Holly Miowak Guise, Iñupiaq, is assistant professor of history at the University of Mexico and author of “Alaska Native Resilience: Voices From World War II.” (Photo by Haiden Renae (Navajo/Diné) directed by Cara Romero (Chemehuevi))
Outside Holger Jorgensen’s wood-paneled house near Fairbanks, Alaska, it was at least 20 degrees below zero, but inside was warm in both temperature and conversation. Jorgy, as he was known, sat in his recliner in his living room across from Holly Miowak Guise, a young Iñupiaq doctoral student at Yale University who was gathering oral histories with Alaska Natives about the 1940s.
Guise sat with her recording equipment on the nearby couch as they talked a long time about his experiences as an Iñupiat person who served in the Alaskan Territorial Guard as sergeant and pilot during World War II. Before Guise left, Jorgy introduced the young researcher to his best friend, another World War II Athabascan veteran and fellow retired pilot, Al Wright. The next day, Wright sat with her for hours while Jorgy snoozed on the couch behind them.
The interviews with Jorgensen and Wright in March of 2015 are now part of Guise’s new book, “Alaska Native Resilience: Voices from World War II,” released in July by the University of Washington Press.
Jorgensen and Wright were among more than 90 elders and many more interviews that Guise conducted from 2008 to 2022 about their memories of World War II, the invasion of the Aleutian Islands by Japan, occupation by the U.S government, segregation, discrimination, forced internment of Unangax̂, and ways they asserted their sovereignty throughout the 1940s.
Holger “Jorgy” Jorgensen, Iñupiat, at left, with author Holly Miowak Guise, Inupiaq, center, and Al Wright, Athabascan, in October 2017. (Photo courtesy of Holly Miowak Guise)
Over time, Jorgy became like family to Guise. He died in 2020, but she continued to keep up with Wright. They both missed their friend, but Wright had a perspective Guise hadn’t expected.
“We all have to do it sometime,” Wright told her over the phone before he died in 2022.
Guise, now an assistant professor of history at the University of New Mexico, carries Wright’s words of wisdom with her.
“Al put it in perspective,” Guise told ICT and Underscore recently. “People should hang out with more elders. They’re hilarious. They’re heartfelt.”
Oral histories
The inspiration for Guise’s research came from her own family history and the stories she heard about World War II. Guise grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, and her family is from the village of Unalakleet in western Alaska along the coast of the Bering Sea.
Her grandparents were born in the 1920s, with her grandmother turning 98 this October. Her grandfather died when she was in middle school, but she heard stories about his service in the Alaska Territorial Guard, a largely Alaska Native reserve component of the U.S. Army formed to protect the coastline after the Japanese invaded the Aleutian Islands in June 1942. More than 6,300 Alaska Natives joined the Alaska Territorial Guard.
“I heard stories from them, and I wanted to think more broadly about what the impact was on all Alaska Native people,” Guise told ICT + UNN. “There’s really diverse experiences with how Alaska Native people experienced the war once Japan invaded their homeland and once the U.S. militarized the territory.”
Guise, 37, grew up in the 1990s during a time when the awareness of the trauma and violence of boarding schools didn’t often make the news, but she knew her mother went to the Mount Edgecombe boarding school in Sitka, Alaska. It was important to her that she share the elders’ stories in ways they wanted them to be shared.
“It was really important to me to try to work with Alaska Native elders, to share their stories and also to write the history the way they want to tell the story, and also what they want to share about that time period,” Guise said.
She wanted to keep oral history at the center of the project. She took what she knew from her own family history and zoomed out to look broadly at what was happening in the 1940s with the Alaska Equal Rights Act of 1945, the first anti-discrimination law passed in the Alaska territory in the U.S.
“It just clicked,” Guise said.
World War II was at the center of her doctoral dissertation, which was expanded into the new book. She examines the militarization of what is now Alaska, the experiences and impacts of that on Alaska Native people, the impacts of settler colonialism, and how Native people pushed back.
“Funter Bay Relocation Camp, St. Paul Villagers.” Fredericka Martin Collection, 91.223.272. (Photo courtesy of the University of Alaska Fairbanks)
As an Iñupiaq woman, Guise never felt entitled to access other Alaska Native communities. Through other Alaska Native intellectuals and by making connections, she was able to interview elders across Native Alaskan geographies in Anchorage, Bethel, Fairbanks, Juneau, Kodiak, Metlakatla, Nome, Unalakleet, Unalaska, Utqiagvik (known in English as Barrow), and Wasilla.
The elders from those towns and villages included the Alutiiq, Athabascan, Iñupiat, Tlingit, Tsimshian, Unangax̂ (Aleut) and Yupiit peoples.
Guise shared their stories just as they asked. Alice Petrovelli, for example, an Atkan elder who is included in the beginning of the book, identifies as Aleut.
“[Aleut’s] the Russian colonial word,” Guise said. “A lot of the elders use that jargon. But there’s been a shift, with the more recent generation of younger Natives, myself included, to steer away from the colonial language. I wanted to be cognizant in the book, Alice Petrovelli identified as being Aleut.”
Petrovelli talked about the medical discrimination she experienced in the relocation and internment camps during World War II. Petrovelli’s story is also included in “Aleut Story,” a 2005 documentary film written and directed by Marla Williams.
She talks about how one of her daughters didn’t believe the story of Atkan internment because they didn’t learn about it in school.
“I think that’s a really common narrative for younger Native people, because we don’t always hear the stories in school that we hear in our own families, whether it’s medical testing, or medical discrimination, or even some of the darker legacies of boarding school histories,” Guise said.
“I’m in complete agreement with the education system in the U.S. needing to teach more about not only Japanese incarceration during the war, but Unangax̂ internment,” she said. “Unangax̂ internment is something I never learned about in school either, and it’s a very significant history in terms of Alaska. One of my parents told me in passing when I was a junior in high school, and I was floored.”
The forced relocation and internment of Unangax̂ in 1942 resulted in 10 percent of the Unangax̂ population dying because of rampant illness brought by settlers and compounded by poor housing, impotable water and lack of medical care. The majority of those who died were infants and elders.
Petition by Unangax̂ women protesting conditions, October 10, 1942. (Image: National Archives, 2641505)
As Guise points out in the book, “The casualties of war occurred not only overseas but also within U.S. territorial boundaries and most importantly within the lands of Indigenous nations.”
Without requesting consent or permission from Tlingit leaders, the Unangax̂ were forcibly relocated onto their lands in makeshift camps, including one in an abandoned cannery, with no clean water supply.
“That chapter about Tlingit tribal mutual aid to Unangax̂ who are incarcerated on their homelands is really only possible through the oral histories,” Guise said. “It’s in talking to Tlingit elders about this experience of, we could say a diasporic Unangax̂ population, on their homelands, and hearing Tlingit elders talk about how their family members helped Unangax̂ people. It’s really powerful to hear that those stories had been passed down as family legacy.”
Outside of the more than 90 interviews that Guise conducted on her own, she utilized the National Park Service’s records on Unangax̂ relocation and Aleut internment, and the Commission on Wartime Relocation Authority testimonies. She also dug through the archived collections at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
It was her relationships that she built with the elders that kept her motivated.
“I have all these really special memories of these different elders, and it was impossible to put everything in the book,” Guise said. “But I hope with the way that I wrote the book, that it shows that I care deeply about them.”
This care was especially important because most of those interviewed recounted old traumas. In one such interview, Guise turned the recorder off and took a break after an elder was brought to tears when talking about being a child and seeing their father being beaten by police in Juneau, Alaska.
“There’s something about the cruelty and dehumanization of Native people, particularly in settler colonial government societies, and then to have somebody feel that impact all those decades later,” Guise said.
Segregation
As an undergrad majoring in Native American studies at Stanford University, Guise received a community service research internship through the Center for Comparative Studies and Race and Ethnicity to work with the Alaska Native Policy Center.
The center mentored her on interviewing Alaska Native elders about racial segregation in Alaska that predated the 1945 Alaska Equal Rights Act.
She began talking to elders in 2008 about their experiences with segregation. Her research took her to the Sealaska Heritage Institute in Juneau, where she was able to spend time researching documents on the Alaska Native Brotherhood and the Alaska Native Sisterhood found primarily in southeast Alaska. They were an activist organization of organized Native people.
“It’s so powerful to be able to go to basically a tribal archive and see all of these tribal activists, and it’s like a whole legacy of this activism that spans over a century,” Guise said.
Governor Ernest Gruening (seated) signs the Alaska Equal Rights Act of 1945 alongside Alaska Native Sisterhood president, Elizabeth Peratrovich (second to left), and Alaska Native Brotherhood president, Roy Peratrovich (far right). (Photo courtesy of Alaska State Library, ASL-PCA-274-1-2)
With both her research and the oral histories she collected, Guise was able to link the oral histories and the written activism against segregation, and Alaska Native’s advocacy for equality in public spaces.
Guise pointed out that during World War II, because of the militarization and U.S. imperialism expanding into Alaska, racial divides grew between White settlers and Indigenous people.
“But Native people are pushing back, and they’re saying, ‘We don’t want separate restaurants. We’re fighting in your war, we’re serving in the U.S. military, and we want equality in public spaces,’” Guise said.
“While they’re advocating for equality in social spaces, Native people are also advocating to protect their land and water rights,” she said. “That is uniquely Native rights in terms of trying to protect their resources while also trying to be treated equally. I don’t think that that’s too much to ask for, you know, to be able to hold on to your land and water rights while being treated like a fellow human being when you go to a business.”
Many of the people Guise spoke with didn’t consider themselves activists, but she explained that they were outspoken and pushing against racial boundaries and against discriminatory treatment. Guise explained that it was important to her to amplify Alaska Native women’s perspectives and leaders and their activism.
Restoring equilibrium
A common thread that runs through Guise’s book is what she calls “equilibrium restoration.”
“Colonialism is something that continuously hits like waves against Native people, but that Native people continuously push back at an equal rate, and in doing so, they’re trying to restore the equilibrium,” Guise said.
An example detailed in her book describes how the descendants and survivors of relocation and internment camps travel 1,500 miles across Alaska for equilibrium restoration with a biennial remembrance of the relocation and internment of the Unangax̂ on Tlingit lands. The Tlingit host the remembrance and the Unangax̂ are invited guests.
Traveling that far across Alaskan terrain can require a flight, a boat and a float plane or ferry to reach the destination. It has been important for those who experienced the internment camps and their ancestors to practice ceremonial healing where the internment camps were in southeast Alaska. They are also able to teach younger generations the history of internment that isn’t otherwise taught.
“What I wanted to also capture with the book is this component of intergenerationality and how there’s something very restorative, being able to teach the younger generations about your own history, and being able to go back to a place and to claim that history in a way that was not made possible through colonialism,” Guise said. “Native people went there themselves and they taught their own descendants about that history, and they taught about the significance of why you need to remember.”
Another example Guise gave to ICT + UNN was of an elder who started teaching her Native languages later in life after enduring a boarding school that didn’t allow her to speak her language.
“There’s so much violence… with how the U.S. and even other colonial empires have treated Native people,” Guise said. “I liked ‘equilibrium restoration’ because it shows how Native people push back and change the outcome of colonial projects. Because if colonial governments or empires can have their way, they try to completely remove Native people.”
More info
The new book, “Alaska Native Resilience: Voices from World War II,” by Iñupiaq history professor Holly Miowak Guise, is available through University of Washington Press.
This article first appeared on Underscore Native News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.