NOTES

Any person I could imagine protesting portrayal in these pages has had his or her name changed or omitted. Otherwise, I hope the people described here will bear the impertinence of my gaze, the burden of my affection.

“From the Air”

Amelia Hill’s extensive collection of photographs, from the early 1920s to 1953, can be found in the Alaska State Library Historical Collections, Juneau.

“D-2 lands,” as people commonly referred to them in those years, were on everyone’s mind when we worked in the Brooks Range in the late 1970s. These lands were reserved under Section 17 (d) (2) of the 1971 Alaska Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA). This legislation was intended to settle Native claims, largely for the purpose of securing the lands along the Alaska Pipeline corridor for development, but this legislation also directed the Secretary of the Interior to withdraw millions of acres of lands for conservation purposes as “National Interest Lands.” Protected status of these lands was due to expire on December 31, 1978, if they were not particularly designated. Congress failed to designate the D-2 lands, and their status was argued for much of the decade. As protected status was due to expire, President Jimmy Carter used the Antiquities Act to designate fifty-six million acres of the D-2 lands as national monuments, while Carter’s Secretary of the Interior, Cecil Andrus, used the Federal Lands Policy Management Act to withdraw another forty million acres. The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) passed into law in December 1980 and created National Parks and National Wildlife Refuges from these withdrawn (from development) lands. Many Alaskans and their elected representatives opposed these conservation measures, so the terms “D-2” and “D-2 lands” were well known and often used pejoratively.

“Shape of an Egg”

Emily Ivanoff Brown is quoted from Eliot Wigginton’s I Wish I Could Give My Son a Wild Raccoon (New York: Doubleday, 1976).

“People on the Ferry”

In The Ascent of Denali, Hudson Stuck describes Walter Harper setting foot on the actual mountain top in 1913: “Walter, who had been in the lead all day, was the first to scramble up; a native Alaskan, he is the first human being to set foot upon the top of Alaska’s great mountain, and he had well earned the lifelong distinction.” Stuck, Episcopal archdeacon of Alaska and the Yukon, should be widely read for his entertaining accounts of early travel in the territory and his advocacy of Native languages and cultures. His preface to The Ascent of Denali, first published in 1914, is an eloquent appeal for the “restoration to the greatest mountain in North America of its immemorial native name.” Mary F. Ehrlander’s book, Walter Harper: Alaska Native Son (University of Nebraska Press, 2017) chronicles the life and times of Harper and his adventures with Stuck, the Mt. McKinley ascent and the sinking of the Princess Sophia.

“My Life in the Service of Dog”

Lines quoted from Rilke as epigraph to this essay are from Ahead of All Parting: The Selection Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, Edited and Translated by Stephen Michell (New York: Random House Modern Library Edition, 1995).

“St. Anne’s Reel”

A good resource for researching dances and fiddle tunes from America and the British Isles is the Fiddler’s Companion, compiled by Andrew Kuntz. An online searchable wiki of this collection can presently be found at www.ibilio.org/fiddlers/ Fiddler’s Companion entries for “Varsovienne” and “Put Your Little Foot” cite their entwined histories. Check out fiddler Vi Wickam’s blog, “Fiddle Tune a Day, Day 103” for more on this old dance tune.

Bodie Wagner sang us a still immense but slightly different version of Captain Jack Crawford’s song “California Joe.” The original was first published in Crawford’s book, The Poet Scout: A Book of Song and Story, in 1879. The song was recorded by Bill Jackson in 1941 at the Arvin Farm Security Administration camp in California, now part of Voices from the Dust Bowl: The Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Worker Collection, 1940–1941, available through the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/collections/todd-and-sonkin-migrant-workers-from-1940-to-1941/about-this-collection/. Jim Ringer sings the Bodie version on his recording, Waiting for the Hard Times to Go (1972).

A similar account of how Frank Hobson came to be a violin maker, with details about how he chose his materials, was published in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, Saturday, April 10, 1976.

For the history of shape-note music, I relied on Buell E. Cobb Jr.’s The Sacred Harp: A Tradition and its Music (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1978).

Read much more about Alaskan and Canadian Native fiddling traditions in Craig Mishler’s The Crooked Stovepipe: Athapaskan Fiddle Music and Square Dancing in Northeast Alaska and Northwest Canada (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993). For a first stop that will lead to others, seek out the music of Bill Stevens, an iconic Alaska fiddler and teacher. Music of many Native Alaskan fiddlers, as well as highlights and interviews from the annual Athabaskan Fiddle Festival, held in Fairbanks, Alaska, can be found on Youtube.