Sylvia Carlsson - the woman who gave me my start in Alaska; contemplating the future of this blog, part 3

Memorial services for Sylvia Carlsson were held at the Alaska Native Heritage Center and were presided over by the Alaska Native Sisterhood.

In the final years of her life, Sylvia Carlsson became well known for her letters to the Editor of the Anchorage Daily News, which appeared on a regular basis. This is her final letter, published January 21, 2011 - just two days before she died unexpectedly at the age of 76:

Anybody can destroy; ability to create valued

Following the State of the Union address, some Republican and tea party members of Congress will fall into full assault mode and will begin battering the health care legislation signed into law in 2010. They've dubbed it "Obamacare" and labels not fit to mention. The legislation is actually entitled the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act or Public Law 111-148, but it is rarely referred to by its proper title in any of the media offerings -- "Obamacare" is more sensational maybe?

A few of the newly minted members of Congress seem to view themselves as foot soldiers specifically elected to wreak havoc on anything with President Obama's name on it, especially the PPAHCA. At least that's the impression I'm getting from interviews on the tube and in print.

Is there anything in the PPAHCA that could have helped the deranged shooter in Tucson? That question has yet to be asked.

When We the People begin electing members to Congress to destroy rather than create law, are we in trouble? Answer that question for yourself.

-- Sylvia Carlsson

I knew Sylvia for a different reason. I was a homeless person when I met her, and I had a homeless family. But I also had a dream - to make a life in Alaska for my family and me, to move out of the two tiny tents in which we endured the almost constant rain of the summer of 1981 into a house or apartment and to get to know something about this place they call Alaska.

It was Sylvia Carlsson, then President and Publisher of the Tundra Times who made it possible for me to begin to live that dream. She gave me my first and only non-freelance job in Alaska when, working in conjunction with Linda Lord-Jenkins, she hired me to come on as a reporter and photographer.

I worked there for 3.5 years and in that time, thanks largely to connections that enabled Sylvia to oversee agreements with the airline companies to provide me free transportation in exchange for ad space, I was able to do work in every region of Alaska, from the rain forests of Southeast, the wind-blasted volcanic islands of the Aleutian Chain, the Southwest Y-K delta, the Interior and, of course, the Arctic.

It was great fun and a big learning adventure. At times along the way, Sylvia backed me up against powerful individuals and organizations within her own Native community. Other times, we disagreed, and strongly so.

None of what I have done would have happened had Sylvia not hired me - not only my work for Tundra Times, but there would have been no Uiñiq magazine, no Alaska's Village Voices as I once shaped it - so many things.

So, when her niece and my good friend Diane Benson informed me that Sylvia, Tlingit, of the Raven Clan, had passed away, I made certain to attend her memorial service at the Alaska Native Heritage Center. There, I found her ashes on a small table alongside her picture.

I paid her my respects and gave her a Gunalchéesh, "thank you" in Tlingit, for hiring me and for giving me this great opportunity.

As Margie walks into one of the many campsites that we stayed in during the two months between the day we arrived in Alaska and when I was hired on at the Tundra Times, Caleb plays in the dirt. Melanie and Jacob visit in the master tent. Summer, 1981.

By June of 1981, it had become clear to me that if I was ever to realize my dream of making a life in what I knew to be my spiritual home - Alaska - I could wait no longer. I could not sit around until someone in Alaska gave me a job, I could not wait until a pile of money sufficient to finance the move and transition from Arizona to Alaska fell upon me. I had to go to Alaska and I had to go right then. I had dreamt long enough. It was time to take action - time to go.

So Margie and I held a yard sale, sold most all that we owned and then packed what was left on top of and into our Volkswagen Rabbit along with two tiny tents and our children, who then numbered four, and hit the road north.

Among those who loved us, many gave me good and loving council - "don't go!" You are not a kid anymore - you are a man with a wife and four children - a baby daughter, for hell's sake! Put your childish dreams behind you and be a man - be responsible, don't go!

Alaska is a harsh place. You're not prepared. Alaska will be cruel to you. Alaska will show you no mercy.

When we reached Salt Lake City, we stopped to visit my folks for a week or so. Rex Jr, my oldest brother, said he had shown my National Geographic work to a friend of his at the Salt Lake Tribune and she had a job there, waiting for me. He gave me her number and told me to call her.

I did not call. I loaded the family back into the car and pointed the Rabbit north, once again. "You'll turn around and come back before you reach the Canadian border," Dad told me just before we pulled out of his driveway. I called him from Canada. "You'll turn around and come back before you ever get to Alaska," he predicted.

Next, I called him from Tok, Alaska, just on this side of border from the Yukon Territory. "You'll be back within a year," he said.

That was almost 30 years ago.

When I drove across the border from the Yukon Territory on July 14 - my 31st birthday - and looked out at Alaska, at big, wild, country that I had never before seen, country in which I knew no one - hard, cold, country where no job awaited me, I felt this warm feeling of exquisite peace. I felt that finally, after having spent 31 years wandering in that wilderness called the Lower 48, I had come home.

It has long been my contention that although I was born in the city of Ogden, Utah, I have been an Alaskan since birth - it's just that I was born into exile.

I wondered why it took me exactly 31 years to get here, but it was better to have arrived late than not at all.

Rex, doing his art at the picnic table that serves as a tie down stake for the tent he sleeps in. Summer, 1981.

When I first got into the internet, and when I first saw blogs, I had this feeling that both had been made and created just for me. Basically, I had made a career of creating publications that I wrote, photographed and designed on contract, and I had longed to create my own publication.

I even tried it once, but the effort went nowhere. Even though I have spent 29 years of my 35 year career in business for myself, I am not a business man. I always put what I want to do ahead of money, and so tend to often wind up short. The expense of keeping a high-quality paper publication going while I figured out how to fund it was beyond my resource. I published one issue and then the thing died.

But with the internet - with a blog - the expense of producing and distributing a publication with a potential worldwide audience would be nominal. 

Yet, I hestitated for over a decade. I feared that if I put my photos on the internet, people would steal them, put them to unauthorized use. In fact, people had already done so, but I feared that on the internet, the problem could prove severe.

So, as badly as I wanted to launch an internet publication, I didn't.

Too bad. If I had have done so, perhaps I could have figured it out long before now. Perhaps by now, I would have a self-sustaining publication going. There are a good number of these out there, you - many produced by individuals, most of whom seem to have jumped in and built there readership and found their support before there were a billion blogs to compete with.

I don't think "a billion blogs" is much of an exaggeration at all. 

But because of this fear of theft, I waited until it became clear to me that the entire photographic world was moving online, anyway. Not just the young up and comers, but even the greatest known works by the greatest masters were coming online.

So a bit of theft and appropriation would just have to be tolerated. If something major were to happen, there are always the courts.

To all my Facebook friends - be assured, none of this applies to you. It gives me pleasure when you place my pictures on your wall, or use them as your profile pic - so long as my copyright mark remains and credit is given. I liken this to when I step into people's houses and find my pictures, clipped from magazines and newspapers, hanging on the wall.

Rex visits Melanie in the master tent. The summer of 1981 was the wettest on record to that time. It rained almost every day, sometimes all day and all night, too.

Well, damnit. I have again surpassed my alloted blogging time today and once again have done so much rambling that I have not gotten down to the main point of this "Contemplating the future of this blog" thing.

So I will have to do a part 4.

From comments that I receive, both here and in Facebook, I see that some of my readers still fear that one of the things that I am contemplating is to shut down the blog entirely.

No - no, not all.

I see this blog, and the electronic magazine that I plan to add to it, just like I saw Alaska after I drove across the border on the Al-Can with my family. I was looking at my future - Alaska. My past was literally behind me. I would still make short returns back into that past. The places and people who had been important to my life down south would continue to be so. From time to time, I would go down there and we would get together and do things.

Sometimes, I would go to places outside Alaska where I had never been - but my spirtual home was now my physical home and would remain so. I had almost no money, no home, but I had desire. I did not know where the money would come from. I knew that  it would come and it did - never enough to make it easy, but enough somehow to always carry on.

Now, this blog, and electronic publishing - this is what is before me. This is my future. I will still make my visits back into paper, but this world of electronic publishing is where I am and I am only going deeper. Once again, I lack all but marginal resources and I do not know where sufficient resources are going to come from. The resources will come, though, I know it. 

And you readers - you have encouraged, by coming and by your support.

Tomorrow, I will see if I can do what I was going to do today so that I can close out this series.

Two Ravens, in honor of Sylvia Carlsson of the Raven Clan. Thank you again, Sylvia, for the many good things that you made possible in my life.

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Diane Benson takes her final bow as Tlingit civil rights heroine Elizabeth Peratrovich

There was a reason that I drove to Anchorage yesterday and got myself caught in falling ash - to see Diane Benson act in her final performance of the one woman play, "When My Spirit Raised It's Hands." Here, at the end of the play, she takes her final bow as Tlingit civil rights heroine Elizabeth Peratrovich.

Diane first put the play together over a decade ago to create a simple but effective device to teach Alaska schoolchildren something about how Alaska's Natives had to fight racism and prejudice to secure their rightful place in their own homeland.

Afterward, she explained that she feels it is time for a younger Native actress to step up and take the play over. "I don't want to be the grandmother forever playing a woman in her thirties," Diane explained.

In 1941, Elizabeth Peratrovich moved from the tiny Tlingit village of Klawock to Juneau with her husband Roy. There, she was surprised and deeply hurt to find signs, such as this one depicted outside "Mel's Diner," that banned Natives from certain establishments. These are the actual words that Elizabeth found herself confronted with - and such signs were common in Alaska cities, from Juneau to Fairbanks to Nome.

Elizabeth was the Grand President of the Alaska Native Sisterhood and Roy the Grand President of the Alaska Native Brotherhood. They teamed up to lead the fight for civil rights for Alaska Natives in Juneau, the territorial capital.

The US entered World War II and a higher per-capita percentage of Alaska Natives and American Indians entered the military to fight the Axis then did any other racial group. 

To make a statement, Elizabeth the "No Native or Dogs" moved the sign from in front of the diner to the recruitment office.

Elizabeth and Roy allied themselves with Governor Ernest Gruening, who expressed revulsion when they showed him what kind of discrimination Alaska Natives had to face. Along with allies in the Territorial Legislature, they helped draft an anti-discrimination bill. The effort took years, but finally Alaska's Anti-Discrimination Act came before the legislature in February, 1945.

The Act passed in the House, but ran into stiff opposition in the Senate.

"Who are these people, barely out of savagery, who want to associate with us whites, with 5,000 years of recorded civilization?" mocked Juneau Senator Allen Shattuck.

Another Senator proclaimed that he should not be forced to sit in a theatre alongside an Eskimo, because the Eskimo smelled.

It was after that, in the moment depicted above, that the spirit of Elizabeth Peratrovich raised its hand. Her right to speak was honored. She stepped before the Senate.

Standing between the American and Alaska flags and the traditional clan blanket that Identified Elizabeth as a Lukaax.adi clan of the Raven moiety, Diane recites the speech that the ANS Grand Camp president delivered that day.

"I would not have expected that I, who am barely out of savagery, would have to remind gentleman with 5,000 years of recorded civilization behind them of our Bill of Rights. When my husband and I came to Juneau and sought a home in a nice neighborhood where our children could play happily with our neighbors' children, we found such a house and arranged to lease it. When the owners learned that we were Indians, they said 'no.' Would we be compelled to live in the slums?...

"There are three kinds of persons who practice discrimination. First, the politician who wants to maintain an inferior minority group so that he can always promise them something. Second, the Mr. and Mrs. Jones who aren't quite sure of their social position and who are nice to you on one occasion, and can't see you on others depending on who they are with. Third, the great superman who believes in the superiority of the white race..."

Shattuck challenged her. He asked if the act of passing the bill would actually end discrimination.

"Do your laws against larceny and even murder prevent those crimes? No law will eliminate crimes but at least you as legislators can assert to the world that you recognize the evil of the present situation and speak your intent to help us overcome discrimination."

Peratrovich finished to silence - and then loud applause. The Act passed, 11- 5: 19 years before the US Civil Rights Act was enacted in 1964.

After the play, Diane sat down to take questions, but was interrupted by Tony Vita, who presented her with a plaque from Roy Peratrovich, Jr. Her emotion showed.

If you would like to read what Roy Jr. wrote, just click this picture.

Unfortunately, Elizabeth Peratrovich died before Alaska became a state in 1959. Diane came along too late to meet her, but as a youth she did get to know Roy. Diane had led a tough life, had been in many foster homes and had experienced abuse, both physical and sexual.

Roy firmly told her not to drop out, but to finish school and make something of her life. She agreed that she would.

Just as Elizabeth predicted, there were those who still discriminated against Natives, despite the act. As a girl, Diane once went into a restaurant in Ketchikan where a waiter refused to serve her.

Her father complained. The waiter was fired. That might not have happened, had no such act been in place. After the play, Diane stressed that racism is still strong in Alaska, and urged all present to continue to fight against it.

Diane is the mother of Latseen Benson, an Army veteran who lost his legs fighting in Iraq. As a past candidate for Congress and before that, for Governor, Benson has strongly stood for the rights of veterans.

In this, she also echoes Elizabeth Peratrovich, who, as ANS President, organized fundraisers and drives to help World War II soldiers of all races, including prisoners of war.

When her son went to war, Diane was helped through the turmoil of all that happened by her cat, Romeo. The story is right here, on the No Cats Allowed Kracker Cat Blog.