FALL / W INTER 2013THE MAGA ZINE OF THE AL AS K A HUMANIT IES FORUM

Clark James Mishler’s Portrait Project | Cameras for the Homeless | Historic Killisnoo Images

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

LETTER FROM THE CEO

ALASKA HUMANITIES FORUM

Forum is a publication of the Alaska Humani-ties Forum, supported by the National Endow-ment for the Humanities, with the purpose of increasing public understanding of and partici-pation in the humanities. The views expressed by contributors are not necessarily those of the editorial staff, the Alaska Humanities Forum, or the National Endowment for the Humanities. Subscriptions may be obtained by contributing to the Alaska Humanities Forum or by contact-ing the Forum. No part of this publication may be reproduced without permission. ©2013. Printed in Alaska.

board of directorsJoan Braddock, Chair, Fairbanks

Ben Mohr, Vice Chair, Eagle River

Evan D. Rose, Treasurer, Anchorage

Dave Kiffer, Member-At-Large, Ketchikan

Mary K. Hughes, J.D., Former Chair, Anchorage

Jeane Breinig, Anchorage

Christa Bruce, Ketchikan

Michael Chmielewski, Palmer

John Cloe, Anchorage

Dermot Cole, Fairbanks

Ernestine Hayes, Juneau

Nancy Kemp, Kodiak

Catkin Kilcher Burton, Anchorage

Scott McAdams, Sitka

Pauline Morris, Kwethluk

Wayne Stevens, Juneau

Kurt Wong, C.P.A., Anchorage

staffNina Kemppel, CEO

Susy Buchanan, Grants Program Director

Laurie Evans-Dinneen RURE Programs Director

Kitty Farnham Leadership Anchorage Program Manager

Liza Root, Office Manager

Matthew Turner Special Projects Coordinator

Carmen Davis, C3 Project Manager

Jonathan Samuelson Take Wing Alaska Project Coordinator

Gregory MosesTake Wing Alaska Family School Liaison

Veldee Hall RURE Sister School Exchange Project Manager

Dustin Hauptli Project Associate

THE MAGA ZINE OF THE AL AS K A HUMANIT IES FORUM

It has been just more than one year since I joined the team at the Alaska

Humanities Forum in what has proved an exhilarating and innovative time for our organization. All of our programs have demonstrated marked success over the last year. But there are two in par-ticular we invite you to engage as active members of the humanities community.

THE ANCHoRAGE CENTENNiAL CELEBRATioN PRoJECT

The Alaska Humanities Forum is excited to partner with the Municipality of Anchorage and the Rasmuson Founda-tion to provide fiscal and programmatic oversight of the Anchorage Centennial. The Forum is overseeing more than a million dollars of funding for this project, which includes three legacy projects – the Anchorage Centennial Commemorative Book, Documentary and Online Archive/App. We also will provide community grants for a diverse set of projects that will promote, educate and celebrate the first 100 years of Anchorage. For information on how you may get involved in the An-chorage Centennial Celebration including how to apply for an Anchorage Centennial Community Grant, please visit akhf.org or see the story on page 9. We thank both the Municipality of Anchorage and the Rasmuson Foundation for their generous support.

RE-ViSioNiNG THE ALASKA GoVERNoR’S AWARDS

The Alaska Humanities Forum, Alaska State Council on the Arts, the Arts and Culture Foundation and the Governor’s Office have jointly sponsored the Gover-nor’s Awards for the Arts and Humanities since 2001. The awards honor significant achievements by Alaskan artists, writers, historians, scholars, humanities and arts institutions, and other contributors to the arts and humanities in Alaska. In the past, the Governor’s Awards ceremony has been held as a traditional banquet located in Anchorage or Fairbanks in late October. However, this year the Alaska Humanities

Forum and the Alaska State Council on the Arts have developed a new vision and format for the Governor’s Awards.

This year’s awards ceremony will be held in Juneau on January 30, 2014, to coincide with the state legislative session. It is our intent to make this celebration of the arts and humanities a public event in a new venue, as well as an opportunity to inform state legislators and elected officials about the positive impact of arts and humanities projects across the state.

We also will transition to a new ceremony format, combining artist and humanities grantee performances with award presentations in a theater setting, thus broadening our audience and creat-ing a more dynamic event. Tickets will be offered at a reduced rate.

The Governor’s Awards will be held in conjunction with an Arts and Humanities Advocacy Week with the Alaska State Leg-islature. We are developing a coordinated message for statewide arts and humani-ties organizations to deliver to their state legislators during this week. We believe this new format for the Governor’s Awards will provide the Alaska Humanities Forum an opportunity to share the great work of Alaskans in the arts and humani-ties with both a broader and more targeted audience.

Nominations for the Arts and Hu-manities Awards are currently open and any member of the public is welcome to nominate an individual or organization. All nominations are due by November 15, 2013. For more information, includ-ing online nomination forms, please visit akhf.org.

Finally, I want to thank all of you that donated to the Forum during the last year. Your contributions have a significant impact on the programs and projects that we provide and helped the Forum to use the humanities to tell the stories and impact the lives of all Alaskans.

— Nina Kemppel, CEO

Celebrating and Re-Visioning

FORUM10A Call to LookThe Brother Francis Shelter in Anchorage provided cameras and photography training to a group of homeless clients. They returned with art.

26The Quest of Clark James

Mishler

20A Russian American

Photographer in Tlingit Country

FALL / W INTER 2013THE MAGA ZINE OF THE AL AS K A HUMANIT IES FORUM

LETTER FROM CEO NINA KEMPPEL

2 Celebrating and Re-Visioning

GRANT REPORT

4 Kwethluk Children’s Home Project

ANCHORAGE CENTENNIAL

9 Call for Grant Applications

PROGRAM NOTES

35 New Leadership Anchorage Director 36 New Teachers Learn about Native Culture

POETRy

38 Where I’m From

FORUM PUBLICATION

42 Brian Adams’ I Am Alaskan

FROM THE ARCHIVES / IN MEMORIAM

46 Barbara Sweetland Smith, 1936–2013

GRANT REPORT

48 Trails across Time

EVENTS

50 First Friday @ the Forum

CO

NTE

NTS

PHOTO CREDITS: TOP, COLLEEN. MIDDLE, VINCENT SOBOLEFF. RIGHT, CLARK JAMES MISHLER

CoVER: Barrow whaling captain Freddie Tuckfield on the Delaney Park Strip during a visit to Anchorage. Photo by Clark James Mishler.

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Katie Baldwin Basile’s first memory of the long-abandoned Kwethluk Children’s Home, or “the

orphanage” as locals sometimes call it, comes from a trip 20 years ago with family and friends. Their small flotilla motored a half hour upriver from her hometown of Bethel, then took a right off the lower Kuskokwim River and headed into the muddy and meander-ing Kuskokuak Slough. Three miles beyond the village of Kwethluk, Basile remembers coming around a wide bend and watching these ghostly, weathered buildings rise from the tundra, as in-congruous with the landscape as sky-scrapers in a cornfield.

“It struck me as really odd,” she re-calls. “It’s just tundra and river forever, and all of the sudden these western style buildings, they just shoot up out of no-where.”

Once the boats were anchored, she and the others scrambled up a steep cut bank and walked along a gap-toothed boardwalk toward a little Moravian church with a bell tower and a smat-tering of other buildings, some three-stories tall, in various stages of decline from decades of neglect, vandalism and beatings by weather. Basile, who was 10 at the time, remembers that day in June being gray and misty. She remembers the tundra smelling of Labrador tea and the buildings of mildew and decay. She remembers exploring the boys’ dorm and the hollow resonance of its wooden floor beneath her feet. She remembers how a friend’s little brother fell partway

through the floorboards, and how, as grownups pulled him to safety, she and her girlfriends ran out screaming.

What stuck with her then, as it still does now, was how eerie the place felt. It looked empty, but felt inhabited. In-side a tent that night, listening to ghost stories and a reading of “The Cremation of Sam McGee” didn’t calm her nerves.

As spooked as she was, the orphanage kept drawing her back. And the more she returned, the more questions she had about its place in history.

The home, shuttered since the early 1970s, started taking in children in the late 1920s. Many of them had lost their parents to influenza and other post-contact diseases. In its later years, funded by the Moravian church and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the “orphan-age” operated more as a boarding school and a home for children whose families couldn’t care for them.

In 2008, after earning a degree in photojournalism with a minor in an-thropology from the University of Montana, Basile started bringing along her camera to capture the home’s stark imagery—fireweed peeking in through broken windows; an old school desk sit-ting abandoned in the snow, pages of a book fanned open by the wind; a tat-tered nightgown hanging from a cur-

tain rod; a mattress oozing its stuffing; a half empty bag of DDT.

More recently, backed by a $4,500 grant from the Alaska Humanities Fo-rum, Basile has been gathering stories from people who lived at the Kwethluk Children’s Home. Many of them are now elders living in communities along the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. Through her Kwethluk Children’s Home project, she is documenting this remnant of the past, a symbol of a time of great tran-sition for Yup’ik people as they found themselves confronted with new belief systems, new ways of doing things and new and deadly European diseases.

“Growing up in the painful wake of Western assimilation has left me searching for meaning in this clash of cultures,” writes Basile, who now lives in Oregon, works as a photographer and teaches photography and digital story-telling to youth and adults. “On trips home to Alaska, I visit the orphanage. Scouring the wreckage for treasures, stories and answers.”

To share the home’s story with her community, and with the world, she’s creating a multimedia website with web designer Erica Rudy. The site will feature a digital story with her photographs, au-dio clips from her interviews, video clips and portraits of former residents.

GRANT REPORT

Kwethluk Children’s Home Project

The Forum supports an effort to document in stories and photographs a place of cultural transition

By Derba McKinney

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Once used by children at the Kwethluk Children’s Home, a desk now sits abandoned outside the boys’ dormitory. KATIE BASILE

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The sons of the home’s former super-intendent, Joel and Jim Henkelman, now living in Homer and Nikiski, re-spectively, have offered shared rights to hundreds of historical photographs, old film footage and the use of their father’s self-published memoir for the project.

The Moravian Church, founded in 1457 in what’s now the Czech Repub-lic, first sent missionaries to Alaska at the urging of Presbyterian Minister Sheldon Jackson to “Christianize the Eskimo people of Alaska.” After explor-ing the Yukon-Kuskokwim area, the Moravians chose Mumtrekhlagamute, meaning “smokehouse people.” For the church they would eventually build, they chose a site across the river and called the place Bethel, meaning “a sa-cred area” or “house of God.” The Mora-vians’ held their first public worship service in Alaska there in 1885.

Growing up downriver from the chil-dren’s home, Basile first became aware of its existence through the story of Ga-briel Fox, a boy who had run away from the home in 1968, and was never seen again—not in human form, anyway. Or so the story goes.

One version is that the boy has been wandering the tundra ever since as a half-human, half-animal being, a wild child stuck between two worlds. He’s not a ghost, but has become so light he can walk on the tops of trees and hop across wide rivers. “Cillem quellra” is the Yup’ik term for those who get lost on the tundra and fall into this state: “Made cold by the universe.” To this day people along the Delta report Gabriel Fox sightings. And he still gets blamed when things go missing or fish or meat disappears from people’s caches.

“People would always say, ‘Watch out for Gabriel Fox,’ Basile said. “Or, ‘You’d better be home on time or Gabriel Fox will get you.’”

Basile always assumed it was just a story parents told to keep their kids on the straight and narrow. But during one of her visits to the children’s home, she was taking photographs inside the old superintendent’s house when she came

across a typewritten letter to Bishop Ed-win Kortz. In the last paragraph Clar-ence Henkelman had written:

“Our missing boy Gabriel Fox still has not been found. He was seen around Kwethluk a number of times but has not been seen for over a week. All the neigh-boring villages have been alerted, but no reports have come on having seen him.”

As she held the letter in her hands, a chill ran down her spine.

“It was, oh my god, this legend I was always hearing about as a child was an actual person. He wasn’t just a spirit or a rural myth. He was a real boy who lived here, and he had a story. That’s when I thought, ‘I’m going to turn this into something.’”

Basile never takes anything from the site, so she left the letter where she found it. She’s glad she photographed it, though, because the next time she was there it was gone.

Basile has since talked to the social worker who accompanied the boy to the children’s home, and has read her ac-count of the story. She now knows Ga-briel Fox was 13 years old when a judge sent him and his two younger sisters to the home due to parental neglect. She knows now that search parties looked for him for a week, on the ground and from the air, until blizzards put an end to their efforts.

Among former children’s home resi-dents Basile has interviewed is a man who claimed he was there the night Ga-briel ran away.

“He told me Gabriel Fox woke him that night and said, ‘I’m going to take off, you should come with me.’” The man told Basile he refused to go yet watched the boy climb out the window. He told her he saw him run across the tundra and disappear behind a spruce tree. And he meant, “disappear.”

The Hickelman sons told Basile their father received a phone message some-time in the ‘80s from a hospital in Cali-fornia on behalf of a man claiming to be Gabe Fox. But their father was never able to reach the man so he never knew whether it was a hoax.

Certain pragmatists have yet another version of the Fox story. The boy ran off

GRANT REPORT

‘oh my god, this legend

i was always hearing

about as a child was

an actual person. He

wasn’t just a spirit or

a rural myth. He was a

real boy who lived here,

and he had a story.’

— Katie Basile

A L A S K A H U M A N I T I E S F O R U M F A L L / W I N T E R 2 013 7

at a time when the river ice was thin, and the easiest way back home to his mother in Bethel would have been to follow the river.

Basile said she went into this proj-ect with an open mind, but wanting to know the impact the home made on Yup’ik children’s lives. It may have pro-vided structure during turbulent times, but at what cultural cost?

“The kids were not with their par-ents or grandparents, they were sitting in school desks learning English and Christianity,” she said. “But the kids also fished for their own food, picked berries and hunted. They practiced sub-sistence. A lot of the food they ate came from the land. People from the commu-nities stopped in. There was an effort to incorporate Native culture.”

Still, she wondered if children suf-fered. During one interview, the woman started to cry. Basile braced herself to hear “something terrible.” Instead, the

woman described seeing a Christmas tree inside the home for the first time and how it was the most beautiful thing she’d seen in her life.

Another former resident, who’d lost his father to tuberculosis, told her it was tough at the home, that he couldn’t have his way all the time. It gave him an authority and a discipline he had never known. But he liked it there, he told her, and felt well cared for, like part of a big family. When Basile asked him to sum up his experience in one word, the word he chose was “love.”

“I’ve heard of people going there and stacking books back up on the shelves or sweeping up the church,” Basile said. “They clean up just a little bit, which I think is really nice. It speaks to the re-spect people have for the place.”

Eva Malvich, director and curator of Bethel’s Yupiit Piciryarait Museum, is planning an exhibit dedicated to Basile’s project next summer, with an opening reception and community potluck in June.

A view of the interior of the chapel at the Kwethluk Children’s Home. A vacuum cleaner is often found in various places throughout the property, most often on the altar of the chapel. KATIE BASILE

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“It will be a perfect time because the king salmon will be running,” Malvich said. “What a great way to open the ex-hibit, with fresh fish.”

Like many local people with connec-tions to the home, Malvich has an uncle who spent time there while his father was away for work. Another is Ana Hoffman, president and CEO of Bethel Native Corporation. She had a great-un-cle who was there briefly, until a relative showed up unannounced in a qayaq to take him downriver to live with an aunt. The qayaq, or kayak, had only one cock-pit so her great-uncle got stuffed into the front under the deck. And off they went downriver, past Bethel, all the way to Tuntutuliak.

“I asked him, how did you feel when this person came to pick you up, and he said he was disappointed. I asked why, and he said, ‘If I had stayed at the or-phanage I would have been a smart man today.’

“Whenever I go up to the children’s home, after hearing that story, I always picture my great-uncle, who lived to be 92, as a little boy being loaded in the qayaq and paddled downriver.

“I’m glad she’s doing this,” Hoffman said of Basile’s project. Hoffman said Basile’s understanding of Yup’ik culture and values is “a priceless asset to this project.

“Living here on the river, when you go by the children’s home, when you ap-proach it, you immediately get a sense of the value of the place. You know, there are a lot of stories there.”

Basile wants to collect as many of those stories as she can before they go the way of the old buildings. Each time she visits a little more of the place is gone. The climate hasn’t been kind. And people take things, move things around and leave their names all over, making their presence known. Just as she felt on her first visit at 10, the place feels empty, but not.

“Even today when I go to take pic-tures I can’t go by myself,” she said. “It’s an eerie place. And the wind howls. It’s very haunting.” ■

GRANT REPORT

A textbook sits in the attic of the superintendent’s house at the abandoned Kwethluk Children’s Home. KATIE BASILE

A view of the boys’ dorm at the Kwethluk Children’s Home. KATIE BASILE

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