Curating Alaska Native culture

Does it bother you to have something new happen everyday?

That was a question asked of Eleanor Hadden during her interview at the Alaska Native Heritage Center. Her answer-"Oh, I love it"-set her on a career as a curator at the Center, where she essentially presents Alaska Native cultures to the world. And it's certainly been busy.

"For 11 years, I've had something new happen every day," she laughed. She has a desk in a back room wedged between a wall and five massive floor-to-ceiling rolling cases of artifacts, but she's barely ever there. Instead, she's out dusting artifacts, surveying the five Native houses around the lake or donning work clothes to polish the statue out front. She does the simple things-firing up video monitors, checking light bulbs, locking doors-as well as the bigger projects like polishing whale bones, contacting musk ox tanners and even climbing into cherry pickers to clean the canoes suspended from the ceiling or the totem pole at the Southeast village site. Her business card could be a mile long-exhibits and collections curator, librarian, registrar, archivist, conservator, alternate after-school chauffeur for her granddaughters.

"My days vary depending on what fire is burning that morning," she laughed.

Wrong answer, right outcome

As an anthropologist, Eleanor certainly has a variety of perspectives from her well-traveled life. She grew up throughout the Southeast-Kethikan, Metlakatla, Kasaan, Sitka-and spent time in Oakland when a government relocation program uprooted her family. Her adult life was just as mobile. She took several classes at both UAA and UAF before her husband Ronald-who earned a B.B.A. at UAA in 1975-was relocated by the military. Their travels in the service took them even further-Kansas, Texas, California, Massachusetts, Italy, Germany-but it wasn't until she returned to Alaska for good that she realized her interest in anthropology.

Following her husband's retirement, the family found themselves in Anchorage and Eleanor found herself back in the classroom. When she enrolled in an anthropology class called Alaska Natives, she discovered her calling. Despite a lifelong familiarity with the course subject, this class would not be an easy A.

Her entire career has been shaped by one wrong answer in that class. The professor asked for a word that described the relationship when an uncle raises his nephew. Eleanor's answer was immediate, learned from her Tlingit/Haida/Tsimshian roots. To her, that relationship is simply called 'uncle raises nephew,' a common practice that keeps a son in the mother's clan, providing access to the clan's hunting and fishing lands. The professor marked it in red, saying the answer was actually avunculate.

For the first time, Eleanor saw her culture analyzed externally and placed within a larger framework of all world cultures. "What other words do they have for what I do on a daily basis?" she remembers thinking. So she took another anthropology class. And then another. She graduated with a B.A. in anthropology in 1997. "All from that one question," she recalled.

But she'd been an anthropologist all along. "I realized, as I traveled around the world, I was seeing what was going on through the eyes of an anthropologist," she said. Now, thanks to UAA, she had the academic expertise and vocabulary to discuss her observations as well.

Two years after graduating, she returned for a master's degree, studying a very personal subject. The international anthropologist community frowns upon studying your own culture, citing the threat of bias, but Eleanor campaigned to reverse that academic concept. "Isn't it better to have a bias and know it, then think you don't and do?" she asked.

For her research, she followed up on a long held family concern. In 1935 and 1937, the American government tested a tuberculosis (TB) vaccine on 8,000 Native American families. When they arrived in Southeast, these researchers offered TB tests and chest x-rays for residents, but also implemented a vaccine test where half the children received a placebo. 20 years later, Ernest Gruening-Alaska's medically trained territorial governor-requested vaccines to combat an escalating TB crisis, but was instructed to not revaccinate any one in the study. This meant Eleanor's mother-who received the placebo as a child-was ineligible. Children born in the 20 years since-including Eleanor and her cousins-received the vaccine, although not everyone's shots were recorded, creating plenty of future medical confusion for this second generation as well. Many of their parents were exposed to TB via vaccine without knowing, many of the kids were exposed to TB without records.

Years later, Eleanor's mother connected all these dots. She was working at the Ketchikan health board when another team of researchers arrived, conducting a 60-year follow-up on the original TB vaccine test, assuming the study subjects had consented in the 1930s as indicated. She was shocked to see her name on the list of test subjects.

For Eleanor's research, she dug deeper into the misinformation of the original 1930s campaign and the ongoing ethics issues of the subsequent studies. She conducted comprehensive interviews with 23 tribal members-mostly children of the original subjects, but a few surviving participants as well. Eleanor defended her unorthodox thesis and graduated with a master's degree in 2008. Her research ushered in new opportunities as well-she now meets monthly with other members of the Indian Health Service/Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium's Institutional Review Board, a group that reviews research on Alaska Native people.

Journey to the Center

While in school, Eleanor's Native-focused thesis caught the eye of the Alaska Native Heritage Center and brought her back into the operation, where she's been involved pretty much since the Center's inception. Prior to the culture center's opening in 1999, a committee of Alaska Natives assembled to discuss what should be included in the finished galleries and houses. Eleanor brought a diverse perspective from three cultural groups to the Southeast committee.

The Center originally opened as an educational space for outsiders, intended to share culture and dispel the notion that Alaska Natives are one homogenous entity. However, in Eleanor's eyes, the Center has become something much greater for the larger Native community.

"Every culture that's here, they are to me as I am to them," she said. "We're learning about each other as well." The staff will often hold potlucks to share food and anecdotes from life across Alaska. "That has been the most fun thing-learning all the cultures of Alaska and learning how similar we are and how different we are," she continued. "That was a benefit I didn't know I would get."

So next time you're at the Alaska Native Heritage Center, keep an eye out for Eleanor. She's either gliding between galleries, checking in on the houses or, if the day calls for it, she'll be outside polishing statues.

Every day holds something new.

Written by J. Besl, UAA Office of University Advancement