GRANT REPORT TWO PROJECTS IN SOUTHEAST ALASKA, one in Juneau and another in Sitka, delve into the complex histories of Alaskan communities, presenting nuanced (and at times disruptive) retellings of the predominant histories of place. While the Voices of Sheldon Jackson School and College and the Juneau Voices project approach the concept through different mediums, they both engage participants in ways that enhance continuity between past and present, and remind the audience that history is not simply in the past.
A Sense of Place By Maisie Thomas
VOICES OF SHELDON JACKSON SCHOOL AND COLLEGE
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he Voices of Sheldon Jackson School and College project uses the words of alumni and former staff to tell the complicated history of the Sheldon Jackson School and College. Sitka is in the heart of Lingít Aaní, owned and stewarded by Tlingit clans for millennia. The school began as a Presbyterian mission for Alaska Native children in 1878, moved to its current site in Sitka in 1884. In 1917, Sheldon Jackson became a high school, with college programs added in the 1940s.While the high school was phased out in 1967, Sheldon Jackson remained a private college until it abruptly closed in June of 2007; Sitka Fine Arts Camp took over much of the campus in 2011. Other nonprofits also share stewardship of the historic campus. There were hard feelings in Sitka toward the school stemming from its debt and abrupt closure, and from its legacy of suppressing and denigrating Native languages and culture, causing devastating and ongoing harm to generations of Native people.
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A L A S K A H U M A N I T I E S F O R U M S U M M E R 2020
Yet there were also former students who were fond of the school, and staff who had dedicated a lifetime to service there. Rebecca Poulson and her friend Alice Smith felt the need to document the story, the good and the bad, before it was lost. They began conducting interviews with former students and staff in 2012. Poulson said she was immediately surprised by the interviews. “Every person we interviewed completely subverted our expectations,” she explained. Considering the reputation of missionary boarding schools, she expected the stories to be grim and the memories to be dark. However, this was not the case. Despite the school’s suppression and dismissal of Native language and culture in the high school years, and perennial financial and administrative struggles in the college years, all but two alumni and every former staff member interviewed expressed a deep affection for “SJ.” “The story is really, really complicated and relevant,” Poulson explained, “as more
conversations [are] being had about systemic racial bias now.” Sharing the interviews and the complicated history of the school is a way “to get beyond simplistic, stereotyped narrative of our history, and to understand how racial bias in the past continues in the present.” The project has two components: a set of eight interpretive signs, installed in December 2019 on the campus, and a website with photographs, interviews, documents, yearbooks, links and recordings, and where site visitors can also contribute their own material (sjvoices.org). The website is an ongoing project, with more material added regularly. Four of the signs are chronological and introduce the different eras of the school (The Training School Era, The Cottages Era, The High School Era, and The College Era), while the other four focus on important facets of the school’s history. The goal is not to tell people what to think. Instead, they relay the history of Sheldon Jackson through the words of those who lived and worked there, allowing viewers to connect the material to their own experiences and come to their own understanding.
