Alaska

BIA boarding schools' devastating legacy continues to echo in Alaska • Alaska Beacon

Published

2 years ago

April 23, 2024

BIA boarding schools' devastating legacy continues to echo in Alaska • Alaska Beacon

There was only one purpose for the boarding school system in Alaska. In fact, there was only one purpose for the Bureau of Indian Affairs educational program in America.

It was all about white power. White supremacy. Assimilate the savage Natives by force.

The Inupiat people of our Bering Straits region, first subjugated by the Swedish Covenant Church in Unalakleet in 1887 under a missionary named Axel Karlsson, became the norm for the Bering Straits Inupiat from that point on. Every village was dominated by the church and the BIA school system.

In tandem with the BIA objectives, the accompanying church contracts with the U.S. government system also added their layer of rules about who the masters were over our people.

The unholy remnants of that system remain to this day.

All of the villages in my region, now served by Bering Straits Native Corp., have locked themselves into a system to leave their cultural roots behind. Damage was done to the arts, the languages, the heritage of Inupiat song and dance, the storytelling as my Grandma Kipo used to do and along with that, the 10,000 years of respect for elders.

She was the last of her roots. She passed on in 1953.

The Washington Post in an August 2023 report said that life was not easy for Native students.

Forced by the federal government to attend the schools, Native American children were sexually assaulted, beaten and emotionally abused. They were stripped of their clothes and scrubbed with lye soap. Matrons cut their long hair. Speaking their tribal language could lead to a beating.Taken from their homes on reservations, Native American children — some as young as 5 — were forced to attend Indian boarding schools as part of an effort by the federal government to wipe out their languages and culture and assimilate them into white society.

As the Post reported:

“For nearly 100 years, from the late 1870s until 1969, the U.S. government, often in partnership with churches, religious orders and missionary groups, operated and supported more than 400 Indian boarding schools in 37 states.

“Government officials and experts estimate that tens of thousands of Native children attended the schools over several generations, though no one knows the exact number. Thousands are believed to have died at the schools.”

There were at least a dozen combination church-government schools in Alaska that sprang up as a result of the thousands of parents that died from the Spanish flu and along with it the push to expand the boarding programs across America.

Their charge was to completely and utterly assimilate the children.

The schools in Alaska included the Eklutna Vocational School, the Mt. Edgecumbe High School, the White Mountain U.S. Government School, Wrangell Institute, the Tanana Orphanage, the St. Mary’s Orphanage, the Holy Cross Orphanage and the Dillingham Tutorial School. Several of these schools were operated by churches under contracts with the federal government.

The number of Native students that attended all of these schools is unknown.

Each and every institution had their rules and regulations handed down from officials of the federal government. Students at Wrangell Institute for example, were not always called by their names. Instead, each was given a number. If you attended Wrangell Institute from the first grade on, you were called “number so and-so,” for the next 12 years. “None of the school staff knew our names.”

Some Alaska Native grandpas and grandmas to this day remember their numbers, like 124, “that was my name,” one said.

A system of federal, private and religious-run boarding schools over more than 150 years did its best to wipe out thousands of years of Native languages, cultures and family ties. The damage done to these children, and to the generations that followed, is immense.

Somewhere in Alaska are the remnants of more than 2,000 boarding home students who have never said a word about their experiences. The fabric is still torn. I myself was abused in Shaktoolik Day School by a BIA teacher bent on something so terroristic that I still can’t understand the inhumanity.

I was almost killed at the age of 6 for speaking Inupiat. And the teacher was making an example of me by violently washing my mouth out with a bar of Fels-Naptha soap.

One thing I cannot yet forget is the 12-year-old girl in my classroom who sobbed as she was ordered to explain in English that I was being punished because I spoke my God-given language in class.

I can’t remember the girl’s name. She cried so hard that day.

Our parents did nothing. Not a word was said. And neither did anyone from the village. Nothing was done. Why?

At that time the word of a white man was absolute law.

When the teacher was done washing my mouth out, he dropped me on the hardwood floor. I landed on my hands and knees with the bar of soap still in my mouth.

I was choking, but I knew I had to live. I fought to live. I fought hard to catch a breath. Finally, the bar of soap popped out along with a mouth full of bubbles.

That violence has never been forgotten by me. It will never leave my presence. At 81 years of age, I still take a medication for post-traumatic stress disorder once a day.

I am not the only one in my family who was victimized by federal and church policies that have caused eternal harm.

One day in July, a hot summer afternoon, I met a Tlingit man I had known for years, sitting on a bench at the former Sears Mall in Anchorage. There he told me an incredible story I never knew about.

He spoke of how he came to know my parents. He said the captain of the Alaska Bureau of Indian Affairs supply ship had dropped off four little Inupiat children on the Hoonah beach on its voyage back to Seattle sometime in the 1920s.

“They were all alone, just standing on the beach, four little ones about 4, 5, 6 years old. We saw them from our house and went down and took them home with us.”

He allowed me to know how his father and mother raised them from then on as their own.

The four were my dad’s siblings: Ann, George, Edward, and Axel Jackson. The captain said he put them on his ship in Nome, Alaska, to see if he could find them a home and family on his way south to Seattle. The captain also said he stopped at every village and town along the way. No one volunteered.

Alaska was in the midst of the Spanish flu epidemic at the time and people were dying by the thousands. Tuberculosis was also rampant. A report from that time told of people dying in every village, with at least 10 a day in the Nome area gold fields where my father’s dad, Erick Jackson, worked as a mining engineer.

Jackson was from Finland, and was one of many who trekked across the Chilkoot Pass on his way north to the Nome gold mines.

The Spanish flu and TB took many lives, with some villages entirely wiped out. The Tetpon family of Shaktoolik later adopted my father Eric Jackson Tetpon Sr. when he was 2 years old.

The other four were left in Hoonah.

Hoonah is located in Southeast Alaska and was the last stop on the supply ship’s voyage back to the Pacific Northwest. The four grew up as family members of the Mercer family in Hoonah and later, Anne, George, Edward and Axel were sent to Chemawa Indian School in Salem, Oregon.

Three of the four did well and survived the hell they experienced at Chemawa Indian School. Axel Jackson did not make it. The word is that Axel was so badly abused at the school that he was admitted to the Morningside Hospital, a psychiatric facility in Portland.

My father said he never spoke another word for about 30 years. Axel passed away there.

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX

Source link

Click to comment

Alaska

State of Alaska Secures Win in Fight for Transparency Around Oil Development

Published

5 hours ago

May 29, 2026

Press Room

State of Alaska Secures Win in Fight for Transparency Around Oil Development

Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Image-SOM

(Bethel, AK) –Wednesday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a favorable opinion for the State of Alaska in ConocoPhillips Alaska v. Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (AOGCC), agreeing that State laws requiring disclosure of oil well data are not preempted by federal law.

“Alaska relies heavily on our resources and resource development,” said Acting Alaska Attorney General Cori Mills. “We are also stewards of those resources for the citizens of Alaska. Alaska’s law both allows resource development now, and encourages further development and exploration in the future. We’re pleased that the Ninth Circuit recognized that federal law has not overridden Alaska’s balanced approach.”

The Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission regulates oil and gas operations throughout Alaska, including within the National Petroleum Reserve–Alaska (NPR–A). Under Alaska law, companies need permits from the AOGCC to drill and must submit well data. The AOGCC is required to keep well data confidential for 24 months.

ConocoPhillips drilled several wells on lease holdings within the NPR–A and submitted data to the AOGCC. When the 24-month period expired, the AOGCC notified ConocoPhillips of the upcoming well data disclosure. ConocoPhillips sued in federal court to stop the disclosure process claiming that the Naval Petroleum Reserves Production Act, the federal law allowing private exploration in the NPR–A, preempted Alaska’s 24-month disclosure law. The federal district court found Alaska law preempted, and the AOGCC sought appellate review by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

On appeal, the Ninth Circuit agreed with the AOGCC. The federal Production Act does not preempt state law. The Ninth Circuit therefore reversed the district court’s holding to the contrary.

“The Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission is pleased with the court’s decision upholding Alaska law,” said AOGCC Commissioner Jessie Chmielowski in a declaration filed in the litigation court. “Alaska’s balanced approach to well data confidentiality leads to increased exploration activity, not less. Alaska law allows for a two-year confidentiality period on exploration well data to leverage a company’s investment in drilling. Thereafter, making the data public has incentivized exploration on the North Slope. Placing well data in the public record allows competing companies to evaluate different exploration concepts or interpretations based on seismic data that, without well data, are just educated guesses.”

# # #

Source link

Alaska

Opinion: A governor’s race for Alaska’s next generation

Published

18 hours ago

May 28, 2026

Press Room

Opinion: A governor’s race for Alaska’s next generation

Alaska Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins (Photo courtesy Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins)

Alaska needs change. That’s why I’m running for governor: to bring new energy and a new generation of leadership to the governor’s office.

For 13 years in a row, more Alaskans have left our great state than have moved here. Prices are rising, schools are closing and Alaskans are getting left behind.

This year, those planning to leave Alaska include Ben and Catherine Walker, both recipients of Alaska’s Teacher of the Year Award. They can’t justify staying in the place they grew up in and love because of our failure to invest in the fundamentals, such as our schools.

The problem is personal. I’m 37. Many of those leaving Alaska are my age — debating whether there’s a future for us here or not. It’s a challenge we must solve.

I love challenges.

Back in 2012, I dropped out of college to challenge an entrenched Republican incumbent legislator who was running unopposed to represent my home region of Southeast Alaska. I launched a scrappy, grassroots campaign and focused on the kitchen table issues that matter to every Alaskan: good schools, getting our fair share of oil revenues, lowering costs, protecting our fisheries. I won — by 32 votes.

When I was sworn in, I was baby-faced and bushy-tailed, just 23 years old. It was the beginning of a decade-long tenure in the Legislature. A lot happened in those 10 years.

Among the most important: We formed the House Bipartisan Coalition in 2016. While I have a “D” next to my name, I believe strongly in working across party lines. That’s what the Bipartisan Coalition was, and is, all about: Democrats, moderate Republicans and independents, all working together to do what’s best for Alaska.

I want to bring that same bipartisan, vigorous problem-solving spirit to the governor’s office, where it has been nonexistent the last eight years.

As governor, I want to work hand in hand with the Legislature to deliver some desperately needed wins for Alaska that will make our lives better and get our state back on track:

• Reinvest in our public schools. Our school districts are in battlefield triage mode, but instead of amputating limbs, our school boards are forced to choose which sports to cut, which electives to discontinue and which neighborhood school to close. Enough already. Get school funding back up to par.

• Forward fund our schools. Our school districts shouldn’t have to guess how much education funding will end up being appropriated in end-of-session legislative haggling.

This circus forces school districts to prospectively fire teachers, then rehire them a month or two later, when they find out the final education funding number. It’s awful for all involved. We should fix it by forward funding.

• Close the Hilcorp corporate income tax loophole. Hilcorp should pay their fair share in taxes just as ConocoPhillips, and nearly every other major corporation in Alaska, already does.

• Lower the cost of energy. Chugach Electric Association, Golden Valley Electric Association, Homer Electric Association and Matanuska Electric Association operate about 1,700 megawatts in power generation capacity. Peak Railbelt winter demand is half that: about 850 megawatts. Guess who pays for the nearly gigawatt in underused and unused power plants? You, on your power bill. The governor should force the co-ops to work together, reduce redundancies and diversify energy sources, including renewables, in order to reduce the sky-high cost of energy for Alaskans.

• Lower the cost of childcare. Alaska has inadvertently created a system of childcare permitting and licensing that effectively amounts to death by a thousand pieces of paperwork. It’s creating scarcity and cost. We need to fix it.

• Lower the cost of housing. Cut red tape to make it easier and cheaper to build more homes of all kinds — from tiny homes and ADUs to manufactured and modular housing, to apartments and condos, to traditional single-family homes. More housing of all kinds, faster.

• Rein in bottom-trawl bycatch. I will nominate Alaskans to the North Pacific Fishery Management Council who will make sure that Alaska and Alaskans — not Seattle and Lower 48 industry interests — foremost benefit from our fisheries.

• Responsibly develop our resources. Support projects that have regional buy-in and support, such as Pikka on the North Slope, which just produced first oil this month, while saying “no” when the risks are too great and those in the region are opposed, as is the case with Pebble.

• Grow our tourism economy. And let’s crack the code on winter tourism while we’re at it. If Iceland can do it, we darn well can, too. Fairbanks is having burgeoning winter tourism success. Let’s follow their great lead.

• Make Alaska an awesome place to live. Let’s build dozens more public-use cabins. Let’s build an alpine hut-to-hut system like they have in New Zealand and the Alps. Let’s build the Alaska Long Trail. Let’s make Anchorage a world-class winter city.

Does this sound like the kind of Alaska you want to live in? Then I have great news: We are the governor campaign for you. And if what you just read gives you indigestion, you’ll be relieved to know you have 17 other options.

I have more great news: I can win.

After beating an entrenched Republican incumbent, I spent a decade representing a swingy district that voted for Donald Trump.

In those 10 years, I recorded some of the highest margins of crossover support from Trump voters of any Democrat in Alaska. I ran 12% ahead of Hillary Clinton in 2016 and 15% ahead of Joe Biden in 2020.

Here’s the simple truth: Whoever becomes our next governor will need to win with the support of significant numbers of independents and moderate Republicans, in addition to Democrats. I’ve done that. And I’ll do it again. Will you join me?

Former state Rep. Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins of Sitka is a candidate for governor of Alaska.

• • •

The Anchorage Daily News welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)adn.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@adn.com or click here to submit via any web browser. Read our full guidelines for letters and commentaries here.

Source link