Arlene Skinner's Alutiiq Basketry (published 2005)

Arlene Skinner's Basketry

Anchorage Museum of History and Art exhibit catalog

By Drew Herman

Known for tight weave and fine detail, the traditional basketry of the Aleuts/Unangan peoples of the Aleutian Islands transformed a method for making practical objects into a medium for cultural and artistic expression that anyone can appreciate. By mastering the technique of Aleut basketry, Kodiak artist Arlene Skinner has found a home for her expressive talents. Of Cheyenne and Sioux heritage,

Skinner has lived on Kodiak Island in the heart of Alutiiq (neighbors of the Aleuts/Unangan) territory since 1960. There she learned the imported Aleut technique, making it her own, carrying on a tradition from a region she has never visited herself.

Born on the Northem Cheyenne Reservation in Lame Deer, Montana, Skinner attended grade school in Montana and Seattle. She married a Kodiak fisherman and moved to the island in the Gulf of Alaska, where she has raised five children and has pursued several textile crafts.

"It makes me feel good to use my hands," says Skinner.

While her work usually has a strong aesthetic side, practical application formed a common thread. Crafts like quilting and knitting, in addition to their practical use in a growing family, proved to have a powerful spiritual value for Skinner. She came to depend on the quiet time at the end of the day when

she did such work: "I didn't feel complete unless I created something." Learning the Aleut tradition added a different dimension to her craft work. "I didn't think of them as art until the basketry," she said.

Basket weavers make their products literally from the ground up, combining physical effort and ecological awareness with an artist's attention to detail. The process begins with gathering and curing beach rye while it's green, between late June and late July. Later in the season the grass gets coarser, and Skinner prefers pliability. "You pick right after the heads come out," she said. Exactly where the grass grows matters, too, since the blades get too coarse at heads of bays where they have to stand up to stronger winds.

The gathered grass must stay wet, and from a pillowcase full of picked grass, Skinner makes a bundle only as big as her wrist, keeping it wrapped ten to fifteen days.

"The color fades out and you get a pretty golden shade," she said. Sometimes only one or two blades eighteen to twenty-four inches long from the center of the bundle turn out just right. "Your basket is only as good as the curing," Skinner explained.

Arlene Skinner found her way to Aleut basketry through a class at Kodiak's Baranof Museum. Her teacher, Eunice Neseth, had learned from Anfesia Shapsnikoff, who was born on Atka and lived in Unalaska. Shapsnikoff sometimes visited her son who worked in a Kodiak bakery.

During a visit in 1956 she became ill and spent some quiet recovery time practicing the traditional art. When Neseth and other Kodiakans saw the beautiful, tiny baskets, they asked the visitor to teach them. In regular visits over many years, Shapsnikoff passed her Aleut art along to dozens of new weavers in Kodiak. After Shapsnikoff's death in 1973, Neseth continued teaching, and later Arlene Skinner led

classes at the museum and the local college.

According to Ray Hudson, the art's continuity gives it a special place in the history of Alaska Native culture, providing an "unbroken link" between today's Unangan (Aleut) people and their ancient ancestors. Hudson, a teacher in Unalaska from 1964 to 1973, was also a basketry student of Shapsnikoff. She asked him to help write about her art and preserve the tradition, and they collaborated on an article that appeared shortly after she died, and which has become a classic text on Aleut basketry (Shapsnikoff, Anfesia T.,  Aleut Basketry, Anthropological Papers of the University of Alaska; v. 16, no. 1 (August 1974), Fairbanks, University of Alaska Press, 1974). The writings and classes were only part of Shapsnikoff's efforts. She traveled quite a bit giving talks about Aleut culture. Shapsnikoff, who was literate in several Aleutian dialects, felt the unique basketry held a central place in that culture. "It was something that identified a person as Aleut, as Unangan," Hudson said.

Basket styles from one island to another can be partly distinguished by the raw material, the Aleutian

grasses, with those of Attu and Atka considered finer than that of Unalaska (or Kodiak). According to Eunice Neseth, the original weavers from Atka made special trips to Attu to get the best. "They just wouldn't think of using any other grass," she said in a 1983 radio interview. "Usually Anfesia concentrated on the Attu technique," Hudson said. Today, highly skilled and artistic practitioners of traditional Aleut basket weaving- some of them relatives of Shapsnikoff keep the art alive in the Aleutian Islands. Thanks to Shapsnikoff and other teachers, including those she trained, people from other areas and traditions like Arlene Skinner and Ray Hudson have been able to take part. Skinner

estimates she has taught about three hundred students over twenty years in Kodiak.

Skinner said she learned in part so she could transmit some of their Alaska Native heritage to her own daughters, and she made them take her class. "Two out of the four really enjoy it," Skinner said. Her situation is nothing new. According to Neseth, Shapsnikoff was too restless and tomboyish to learn basket weaving from her own mother, whose work she remembered as so fine she compared it to silk. Later she settled down enough to learn the art in school in Unalaska, where her aunt was the teacher. Skinner has further refined her work through studying the diagrams and descriptions in the article by Shapsnikoff and Hudson.

Her participation in the Earth, Fire and Fiber juried art exhibitions at the Anchorage Museum challenges Skinner to stretch to new ideas. She has introduced blue trade beads and red heart beads woven into her original patterns, and even incorporated pieces of amber and turquoise sent by her aunt in Arizona. As she continues to develop the art of basketry, Skinner chooses not to promote her work through galleries, finding that it digs too far into her creative time.

And the demands of traditional basketry leave little room for drumming up business. "It's hard on your eyes and it's hard on your shoulders," Skinner said. Nor can inspiration be rushed. The weaver always looks at her work with satisfaction and feels a strong bond to the finished baskets.

Kad'yak Identified (published 2004)

Kad’yak positive id 7/16/04

By DREW HERMAN

Mirror Writer

For several days the divers working on a historic shipwreck near Kodiak Island knew a mysterious object only as “the cylinder over by the rocks,” but now marine archaeologist Tane Casserley calls it “the Grail,”

 The easily read Russian letters on one end of the cylinder spell out “Kad’yak,” the name of a Russian American Company bark which sank in 1860. That makes this partially rock-encrusted artifact the always-hoped-for but rarely found crucial piece of evidence which allows investigators to say for certain which ship they’ve found — in this case the oldest wreck ever identified in Alaska waters. 

“We were pretty happy about this,” principal investigator Frank Cantelas said.

With that understatement, Cantelas literally unveiled the important find Thursday, pulling away a cloth to reveal a 10-gallon aquarium containing the artifact soaking in freshwater. Excited applause broke out as the audience at Kodiak College grasped its significance. The archaeological team scheduled the presentation to update the public about their ongoing work.

Biologist Brad Stevens, the Kodiak resident whose efforts led to the discovery of the Kad’yak in 2003, summed up the moment: “There’s the ship in a tank.” 

Cantelas and his colleagues from the Maritime Studies Program of Eastern Carolina University have a permit from the Alaska Department of Natural Resources to study the Kad’yak. Their current expedition has sponsorship from the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Kodiak area museums and private individuals.

The divers had seen the cylindrical object several times since beginning their underwater work July 11. Then on July 14 Cantelas gently lifted it, exposing a buried part of the metal disc on one end. Protected from direct exposure to saltwater by the sand and rock of the sea floor, the lettering showed up clearly.

“We came up and I didn’t tell anybody right away,” Cantelas said. Saving the big news until after dinner on board their floating headquarters, the F/V Big Valley, he coyly mentioned the cylinder and asked if anybody had noticed the writing on it.

“So everybody fell out of their seats,” Cantelas reported with satisfaction.

With the artifact in hand, further research will be needed to figure out its use. At about 1 foot long, it consists of two circular metal endplates joined by a heavily encrusted shaft. One end has a square indentation that looks like where it connected to another part.

It was found a short distance to port from the presumed stern of the wreck, not far from the ballast pile, leading Cantelas to speculate it could be a spindle from the ship’s wheel. But colleague Jason Rogers was doubtful.

“It looks very big to me to be a ship’s wheel,” Rogers said, noting that an archaeological truism says to expect five hours of research for every one hour in the field.

Cantelas called the object a “composite artifact,” consisting of several different materials apparently including wood, brass and iron.

“Wood doesn’t last long in a saltwater environment,” Cantelas said.

Conservators will have to take the object apart and treat each of the materials differently to safely clean and preserve them. Parts may soak in freshwater for a year to remove the salt impregnation.

After decades on the ocean floor, man-made objects can acquire layers of concretion making them almost indistinguishable from the surrounding natural features. Even something as large and distinctive as a cannon, of which two have been found at the Kad’yak site, can escape the notice of the experts, whose time at that depth is limited to about 30 minutes per dive. 

“Those cannon are really hard to spot,” Rogers remarked.

The divers have enjoyed good conditions all week. In addition to the lettered object and cannon, they have found deck braces, a ballast pile, and a cluster of three anchors that seems to indicate where the bow came to rest.

Creating a map of the site to help orient future work is a primary goal of this year’s site work, which concludes later this month.

The cylinder will be one of only a dozen or so samples the archaeologists expect to remove from the site this summer, said Tim Runyan, director of the ECU Maritime Studies Program. The samples will help identify and date the wreck. Future expeditions may then recover other artifacts, which could eventually find places on public display in local museums.

“There should be personal artifacts,” Runyan said.

All the crewmembers safely abandoned ship when it struck ground near Woody Island in 1860, but they probably did not have time to take much with them. Listing heavily and buoyed by its cargo of ice, the Kad’yak drifted northward for three days before settling in about 80 feet of water off the southern shore of Spruce Island. 

The “site formation process” is of particular interest to archaeologists, who work to reconstruct the way the ship wrecked and broke apart, Runyan said. In this case the main hull seems to be buried.

“We haven’t found the keel yet,” Runyan said.

Thanks to the anaerobic environment beneath the sand and protected by the hull timbers, historically interesting artifacts still buried there “could be in very good condition” even after 144 years.

Although he cautions there may be nothing, Runyan holds out hope of finding carpenter’s tools or personal items such as seamen’s chests under the sand. However, removing the higher volumes of sand and rock calls for special equipment.

“Really to do that properly you need a dredge,” Runyan said.

Cantelas emphasized how rare it is to find any identifying object in an excavation like this one. He estimated it happens with fewer than one out of 100 sunken wrecks, making the relatively quick discovery of the marked cylinder particularly gratifying.

Expedition photographer Casserley, an ECU-trained member of NOAA’s maritime archaeology center, is a veteran of archaeological expeditions to the sunken wreck of the USS Monitor, as are several others now working on the Kad’yak. The Union ironclad that battled its Confederate rival Virginia (Merrimac) in the most famous sea battle of the Civil War now lies off the coast of North Carolina.

“That’s one of the most heavily investigated shipwrecks in the world,” Casserley said.

Yet it took divers 19 years to turn up an engine revolution counter marked with the ship’s name. Even after it was found in 2002, conservators worked for a year to clean it off before exposing the lettering and learning exactly what they had found.

Although there was no real doubt about the wreck’s identity, “It was a huge moment,” Casserley recalled.

Drew Herman can be reached via e-mail at dherman@kodiakdailymirror.com.

Attu decommissioned (published 2009)

Attu decommissioned

By Drew Herman

USCG Auxiliary

Even after World War II ended, young Coast Guard recruits at the electronics school in Groton, Conn., promised not to say the word “loran” and risk a leak about the top-secret navigation system that guided American bombers to targets in the Pacific.

“Everything was very confidential,” said Don Funk, who manned the loran station on Attu Island for 13 months starting in 1946.

Not that he had much opportunity to tell anybody about his job as he stood watches on the most remote island of the Aleutian chain — closer to Russia than to the mainland of Alaska.

“It was isolated duty,” said Funk, now 86 years old and a resident of Lansing, Mich.

When the need for secrecy ended, the long range navigation system, or loran, revolutionized navigation for mariners and pilots, helping Alaskans settle the state’s vast interior and develop the nation’s most productive commercial fishing industry.

But manning the remote posts needed to operate the system remained one of the loneliest jobs in the world, until the last Coast Guardsman left Attu on Aug. 27, 2010. 

The decommissioning ceremony for Loran Station Attu took place one day later than scheduled because dense fog typical for the Aleutians forced a Coast Guard C-130 to divert to nearby Shemya Island overnight. The airplane from Air Station Kodiak brought Funk and other guests and dignitaries to the island for a few hours before leaving with the entire 20-man crew.

“Loran’s been around a long time,” said Chief Warrant Officer Jeff Rosenberg, the last commanding officer on Attu. “And now it’s gone.”

Rosenberg noted about 1,300 Coast Guardsmen have served on Attu in the course of 66 years, one month and 21 days, a figure he has memorized.

In June 1942, forces of the Imperial Japanese Army landed on Attu. American forces won back the island 11 months later in a series of bloody engagements, the only land battles of World War II on American soil.

The isolation, rugged beauty and sense of history stay with everyone who served on Attu. 

At the decommissioning, Coast Guard Cmdr. James Boyer, chief of ports and waterway management in Alaska, quoted a 1945 memo from Col. James R. Kilgore of the U.S. Army Air Forces. Kilgore credited the loran stations with making the Allies’ victory possible and he described the Coast Guardsmen’s crucial work as “unglamorous, tedious, monotonous and requiring painstaking exactitide.”

Funk joked that the posting at Theodore Point, in a different part of Attu from the final station, amounted to incarceration. He remembers the excitement of mail call every 10 weeks or so when a dory or landing craft approached the beach.

“Four guys would row like the dickens through the rocks” [to meet the mail], he said.

Those early teams did not enjoy the relative luxury of a cozy barracks that made life easier for their successors.

“We just had Quonsets that sunk in the mud,” Funk said. “We didn’t have a flagpole; it would’ve blown down.”

Although the accommodations improved over the years, the extreme weather conditions never changed. After the decommissioning ceremony, a color guard hauled down the Stars and Stripes from a flagpole that has always spent the winter months safely stowed out of the frequent hurricane-force winds.

Funk’s assessment of loran duty applies to the last day at the station as much as to the first.

“It was a challenge,” he said. “Everybody kept things running no matter what. You had to.”

Following his time on Attu, Funk had his choice of duty station. He returned to home waters and helped install navigation equipment for Lake Michigan that’s still functioning. After leaving the Coast Guard, he worked as a salesman and as a Michigan state trooper, but he remembers with pride his role in the 20th century navigation revolution.

“Every little boat on the Great Lakes had loran,” he said.

Boyer pointed out that loran made a particular contribution to shaping life on the Last Frontier including the expansion of commercial fishing in the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska during the 1950s.

 “Alaska fisheries were built on loran,” Boyer said.

And even though GPS technology has replaced loran during the last two decades, leading to the August decommissioning ceremony on Attu, loran’s legacy continues in the newer technology. 

“The fundamentals of GPS are based on the loran concepts of time differentials,” Boyer said.

Ron Caswell arrived on Attu 25 years after Funk left to stand watch at the loran station as a Coast Guardsman in 1972. Today Caswell lives near the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and works as an engineer for the International Space Station. But like Funk, he jumped at the chance to return to Attu to attend the decommissioning and relive his earlier adventure.

Caswell shares Funk’s deep feelings for their remote post and the work they performed there.

“Of all the things I have done in my life, I am most proud of my service in the United States Coast Guard,” he said. “It still boggles me why anybody would want to join a different branch when the Coast Guard does so many different things.”

Caswell earned his degree on the GI Bill, he said, “So everything I did with the Coast Guard benefited my life. Hopefully I benefited the nation with my duty also.”

Standing on Attu again for the first time in 37 years, Caswell recalled a hike he took with an Air Force visitor, when they stood on a mountain overlooking the center of the island, more isolated from other people than possible even in a giant national park.

“I’ve never experienced that feeling ever since,” he said.

Once when a Coast Guard cutter had to wait at Attu for spare parts, the station crew got to celebrate Coast Guard Day on Aug. 5 with a ball game.

“That was pretty unique for this whole year to have enough people at one time to have a baseball game,” he said.

When the Air Station Kodiak C-130 took off from Attu after the decommissioning, only a handful of contract employees remained on the island. They will spend a few weeks preparing the station’s buildings for a future without much human attention. Without the loran station, Attu will have no residents. The few dozen Aleuts who lived there before World War II were forcibly removed by the Japanese and never returned to re-establish their village.

In the coming years, biologists, historians and anthropologists will visit occasionally for various projects, including repatriation of the thousands of Japanese soldiers buried there.

The last residents of Attu climbed out of the C-130 onto the tarmac at the airport in Anchorage in the first stage of dispersing to their new Coast Guard assignments. The young men gathered their bags, shook hands and joined Funk and Caswell as veterans of the most remote post in the U.S. military.

Petty Officer 2nd class Nathan Kinzel served on the Charleston, S.C.-based cutter Dallas before he asked for the assignment to Attu.

“I needed a break just from life in general,” said Kinzel, who enjoyed getting in a lot of reading.

Seaman William Sniffen came to Attu straight from basic training.

“I thought it’d be interesting,” he said.  “I thought I’d learn a lot.”

Sniffen understands the connection earlier loran crewmen feel to Attu.

“It’d be cool to come back here eventually,” he said.

Attu can fairly claim the title of “last place on Earth,” since no inhabited land lies farther west on this side of the International Date Line. In effect, the sun sets there last.

Although soon nobody will be there to see those sunsets, about 1,300 Coast Guardsmen found out how they looked and felt.

For Caswell, the return visit to Attu “went by too fast.”

“I’m not sure ‘home’ is the right word, but it felt comfortable. It felt like a very familiar place to be,” he said.

“What a unique experience, to get to spend time out at a place like this”

###

Strange Women Lying in Ponds Distributing Swords

Congratulations, Harry and Meghan! All hail, little Prince Soon-To-Be-Named!
Now everybody please get over it.
I know the British royal family is just one among a galaxy of unworthy subjects modern Americans waste their time and attention on, but it particularly gets my patriotic, historical, social and aesthetic goats.
For starters, a reminder about a fundamental principle of American freedom: Royalty is bad.
Without a garrison of Redcoats looming over your farm, it gets easy to forget that. (Thank you, Mr. President, for reminding us of the historic depredations in D.C. by somebody in the War of 1812 — British, Canadians, whoever.)
Since the Revolution, Americans have relapsed into thinking an English accent equates to sophistication, thanks to a seemingly innate reflex like the one that gives rich, white guys automatic authority without reference to professional or moral merit.
Americans’ nonsensical interest in the modern royalty distills this flaw in our national psyche.
I promise, I’m not still sore about the stamp act, or the troops quartered among us, or even the merciless savages. After all, we not only won independence from Britain, we got stronger and richer, and then we showed up and bailed them out of a couple serious scrapes. And of the itemized complaints in the Declaration of Independence that were not either exaggerated, bogus or imperialistic and racist, we’ve done worse things to ourselves than King George ever did — heck, we’ve gotten suspending the legislature down to a routine.
But George Washington didn’t let people call him “your majesty,” and the framers made inherited titles unconstitutional (ok, props to the rich white guys).
Yet the fact remains, we still revere people based on the success their ancestors had at appropriating land and oppressing peasants, which most of us were.
Is this reflex some sort of nostalgia for the good old days of getting trod ’neath the fancy heels of our moral inferiors?
Meanwhile, every school teacher, gas station attendant and Marine veteran you meet in a normal day does more good and deserves more respect than a royal. Every dry cleaner, barista, beautician and farmer is more interesting and productive.
Sure, fame generates its own publicity and media feedback loop. But why the royals? Is it the castles, the clothes, the ears …?
Why this fascination with people less interesting and even less admirable than the Kardashians, who at least built their own empire of illusion. The current royals use an illusion built up by 947 years of other people’s hard work.
So now we have a tabloid fascination that puts British royalty, supposedly a paradigm of high class, on exactly the same level as the most vulgar characters in the increasingly misnamed “reality” that inspires half the programming on TV.
Simple demographics guarantees that kings will, on average, be below average in their ability to run a country. As a system of government, hereditary monarchy is therefore worse than picking a person out of the population totally at random and investing them with ultimate power. The only potentially redeeming feature, stable succession, is too fraught with violent exceptions to merit mention.
The occasional examples of hereditary rulers who seem to combine a modicum of administrative capability and interest in public good, like Charlemagne or William of Orange, stand out precisely because the interval of stable leadership is so obviously exceptional.
Then when an energetic, capable person rises to power and establishes a new dynasty, their successors are necessarily less impressive, thanks to an effect
statisticians call “regression toward the mean.”
Thankfully, the United States won the Revolution, thereby ensuring we would never again have to worry about people in power putting close family members in positions of trust and responsibility.
Ancient Rome’s string of “good emperors” — the A.D. 96-180 run of five competent leaders appointed by their predecessors — ended as soon as one of them had an adult son to take over, and Russel Crowe’s birth was 1,784 years away.
Poor Vladimir Putin, doubly cursed as a misogynist and would-be dynasty founder without a son even among his illegitimate offspring. There was a promising son-i-n-law selected from the billionaire oligarchs, but that ended in divorce, while the other legit daughter married a Dutchman.
Let’s not kid ourselves. This is the only reason Putin did not mark the centenary of the fall of the Romanovs by crowning himself czar. a move the people of Russia would welcome enthusiastically, based on their gratitude for the way Putin has undermined the economy, civil liberties and basic public services.
Not one to criticize without offering solutions, I do have a few suggestions in case we decide reverence for a vapid, national figurehead is indispensable.
Alternative 1: Pick someone completely at random to be monarch for life. Give them constant publicity and inexhaustible wealth. When they die, hold another nationwide lottery. Sure, we could end up revering a pillar of the community or a hardened criminal, a charismatic wit or a talentless sociopath just like picking whoever happens to be next in line of a single royal family, but at least the random successor would have some claim to represent the general population.
Alternative 2: Count web searches and crown the top person, reign valid until Google rank drops.
Alternative 3: Rotate the crown between musical genres. We kind of do this already — Kings Benny Goodman, Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson, Queen Aretha Franklin. Alas, this approach has the disadvantage that the royals actually deserve attention.
Alternative 4: Award a crown and universal reverence to someone who exemplifies virtues like humility, grace, wisdom, generosity … Beg pardon, what was I thinking?
Meanwhile, if I find myself wondering about Meghan and Harry, I will try to match that wasted time by thinking about the school teacher or gas station attendant or Marine veteran —— people who actually matter.
So have your own royal day, and long live Queen Khloe!

Drew Herman is a Sound Publishing copy editor and award-winning columnist. Ceterum censo "utilize" esse delendam.