Forget-Me-Nots

Liz Cheney is an Alaska Native from Kake.

She says Natives were left out of the effort to create a state.

Only one — Frank Peratrovich participated in the constitutional convention.

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Dan O’Connell graduated from med school and headed north to Alaska to work in the Indian Health service in the early 60’s. Unlike many others, he and his family stayed to make a home in rural Alaska. He caught the tail end of a traditional way of life.

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Robin Samuelsen followed his father Harvey Samuelson into the Bristol Bay fishery.  An Alaska native, he says Yupik eskimos got the shaft in the early days of the state’s largest salmon fishery.

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Dennis Maloney, an Alaskan resident was in law student in Washington D.C. when a trip to the capitol for a state income tax form lead to a job with Mike Gravel.

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Oren Siebert flew small planes commercially out of the Alaska Peninsula and down the Aleutian Chain. He started PenAir. He remembers how little service there was for communities without landing strips, like Saint George Island in the Bering Sea.

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Robin Samuelson’s earliest memories are picking salmon out of his grandmother’s set net site in Bristol Bay. But his stint as a crew member on his father’s fishing boat did not last very long.

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Gregg Erickson went to college Outside.

He would make his life out there.

But that changed when his job at an Anchorage gas company grew after the Good Friday Earthquake in 1964.

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Deborah Williams was special assistant to Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt when the battle over oil development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge shut down the federal government all over the country.

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Russian Orthodox Priest Father Michael Oleska says the reason  some Alaskan Natives call themselves Aleuts is because of a shared history of intermarriage with Russian fur traders.

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Ermalee Hickel was born in Anchorage in 1925 at the old Railroad Hospital.

She has watched Anchorage and Alaska grow.

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Vic Fischer helped form a grassroots organization to push for statehood.

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Before there were computers to help track infectious diseases like TB, there were Natives like Herman Schroder who helped doctors track and treat an epidemic that decimated Native Alaskans.

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During the Second World War, Katie Hurley left for a vacation and got trapped by security issues when she returned home to Juneau.

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Wally Hickel, an Anchorage developer, played a key role in the statehood battles, lobbying in DC.

He and his friend Malcolm Roberts talk about a trip he made to get Congress to set aside more land for the state.

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Joe Senungetuk grew up in the Village of Wales on the Seward Peninsula where he saw few white men. He didn’t understand what prejudice was until he went to Nome.

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In 1970, Bob Moore became the first teacher in the Alaskan Old Believers Village of Nikolaevsk. Residents who practiced traditions rooted in 17th century Russia were suspicious til he played midwife to a cow.

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