By Rebecca Poulson
Founded in 1878, Sitka’s Sheldon Jackson College was the oldest institution of higher learning in Alaska when it closed abruptly in 2007. The windows were boarded up, and the already neglected buildings remained unheated and empty as the college board of trustees struggled to address a massive debt. Then, in 2011, much of the core campus was turned over to Alaska Arts Southeast and its Fine Arts Camp, who are restoring the physical campus, and filling it with arts and cultural education programs. Along with the physical campus, the Fine Arts Camp soon found they had inherited a deep and complicated history. In addition to the strife surrounding its closure, Sheldon Jackson has a legacy as a Presbyterian mission school of repressing Native language and culture. In spite of this purpose, many staff and graduates of the high school and the college have strong affection for this place. The relationships of graduates to the school and the impact of the school on the lives of both students and staff add to our understanding of Alaska Native experiences in the 20th century.
This chronology is a start at shedding light on some of the apparent contrasts and contradictions in the school’s history. The early history of the school is especially relevant because Alaska today is the product of the the power struggles of this crucial era, and the legacy of Sheldon Jackson and his mission.
I’ve tried to footnote information that’s not widely documented.
Founded in 1878, Sitka’s Sheldon Jackson College was the oldest institution of higher learning in Alaska when it closed abruptly in 2007. The windows were boarded up, and the already neglected buildings remained unheated and empty as the college board of trustees struggled to address a massive debt. Then, in 2011, much of the core campus was turned over to Alaska Arts Southeast and its Fine Arts Camp, who are restoring the physical campus, and filling it with arts and cultural education programs. Along with the physical campus, the Fine Arts Camp soon found they had inherited a deep and complicated history. In addition to the strife surrounding its closure, Sheldon Jackson has a legacy as a Presbyterian mission school of repressing Native language and culture. In spite of this purpose, many staff and graduates of the high school and the college have strong affection for this place. The relationships of graduates to the school and the impact of the school on the lives of both students and staff add to our understanding of Alaska Native experiences in the 20th century.
This chronology is a start at shedding light on some of the apparent contrasts and contradictions in the school’s history. The early history of the school is especially relevant because Alaska today is the product of the the power struggles of this crucial era, and the legacy of Sheldon Jackson and his mission.
I’ve tried to footnote information that’s not widely documented.
A Chronology of Sheldon Jackson School and College: Origins
The Kiks.ádi clan of the Lingit people are the traditional owners of the land that became the Sheldon Jackson campus.1 The Lingit people held what is now Southeastern Alaska since time immemorial; the history of this school is a small fraction of the centuries of Lingit life in this place.
At the time the first Europeans came to the North West Coast in the 1770s, there was a major winter village at the foot of Castle Hill (Noow Tlein) (roughly the Sitka Hotel area), with some clan houses atop the hill. There was also a village from the mouth of Indian River to Jamestown Bay.2 There were probably structures here on the campus.
There is an ancient Kiks.ádi story about the unusual, flat-topped rock at one corner of the campus. This story is where Dog Creek (Keitlyátx'i Héeni, Puppies Creek, in Tlingit) gets its name.3
1700s
Russians worked their way into Alaska east from Siberia beginning in the 1740s, using forced labor by the Indigenous people of the Aleutians and Kodiak Island and the mainland of that region to kill sea otter for their valuable skins, devastating societies and decimating villages, and wiping out sea otters, as they came east.They established forts in Prince William Sound and on Kodiak Island.
After the 1780s, other nations joined in the maritime fur rush. Rather than using forced labor, this trade was by captains who traded with the Indigenous traders on the North West coast for sea otter furs. In the 1790s, Sitka became the central battleground in the fur trade. British and American ships traded with the Tlingit and other North West Coast traders, while the Russians, having destroyed sea otter populations in the Gulf of Alaska, considered Southeastern Alaska to belong to them.
In 1799 Alexander Baranov, the chief of the Russian American Company, negotiated with the Kiks.ádi leaders to allow him to build a fort at Old Sitka. In 1802, a multi-clan alliance of Tlingit destroyed the fort. Kiks.ádi tradition tells that it was an accumulation of insults that led to the fort's destruction. Economic conflict - that the Russians were taking sea otter from Tlingit waters - was likely also a factor.
It took the Russians two years to return to Sitka from their base at Kodiak. In 1804 the Kiks.ádi had built a new fort at Indian River designed to resist naval bombardment. Due in part to the Kiks.ádi loss of a canoe of gunpowder and the fortuitous presence of the Russian frigate Neva, the Kiks.ádi retreated, and the Russians with the Alutiik, Unangan and other western Alaskan Native people who were working for them, took over the site of Sitka, renaming it New Archangel. The Kiks.ádi (and their spouses and children, who belong to opposite clans) suffered heavy losses in this “survival march,” which was in late October. They lost canoes, houses, and their winter food supply. In 1805, however, a peace was conducted and the Russians allowed to stay at Sitka.
While the Russians hung on to Sitka for the next six decades, they relied on constant diplomacy with the Tlingit clans in order to sustain what was essentially an outpost, although they used Sitka as their center of administration for their claims in Alaska. Tlingit clans never left the area, then after 1827 built a village adjacent to the Russian fort, the site of Sitka Indian Village today. Both sides benefited from the trade, which is probably why Tlingit leaders tolerated and supported the Russians.
Although European diseases, especially smallpox, had a terrible impact, the Tlingit clans did relatively well. The Tlingit clans controlled all their traditional territory in southeastern Alaska, and trade that had grown exponentially with the global trade for sea otter and other furs and art works, continued even after the sea otter were mostly gone, after 1810 or so. The Russians depended on Tlingit and Haida traders for food like halibut, venison, potatoes and berries.
1867
In 1867 Russia's Alaskan claims were transferred to the United States. With U.S. occupation, Sitka went from a somewhat decayed but quiet company settlement to being the violent frontier of American colonization. Alaska became a military district, without law and order, much less any system of civil government. In addition, the fur economy collapsed, and there was a world-wide depression. American traders pushed Tlingit traders out of what activity there was. Alcohol, speculators, merchants, and rough characters poured into the District, but most soon left.
In the first decade Alaska was under the authority of the Army, Civil War veterans who may have contributed to the disorder.4
The Americans brought with them virulent racism, and overwhelming military power. This was the era of the Indian Wars and aggressive westward expansion, the height of Manifest Destiny. In the rest of the United States Native Americans were brutally forced off their lands and onto reservations in the essentially genocidal policies of the U.S. government. In the 1850s the state of California had even been paying a bounty on Indian scalps. In 1869 the U.S.S. Saginaw shelled and destroyed the villages of Kake. U.S. occupation was a cataclysmic event for Alaska's Native people, who were not citizens, and even basic rights were not respected.
After an initial rush of speculators and entrepreneurs, Sitka, and Alaska, quieted down again. Then in 1874 Wrangell became the colonization frontier, with the Cassiar gold rush. An influx of miners and those hoping to benefit from the gold rush (traders, liquor sellers) flooded to Wrangell, with devastating impact on the Stikine Tlingit clans, who had controlled this important trade route, with a monopoly on much of the interior trade.
In 1877 the Reverend Dr. Sheldon Jackson founded a mission school for girls in Wrangell, recruiting teacher Amanda McFarland, a widow from Oregon. Sheldon Jackson was an ambitious, dynamic Presbyterian minister, founder of scores of churches in the west. He wanted to pioneer Alaska.
In 1877 Alaska still had no government – it was a Military District – then the Army pulled out. Sitka by this time had no industry other than alcohol and some other trade, mineral prospecting, provisioning fishing and seal hunting boats, and a few federal officials, like the Collector of Customs. Alaska was officially under the jurisdiction of the Treasury Department until 1880, when the Navy took over.
In 1878 Sheldon Jackson recruited Reverend John Green Brady and teacher Fannie Kellogg to start a mission school for Native children in Sitka, and they opened the school in April in a former barracks. The school closed in December. Brady quit (but traveled to Washington D.C. to lobby for education for Natives), and Kellog married missionary S. Hall Young, and moved to Wrangell.
In 1879 missionary Alonzo Austin came to Sitka and taught the day school for white and Russian children. In April 1880 Alonzo Austin and his daughter Olinda reopened the mission day school, for Natives.
From 1879 Navy Commander Beardslee, and his successor Captain Glass, of the USS Jamestown, forced Sitka's Tlingit residents to whitewash and number their houses, and encouraged the rebuilding of the village in new frame style houses. In 1881 Captain Glass forced Native children to go to the Presbyterian school, by giving all the families and children numbers, and fining those whose children do not go to school.
The Presbyterian Native school was in various locations: initially, when it was a day school, it was on the top floor of the Guard House, a large former barracks next to Noow Tlein (Castle Hill). Then, when boys asked to live at the school, they moved to the old Russian hospital building (a similar building to the Russian Bishop’s House, it was located on the site of Pacific High School). It burned down in January of 1882, probably due to the building settling and dislodging the chimney. They moved the school into an old, leaky, drafty shed on the waterfront across the street.5
In 1881 missionary-turned-businessman John Green Brady claimed 160 acres of the present campus, in spite of there being no land laws in effect to make this possible, and donated it for the mission. He may have got it by using Civil War veteran land script he had accumulated.6 Sheldon Jackson was a very good fund raiser. The only sawmill in town was out of order, so Sheldon Jackson bought a cannery building at Old Sitka (from a short-lived cannery operation, one of the first in Alaska, built in 1878). Missionary Alonzo Austin and a willing crew of his students dismantled, hauled, barged, and built the two-story boys dormitory, 50 by 100 feet, in the fall of 1882.7
In 1884 they added a second building, for girls, of 50 by 130 feet, after McFarland's school in Wrangell burned down. Later they built two hospitals, and the Cottages settlement, with three houses built by 1888.8
The Cottages was a model Christian Native community for former students, located on mission property at the edge of the Sitka Historical Park, on Kelly and Metlakatla Streets. Houses once stood on the east side of Metlakatla Street, where the parking lot is now. While the missonaries' ideal is to have the families separate from their Native culture, and to live as European-Americans might live in the states, traditions and language continued. Marriages were correct matches in Tlingit protocol. Matriarchs of many of the Cottages families were the Sloan sisters, Kiks.ádi Point House women who became Mrs. Don Cameron, Mrs. Peter Simpson, and Mrs. George Howard (her daughter married Andrew Hope).
In 1884 the President signed Alaska's Organic Act – finally some civil government (though not much) - and Sheldon Jackson became Alaska's General Agent for Education, a position created for him. The Act entitled established missions to 640 acres of public land, thus expanding and legitimizing the mission's land claim,9
In 1884 Sitka’s First Presbyterian Church was founded with 44 Native and 5 White members. In 1889 a white church was formed.
In 1889 the school had the two large dormitory buildings, an Industrial Arts building, a blacksmith shop, a steam laundry, bakery, hospital, and six Model Cottages. They had 186 pupils, but also functioned over the years as an orphanage and hospital, depending on the need.10
Throughout this period, until 1893,11 federal funds were given to missionary schools. Most people in the United States at the time did not see any problem with this. It made government funds go farther when they can be combined with church funds. American leadership at the time, in government, society and industry, was heavily Protestant. Euro-American settlement and economic development of the west was a national priority. While some were genuinely concerned about the plight of American Indians, all likely understood the benefits of “civilizing” Natives so that they would not be in the way of what most Americans saw as the natural and best use of land and natural resources for settlement, farming and industry - by Euro-Americans.
The 1880s were a period of growth for the school but also political discord in Sitka. With the Organic Act, Alaska had a court system for the first time; many of the early lawsuits were brought against the mission. Some are over the mission's land claim, and others are over the practice of compelling parents to indenture their children to the school for five years in order to attend. They are brought by the federal employees on behalf of Tlingit parents, and by Russian-American residents. In 1885 anti-Sheldon Jackson government officials – the “Court House Gang” as Bob DeArmond called them - together with a faction of the white population, Russians, and Tlingit, pushed back against the growing power of the Presbyterians. They brought suit to take the mission site for a court house, and to nullify the student contracts parents were forced to sign. In order to attend the school, parents had to sign over their children for a period of five years. It culminated in the arrest of Sheldon Jackson, then in relatives taking their children out of the school, so that only half remained. The events led Sheldon Jackson to publish A Statement of Facts Concerning the Difficulties at Sitka, Alaska in 1885.
President Grover Cleveland, son of a Presbyterian minister, came into office in March, and in late 1885 the officials were replaced and the mission allowed to continue.
The 1880s were a time of large-scale taking of Native land and resources, as canneries, mines, and other industries, supported by the US government, exploited streams and land that had been controlled by Native clans. Native persons could only be citizens if they were “civilized” as attested to by whites. They could not own property or vote. They had no right to education or civil rights of any kind. They were viewed, and treated in law, as inferior to whites.
Disease took a heavy toll on southeastern Alaskan Native people, exacerbated by racial bias that caused a lack of resources, dispossession and disenfranchisement.
Presbyterian missionaries fought in Washington D.C. for government for Alaska and for education for Natives. Education for the missionaries meant stripping Native children of all vestiges of their culture. So even as Jackson and former missionary John Green Brady were labeled “pro-Native” in their time, today they would be seen as racist for their insistence on total assimilation, and low regard for everything Native (other than art and handicraft).
Anglican missionary William Duncan led a Tsimshian community from the model Christian Native village of Metlakatla in Canada to settle in Alaska in 1887. The new settlement was called New Metlakatla, or just Metlakatla. Metlakatla was self-sufficient, with its own industry. While he stood up for his Tsimshian followers against the Canadian government and from exploitation by white businessmen in Alaska, Duncan was autocratic and controlling. In the spring of 1888 several young men from the new settlement went to Sheldon Jackson's school in Sitka, including Peter Simpson and Edward Marsden, who became leaders in the Presbyterian church.
In 1887 Tillie Paul, a Tlingit missionary, arrived at Sitka with her three young sons, after her husband, also a Tlingit missionary, drowned. (Her oldest son, Samuel, was adopted by the widow of the other missionary who drowned with her husband Louis Paul.) She worked for the school, and, with other missionaries, held Christian meetings in the Village.12
In 1888 the first museum, made of wood to emulate a clan house, was built to house Sheldon Jackson's vast collection of Native artifacts.
The first decades of the school were filled with incredible physical labor – Alonzo Austin, D. C. McTavish, George Beck, and other missionaries of the first half century were hands-on. They builtd a flume for electricity, and to power a pelton wheel for the carpentry shop. The school was largely self-sufficient as far as food and power. From the very beginning students were the main workforce of the school, doing everything from cooking to cutting wood; but they were led by missionaries who are no shirkers. For a time the school was called the Sitka Industrial and Training School, and part of its mission was to give young men a trade and pride in his work. This continued into the 1930s, when the students, led by staff, hauled a cast-iron sawmill out of the woods from a mine up Indian River, built a sawmill, and got it running; then it burned down, and they started over.
Missionaries wanted to help Native people, but their belief was that the way to help Native people was to get rid of everything Native. They saw no value in Native language or culture. The missionaries' world view and beliefs, their type of education, lifestyle, and Christianity were meant to replace Native culture - which they believed was debased, outdated and inadequate and that they believed was the reason Native people suffered, rather than seeing that it was result of systematic bias. In addition to not having access to the economy and political life, having one’s language and culture considered inferior is extremely damaging to a sense of oneself, but this was never recognized by the missionaries; into the 1960s most educators in Alaska saw acculturation as a necessary step for Natives to succeed in higher education They did not consider that culture and the skills acquisition of a Western education were compatible.13
Disease, especially tuberculosis and its complications, took a heavy toll on Native people in Alaska, whether or not they are associated with the school, into the 1950s.
Even from the early days, many students and their parents actively chose to go to the school. At the time, the only path to citizenship was to adopt the dominant culture. Speaking and writing English, and learning the protocol of Protestant American culture, was the only route (however limited) to economic opportunity. In the 1880s Native property was taken in a land grab by canneries and other industries. Without citizenship and civil rights, Native people were not allowed to compete on an equal footing. At some point the goal of individual advancement evolved into the goal of advancement for all Native people, leading to the birth of the Alaska Native Brotherhood in 1912.
In 1892 the Native Presbyterian church was built on campus (across from the Sage Building, on the current site of Stratton Library). In 1895 the current Sheldon Jackson museum was built, the first concrete building in Alaska.
In 1897 John Green Brady, who first arrived in Sitka as a missionary, then went into business, became Governor.
By 1899 graduate Peter Simpson returned to Sitka, after founding a sawmill with other young Natives at Gravina. The sawmill burned down in 1904; as Natives, they could not get title to the land to rebuild. Simpson's family tradition is that this is the source of his lifelong fight for land claims.14
In 1901-02 the school had 131 students.15
In 1904, the “Last Potlatch” was held. Rudolph Walton, one of the first graduates of the school, had by this time also inherited an important position as Kiks.ádi clan leader. While he did not officially participate, he carved important artworks for one of the host clans. In 1902, he intervened as a mediator in a conflict over use of the frog emblem by two clans.
In 1906 a boatbuilding operation began at the Cottages under Peter Simpson. Men who worked with Simpson went on to build dozens of boats in various parts of town. Simpson built a boat for Rudolph Walton, the William. Rudolph Walton, one of the earliest graduates of the school, was a jeweler and carver, who also had a store in the Village.
In 1906 the Davis case is brought. Rudolph Walton's stepchildren and several other children living in the Village were refused permission to attend the public school (the public school for Natives had been closed) by school board members W. P. Mills and Mrs. George Stowell.16 Rudolph Walton brought suit, with support of former school board member and director of the Presbyterian mission William Kelly. Former missionary Governor John Brady's wife and others testify on behalf of the children, but the court decided that any Native associations or lifestyle means a person is not “civilized.” They lose the case.
In 1910 the Shepherd Building (industrial arts) is constructed on the spit where the Sage building is now. Then, in 1910- 1911, the current campus is built, and the original large campus buildings are dismantled. School was suspended for the year while the new campus was constructed.
In 1912 the Alaska Native Brotherhood was formed – most founders were graduates of the school. This group is founded to fight for citizenship for Alaska Natives. Their original charter calls for Natives to leave behind the old customs. This was later modified. The ANB was instrumental in Natives acquiring civil rights, and ultimately land claims.
Sheldon Jackson was a grade school only, then in 1917 became a High School, which lasted until 1967.
Go to next section of the chronology: The High School
1 Goldschmidt and Haas, 198-99.
2 Goldschmidt and Haas, 64.
3 Kaawóotk Ghuwakaan (Harold Jacobs), FaceBook February 8 2013, and Thornton, 100.
4Hinckley, 34
5A. E. Austin, “History of the Mission,” The North Star, Vol. 5, No. 12, Sitka, Alaska; December 1892, in Armstrong, 25-34.
6Hinckley, 59
7 Austin in Armstrong, 25-34
8 Sheldon Jackson, Report on Education in Alaska (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1888), 22, accessed at https://archive.org.
9Sheldon Jackson, A Statement of Facts Concerning the Recent Difficulties at Sitka, Alaska, in 1885 (New York: T. McGill, 1886), accessed at https://archive.org.
10William Kelley, “Sitka Industrial School,” Home Mission Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 3, February 1889, in Armstrong 35-37.
11Beck, 31.
12 Nancy J. Ricketts, ed. R. Dauenhauer, “Matilda Kinnon Paul Tamaree / Kahtahah; Kah-tli-yudt” in Nora Marks Dauenhauer and Richard Dauenhauer, eds., Haa Kusteeyi, Our Culture: Tlingit Life Stories, Classics of Tlingit Oral Literature, Volume 3 (Seattle: University of Washington Press; Juneau, Alaska: Sealaska Heritage Foundation, 1994) 485.
13Armstrong 91/
14 Isabella Brady (grand daughter of Peter Simpson), personal communication
15Beck, 43.
16Hinckley, 354.
At the time the first Europeans came to the North West Coast in the 1770s, there was a major winter village at the foot of Castle Hill (Noow Tlein) (roughly the Sitka Hotel area), with some clan houses atop the hill. There was also a village from the mouth of Indian River to Jamestown Bay.2 There were probably structures here on the campus.
There is an ancient Kiks.ádi story about the unusual, flat-topped rock at one corner of the campus. This story is where Dog Creek (Keitlyátx'i Héeni, Puppies Creek, in Tlingit) gets its name.3
1700s
Russians worked their way into Alaska east from Siberia beginning in the 1740s, using forced labor by the Indigenous people of the Aleutians and Kodiak Island and the mainland of that region to kill sea otter for their valuable skins, devastating societies and decimating villages, and wiping out sea otters, as they came east.They established forts in Prince William Sound and on Kodiak Island.
After the 1780s, other nations joined in the maritime fur rush. Rather than using forced labor, this trade was by captains who traded with the Indigenous traders on the North West coast for sea otter furs. In the 1790s, Sitka became the central battleground in the fur trade. British and American ships traded with the Tlingit and other North West Coast traders, while the Russians, having destroyed sea otter populations in the Gulf of Alaska, considered Southeastern Alaska to belong to them.
In 1799 Alexander Baranov, the chief of the Russian American Company, negotiated with the Kiks.ádi leaders to allow him to build a fort at Old Sitka. In 1802, a multi-clan alliance of Tlingit destroyed the fort. Kiks.ádi tradition tells that it was an accumulation of insults that led to the fort's destruction. Economic conflict - that the Russians were taking sea otter from Tlingit waters - was likely also a factor.
It took the Russians two years to return to Sitka from their base at Kodiak. In 1804 the Kiks.ádi had built a new fort at Indian River designed to resist naval bombardment. Due in part to the Kiks.ádi loss of a canoe of gunpowder and the fortuitous presence of the Russian frigate Neva, the Kiks.ádi retreated, and the Russians with the Alutiik, Unangan and other western Alaskan Native people who were working for them, took over the site of Sitka, renaming it New Archangel. The Kiks.ádi (and their spouses and children, who belong to opposite clans) suffered heavy losses in this “survival march,” which was in late October. They lost canoes, houses, and their winter food supply. In 1805, however, a peace was conducted and the Russians allowed to stay at Sitka.
While the Russians hung on to Sitka for the next six decades, they relied on constant diplomacy with the Tlingit clans in order to sustain what was essentially an outpost, although they used Sitka as their center of administration for their claims in Alaska. Tlingit clans never left the area, then after 1827 built a village adjacent to the Russian fort, the site of Sitka Indian Village today. Both sides benefited from the trade, which is probably why Tlingit leaders tolerated and supported the Russians.
Although European diseases, especially smallpox, had a terrible impact, the Tlingit clans did relatively well. The Tlingit clans controlled all their traditional territory in southeastern Alaska, and trade that had grown exponentially with the global trade for sea otter and other furs and art works, continued even after the sea otter were mostly gone, after 1810 or so. The Russians depended on Tlingit and Haida traders for food like halibut, venison, potatoes and berries.
1867
In 1867 Russia's Alaskan claims were transferred to the United States. With U.S. occupation, Sitka went from a somewhat decayed but quiet company settlement to being the violent frontier of American colonization. Alaska became a military district, without law and order, much less any system of civil government. In addition, the fur economy collapsed, and there was a world-wide depression. American traders pushed Tlingit traders out of what activity there was. Alcohol, speculators, merchants, and rough characters poured into the District, but most soon left.
In the first decade Alaska was under the authority of the Army, Civil War veterans who may have contributed to the disorder.4
The Americans brought with them virulent racism, and overwhelming military power. This was the era of the Indian Wars and aggressive westward expansion, the height of Manifest Destiny. In the rest of the United States Native Americans were brutally forced off their lands and onto reservations in the essentially genocidal policies of the U.S. government. In the 1850s the state of California had even been paying a bounty on Indian scalps. In 1869 the U.S.S. Saginaw shelled and destroyed the villages of Kake. U.S. occupation was a cataclysmic event for Alaska's Native people, who were not citizens, and even basic rights were not respected.
After an initial rush of speculators and entrepreneurs, Sitka, and Alaska, quieted down again. Then in 1874 Wrangell became the colonization frontier, with the Cassiar gold rush. An influx of miners and those hoping to benefit from the gold rush (traders, liquor sellers) flooded to Wrangell, with devastating impact on the Stikine Tlingit clans, who had controlled this important trade route, with a monopoly on much of the interior trade.
In 1877 the Reverend Dr. Sheldon Jackson founded a mission school for girls in Wrangell, recruiting teacher Amanda McFarland, a widow from Oregon. Sheldon Jackson was an ambitious, dynamic Presbyterian minister, founder of scores of churches in the west. He wanted to pioneer Alaska.
In 1877 Alaska still had no government – it was a Military District – then the Army pulled out. Sitka by this time had no industry other than alcohol and some other trade, mineral prospecting, provisioning fishing and seal hunting boats, and a few federal officials, like the Collector of Customs. Alaska was officially under the jurisdiction of the Treasury Department until 1880, when the Navy took over.
In 1878 Sheldon Jackson recruited Reverend John Green Brady and teacher Fannie Kellogg to start a mission school for Native children in Sitka, and they opened the school in April in a former barracks. The school closed in December. Brady quit (but traveled to Washington D.C. to lobby for education for Natives), and Kellog married missionary S. Hall Young, and moved to Wrangell.
In 1879 missionary Alonzo Austin came to Sitka and taught the day school for white and Russian children. In April 1880 Alonzo Austin and his daughter Olinda reopened the mission day school, for Natives.
From 1879 Navy Commander Beardslee, and his successor Captain Glass, of the USS Jamestown, forced Sitka's Tlingit residents to whitewash and number their houses, and encouraged the rebuilding of the village in new frame style houses. In 1881 Captain Glass forced Native children to go to the Presbyterian school, by giving all the families and children numbers, and fining those whose children do not go to school.
The Presbyterian Native school was in various locations: initially, when it was a day school, it was on the top floor of the Guard House, a large former barracks next to Noow Tlein (Castle Hill). Then, when boys asked to live at the school, they moved to the old Russian hospital building (a similar building to the Russian Bishop’s House, it was located on the site of Pacific High School). It burned down in January of 1882, probably due to the building settling and dislodging the chimney. They moved the school into an old, leaky, drafty shed on the waterfront across the street.5
In 1881 missionary-turned-businessman John Green Brady claimed 160 acres of the present campus, in spite of there being no land laws in effect to make this possible, and donated it for the mission. He may have got it by using Civil War veteran land script he had accumulated.6 Sheldon Jackson was a very good fund raiser. The only sawmill in town was out of order, so Sheldon Jackson bought a cannery building at Old Sitka (from a short-lived cannery operation, one of the first in Alaska, built in 1878). Missionary Alonzo Austin and a willing crew of his students dismantled, hauled, barged, and built the two-story boys dormitory, 50 by 100 feet, in the fall of 1882.7
In 1884 they added a second building, for girls, of 50 by 130 feet, after McFarland's school in Wrangell burned down. Later they built two hospitals, and the Cottages settlement, with three houses built by 1888.8
The Cottages was a model Christian Native community for former students, located on mission property at the edge of the Sitka Historical Park, on Kelly and Metlakatla Streets. Houses once stood on the east side of Metlakatla Street, where the parking lot is now. While the missonaries' ideal is to have the families separate from their Native culture, and to live as European-Americans might live in the states, traditions and language continued. Marriages were correct matches in Tlingit protocol. Matriarchs of many of the Cottages families were the Sloan sisters, Kiks.ádi Point House women who became Mrs. Don Cameron, Mrs. Peter Simpson, and Mrs. George Howard (her daughter married Andrew Hope).
In 1884 the President signed Alaska's Organic Act – finally some civil government (though not much) - and Sheldon Jackson became Alaska's General Agent for Education, a position created for him. The Act entitled established missions to 640 acres of public land, thus expanding and legitimizing the mission's land claim,9
In 1884 Sitka’s First Presbyterian Church was founded with 44 Native and 5 White members. In 1889 a white church was formed.
In 1889 the school had the two large dormitory buildings, an Industrial Arts building, a blacksmith shop, a steam laundry, bakery, hospital, and six Model Cottages. They had 186 pupils, but also functioned over the years as an orphanage and hospital, depending on the need.10
Throughout this period, until 1893,11 federal funds were given to missionary schools. Most people in the United States at the time did not see any problem with this. It made government funds go farther when they can be combined with church funds. American leadership at the time, in government, society and industry, was heavily Protestant. Euro-American settlement and economic development of the west was a national priority. While some were genuinely concerned about the plight of American Indians, all likely understood the benefits of “civilizing” Natives so that they would not be in the way of what most Americans saw as the natural and best use of land and natural resources for settlement, farming and industry - by Euro-Americans.
The 1880s were a period of growth for the school but also political discord in Sitka. With the Organic Act, Alaska had a court system for the first time; many of the early lawsuits were brought against the mission. Some are over the mission's land claim, and others are over the practice of compelling parents to indenture their children to the school for five years in order to attend. They are brought by the federal employees on behalf of Tlingit parents, and by Russian-American residents. In 1885 anti-Sheldon Jackson government officials – the “Court House Gang” as Bob DeArmond called them - together with a faction of the white population, Russians, and Tlingit, pushed back against the growing power of the Presbyterians. They brought suit to take the mission site for a court house, and to nullify the student contracts parents were forced to sign. In order to attend the school, parents had to sign over their children for a period of five years. It culminated in the arrest of Sheldon Jackson, then in relatives taking their children out of the school, so that only half remained. The events led Sheldon Jackson to publish A Statement of Facts Concerning the Difficulties at Sitka, Alaska in 1885.
President Grover Cleveland, son of a Presbyterian minister, came into office in March, and in late 1885 the officials were replaced and the mission allowed to continue.
The 1880s were a time of large-scale taking of Native land and resources, as canneries, mines, and other industries, supported by the US government, exploited streams and land that had been controlled by Native clans. Native persons could only be citizens if they were “civilized” as attested to by whites. They could not own property or vote. They had no right to education or civil rights of any kind. They were viewed, and treated in law, as inferior to whites.
Disease took a heavy toll on southeastern Alaskan Native people, exacerbated by racial bias that caused a lack of resources, dispossession and disenfranchisement.
Presbyterian missionaries fought in Washington D.C. for government for Alaska and for education for Natives. Education for the missionaries meant stripping Native children of all vestiges of their culture. So even as Jackson and former missionary John Green Brady were labeled “pro-Native” in their time, today they would be seen as racist for their insistence on total assimilation, and low regard for everything Native (other than art and handicraft).
Anglican missionary William Duncan led a Tsimshian community from the model Christian Native village of Metlakatla in Canada to settle in Alaska in 1887. The new settlement was called New Metlakatla, or just Metlakatla. Metlakatla was self-sufficient, with its own industry. While he stood up for his Tsimshian followers against the Canadian government and from exploitation by white businessmen in Alaska, Duncan was autocratic and controlling. In the spring of 1888 several young men from the new settlement went to Sheldon Jackson's school in Sitka, including Peter Simpson and Edward Marsden, who became leaders in the Presbyterian church.
In 1887 Tillie Paul, a Tlingit missionary, arrived at Sitka with her three young sons, after her husband, also a Tlingit missionary, drowned. (Her oldest son, Samuel, was adopted by the widow of the other missionary who drowned with her husband Louis Paul.) She worked for the school, and, with other missionaries, held Christian meetings in the Village.12
In 1888 the first museum, made of wood to emulate a clan house, was built to house Sheldon Jackson's vast collection of Native artifacts.
The first decades of the school were filled with incredible physical labor – Alonzo Austin, D. C. McTavish, George Beck, and other missionaries of the first half century were hands-on. They builtd a flume for electricity, and to power a pelton wheel for the carpentry shop. The school was largely self-sufficient as far as food and power. From the very beginning students were the main workforce of the school, doing everything from cooking to cutting wood; but they were led by missionaries who are no shirkers. For a time the school was called the Sitka Industrial and Training School, and part of its mission was to give young men a trade and pride in his work. This continued into the 1930s, when the students, led by staff, hauled a cast-iron sawmill out of the woods from a mine up Indian River, built a sawmill, and got it running; then it burned down, and they started over.
Missionaries wanted to help Native people, but their belief was that the way to help Native people was to get rid of everything Native. They saw no value in Native language or culture. The missionaries' world view and beliefs, their type of education, lifestyle, and Christianity were meant to replace Native culture - which they believed was debased, outdated and inadequate and that they believed was the reason Native people suffered, rather than seeing that it was result of systematic bias. In addition to not having access to the economy and political life, having one’s language and culture considered inferior is extremely damaging to a sense of oneself, but this was never recognized by the missionaries; into the 1960s most educators in Alaska saw acculturation as a necessary step for Natives to succeed in higher education They did not consider that culture and the skills acquisition of a Western education were compatible.13
Disease, especially tuberculosis and its complications, took a heavy toll on Native people in Alaska, whether or not they are associated with the school, into the 1950s.
Even from the early days, many students and their parents actively chose to go to the school. At the time, the only path to citizenship was to adopt the dominant culture. Speaking and writing English, and learning the protocol of Protestant American culture, was the only route (however limited) to economic opportunity. In the 1880s Native property was taken in a land grab by canneries and other industries. Without citizenship and civil rights, Native people were not allowed to compete on an equal footing. At some point the goal of individual advancement evolved into the goal of advancement for all Native people, leading to the birth of the Alaska Native Brotherhood in 1912.
In 1892 the Native Presbyterian church was built on campus (across from the Sage Building, on the current site of Stratton Library). In 1895 the current Sheldon Jackson museum was built, the first concrete building in Alaska.
In 1897 John Green Brady, who first arrived in Sitka as a missionary, then went into business, became Governor.
By 1899 graduate Peter Simpson returned to Sitka, after founding a sawmill with other young Natives at Gravina. The sawmill burned down in 1904; as Natives, they could not get title to the land to rebuild. Simpson's family tradition is that this is the source of his lifelong fight for land claims.14
In 1901-02 the school had 131 students.15
In 1904, the “Last Potlatch” was held. Rudolph Walton, one of the first graduates of the school, had by this time also inherited an important position as Kiks.ádi clan leader. While he did not officially participate, he carved important artworks for one of the host clans. In 1902, he intervened as a mediator in a conflict over use of the frog emblem by two clans.
In 1906 a boatbuilding operation began at the Cottages under Peter Simpson. Men who worked with Simpson went on to build dozens of boats in various parts of town. Simpson built a boat for Rudolph Walton, the William. Rudolph Walton, one of the earliest graduates of the school, was a jeweler and carver, who also had a store in the Village.
In 1906 the Davis case is brought. Rudolph Walton's stepchildren and several other children living in the Village were refused permission to attend the public school (the public school for Natives had been closed) by school board members W. P. Mills and Mrs. George Stowell.16 Rudolph Walton brought suit, with support of former school board member and director of the Presbyterian mission William Kelly. Former missionary Governor John Brady's wife and others testify on behalf of the children, but the court decided that any Native associations or lifestyle means a person is not “civilized.” They lose the case.
In 1910 the Shepherd Building (industrial arts) is constructed on the spit where the Sage building is now. Then, in 1910- 1911, the current campus is built, and the original large campus buildings are dismantled. School was suspended for the year while the new campus was constructed.
In 1912 the Alaska Native Brotherhood was formed – most founders were graduates of the school. This group is founded to fight for citizenship for Alaska Natives. Their original charter calls for Natives to leave behind the old customs. This was later modified. The ANB was instrumental in Natives acquiring civil rights, and ultimately land claims.
Sheldon Jackson was a grade school only, then in 1917 became a High School, which lasted until 1967.
Go to next section of the chronology: The High School
1 Goldschmidt and Haas, 198-99.
2 Goldschmidt and Haas, 64.
3 Kaawóotk Ghuwakaan (Harold Jacobs), FaceBook February 8 2013, and Thornton, 100.
4Hinckley, 34
5A. E. Austin, “History of the Mission,” The North Star, Vol. 5, No. 12, Sitka, Alaska; December 1892, in Armstrong, 25-34.
6Hinckley, 59
7 Austin in Armstrong, 25-34
8 Sheldon Jackson, Report on Education in Alaska (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1888), 22, accessed at https://archive.org.
9Sheldon Jackson, A Statement of Facts Concerning the Recent Difficulties at Sitka, Alaska, in 1885 (New York: T. McGill, 1886), accessed at https://archive.org.
10William Kelley, “Sitka Industrial School,” Home Mission Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 3, February 1889, in Armstrong 35-37.
11Beck, 31.
12 Nancy J. Ricketts, ed. R. Dauenhauer, “Matilda Kinnon Paul Tamaree / Kahtahah; Kah-tli-yudt” in Nora Marks Dauenhauer and Richard Dauenhauer, eds., Haa Kusteeyi, Our Culture: Tlingit Life Stories, Classics of Tlingit Oral Literature, Volume 3 (Seattle: University of Washington Press; Juneau, Alaska: Sealaska Heritage Foundation, 1994) 485.
13Armstrong 91/
14 Isabella Brady (grand daughter of Peter Simpson), personal communication
15Beck, 43.
16Hinckley, 354.
