My aunt Helen Frost established a Lutheran Center for native
students attending the Mt. Edgecumbe School, a boarding school run by the BIA
in 1955. She especially worked with the students who came from the towns where she had been a missionary: Igloo, Teller, Shishmaref and Nome. “They were far from their
home villages and enjoyed having someone they knew to visit and worship with on
Sundays,” she writes in Frost
Among the Eskimos, a memoir of her time in Alaska from 1926 to 1961.
This boarding school still exists and is known for its science programs.
It was very difficult for young kids to leave home, but also
for the villages to say goodbye to their children during the school year.
Debby Dahl Edwardson chronicles the experiences of her husband in boarding
school in My
Name Is Not Easy. One of her husband’s siblings was sent to school in
Oklahoma without the knowledge of their parents. One was killed when,
desperately homesick, he left for home in bad weather and was lost in a small
plane crash. The kids learned to stick together during their difficulties, and,
according to Edwardson, became the generation which created the Alaskan
Federation of Natives. This organization, still a powerful force in Alaskan
politics, originally worked on negotiation and implementation of the Alaska
Native Claims Settlement Act, passed in 1971.
In 1974, a class-action suit, charging discriminatory
practice on the part of the state, was filed on behalf of rural secondary-aged
students, for not providing local high school facilities for predominantly
native communities when it did for same-size, predominantly non-native,
communities. The suit became known by the name of Molly Hootch, a Yup’ik Eskimo
student from Emmonak whose family was among those filing. Molly was no longer in
school by the time the suit was settled out of court in 1976, with the Tobeluk
Consent Decree. It declared the state would establish a high school in every
community where there was an elementary school, unless the community declined
the program.
The settlement fell at a time when social, political and
economic factors were favorable to the success of the program. Alaskan native
peoples were becoming more involved in political and social aspects of their
lives and Alaska was suddenly wealthy due to pipeline revenues from the oil
discovered at Prudhoe Bay. Schools built in small villages across the state
quickly became community centers.
As Nick Jans describes in The
Last Light Breaking, a record of his years teaching in Ambler, these
schools faced enormous challenges. One unexpected result was the prevalence of
basketball! Ambler residents “specified that a gym was first on the list, and
they got what they asked for: a basketball floor with cramped classrooms tacked
on as an apparent afterthought.” Cultural renaissance also came about, with locally-controlled
school districts mandating that local language and culture be taught to every
child.
Paul sees all of these changes. When he begins teaching at
Lathrop High School in Fairbanks, he is especially sensitive to the Eskimo and
Indian kids who are boarders, sometimes treated like servants in the houses
where they live. During pipeline construction, double shifts are instituted to
accommodate all the students. Paul assists in building local schools during the
summers after the Molly Hootch agreement is put into effect. In 1976, he moves
to the burgeoning West Valley High School out near the university when it
opens, behind schedule and with 250 more students than it was built for.
Fairbanks is the city Paul hoped for, diverse, complex, but at the edge of a
natural wilderness.
