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Female Native Teachers in Southeast Alaska Sarah Dickinson, Tillie Paul, and Frances Willard VICTORIA WYATT Not all those who worked to educate and convert southeastern Alaska natives were Caucasian. Some Natives, convinced that accommodation offered the best alternative available in a rapidly changing world, did the same in an effort to insure their people's survival. Victoria Wyatt, who holds a Ph.D. from Yale, is Associate Professor in the Department of History in Art at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. She has written Images from the Inside Passage: An Alaskan Portrait by Winter and Pond (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 7989), Shapes of Their Thoughts: Reflections of Culture Contact in Northwest Coast Indian Art (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 7984), and several articles on Northwest Indian art and oral history. In the following selection, Wyatt examines the careers of three Alaska Native women who became Christian educators: Sarah Dickinson, Tillie Kinnon Paul, and Frances Willard. Although they are not mentioned in Ted Hinckley's article, both Sarah Dickinson and the young Tillie Kinnon served for a time as translators for S. Hall Young. And, while working together at the Sitka Industrial Training School, Tillie Kinnon Paul and Frances Willard devised a Tlingit dictionary. Wyatt describes well the difficult decisions these women faced in a time of change, noting that their acceptance of Christianity forced them to reject certain elements of their traditional culture. However, as she also points out, all three also fought against those aspects of the newly imposed American culture which they deemed undesirable. As Wyatt's insightful analysis demonstrates, culture change is a complex phenomenon which cannot easily be categorized. Determining motivation is a difficult challenge for the historian, for why people act can never be known with cerThis article appeared originally in Margaret Szasz, ed., Between Indian and White Worlds: The Cultural Broker (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 179-96; it is reprinted here by permission. 156 Female Native Teachers in Southeast Alaska 157 tainty; most ofus as individuals often have difficulty identifying our own motivation clearly and coherently. Natives made choices regarding acceptance or rejection of Western beliefs and ideas though, as Richard Dauenhauer's article emphasizes, their choices were often highly circumscribed by the control and pressure brought to bear by the government and the mission societies. Part of the significance of Wyatt's work is her understanding of the active role ofNatives in defining the parameters of change in their world. She has particularly emphasized the role women played in the accommodations made by Natives. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Tlingit and Haida Indians in Southeast Alaska faced tremendous challenges as non-Native settlers moved into their region. Even more than the Russians who had previously occupied Native lands in Alaska, the American settlers appropriated traditional fishing and hunting areas and imposed new economic, religious, legal, and political systems. Native people had to develop strategies quickly to respond to these changes and to the political and cultural oppression they brought. u.S. naval gunboats discouraged Native peoples in coastal Alaska from using force to oppose the foreign invasion. Almost certainly, too, Native leaders there got news of the very violent federal policies toward Indians in other areas of the United States in the 1860s and 1870s and wanted to avoid similar experiences in Alaska. Thus, leaders sought ways to help their people survive and cope with the new developments. As elsewhere in the United States, different individuals chose different methods of achieving this end, and opinion was divided-then and now-about the desirability of each strategy. Many of the choices involved a considerable amount of accommodation and either the appearance or the reality of adopting the value system of the foreign culture. This was certainly true of the many Native women and men who worked among their own people as Christian lay workers and educators. They accepted a new form of spirituality and a new type of educational system and sought to use them as a vehicle to help their peers. Their mission was to educate their people about the non-Native society that was growing around them and to prepare the coming generation to function and compete successfully in the new system. Like all Indians in Southeast Alaska at the time, they faced hard choices. Often white prejudice, cultural oppression, and harsh economic realities forced them to relinquish time-honored customs to maximize [3.138.200.66] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 10:58 GMT...

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