Molly Hootch Ruling

Public education in Alaska took a radical turn in the mid 1970’s. Previous to this time, kids who wanted a high school education, and even some younger kids, could only get it at large boarding schools. High school was not available in the villages strung out across Alaska. Kids were sent far from home to schools run by the Board of Indian Affairs or to schools in the larger cities. Kids from different native Indian, Eskimo and Aleut cultures were mixed together and speaking their native languages was forbidden.

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.

The Reader

One night a week, I shelve books at our local library. It’s hard work, standing on a stool to lift things up to the top shelf and then bending down to the lowest one. Books can be heavy! But they are wonderful, a technology which has allowed us to share thoughts with people who lived as long as two thousand years ago. More if you count cuneiform tablets. (Glad I don’t have to shelve those!)

As I shelve, I am always thinking about the readers who have read the books now being returned to the shelves. It stretches my understanding to know what people are reading. In many ways, readers drive book publishing. Readers seem to wait for thick new books by James Patterson, Catherine Cookson, Stephen King, Robert Ludlum, Debbie Macomber, David Baldacchi, Danielle Steel and many others. These romance and thriller writers, like the mystery and science fiction writers, churn out one book after another. These are the writers who give readers puzzles to solve or predictable stories to while away time. The writers who come up with the right formula, use it again and again. And the publishing world bows to this best-selling readers’ market.

Outside genre fiction, it isn’t so easy for writers. Nevertheless, despite the competition, recent times have been the era of the writer. Poets and Writers magazine publishes page after page of ads for writing workshops, MFA programs, fellowships, and writing contests of all kinds. Workshops explain how wonderful it is to write for all kinds of reasons, to feel more human, to find out what you think, to share your experiences and what you learned from them. Anyone who wants to can keep a blog or publish a book, and books are certainly not the only media where writers are found. Everyone writes!

But all writers must consider their readers. In a New York Public Library discussion, Jeffrey Eugenides earnestly told Salman Rushdie that in his writing process he progressed from focusing on the sentence, to working with the plot, and that now his main interest was the character. The masterful Rushdie rejoined that in his work, his point of view had moved from that of the writer to that of the reader. “There may be a perfect way to tell a story. In that case you must ask yourself, what does the reader need to know? You must become the reader.”

My cousin Helen Frost [http://www.helenfrost.net/], who has been writing books long enough to see her readers criss-cross the globe with recommendations of her work, also recently said, “Sometimes I think writers get too much credit for what happens in the experience of a book.” Just yesterday at lunch, someone who says she doesn’t read very much, told me how moved she had been by Hemingway’s Garden of Eden, how every sentence got down to reality. I’ve never read it, and I find there is some controversy about whether Hemingway would have published it, had he been alive. But I wanted to run right out and get it! And when I do read it, you may be sure I will think of Mary, readership in common being one of the many pleasures of reading.