THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 28, 1996 TAG: 9604260713
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY BERNICE GROHSKOPF
LENGTH: Medium: 77 lines
A Schoolteacher in Old Alaska
The Story of Hannah Breece
Edited by Jane Jacobs
Randon House 302 pp. $24
Hannah Breece was 45 years old in 1904 when she was selected by the U.S. Department of Interior to teach school in the Kodiak archipelago.
She had been a teacher for 24 years, part of the time teaching Indians on a Rocky Mountain reservation. The words ``feminism'' or ``women's liberation'' would have been unknown to her. But this indomitable, imaginative, self-confident woman sailed off into a comparatively unknown land of primitive people to teach their children and remained there for 14 years.
After her first assignment, Breece chose her own teaching posts, the more remote the better. She believed her mission was to help the natives - Aleuts, Kenais, Athabaskans, Eskimos - and those of mixed European and native blood, to ``overcome ignorance, poverty, disease and superstition . . . to bring them benefits . . . from civilization and from Uncle Sam's care for his less fortunate children.''
Alaska had been bought by the United States in 1867; in 1904 Hannah found it was as much Russian as American. She soon learned that her job required more than teaching: She had first to organize a cleaning crew to help scrub the badly neglected schoolroom, and then to persuade the Aleuts of the importance of educating their children. When she observed that the Russian children, who were cleaner and better clothed than the ragged little Aleuts, treated them shamefully, she changed their attitude by asking them to help her ``tame them and teach them.''
Throughout her memoir, A Schoolteacher in Old Alaska, we see evidence of Breece's gentle diplomacy, her quiet determination and resourcefulness in finding ways to overcome the daily problems she encountered. She had to set broken bones, settle internal squabbles, instruct the superstitious natives on the importance of hygiene and sanitation, teach them to cook, and manage without adequate teaching supplies.
And then there was the climate. In Iliamna the temperature in her cottage sometimes fell to 45 degrees below zero. Walking to the schoolhouse through the early morning dark, with the wind shrieking around her, was an ordeal, and she admits there were times when she ``wept like a child.'' But self-pity was not in her nature. She considered it ``the most harmful of all moods.''
Nor was fear, as is evident in Breece's accounts of the dangers she faced from bears, wild dogs, or the enormous risks when crossing an icy lake. Travel was always hazardous. The physical dangers were compounded by the frustrations of dealing with rigid, authoritarian supervisors, the slow-moving bureaucracy in Washington, and the loneliness she must have suffered living so far from friends.
She does, however, admit to one fear.
Arriving at Afognat by steamer from Seattle, she was told to climb down ``the rope ladder thrown over the steamer's rolling, tossing side and from there jump into a rowboat.'' She refused, and a way had to be found to lower her in a rowboat. Eventually she overcame her resistance, although not her dread, and there is a photo in the book of the ample Breece, dressed in her long skirt, descending the rope ladder.
Jane Jacobs, acclaimed author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Systems of Survival and others, is Breece's great niece. She has turned what was a fragmented, disorganized memoir into an outstanding book that gives a vivid portrait of both daily life in old Alaska and an exceptional woman who thought of education ``in terms of nurturing,'' not control.
Jacobs' extensive notes and commentary, explaining and elaborating parts of the memoir that were unclear, are the result of careful research of available documents, interviews and a voyage to Alaska to visit the villages where her great aunt taught. The memoir is enhanced with maps and photos, along with Breece's Alaskan Chronology. Her book is a splendid labor of love and a tribute to a remarkable woman. by CNB