Now’ that first night and the name stuck. The next day, my husband’s plane vanished. She really is the single most precious thing I have. And you’ll love the house. It will give you more room, more time to get on your feet.”

Alice paused to look over the city. “Of course, I will need the assurance that you think of it as a job, so I will pay you and you will need to cover your own living costs, the heat-ing oil, gas for the car, supplies, basic main-tenance. The work of running a house here can be dif-ficult, but there are neighbors who can help.”

er your own living costs, the heating oil, gas for the car, supplies, basic maintenance. The work of running a house here can be difficult, but there are neighbors who can help.” Meg felt her cheeks flush. Six months of saving on rent, six months of having a safe place for building up her bank account, her wits, her connections, and six months of proving to Alice Dunn that she belongs. Meg hemmed and hawed a bit, but not much. As they walked toward the car, she said, “Thank you for this great opportunity, Alice. Mudcakes told me you were a good friend from his time in Alaska, and that you were someone I could trust.” Alice opened the car door and set the picnic basket on the back seat. “Alaska? Oh dear no, your uncle nev-er made it to Alaska. He could no more keep a promise to come north than remember it.” Meg stared at Alice as the reality finally sunk in. Of course Mudcakes could never have climbed the Gold-en Staircase at the turn of the century. He would have been Shrew’s age back then, and though plenty of children hauled up the Chilkoot Trail with their families, they didn’t do it solo. Alice slid into the driver’s seat, turned the key, and pressed down on the clutch. “Your uncle Mudcakes grew up hard, but he never got the chance to grow up well, Meg. Alaska became for him the perfect myth, the perfect dream.” Meg waved as the Chrysler Imperial kicked dust be-hind it and disappeared. Shrew stood nearby, looking more like her father as she grew older, with dark straight hair in contrast to Meg’s dirty blond curls, and long lithe features rather than Meg’s rounded ones. But the two shared the kind of brown eyes that changed to gold in the right light and had a way of looking into space as if looking through it. They headed east hand in hand, gazing straight into the nature

of truth, story and what lies between.

MEG’S feet feel numb now, wet from sweat and snow, and cold from the still-chilled March day. She glances at her watch – 6:10 p.m. – and then behind her. All around, she hears civil service reports through open car windows, hous-es and businesses, the relay of messages from person to person as she crosses Fire-weed on Spenard, hits Northern Lights and heads west. She hears of roads splitting, of houses tumbling into the ocean, of tsunamis ripping apart railway tracks and crushing boat harbors and flat-tening whole towns. Nearby she hears heli-copters. An older man from her neighborhood drives by going the oth-er direction and slows as he passes. “The earth caved in,” he yells from across the road. “There’s no place left to go to.” A woman she knows passes while heading west fast, but she doesn’t stop. An-other car slows behind her and a teenage boy who lives down her

street leans to open the pas-senger door and yells, “Hurry!” M e g jumps in as he punches the acceler-ator. She re-members his name, Ben, as he takes

Meg felt her cheeks flush. Six months of saving on rent, six months of having a safe place for building up her bank account, her wits, her connections, and six months of proving to Alice Dunn that she belongs. Meg hemmed and hawed a bit, but not much. As they walked toward the car, she said, “Thank you for this great opportunity, Alice. Mudcakes told me you were a good friend from his time in Alaska, and that you were someone I could trust.”

Alice opened the car door and set the picnic basket on the back seat. “Alaska? Oh dear no, your uncle never made it to Alaska. He could no more keep a promise to come north than remember it.”

Meg stared at Alice as the reality finally sunk in. Of course Mudcakes could never have climbed the Golden Staircase at the turn of the century. He would have been Shrew’s age back then, and though plenty of children hauled up the Chilkoot Trail with their families, they didn’t do it solo.

Alice slid into the driver’s seat, turned the key, and pressed down on the clutch. “Your uncle Mudcakes grew up hard, but he never got the chance to grow up well, Meg. Alaska became for him the perfect myth, the per-fect dream.”

Meg waved as the Chrysler Impe-rial kicked dust behind it and disappeared. Shrew stood nearby, looking more like her father as she grew older, with dark straight hair in contrast to Meg’s dirty blond curls, and long lithe features rather than Meg’s rounded ones. But the two shared the kind of brown eyes that changed to gold in the right light and had a way of looking into space as if looking through it. They headed east hand in hand, gazing straight into the nature of truth, story and what lies between.

MEG’S FEET FEEL NUMB NOW, wet from sweat and snow, and cold from the still-chilled March day. She glances at her watch – 6:10 p.m. – and then behind her. All around, she hears civil service reports through open car windows, houses, and businesses, the relay of messages from person to person as she crosses Fireweed on Spenard, hits Northern Lights and heads west. She hears of roads splitting, of houses tumbling into the ocean, of tsunamis rip-ping apart railway tracks and crushing boat harbors and flattening whole towns. Nearby she hears helicopters.

An older man from her neighborhood drives by going the other direction and slows as he passes. “The earth caved in,” he yells from across the road. “There’s no place left to go to.”

A woman she knows passes while head-ing west fast, but she doesn’t stop. Another car slows behind her and a teenage boy who lives down her street leans to open the passenger door and yells, “Hurry!”

Meg jumps in as he punches the accel-erator. She remembers his name, Ben, as he takes the right at McKenzie and slows. The view ahead confounds them. The hori-zon appears altered in ways they could not yet digest. They take a left at Clay Products Drive. People run out of intact houses with blankets and clothes, carrying tools and ropes and hand-held radios. Ben pulls over and they run on foot, west to their street. As they turn right, they startle at the abrupt end of the bluff. Ben runs to his house, half of it standing.

“Shrew,” Meg says to no one. The house is gone. In its stead, a tumble of churned up earth and litter still shifting, beams and foun-dations broken and unglued. Beyond the

slide, more slides, a landscape warped and crumbled into dirt and snow and splintered wood and fallen trees and cars pitched into the folds of punctured earthen skin.

The recluse whose corner house looks untouched mutters from behind her, “Peo-ple were swallowed up. Parts of whole houses.” Meg looks at the old man, his cane a gnarled limb every bit as aged as his arm. She turns again to the apocalyptic horizon and scans for movement. Far out in the rubble, a helicopter picks up a man from a sliver of slanted earth. The recluse pushes his binoculars against her shoulder. “Look for her there, on the left side of the slide,” he says, pointing with his stick. “See that house there? That’s the one two doors down from Alice Dunn’s.”

Meg stares, recognizes nothing. She takes the binoculars and spies what looks like the butter-colored siding of Alice’s house, the white trim below its roofline.

“Shrew,” she yells, clamoring over de-bris and down a muddy bank of earth. She moves without thought, picking her way up and over and through what the earth shook and reassembled into puzzle pieces pitched at all angles, in all directions. She sees no

sign of the house, no path showing its dis-location.

It takes 15 minutes to travel a block, but she finds purpose when standing on a sta-ble rise and scanning the wreckage before her, moving the binoculars slowly, methodi-cally, from side to side, up and down. She thinks she sees the last of the neighbor’s house at the waterline. In the distance,

voices shout commands. At the end of the road where she left the old recluse, men in uniforms direct people where to go, a man runs into the debris with a shovel, a woman pulls her children by their hands to a waiting car, dogs bark at the bluff’s edge, a couple of young men with ropes try to navigate the block of shattered earth she just negotiated.

Her legs weaken. She does a 360 and

sees nothing but ruins around her, as if on a lifeboat of frozen dirt in a sea of destroyed lives. She hears a voice and looks left – a woman half buried in her collapsed house. “There,” Meg shouts to the young men be-hind her. “There’s a woman there.” They look at her, and then toward the woman who seems only half alive.

“You okay?” one of them yells. Meg nods.

They look so young, no more than 20, with coats and boots over work slacks and button-up shirts, their faces still stained with the starch of boyhood.

Meg resumes her search, the surreal change of light from snow to shadow, the stump that appears to move, the mound that seems to be waiting, the swaying limbs of trees and beams that look as if they might be flagging their loca-tion.

“There,” she says, pulling the binoculars away from her eyes and peering into the many cavities beyond her perch. “There somewhere.”

Shrew can only be out in the sludge, in the dregs of the shaken earth, either in it or under-neath it or floating on top of it, so Meg keeps moving into the furrows of the earth, over the fragments of lives, through the furnishings of dreams.

Again she yells her daughter’s name. Again she plummets down into slim crevasses and rises onto disjointed blocks of terra firma.

At one crest she hears or imagines a voice, a sigh, a shout, she cannot yet tell. She climbs again to a tenuous perch, looks, and moves again. She hears a murmuring. This time she leaves the binoculars dangling against her sternum and turns completely around, sens-ing a trembling of motion within the imploded subdivision.

She turns again, seeing far behind her the regimented movements of rescuers where the bluff held, and the path of destruction, the household furniture, the sheds and play sets, the bikes and wheel barrows, the timber and metal of permanence undone and, closer than anticipated, a movement below and to the right. Everything looks larger than expect-ed, yet farther away, but she can see it clearly now – a formless stirring deep in a hollow. She tries to hone in on the movement with the binoculars, but she can’t. Her hands cannot hold still, her eyes cannot focus. Could she have gone too far? Was she seeing things to deny the other possibility, that Shrew could be lost here, in this ruptured pit, forever.

She moves back toward what she sensed, a moving target in a landscape of quivering, pitching, slanting, unraveling. She can’t feel her feet they’re so cold, she can’t trust the so-lidity of what’s underneath, but she yells and plunges and climbs until, in a lifetime of wait-ing, longer than the quake itself, she sees the unruly hair, the arm, the gray wool blanket, the swaddled torso, the bare feet of a per-son, a child, a girl crawling out of the belly of the earth. Meg runs, slows, scrambles, yells. Shrew doesn’t shout back, but rather lifts an arm and smiles.

As Meg approaches the girl, she says nothing. She presses her lips against Shrew’s forehead, runs her hands over her daugh-ter’s head, neck, back and hips, checking for blood, for deformities, for relief. They sit and the seconds tremble between them.

“Do you feel pain anywhere,” Meg says, fi-nally. Shrew shakes her head. “Can you move your arms and legs?” Shrew nods. “What’s wrong with your arm, then, why are you hold-ing it against your chest?” Shrew pulls the blanket away to reveal, cusped in the fold of her arm, terrified and uncomfortable, Alice Dunn’s cat.

Meg places her forehead against her daughter’s and smiles wearily. “We have to climb up to a high point so they can see us. We have to stay warm and wait.”

Together, without losing contact, the three of them scramble their way to a cube of earth and wait, huddled up and cold, and with Meg stroking her daughter’s hair and Shrew chanting softly, “Oh Here Now, Here Now, it’s going to be okay.”

AFTER THE FLIGHT AND THE NURSE, the ride to Legion Hall, the food, and the radio news, Meg and Shrew find them-selves leaning into each other on a cot against the window in a smoke-filled room filled with children crying, asking questions, screaming in their sleep, and mothers bracing for aftershocks and bad news. Here, Shrew whispers her story, about how she got out of bed because Here Now pounced on her chest, hiss-ing, making noise, how Shrew opened the front door to the cold because she felt hot, and the cat escaped with Shrew running behind her in slippers and a wool blanket. Then came the crackling and popping, the ground quivering under her feet, yards slipping away from their houses, houses from their foun-dations, foundations from their anchors to the earth, and her cascading into the cold earth, hunkered down and clutching the remains of a tree with one arm and the cat with the other, how the slide seemed to last forever, glacier-speed, yet terrify-ingly fast, out of control, never ending. When it stopped, when her tiny chunk of land anchored itself at an angle, Shrew could see only sky through a dizzying tunnel of earth and debris.

“I was scared, but I wasn’t scared,” Shrew said matter-of-factly. “I had to hold the cat and I had to hold the tree. I didn’t have time to think of anything else except that maybe this is how the world ends and I had to hold to hold onto those two things.”

As she finishes her story, Meg strokes her daughter’s hair. A time passes with no words, just thoughts.

“There’s going to be a lot of work and mending to do,” Meg says finally to her sleeping daughter. “Tomorrow, we’ll know what needs to be done and how we can help do it.”

Meg considers the swirls of hope looping through the minds of others, all at a crossroads, all caught together in this moment of loss and possibility. “I’ve got a good feeling, Shrew. We just made it through the worst of this place, the worst it can throw at us. You’re going to grow up well, we’re going to do well, be-cause with every turn of the earth there’s promise. With every turn of the earth.” ■


‘Free Range Life” was a landmark exhibit of new and innovative local art: eight large paintings created in a collaboration between

Ted Kim, previously best known for his black-and-white skateboard art-style ink drawings; and Duke Russell, one of the most recognized and widely shown painters in the state.

The exhibit opened at the Alaska Humanities Forum in March. Some weeks later, Russell sat down with Forum editor David Holthouse for a short conversation about the show’s inspiration and creative process.

What did you see in Ted’s drawings that made you want to paint them?

I felt like his line art had stories behind it that weren’t being fully told in black-and-white. I saw huge potential in building out that wire frame, filling in the spaces with color in a way that delineates the main object of his drawings from the background, so that all of a sudden you have something that pops off the page.

Describe the process for co-creating the paintings in “Free Range Life.”

I started off by cutting three-by-three [foot]

Free Range ArtA conversation with Duke Russell

“Plant Crusader.”


panels out of half-inch plywood. We wanted the size to be uniform. Then I just randomly painted some textural backgrounds on all the panels. I had bamboo in mind, I had grasslands in mind, but es-sentially the backgrounds just sort of emerged out of their own being.

Were you painting the backgrounds with specific images based from Ted’s drawings in mind?

No. At that point, we hadn’t selected which of his images we were going to use, so I did all the backgrounds without having any idea which imag-es they would go with. Then once the panels were painted, we started looking through his drawings, and deciding, “Okay, let’s put this image on that background, this one on that one,” and so forth.

What came next?We made life-size Photoshop files of his artwork,

and took them to an architectural blueprint shop with a three-foot printer. And from that, as your file is big enough, you get a very fine resolution on what are basically big Xeroxes.

Once we had those, we slathered matte medium on top of the painted plywood backgrounds, and lay the Xeroxes face down—we’d mirrored the im-ages in Photoshop, because they were like decals, so they needed to be opposite—then we peeled the copies back and, within about five minutes the toner started chemically locking into the matte medium.

Because the paper was wet, it wanted to shrivel, so then it was a process of burnishing it down,

basically rubbing all the paper off, but as we did that, we had to be very careful not to rub too hard or we’d rub the toner off as well. We had to be delicate and let it set up for a bit, but not too long, because we knew then we wouldn’t be able to get all the paper off, and it’d be lumpy to paint over.

It was a very labor-intensive, time-it-just-right kind of deal, but the end result was a clear, defin-ing shape that did not alter in any way from his original art. And then we painted the images, in fine detail, which took a lot of hours.

What did you get out of the collaboration?Just in the sense of the physicality of paint-

ing, my chops got better, definitely, because I was just sitting in the saddle, painting and painting, grinding away. When I do my own paintings, I’m thinking constantly as much about the image as the painting, whereas working with Ted on this project, it was like boot camp. It was all about my brush skills, script brush skills. My precision got a lot better.

It’s unusual for two visual artists to collaborate on the same painting. How did you and Ted make it work?

Yeah, anytime two artists manage to work together successfully, it’s a grand accomplishment. I think the key in our case was, the outlines and the shapes had already been worked out, so it was just a matter of agreeing on a process up front and then executing, so it wasn’t like, “Hey, you’re painting on my drawing. Oh yeah, well, you’re drawing on my painting.” We were simpatico. ■

“Child Rising” “Supercub”


The Alaska Humanities Forum oversaw a successful 2014-2015 Humanities and Arts season, a curated visual art and literature series popularly known

as Second Friday @ The Forum. Shows rotated monthly, featuring the works of both emerging and established artists. The Forum’s office-gallery space celebrated works from 11 of Alaska’s most talented artists and authors. The series offered audiences a range of artistic and literary works that showcased the various ways in which contemporary and traditional Alaskan culture manifests in the arts and humanities via sound, pictures, words, objects, and performance. The Forum also redesigned its calendar to have opening receptions and artist talks on the second Friday of the month, which provided a welcome change by all accounts from the Anchorage community.

Breaking new ground this season was the innovative and intense show “Free Range Life,” featuring new collaborative paintings by Duke Russell and Ted Kim.

Ornate in detail and vibrant in color, these works simultaneously evoked a steam-punk aesthetic and the playfulness of Sunday comics. “Free Range Life” was the product of two minds working seamlessly together, creating a body of artwork that would not be realized otherwise. The Forum was thrilled to offer a space for this kind of experimentation in studio practice and shared thinking.

The Forum enjoyed a stellar line-up of artists for its 2014-2015 season including: Gretchen Sagan, Pamela Thompson and Junemoon, Brian Adams, Kerry Tasker, Linda Infante Lyons and Graham Dane, Drew Michael, Duke Russell and Ted Kim, Katie Basile and Erica Rudy, and Ben Huff. ■

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Another spectacular series of shows and Second Friday openings is in the works for the 2015-16 Humanities and Arts season.

September 11 The kickoff opening will be a collaboration between painter Kesler Woodward and poet Peggy Shumaker.

October 9Keren Lowell will open a show of mixed media work.

November 13KN Goodrich will show original paintings.

Second Friday receptions are held from 5:30 to 8 pm, and are free and open to the public. The Forum’s office-gallery is at 161 East 1st Avenue, Door 15, in the Alaska Railroad historic freight shed along Ship Creek in downtown Anchorage. Check www.akhf.org for shows and updates. Mark your calendars and please join us beginning this fall for these exciting visual art and literature events.

CALL TO ARTISTS: The Forum is currently accepting show proposals for the 2016 calendar and beyond. For more information, contact Christina Barber, Curator of Special Exhibits & Programs, at [email protected]

KATIE BASILE and Erika Rudy combined photojournalism, technology, and art in their joint show titled “The Children’s Home,” which documented and preserved stories from a Moravian children’s orphanage in Bethel, Alaska. Their multi-media exhibit shared the oral histories of the people who remember growing up there, and was peppered with imagery of their portraits, the disrepair of the orphanage today, and the landscape that survives these memories. Basile’s project, “The Children’s Home,” was a recipient of an Alaska Humanities Forum’s 2011 General Grant Award.

WRAPPING UP the 2014-2015 Humanities and Arts season was photography by Ben Huff from his new book, The Last Road North. Huff’s photographs chart the changing landscape and people of America’s northernmost road, the Dalton Highway. The Last Road North received an Alaska Humanities Forum’s 2014 General Grant Award. Huff’s work will be on display at the Forum through August.

SECOND FRIDAY @ THE FORUM

2015-2016 SEASON


WITH SUPPORT from an Anchorage Centennial Community Grant, the Anchorage Log Cabin Quilters created a juried exhibit of 40 member-made art quilts depicting historical events, people, and places in Anchorage

Captain Cook Statue in the Sunset, by Marilyn Barnett, depicts the statue of the British explorer at Resolution Park in Anchorage. Cook thought he had found the fabled Northwest Passage when he sailed into the inlet that now bears his name in May 1778. Discouraged when he was encircled by mountains near Anchorage, he named the area Turnagain Arm. A statue of Cook overlooks Whitby Harbor, in England, near a whalebone arch erected by the people of Anchorage and the North Slope Borough. The statue was copied and installed in Anchorage in 1978, overlooking Cook Inlet.

Spenard Quonset, by Darlene Appel, features a large Quonset hut that housed Parkers’ Department Store, near the corner of what is now Spenard Road and Fireweed Lane. The store was home to the first Spenard Post Office when the community was assigned a postmaster and a post office in 1937. Spenard was eventually incorporated into the City of Anchorage, but mail ad-dressed to the artist at “Spenard, Alaska” still reaches her. Her family has lived in Spenard since arriving in Alaska in 1960.

ON DISPLAY: The quilts will be on display September 12 and 13 as part of the Great Alaska Quilt Show at the ConocoPhillips Atrium in downtown Anchorage.

The Story of Anchorage in Quilts

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ALASKA HUMANITIES FORUM161 East First Avenue, Door 15Anchorage, AK 99501

(907) 272-5341www.akhf.org

Non Profit OrganizationU.S. POSTAGE PAID

ANCHORAGE, ALASKA PERMIT NO. 519

FORUMTHE MAGAZINE OF THE ALASKA HUMANITIES FORUMSUMMER 2015

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Forum - Summer 2015