Alaska Mental Health Trust History Project Jukebox

By Karen Brewster

The recently completed Alaska Mental Health Trust History Project Jukebox is now available online at:

http://jukebox.uaf.edu/mentalhealth

A project of the Oral History Program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the Alaska Mental Health Trust Authority, the site features interviews with twenty-nine individuals talking about the history of mental health services in Alaska.

Topics include Morningside Hospital in Oregon, the legal battle and settlement over the management of the state’s mental health trust program, changes in the delivery of mental health services through time, Harborview Developmental Center in Valdez, Alaska Psychiatric Institute in Anchorage, and creation of the Alaska Mental Health Trust.

The struggle for the civil rights of those with mental disabilities in Alaska, the development of a system of care, and establishment and responsibilities of the Alaska Mental Health Trust is a little-known aspect of Alaska history. These stories, many of which have only been known by the individuals who took part in the early days of treating and caring for Alaska's mentally ill, have rarely been presented in Alaska history classes. Now, Project Jukebox has preserved these stories and made them accessible to the public.

The project is supported by the Alaska Mental Health Trust Authority, Alaska Humanities Forum, and National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed on the website do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

For more information, please contact Karen Brewster at karen.brewster@alaska.edu, (907) 474-6672.

The Chief Shakes Tribal House as a Historic Monument in Alaska

By Zach Jones

The June 1940 Chief Shakes Tribal House dedication

ceremony, courtesy Sealaska Heritage Institute.

With a light rain falling on the gathered dignitaries, federal officials, and general Alaskans at Wrangell, Alaska, a ceremony marked the rededication of the historic Chief Shakes Tribal House. The tribal house, a Tlingit Indian clan house of the Naanyaa.aayí Clan, had recently been restored as a historic monument as part of a Depression-era New Deal works relief program. Carried out by Juneau-based professional architect Linn A. Forrest from 1937 to 1939, Forrest was contracted by regional forester B. Frank Heintzleman to oversee various Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) operations to restore and preserve totem poles and traditional Alaska Native architecture. During these two years and via a $24,000 federal grant to the Alaska Native Brotherhood as a CCC project, Forrest oversaw the renovation and construction of the Chief Shakes Tribal House and totems at Wrangell, Alaska. In 1939 he also oversaw totem pole restoration work at the Sitka National Park, as well as at other Southeast Alaskan sites. Through these and other efforts Forrest became involved in Southeast Alaska Native life and later wrote a book about his experiences, The Wolf and the Raven: Totem Poles of Southeastern Alaska, which has been republished in over twenty editions. Forrest’s personal photograph album was donated to the Sealaska Heritage Institute by Forrest’s still-practicing architectural firm MRV Architects and documents his work on these historic events in visual detail. The CCC program and federal recognition of Southeast Alaska Native art as monument-worthy, remains an important moment in Alaska’s history.

In recent times the Sealaska Heritage Institute has posted some images from Forrest’s photograph album online, but scholars and the community of Wrangell continue to recognize and study the importance of the Chief Shakes House and Wrangell’s historic past. Art historian Emily Moore’s (presently teaching at UAA) dissertation focused on the Southeast Alaskan operations of the CCC on Alaska Native art and architecture. As a Visiting Scholar at the Sealaska Heritage Institute in 2011, Moore spoke publicly about her research and the history of the CCC operations relative to Southeast Alaska Native art, which was recorded and placed online.

Of great significant to the community of Wrangell, in May 2013 the Chief Shakes House will again be rededicated. Southeast Alaska’s heavy rainfall and climate precipitated a renovation of the house again, which has been carried out the by the Wrangell IRA tribal government, the Wrangell Cooperate Association. Their work and website documents the process and care for a landmark Alaskan historic site.

First USN Ship in Alaskan Waters on Humanitarian Mission

The USS DELAWARE, sister ship of the COOPER.

By Pennelope Goforth

The U.S. Navy has long and wide wake in the state’s history and is about to make history again with the commissioning of its newest warship in Alaskan waters. Next May the newest naval transport vessel, LPD-23, will steam north to Alaska where she will be officially commissioned as the USS ANCHORAGE. She will be the second Navy ship to bear the name of Alaska’s largest city and home of the state’s major port.

While most people have heard of christening a ship, the ceremony of commissioning is less commonly known. Commissioning inducts the ship into the operating fleet of the United States Navy. It is a formal rite of passage in the life of warship when the commanding officer comes aboard, calls the crew to their quarters and reads aloud the naval orders.

A commissioning pennant is hoisted up the mast with the Stars & Stripes, and the moment is noted on the first page of the logbook. For sailors, it at this moment the ship is said to ‘come alive’ as she receives the official designation USS, United States Ship. Now under orders, she and her crew are charged with the honor and responsibility to support the citizens of the nation in peace and defend it in time of war.

The U.S. Navy first dispatched a vessel into Alaskan waters on a peacetime mission in the summer of 1855. USS FENIMORE COOPER, a 3-gun, 95-ton wooden sailing schooner, was tasked to find any survivors or word of a missing New Bedford whale ship MONONGAHELA. Rumor of a cask from the ship had been reported the previous year floating in the Bering Sea. So the COOPER detached from her survey mission off the China coast and sailed north under Commander C. Ringgold through the Aleutian Islands, searching for and hoping to rescue survivors. None were found.

So, with the autumn storms increasing by mid-September, the COOPER followed the Japanese Current across the top of the North Pacific bound for the Russian American capitol: Novo Arkhangelsk (New Archangel). The port, later to become Sitka, was the most important seaport on the Pacific coast of North America boasting a working shipyard with carpenters, shipwrights and ironworkers, all the professional services a sailing ship of the times might need. Commander Ringgold, well aware that the COOPER would be the first U.S. Navy ship to enter the Russian port, adhered to Navy protocol. Upon entering Sitka Sound in front of the governor’s mansion prominent on the hill of the town, he ordered a booming three-gun salute before dropping anchor.

The mansion was home to Governor S. V. Voyevodsky, lately an admiral in the Russian Imperial Navy. The governor promptly sent out a small vessel, cordially inviting Commander Ringgold and his officers to a fine welcome. In Russian Navy style, with all the best the cosmopolitan capitol had to offer he ordered a formal ball to be held and several rich feasts. They swapped a lot of sea stories and toasted each others’ ships and country with a lot of vodka. The political situation that had pitted the Russians against the British and French in the Crimean War favored a closer relationship with the young American nation. Governor Voyevodsky obliged with gusto.

Several days later, heads and hearts throbbing, the two seafaring commanders parted fast friends. In full uniform, saluted by the Russians, the officers boarded the lightering vessel and were rowed out to their ship. The USS FENIMORE COOPER sailed out on the morning high tide headed for the deep ocean swells of the Pacific. By the time she pulled into San Francisco Bay in late October, the days-long party had become a legend, launching a long beneficial relationship between the U. S. Navy and Alaska.

The USS ANCHORAGE Commissioning Committee plans a festive commissioning for LPD 23. Their hope is after ten days of festivities, shipboard tours, and the formal ceremony at the Port of Anchorage, the USS ANCHORAGE crew and officers will, like the FENIMORE COOPER command before her, return to California waters with a new legend of Alaskan hospitality and goodwill.

Seiki Kayamori and His Place in Alaska History

By Zach Jones

View of workers inside Libby, McNeil, & Libby cannery,
circa 1925. Courtesy Sealaska Heritage Institute Archives.

In 1912 thirty-five year old Japanese national Seiki (Shoki) Kayamori (1877-1941) arrived in Yakutat, Alaska, to work at the local salmon cannery. He joined a crew of Japanese, Filipino, and Tlingit Indian workers already employed in the Yakutat cannery. He was one of the many individuals that make up Alaska’s diverse ethnic population and history. Kayamori, however, was an amateur photographer and spent the next thirty years photographing the people, community life, and environment around Yakutat. His surviving photographs archived at the Alaska State Library and Sealaska Heritage Institute provide an intimate glimpse into the environment and life of those in Yakutat between 1912 and 1941. Kayamori’s photographs, and especially his life story, are telling about the history of Alaska in many ways.

Seiki Kayamori was born in 1877 in the village of Denbo, today part of Fuji City in central Japan. He was the fifth of eight children; the second of four sons. The wealthy and prominent Kayamori family owned a paper mill, farm lands and a small department store. Under Japan’s conscription law, Kayamori likely served a three-year military term. The law also required an additional three-year term in the reserves. In 1903, Japan was on the brink of war with Russia, and reservists like Kayamori waited to be called back to duty.

In September 1903, however, Kayamori boarded the steamer Iyo Maru for a voyage from Yokohama to Seattle. He arrived with $87.10 and a steamer ticket for San Francisco, according to the ship’s manifest, which lists his last residence as Tokyo and his occupation as “laborer and farmer”. The ship's manifest lists his destination as the Japanese Methodist Mission on Pine Street.

By 1910, Kayamori was living in Seattle's Welcome Hotel and working as a “cleaner and passer” at a dye works, according to census records. Around 1912, he moved to Yakutat, a small Tlingit village in southeast Alaska, where he worked in the Libby, McNeil, & Libby fish cannery. Racist attitudes and active unions at the time ensured that the jobs available to Japanese immigrants on the West Coast were largely limited to agricultural, railroad, laundry and cannery work. After his father’s death, Kayamori’s mother went to live with her grandson’s family in Manchuria, then a Japanese colony. According to family members, Kayamori sent letters, money, pictures, toys and once a whole salmon packed in salt.

Yakutat 4^th of July 1927 community celebration.

Courtesy Sealaska Heritage Institute Archives.

In Yakutat, children nicknamed Kayamori “Picture Man”. For thirty years, he photographed celebrations, ceremonies, remnants of traditional Tlingit culture, and the growing influences of white society. Kayamori had a box camera with a hood, and a darkroom in his small house near the cannery on Monti Bay.

As World War II escalated, Yakutat’s Pacific coastline was perceived as vulnerable and U.S. military forces began to fortify the area, also adding a large airfield and base as a refueling and service stop between both the Aleutian Islands and points north (Anchorage and Fairbanks). Soldiers warned Yakutat residents to prepare for an attack. Amid this period, one now remembered for American xenophobia of Japanese Americans, in October 1940 FBI director J. Edgar Hoover sent a letter to the bureau’s Juneau agent requesting the names of “persons who should be considered for custodial detention pending investigation in the event of a national emergency.” The reply included the name Seiki Kayamori and a description: “Is reported to be an enthusiastic photographer and to have panoramic views of the Alaskan coast line [sic] from Yakutat to Cape Spencer.”

A day before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Hoover wrote to the War Department’s military intelligence division requesting information on a number of individuals. Under Kayamori’s name the reply noted: “Reported on suspect list, Alaska.” After the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 local Yakutat residents reported that soldiers severely beat up Kayamori, a 64-year-old, 5-foot-3 photographer. Locals reported that Kayamori felt he would be arrested, and was soon found dead in his apartment, reportedly having committed suicide.

Under cause of death, his death certificate asks “Drug?” The doctor who responded to Kayamori’s death later wrote that he found evidence of an attempt to burn some documents. Locals say soldiers buried Kayamori across the bay, a site that was later paved for a naval ramp. His grave remains unmarked.

Schooner Scandia at Yakutat, January 21, 1916.

Courtesy Sealaska Heritage Institute Archives.

While his story is tragic in many ways, his surviving photographs exist to educate. The bulk of Kayamori’s photographs were obtained by the Alaska State Library in 1976, amounting to 694 images. The State Library’s collection of Kayamori photographs (PCA 55) has been studied with great interest, and some of the Kayamori images have been placed online via Alaska’s Digital Archives. In 2012, a century after Kayamori arrived in Yakutat, the Sealaska Heritage Institute received 28 photographs taken by Kayamori, a donation by Yakutat born-resident and Tlingit leader Byron Mallott on behalf of the community of Yakutat. These 28 photographs were recently discovered in Yakutat and are now available for study and online [click here]. The photographs and life story of Kayamori will continue to capture the interest of educators for generations to come and help us all understand more about Alaska’s complex historic past.

Sources:

Ronald Inouye, “For Immediate Sale: Tokyo Bathhouse—How World War II Affected Alaska’s Japanese Civilians,” Alaska at War, 1941-1945. The Forgotten War Remembered, ed. by Fern Chandonnet (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2007), 259-263.

Margaret Thomas, “Was Kayamori a Spy,” Alaska Magazine (Nov. 1995): 48-54.

Margaret Thomas, “Attack Prompted Suicide of Yakutat Photographer,” Juneau Empire, 6 December 1991. 

India Spartz and Ronald Inouye, "Fhoki Kayamori: Amateur Photographer of Yakutat, 1912-41," Alaska History 6, no. 2 (Fall 1991): 30-36.

Wikipeda.com, accessed October 2, 2012.

Thanks to Juliana Pegues.