Pearl Johnson is a great-grandmother. She lives in Nome. This semester, she commuted all the way from the Seward Peninsula to Anchorage, 500 air miles each way, to take a class at UAA. It met seven times on Friday nights and all day Saturday over three and a half weekends.
Johnson drained her airline mileage account and then spent money on plane tickets. She rented cars in Anchorage and stayed in modest hotels. Sometimes she'd squeeze in a little shopping or a haircut in town, but her energy was laser-focused on school. She never missed a session. Now she's hard at work on her 20-page term paper.
What gripped her? Alaska Policy Frontiers, taught by Willie Hensley in the College of Business and Public Policy. Since 2011, Hensley has served as a visiting distinguished professor teaching this graduate class with a focus on recent Alaska history. As he writes in his syllabus:
"It is a truism that history is written from the perspective of the victors and taught in schools from that point of view. It is unusual and difficult for history to be taught by those who lost control of their space and resources, institutions, values, use of their language, art, music and meaningful ceremonies."
The course includes economics, colonization, indigenous impacts and modern day issues. They focus on mining, from Pebble to Red Dog to Donlin Creek. He features guest speakers on energy and fisheries, and a gripping panel of survivors from Alaska's boarding school legacy.
The state's financial downturn has been a steady topic. "We've been doing state fiscal policy since 2011," Hensley said, "long before most Alaskans realized there was a drastic issue coming down on us."
Johnson heard of the class over breakfast with an Anchorage friend when Hensley walked up to chat. Listening in, Johnson was riveted, and even miffed that her Anchorage friend hadn't clued her in earlier. "I've had all these questions, for years — about ANCSA (Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act), ancestral lands, corporations. …" That breakfast was on a Tuesday; the first class was Friday night. Johnson committed.
She is the granddaughter of an Inupiaq woman and a gold miner. She grew up in White Mountain with a "strict upbringing." She was glad for it. "My parents and the people I knew were good. They lived with respect for each other."
Her silent and serious father impressed her with his self-sufficiency. "He was capable of doing so much on his own. And he didn't want handouts." She remembers him buying the family a full set of the Encyclopedia Britannica. "I don't even know where he got the money for that," she says. "We had no money. But he refused to put his last three daughters in boarding school. He kept us at home, and we moved from the village to Nome, for education."
Johnson graduated from the Nome public school system, "knowing it favored the other race," she said, "we were a just a footnote there." She tried college in Fairbanks but soon moved to Anchorage for business school. "I learned to type, how to take shorthand, all kinds of office skills." She married a military man and moved to the East Coast. She found steady work in corporate environments and law firms, even at the Lincoln Center in New York City. "I was just a kid when I left," she said. "I grew up in New York."
Her aging mother eventually drew her home to Alaska, and Johnson has been here since. She sees her kids and grandkids, now living in Florida, mostly on holidays. But she's had time in Nome to ponder the dramatic changes in the state and among Alaska Native people, which is why Hensley's course was such a siren call.
"I've had all these questions and thoughts about ANCSA, and nowhere to find the answers," she said. "A big one was why did we get 12 corporations, when maybe we should have gotten one?"
She calls ANCSA an abstract document engineered for failure. "It turned Alaska Natives from hunter-gatherers to capitalists in a short time period. They did this to be sure they got their money back," she said. "The point of Westerners was to destroy us."
Hensley is older than Johnson, but she remembers seeing him when she was in college in Fairbanks. "He was able to function in the greater society much better than many of us. He had to," she said. "When Native people needed a voice, he was there for us."
She considers the class an important gift. Top on her list was hearing guest speakers from boardrooms of the most successful Alaska Native corporations in the state. Contrary to destroying Alaska Native people, some managed to take the corporate model global and "grow like crazy."
The class was a journey for Johnson. "In ancient cultures, kings and czars would send one child away to the center, say Rome, to see how everything really works. In this class, I felt like I took that trip," she said.
The class has whet her appetite for further study. She's started thinking about how the leadership structure of a whaling crew translates well to a successful corporation. "There are huge parallels," she says, built on trust and cooperation. "The same model, used for millennia, functions out on the Bering Sea even today. It feeds not just families, but whole villages. One whale goes all the way to Seattle and beyond. That's how successful it is."
Kathleen McCoy works for UAA where she highlights campus life in social and online media.