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Susie Abraham, in her own words
In May 1991 the Anchorage Daily News asked my great-grandmother about growing up Native in Alaska, and then had the sense to print what she said rather than a summary of it. She was eighty-nine.
You have to know all the patriotic song. I mended clothes when I was small at Salem Indian Training School. That was where I grew up… I stayed there until 1915. When I came back I was a teen-ager.
(There were) lots of horses in Juneau, Ketchikan, Sitka, Seattle. When you traveled, the horses would be on the dock, waiting to take the carriage and suitcases and the passengers to the hotel. When I came home I went to Yakutat; my parents were there.
Strange place, Yakutat. I was wishing to go home to my hometown, Katalla. I was really feeling upset when the big steamship came from Seattle and stopped at the tiny place Yakutat. Different mountains, everything was different. I went to school at Yakutat. I had lots of fun… It was run by Swedish missionaries.
My parents died in 1918 from the Spanish influenza. It spread all over real quick. It was bad. The doctors didn’t know the flu. As soon as you got it, you had no chance. They burned everything — all the clothes (the victims were wearing). I went to Sheldon Jackson School then, in Sitka, Alaska. There’s a college there now.
When I returned to Yakutat, the Tlingit people began to learn (about their heritage). (Some) gave orders: ‘They (your parents) should have told you what you are. You dropped it too many years ago. All the nations in the world, they got their own costumes — their own dances. But you people turned to white…’ That’s the time they began to dance Native dances and I (first) saw it. That’s the time I began to dance. That’s wonderful.
Birds and bees and daisies. This is the way Alaska is supposed to be, a long time. Here they have respect for me, some of them.
The white people (who) built up Alaska — they are the ones that I have respect for. The teachers, the secretaries, the bookkeepers, the lawyers, the doctors. I have respect for them. But some of them, just two or three years ago, they came to Alaska and look down on the dark people. So it hurts me sometimes.
Susie sings:
Memories, memories — dreams of love so true / Old and sweet, memories, I’m drifting back to you / Childhood days, wildwood days, among the birds and bees / You left me alone, but you’re still my own / in my beautiful memories.
… I can sing it yet.
We played all kinds of games. The Tlingit games. Just like a child we were happy.
Why this page exists
Everywhere else on this site I argue that communities should tell their own stories, that authenticity creates credibility, and that the most powerful accounts come from people speaking from lived experience.
This page carries that argument out: a woman of eighty-nine, given room to speak, in a statewide newspaper, without anyone editing her into something more comfortable.
Note what the reporter did. They asked, and then they got out of the way. Thirty-five years later it is still the best piece of communication anyone in my family has been part of, and no strategist was involved.
Excerpted from We Alaskans, the Anchorage Daily News Sunday magazine, May 12, 1991. Reproduced with attribution; permission being confirmed. The complete text is longer than the portion shown here.
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