Why this book: I’ve always been interested in Native Alaskan culture, and I picked this book up at the Native Alaskan Heritage Museum in Anchorage during my visit in Sept 2022.

Summary in 3 Sentences: This is the personal account of the author, growing up in the small, Catholic and traditional Athabaskan village on the Yukon River in Alaska in the 1940s and 50s. It tells about her life, her family living a life of subsistence on hunting, fishing and berry picking, and the values and traditions of the people in that village in the period before modernization truly came to remote villages.  As she became a teenager and young adult, there was more contact with the outside world, and she wrote this when she was in her late 50s, looking back on her life as a child, after having moved to Anchorage to work, get married, and have her own children.  

My Impressions:  This is a first person memoir of a young native Athabaskan Dorothy Savage Joseph’s childhood growing up in Holy Cross, Alaska, a small Catholic village on the Yukon River.  Dorothy was born in 1940 and her childhood and this story take her through the 1940s and the 1950s, up to when, as a young woman she left her home village to work part time in Fairbanks, and then ultimately to marry, raise a family, and live in Anchorage. We don’t hear much about that later part – the book’s focus is on what life was like in Holy Cross, to include in her family’s “fishcamp” during the 40s and early 50s.

The book is short – 143 pages – and includes some grainy black and white photos that give a bit of context to her story. “Fishcamp” itself was a camp that her family established a few miles down the Yukon from their home village of Holy Cross, where Dorothy’s family went to spend the summer, fishing and collecting berries and the like. Her family lived a subsistence lifestyle – her father hunted and fished for food, his mother preserved the meat and the berries and what they were able to collect during the short spring, summer, and fall to help them get through the winter.  What little cash they had was from selling furs from animals that her father hunted, and during the summer, he earned a bit of money piloting boats down the Yukon.

Dorothy was one of apparently 15 children and though she doesn’t mention the burden that so much childbirth had on her mother, it’s clear that there were a lot of children around and all of them were engaged in the project of hunting berries, plucking the feathers from birds her father had shot, cleaning and drying fish, and the myriad activities necessary to live well in the summer, and have enough food to get through the winter, when food would be scarce.

The village of Holy Cross was founded in 1857 by a Catholic Priest and they created a mission there, which included an in-resident school for those who didn’t live near the village, but also included classes and school for those like Dorothy who lived in the village and could get to school. She attended school as a young girls when urgent chores at home did not preclude her attendance. She was (I believe) the 3rd oldest, so as more kids came along she not only helped he mother with food gathering, prep, and storage, but also taking care of younger children.   As she got older and more capable, several times she had to go to school every other year.    By her account she was a good student and loved school. She also loved to read, but reading material was scarce.

Her mother sounds like an extraordinary person – all the things she was able to do while her husband and Dorothy’s father was away hunting and trapping and preparing and storing all the food they needed to get through the winter.  They also had to take care of dogs, as dog sledding was a major form of transportation in the winter.  

She does note that occasionally there were issues with home-brew and some incidents related to drunkenness, but she doesn’t indicate that alcoholism was as much of a problem as I sometimes read that it is today in native Alaskan communities. Most of the memories she shares, are pleasant and positive, and she said she got a lot of help from her mother and sisters in recalling events for the book. Her book is very conversational, as though she were telling it to you at the kitchen table. Occasionally she apologizes for a digression, and then comes back to her main story.

All in all, a very interesting and enjoyable book to get a feel for Native Alaskan culture in a small village in the interior of Alaska in the mid 20th century.  One can’t help but like and respect Dorothy – and I sent her a note thanking her for writing this book.  I was able to read most of it on my plane ride back to San Diego from Anchorage.  But  her story is restricted to her experience as an Athabaskan Native Alaskan – there are in fact at least five different ethnic groups in Alaska, the Athabaskan being the largest, living in the largest portion of the territory in central Alaska.  Those considered by most of us in the lower 48 as “Eskimos” live on the West and Northern Coasts of Alaska