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. 

At the end of the gBETA program, the startup founders will pitch their companies to investors, community partners, and the public at a showcase event in Anchorage on May 30.

“I’m thrilled to get to work with these five incredible Alaska-based companies on their growth,” says Erica Dye, gBETA Alaska program manager. “This program not only supports these five companies but brings opportunity and economic development to the entire state of Alaska.”

gener8tor is a global venture firm and accelerator network that supports startups, workers, employers, artists, and musicians by partnering with companies, governments, universities, and nonprofits. Partners in Alaska include the Alaska Investor Network, Denali Commission, and UAF Center for Innovation, Commercialization, and Entrepreneurship (Center ICE).

“Center ICE is honored to bring this program to Alaska to support our top entrepreneurs and help grow Alaska’s innovation economy,” says center director Mark Billingsley.

Since launching in 2015, gBETA accelerator alumni have raised more than $741 million in capital and are credited with creating more than 4,500 jobs in the US and Canada.

Another gBETA Alaska cohort is scheduled to be chosen in the fall.

The Yup’ik village of Newtok, perched precariously on thawing permafrost at the edge of the rapidly eroding Ninglick River, is the first Alaska community to begin a full-scale relocation made necessary by climate change.

Still, the progress of moving to a new village site that is significantly outpacing relocation efforts at other vulnerable Alaska communities, remains agonizingly slow, say those who are in the throes of the transformation.

“There is no blueprint on how to do this relocation,” said Carolyn George, one of those still living in Newtok. “We’re relocating the whole community to a whole different place, and we did not know how to do it. And it’s been taking too long — over 20 years, I think.”

George, who works at the Newtok school, was one of the self-described “Newtok mothers” who made comments at a panel discussion at the recent Arctic Encounter Symposium in Anchorage. The river waters, once at least a mile away, have edged closer and closer, and the village, once sitting high on the landscape, continues to sink as that permafrost thaws, she said.

Plans to move Newtok started to solidify in 2006 with the formation of the local-state-federal Newtok Planning Group, but that followed many years of debate and study that led to the decision to relocate. according to the Alaska Division of Community and Regional Affairs. The new site, about 9 miles away on the south side of the Ninglick River, is called Mertarvik, meaning “getting water from the spring.”

In 2019, the first Mertarvik residents settled into their new homes. As of now, more than half of the residents have moved to Mertarvik.

The latest count is 220 in Mertarvik and 129 still at Newtok, said Christina Waska, the relocation coordinator for the Newtok Village Tribal government.

The goal is to have everyone in Mertarvik by the fall, even if that means some people will be living in temporary housing, like construction work camps.

“Our ultimate goal is to not leave anyone behind,” she said.

With a single local government, a single Tribal government and unified services like mail delivery, Newtok and Mertarvik technically make up a single community. But often it does not feel that way.

George is among those coping with a sense of limbo.

Her five daughters and their father have moved to a new house in Mertarvik, but she remains in Newtok because of her job. That is a hardship, she said. “Being alone, I get anxiety, and I miss my girls, you know. Especially at night,” she said.

And the school where she works, and which is set to be demolished this summer, is in dire shape.

The four classrooms are heated by a small generator. There is no food cooked on-site for the kids. There is no plumbing – a situation that, for now, is being addressed with a “bathroom bus” that shuttles kids to their homes as needed.

Conditions are notably better at Mertarvik, said speakers at the conference.

Lisa Charles, another panel member, described the difficult conditions her family left behind in Newtok. The family was packed into a too-small, two-bedroom house with thawing permafrost below and mold growing inside. It took a toll on their physical well-being, she said.

But once the family settled in at Mertarvik, things improved, she said.

“After moving over to the new village site, we noticed all of our health improved, especially for my daughter that grew up with asthma,” Charles said. “After we moved over to our new home, she grew out of her asthma problem.”

There have been complications, like power outages affecting the school, attributed to demand that outstripped capacity.

Among the challenges is a timing mismatch. Waska and new Tribal administrator Calvin Tom started their jobs only recently, too late for them to place summer barge orders, and as a consequence, no building materials are expected to be barged in 2024 and no new houses will be built this summer in Mertarvik, Waska said.

There is still plenty of work to be done aside from construction, she said. And construction is seen as a process that will continue long after all residents are settled at Mertarvik, she added.

“It’ll never be done. If you look at every village, even Anchorage, Fairbanks, it’s always under construction,” she said.

While Newtok is the first Alaska village to relocate, others will follow.

Even two decades ago, 31 communities were identified as facing imminent threats that would make their locations potentially unlivable in the near future. Of those, nearly half were planning or considering some form of relocation.

Next after Newtok to relocate entirely may be Kivalina, an Inupiat village on the Chukchi Sea coast that is facing numerous climate stressors along with rapid erosion. The community now has a new evacuation road, completed in 2021, that can better enable movement to a new site.

But plans hit a snag after a study by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers revealed that the originally chosen relocation site, called Kiniktuuraq, is also vulnerable to the same climate change stressors that are expected to make Kivalina uninhabitable in the relatively near future.

Napakiak, a Yup’ik village perched on a section of eroding land along the Kuskokwim River that is being quickly eaten away in large chunks, has also made progress. The community is now engaged in a partial relocation, a strategy known as “managed retreat.” Some families have already moved from vulnerable sites to safer ground upland, and there is state money available for a new school to replace the erosion-threatened building.

There is no single source of money to pay for relocation work, even for the Newtok-Mertarvik transformation, the most advanced of the projects.

The Newtok-Mertarvik move has been funded through various allocations over time. Among the recent infusions were $25 million through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and another $6.7 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Napakiak received a similar $25 million grant through the infrastructure law and a $2.4 million infusion earlier this year from FEMA.

The combined costs of full and partial relocations for all the villages that need them are expected to be staggering.

Of 144 Alaska Native villages with damages from flooding, erosion, permafrost thaw or some combination of those impacts, costs for protecting infrastructure are expected to mount to $3.45 billion over the next 50 years, according to a 2020 report by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. An additional $833 million is needed to protect the hub communities of Utqiagvik, Nome, Bethel, Kotzebue, Dillingham and Unalaska, said the 2020 BIA report, which was produced in cooperation with the Denali Commission and other agencies.

The sources for the needed funding remain unclear, and bureaucratic hurdles are delaying progress toward necessary relocations, a recent report from the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium said.

There are fundamental obstacles in rural Alaska that make it extremely difficult for Alaska communities to work through the federal system, said Jackie Qataliña Schaeffer, ANTHC’s director for climate initiatives.

She cited an example during the Arctic Encounter Symposium forum. “Every federal agency requires you to have some type of reporting and in most of the cases you have to apply for the federal funding online. If you don’t have stable internet, how do you do that?” she said.

The ANTHC report recommends an overhaul to streamline a process that is a poor fit for remote Alaska villages.

In some ways, the Newtok-Mertarvik residents said, their split community has successfully overcome difficult challenges, making their relocation a possible example for other threatened communities in Alaska and elsewhere in the United States.

But those successes can also be bittersweet.

Relocation is absolutely necessary because the old village site is now an unhealthy place to live, Waska said. Nonetheless, she feels conflicted about abandoning the hometown she loves.

“Newtok is my home. It’s kind of sad. It kind of breaks my heart that Newtok is no longer going to be there,” she said.