Cox, Dauenhauer among winners of Indigenous Literature Awards (fwd)

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Cox, Dauenhauer among winners of Indigenous Literature Awards
http://www.adn.com/life/story/4746196p-4692929c.html

[photo insert] Loretta Outwater Cox speaks during an Alaska Federation
of Natives workshop in October as her parents listen. Her book about
her great-grandmother, "Winter Walk," was published last year.  (Photo
by Jim Lavrakas / Anchorage Daily News)

By MIKE DUNHAM
Anchorage Daily News

(Published: February 15, 2004)

The fourth annual Alaska Indigenous Literature Awards presentation was
Tuesday night at the Sheraton Anchorage Hotel. Among the honorees on
hand to accept their awards were veteran Tlingit historian, folklorist
and playwright Nora Marks Dauenhauer of Juneau and Loretta Outwater
Cox, originally from Nome, whose tale of her great-grandmother's
harrowing trek for survival, "Winter Walk," was published last year.

Sidney Huntington of Galena was honored for his recollections of
Interior life, "Shadows of the Koyukuk," which has gone through six
printings to date. The spry 89-year-old addressed the awards audience
with an impassioned plea for education. Places where, in his youth,
fewer than 10 people lived now have hundreds of residents, populations
too large to be supported solely by subsistence means, he said.

"We can't go back to living what we call 'off the country,' " said the
former member of the Alaska Board of Game. "There's no way we can keep
taking food out of the woods like we used to do."

There's no need to be nostalgic about that, he added, dismissing younger
people who romanticize the old way of life. "They don't know what
they're talking about! Thank God those days are behind us."

Huntington could speak from long experience. He recounted an early
trapping trip during which he enountered minus-72-degree cold and
barely made it home alive. At that time he promised himself, "If I ever
have children, they won't be going through this."

Better schooling was the solution, he determined, and he spoke proudly
of the achievements of students from Galena, where he served on the
school board for many years.

Education was also on the mind of another award winner, storyteller Mike
Andrews Sr. of Emmonak. He has spent 20 years working with students in
the Lower Yukon School District, where he has been a leader in the
effort to preserve the Native language and life ways. But he remembered
having to wake up at 6 a.m. to fuel stoves in the dimly-lit, two-room
mission school at Akulurak.

Speaking in Yup'ik, he noted that "today you don't have to freeze in the
classroom. Why is it students aren't interested in going to class? In
the old days, it was the opposite."

In accepting her award, Dauenhauer said it should include the names of
her husband and collaborator, Richard, and many other people who have
contributed to her life's work. She thought back to when she first
began to collect and publish the memoirs of Tlingit elders, creating a
ripple that she hoped would spread "farther and farther and farther."

"Well, it did," rejoined Joanna Wassillie, who followed Dauenhauer to
the podium to introduce Andrews. Wassillie said that as a young Yup'ik
student, she was overwhelmed when she first encountered Dauenhauer's
books. She had not thought there was such a thing as Native literature,
and to discover it was a revelation.

Kodiak elder John Pestrikoff, honored along with his late wife, Julia,
was unable to make the flight to Anchorage because of a storm. A niece,
Anchorage artist Helen Simeonoff, accepted the award on his behalf,
observing philosophically, "We know that in Alaska you fly according to
weather, not according to reservations."

Other honorees included the late Belle Dawson of Grayling and Robert
Cleveland of Shungnak, whose stories and oral histories were recorded
on tape before their deaths.