Reveling and preserving Alaska's Native history: Alice E. Brown's Papers come to UAA

UAA/APU Consortium Library's Archives and Special Collections were recently given Alice E. Brown's personal papers by her granddaughter, Rebecca Lyon.

It wasn't until Rebecca started looking through her grandmother's papers in nominating her for the Alaska Women's Hall of Fame that she realized such valuable papers should be available to anybody for research. She contacted Archives and Special Collections about providing a home for the papers, and in December 2009 she donated them. But Rebecca went one step further. After seeing the amount of work that went into describing collections, Rebecca Lyon contacted several Alaska Native organizations asking them to support the Archives' work on the Brown papers. That support was provided by The CIRI Foundation, who awarded the Archives a Heritage Project Grant for the summer of 2010, allowing the Archives to dedicate a professional archivist to go through the papers closely and write up much more extensive description than otherwise possible.



Alice E. Brown was an active member of the Alaska Federation of Natives (AFN), serving on its Board of Directors. The collection of papers relates primarily to the earliest history and goals of the AFN, especially as they relate to the passage of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act.  The papers cover approximately the time frame of 1965-1973 and represent some of the only documentation of this history.  

The placement of these papers into a research facility represents the first time many of these documents have been publicly accessible to Alaska Natives and to researchers studying the development of the AFN and The CIRI Foundation will ensure the long-term accessibility for the community.



These papers will hopefully encourage and ignite the sharing of information and promote an understanding of the time, organizations, people and history represented. In addition, Alice E. Brown was also elected into the Alaska Women's Hall of Fame Class of 2010.

For more information about the papers, visit http://consortiumlibrary.org/archives/FindingAids/hmc-1060.html. For more information about the Archives, visit consortiumlibrary.org/archives.