Drawing on her Athabascan heritage, Jan Harper-Haines delves into family history and a murder mystery

This is part of Alaska Authors, an occasional series about authors and other literary figures with ties to the 49th state.

Jan Harper-Haines was a senior in high school when she took an elective writing class.

“I was really enjoying it,” she said of the course, adding that her teacher “always read my stuff in the class, and she said, ‘You should write.’ ”

Soon afterward, a fellow student echoed that sentiment. “I was so shocked,” she recalled. “I never forgot that.”

Decades later in 2000, she published her first book, “Cold River Spirits,” an in-depth account of her Athabascan family’s history during the tumultuous 20th century when change came rapidly to Alaska.

“I had these stories that my mother had told me, and she had learned some of them from her mother,” Harper-Haines said about the book, which she spent a decade writing. “It took a lot more polishing and beefing up and understanding to get them into a book state.”

More recently, she published her first novel, “The Ravenstone Chronicle.” It’s a murder mystery about a woman of mixed Athabascan and white heritage who gets involved in a criminal investigation that takes her back and forth between Fairbanks and a fictional Native village.

Writing a novel, Harper-Haines said, required a different approach than her family memoir did.

“Everything was different than writing ‘Cold River Spirits,’ because there, I simply had to link the stories,” she said. “With fiction, you have to have a beginning, a middle and an end. And there’s got to be a plot. And you have to have these things linked.”

Harper-Haines’ trek to becoming a published author was long in coming. Born in Sitka, she spent her childhood in Anchorage, where her family moved when she was 5. After graduating high school, she enrolled in the University of Alaska Anchorage. At her mother’s behest that she study something with better income prospects than writing, she majored in home economics.

After earning her degree, she worked in then-Gov. William Egan’s office, and then taught middle school at Elmendorf Air Force Base. Along the way she got married and moved to Hawaii. “I fell in love with that place,” she recalled. “I thought, if I need to get away and heal, that’s where I wanted to be.”

That first marriage was brief, and in 1974 Harper-Haines relocated again, this time to San Francisco. There she met and married her husband, Larry Haines, an architect. The couple have remained in California ever since.

During this period she began attending writing seminars and graduate classes taught by leading authors in the Bay Area.

“Those were a help, because you’re with people who are like-minded, and it spurs you on,” she said.

She wrote quite a few pieces for herself, she said, but “I didn’t get into it until 1990 when I was a student at the College of Marin taking writing classes. That really got me going. My stuff was being read in class and I began to hear it differently. I realized that if you read something out loud to yourself, you can change it. Because it doesn’t sound the same as when you simply write it down. That was one of my first self-taught lessons.”

Harper-Haines then turned her focus toward what would become “Cold River Spirits.” The book chronicles three generations of her family’s history, which was rooted along the Yukon River. Her maternal great-grandfather, John Minook, was of mixed Russian and Athabascan descent. His wife, Martha Sport, was Athabascan, as was her paternal great-grandmother, Jenny Zindan Seenta’ana Bosco, who married Arthur Harper, an Irishman.

Much of it follows the story of her grandparents, Louise Minook and Samuel Harper, making their way through the upheavals that significantly changed Native life in Alaska’s Interior. Harper-Haines provided an intimate portrait of the couple’s rocky marriage and her grandmother’s steadfastness following her grandfather’s early death. From there it turns to her mother’s family as they lived through the war years and beyond.

Harper-Haines started writing the book, she said, because “I wanted to capture all the stories Mama told me.”

She assembled the narrative from bits and pieces gathered from her mother, aunts and uncles.

“I’d get a little bit more information and a little bit more,” she explained. “It added up and I filled in the pieces and somehow I was able to put this together.”

By luck, Harper-Haines’ cousin Yvonne Mozee knew Kent Sturgis, then the publisher and president at Epicenter Press. This led to a book contract, and in 2000, “Cold River Spirits” hit the shelves. “I didn’t have to really pursue much in the way of agents or anything like that because I had these connections through my mother’s huge family line,” she said.

The book received positive reviews, and Harper-Haines said many people have told her how much they enjoyed it. Her mother, a great inspiration who, she said, maintained her dignity in the face of racism and other obstacles as a Native woman, had struggled with health issues and didn’t live to see it published. But she had given her daughter her blessing.

“She was fragile. She just was,” Harper-Haines said. “I just don’t know how she did it.”

Following her first book, Harper-Haines, pondering what she might write next, decided that “before I die, I want to write a novel, because that’s a major challenge.”

With “The Ravenstone Chronicle,” she said, “I didn’t do it the way mystery writers are supposed to. They’re supposed to have the ending already in mind. I didn’t have an ending. But I had a beginning and I got interested in it. And then I wanted to know what happened next.”

The central character, Cara Fielding, is a journalism professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who becomes involved in solving a murder in her home village of Goldspring. Cara’s life is divided between her professional job in urban Alaska, and her roots in the rural fictional village, which Harper-Haines based loosely on Nenana and other communities.

“I could make up this town following pieces of towns that I knew that I was familiar with,” she said. She also evoked Interior Alaska in wintertime with concise language that describes what residents encounter. “I loved going there in my head and feeling the snow, the ice, and how your car won’t start, or how you slither off the side of the road. It’s so real to me.”

Just as “Ravenstone” was published in 2022, Harper-Haines was struck by a car while walking and was unable to promote it. Still recovering from her injuries, she’s forging onward, currently working on a collection of stories from her childhood that, she said, are written “from my standpoint. The daughter of an Alaska Native. How I saw things and experienced them. I’m hoping that some of this helps other people.”

“Ravenstone,” along with “Sivulliq: Ancestor” and “Eagle Drums,” is one of three novels by Alaska Native women authors that have recently garnered attention beyond Alaska. Harper-Haines, hoping more will follow their lead, offered advice to aspiring writers.

“Just sit down and write and don’t try to form it,” she said. “Don’t think it’s got to be a perfect sentence. That’s baloney. Just write the first thing that comes to your head, and after about the third or fourth sentence you’ll find something that will really get you going.”

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