peter young’s listopia

66) Velma Wallis, Two Old Women, 1993
A long and graceful retelling of an Athabaskan legend of two old women, Ch’idzigyaak and Sa’, who are abandoned by their tribe and left to fend for themselves in the Alaskan wilderness. Velma Wallis, an Athabaskan herself, has kept to straightforward traditional storytelling even though this is a centuries-old, octogenarian version of Thelma and Louise.

30) Hannah Breece, Jane Jacobs, A Schoolteacher in Old Alaska, 1995
After the US purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867 education became the responsibility of Washington DC, and in 1904 a teacher from Philadelphia, Hannah Breece, sought out the northern frontier places, and the more remote the better. She taught the children of native Aleuts, Athabaskans and Eskimos as well as well-established Russians and pioneering Americans, and while staunchly Christian, Prohibitionist and a willing carrier of the 'white man's burden' it was her resourcefulness in the face of adversity that invariably saw her through. Breece's journal was completely re-edited by her younger relative Jane Jacobs into a more readable style (having been turned down for publication in her own time), but it's Breece's thoughts on the people she educates, while well-meaning, that often appear highly condescending to the degree that they set teeth on edge: phrases like "I have always been careful when working among inferior races...", and, "I am superior to an uneducated native woman and give her to understand that I realize it" illustrate the prevailing assumptions of the times among whites towards native Americans and have wisely been left in. There are apparently few books to turn to about that time and place to put her experiences into historical perspective, something Jacobs had to do herself with background research into the prevailing religious and political contexts, all of which ended up as informative chapter-by-chapter commentaries. But it's either Breece's encounters with some colourfully strange characters or her entrenched beliefs about race, religion and class that distinguish this memoir, making it something of a Northern Exposure experience for American history buffs.