JOHN SMELCER
Insider/Outsider: Living Between Two Cultures
John Smelcer is the son of an Alaska Native father from the Ahtna Tribe of Alaska. Smelcer's father was born more than twenty years before Alaska became a state. John's mother is white. The Ahtna People inhabit eight small villages, most of them located along the silty Copper River. Ahtna Native Corporation is one of the thirteen Native corporations established in 1971 by Congress under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA), the largest indigenous land claims settlement in U.S. history. Alaska Natives born before 1971 are tribal members (called shareholders) of one of the thirteen Native corporations. As the direct descendant of an Alaska Native, John Smelcer is a card-carrying, voting shareholder in Ahtna Native Corporation and a member of the Native Village of Tazlina. His full-blood Indian grandmother, Mary Smelcer-Wood, his father’s mother, gave John his original shares in the corporation and left him additional shares in her will at her death in late 2003, such was her love for her grandson, who devoted much of his life to learning and preserving the Ahtna language and culture. Because clan membership in Ahtna is matrilineal, John's father is Talcheena Clan ("Comes from the Sea" Clan; pron. tal-chee-na) while John is Tsisyu Clan ("Paint" Clan; pron. shish-you) since his mother is non-Native.
John Smelcer pursued a largely subsistence lifestyle, something of which his grandmother was very proud. John always shared his moose meat and caribou meat and salmon with his grandmother and her older sister, Morrie Secondchief, both born in Tazlina Lake Village, which was abandoned long ago. They called John "Canaani," which means "Him with Hunter's Luck." He frequently brought porcupine to Morrie’s husband, Joe Secondchief, who was one of those very rare elders who never learned to speak English. When Joe died in his nineties, John participated in his potlatch. This practice of sharing food the land provides is at the very heart and soul of subsistence living in Alaska. As was once the case in Indian communities all across America for almost a century, many of John’s Indian relatives were sent away by the government to distant boarding schools, where, among other hardships, they were prevented from speaking their own language. In the very late 1800s, the federal government outlawed the potlatch in Pacific Northwest Indian cultures. John's great grandfather, Tazlina Joe, was instrumental (so some elders have said) in taking the potlatch underground until the U. S. government eventually lifted the ban sometime around the 1920s.
All his life, John Smelcer was raised to know traditional Indian ways. His father taught him especially how to hunt and fish and how to exist on the land—above all, to respect it. At his father’s encouragement, John attended Army training in mountaineering and arctic survival, sometimes at fifty degrees below zero, even though John was still in junior high and high school. Even as a boy, John was involved in special programs for Alaska Native schoolchildren. In 1978, while in eighth grade, John was selected by the Fairbanks School District to participate in an exchange program sponsored by the Johnson O’Malley Program, a federally funded program for Alaska Native schoolchildren. Indian students from Fairbanks were sent to Nulato, a Native community on the Yukon River to experience life in a village and to participate in a week-long annual Native ceremony called the Stick Dance. In his late teens, John lived for a season in Kaktovik, also called Barter Island, an Eskimo village on the edge of the Arctic Ocean (note polar bear in photo). During his senior year at Lathrop High School, and on recommendation of U. S. Senator Ted Stevens, John was awarded a four-year Army ROTC scholarship to attend any university in America. He choose the University of Alaska Fairbanks. A year or two later, four-star General William Westmoreland, commander of American military forces during the Vietnam War, joined John's family for dinner at their house in Fairbanks, Alaska.
Throughout the 1980s, John was a student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF), earning bachelor degrees in anthropology, English, and education. It was during those years that he went moose hunting on Tyone Lake near the abandoned Tyone Village (in Ahtna Country) with Michael Dorris, who was then Director of Native American Studies at Dartmouth (Photo by Michael Dorris). For over two decades, books such as Louise Erdrich's Tracks incorrectly refer to it as Tyonek. Always a leader, John ran for UAF Student Council president in 1984. After graduation, he ran for the Board of Directors of UAF's Alumni Association. He lost to Joe Usibelli, Jr. While a student at the UAF, John served in the United States Army Reserve, eventually receiving an honorable discharge. On May 2, 1984, John had a rare, unguarded conversation with President Ronald Reagan and First Lady, Nancy Reagan. In the fall of 1987, John became a father. The birth of his daughter, Zara, remains one of the happiest moments in his life. Tragically, six months later, tormented by years of abuse and despair and shame, John’s younger brother, James Ernest Smelcer, committed suicide weeks before his twenty-third birthday. Family always called him Ernie. During the summer of 1989, John worked cleaning the beaches of Prince William Sound after the wreck of the Exxon Valdez, at the time the largest environmental disaster in U. S. history.
Throughout the 1980s to the mid-1990s, John Smelcer was a nationally and internationally ranked weightlifter and bodybuilder, setting numerous records, mostly in the 132 lb/60 kg class. Stories about him appeared in newspapers around the world. For his contributions to the sport, John was awarded a citation by U.S. President Bill Clinton. In the early 1990s, after earning college degrees in anthropology (including archaeology and linguistics), education, and literature, John became a professor of English and Developmental Education at the University of Alaska Anchorage, where he co-directed the fledgling Alaska Native Studies program and served as faculty member for the Alaska Native Students Club. In 1994, John was one of only four faculty members at the university to be student-nominated for the Chancellor’s Award for excellent service to students. That same year, Gen. Mark Hamilton, the president of the University of Alaska Statewide System personally appointed John to serve on a committee tasked with finding a new chancellor for the university. John had once been a candidate for president of the University of Alaska statewide system. The summer after leaving the University of Alaska, Ahtna Native Corporation hired John to be their field archaeologist. John spent the summer living in a camper, tromping all over Ahtna’s lands in search of archaeological sites to identify and protect, and having frequent close encounters with moose and grizzly bears. He discovered and documented a number of abandoned villages and historical sites. The findings were published in John's The Archaeological Prehistory of the Kotsina, Copper and Chitina Rivers (Glennallen: Ahtna Forest Products, 1995).
In the winter of 1995, John was appointed by the Ahtna Board of Directors to serve as the executive director of Ahtna’s Heritage Foundation, a nonprofit organization funded by the corporation to preserve the Ahtna language and culture, as well as to distribute over $100,000 in college scholarships annually to Ahtna shareholders and their descendants. John himself had received scholarships from Ahtna throughout his college education. His uncle, Herbert Smelcer, was chairman of the Board of Directors. Herbert was an influential Alaska Native leader, serving variously as president of Ahtna, Inc., as president of one of Ahtna’s subsidiary corporations, and as a member of the Board for decades. Herbert signed key legislation with President Carter. Hundreds of important Alaska Native leaders attended Herb’s funeral service held at the Alaska Native Heritage Center in Anchorage. John and his uncle spent a good deal of time together hunting, fishing, snowmobiling, and operating the family’s subsistence fishwheel on the Copper River, just below its confluence with the Tazlina River, which in Ahtna means “Swift River.” John's subsistence permit allowed him to catch 500 salmon a year. For decades, Herb lovingly instructed his nephew in the Indian ways of knowing. Herb briefly served as the interim superintendant of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Alaska Interior Division. In that important post, Native villages often invited him to participate in cultural events. Several times, John was invited to accompany Herb to participate in traditional hunts with Eskimo communities. When Herb graduated from Prince William Sound Community College in 1997 with an associate's degree in business, John, then a part-time faculty member at PWSCC, presented his uncle with his diploma at graduation. A rare moment. Later that year, the Alaska Department of Fish & Game announced a plan to reduce the number of salmon that Ahtna villagers could harvest from the Copper River by increasing the quota that non-Native commercial fisherman could catch out in the Copper River Delta in the Gulf of Alaska. John and Herb (as Chairman of the Board of Ahtna, Inc.) traveled to villages speaking about the issue and garnering support to oppose ADF&G's proposed harvest limits. They failed. The State successfully argued that increasing catch limits for commercial fisherman did not impact Native subsistence rights.
From late 1995 until the summer of 1998, John drove 170 miles each way to work at his tribal office in Glennallen, living in his small, rustic cabin without electricity or running water, television or telephone or a toilet, cutting firewood for a woodstove, and writing by the light of oil lamps. During his tenure, he held over a hundred workshops with Ahtna elders to compile and publish a dictionary of the Ahtna language. The end result was that John became the living repository of the Ahtna language with its four (now only three) distinct dialects. In the summer of 1998, John was successful in publishing a dictionary of nouns common to the language. Today, only John and twenty or so elders can speak the language. He is the only tribal member alive who can read and write fluently in Ahtna. When John dies, so too will the Ahtna language. Carl Sagan, the world famous Pulitzer Prize and Emmy Award winning scientist, once wrote that “no other ethnic writer shares such a heavy cultural burden.” John regularly publishes his bilingual poems around the world, most recently including The Language Raven Gave Us (Farleigh Dickinson University/The Literary Review, 2009). They stand as the only literature of his culture in existence. During 1995-1998, John instituted an annual culture camp along the banks of the Copper River near Gulkana at which he and elders taught workshops on language, traditional storytelling, subsistence practices, clanship and cultural history. He received a grant from the State of Alaska to create language, culture and literary programs for Indian youth. John also worked with Ahtna elders to compile a book of every existing myth in the culture. That book, In the Shadows of Mountains, features an introduction by Pulitzer Prize winner Gary Snyder. He also compiled and published an oral history collection, What We Leave Behind (foreward by Barre Toelken), and a bilingual children’s picture book called Walk About. On the 25th anniversary of the Alaska Native Settlement Claims Act (ANSCA), one of the boldest Indian legislations in U.S. history, John published An Act of Deception, a book that examined the negative impact of the Act on Alaska Native Peoples. Former Alaska Federation of Natives (AFN) president, Emil Notti, wrote an introduction.
"There are very few remaining Native speakers of our language. John [Smelcer] has done a great deal to help preserve our ways, and we know that he will continue to do so in the future. He is our descendant, and it is trusted and hoped that he...will carry on our heritage and the knowledge of our traditional ways." -- Chairman of the Board of Directors, Ahtna Native Corporation (September 1994)
"John Smelcer 'alt'senii, tsin'aen koht'aene kenaege' ghanii nilna'sghidaetl'."
"We say thanks to John Smelcer for bringing us together to save the Ahtna language."
-- Ahtna Chief Harry Johns, 1999
"John Smelcer...is recognized as a tribal member in the Ahtna Native Corporation. His [full-blood] grandmother [his father's mother] and uncle say, "Being Alaska Native...is a way of life. John has been raised to know these things, which are the essence of who were are. He is one of us." -- News From Indian Country (America's largest Native-owned newspaper)
“I’ve worked with two really dedicated linguists in my life: Michael Krauss and John Smelcer. Michael has worked tirelessly for 45 years to preserve Eyak language and history. Much younger, John has worked just as hard to preserve Ahtna and Alutiiq. I’m always happy whenever either friend comes calling.” -- Eyak Chief Marie Smith Jones / Recorded interview, Anchorage, Alaska (February 9, 2007)
During those years, Ahtna Native Corporation nominated John to serve on numerous statewide committees related to Alaska Native issues. John was part of a small group of Native leaders determined to establish a residential college in Anchorage specifically for Alaska Native students. At the end of his service to the Ahtna People, John was nominated by his uncle and other Alaskan leaders for the Alaska Governor’s Award for the Humanities for his contributions to Alaska Native languages and cultures. After leaving the Ahtna Foundation, Uncle Herb wrote a beautiful letter of recommendation, which John cherishes. In 1999, Chief Harry Johns led a special ceremony in Copper Center to designate John as a Traditional Ahtna Culture Bearer -- a term usually reserved for elders with signficant cultural knowledge -- presenting him with the beaded necklaces of the late Chief Jim McKinley. It was -50 degrees Fahrenheit that day. John's uncle, grandmother and great aunt participated. Chief Johns passed away in 2003 at the age of 94. Ben Neeley, who is related to John's grandmother, became the new traditional Ahtna chief. Indeed, all three chiefs were related to John's grandmother. In 2000, John was a final candidate to be president of Diné College, the college of the Navajo Nation. In 2003, John led a national protest against McDonald's for its erroneous policy of excluding Native Americans from their scholarship program. Eventually, the NAACP (Julian Bond himself), the Native American Rights Fund, and the Federation of Alaska Natives joined him, as well as a number of senators and congressmen. The story ran in newsapers across America (Google: Smelcer McDonalds), a real David and Goliath story. John lost. Later that year, a national foundation recognized John for his enduring commitment to Alaska Native Peoples. Tribes across the nation have invited John to speak at their reservations about language and cultural preservation. During those reservation visits, John interviewed hundreds of elders who had attended Indian boarding schools when they were children. In early 2004, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation appointed John to be a nominator for the prestigious $500,000 MacArthur Fellows. In 2003, John delivered the keynote speech for the Alaska Women's Association of Human Resource Professionals. His topic was trying to convince the hundreds of gate-keepers from over a hundred organizations to look past cultural stereotypes and to hire more qualified Alaska Natives/Native Americans.
From the spring of 2004 until the summer of 2008, John was the tribally appointed director of Chenega Native Corporation’s Language and Cultural Preservation Project. Chenega, the village corporation of the Native Village of Chenega Bay in Prince William Sound, is one of the most successful Native corporations in Alaska. As he did with his own tribe, John spent several years working with elders to document and preserve the Alutiiq language and culture unique to the Chenega Bay region. During that tenure he produced a series of innovative language posters, two interactive language DVDs, and a noun dictionary of the Alutiiq language, making John one of only a handful of people able to speak, read, and write in the Alutiiq language. As well, he worked with elders to produce two important oral history books: We are the Land, We are the Sea and The Day That Cries Forever, a major contribution to Alaska history. In a book review in the Anchorage Daily News, Alaska’s largest newspaper, The Day That Cries Forever was hailed as “must reading for every Alaskan.” The book was later adapted into a play by the same name. Since the mid 1990s, John has received nearly a million dollars in state, federal, and private grants to support his research in the preservation of Alaska Native languages and cultures. In late spring of 2009, Gov. Sarah Palin (2008 Republican nominee for vice president of the United States) asked John to nominate someone for the Alaska Governor's Award for the Humanities. John nominated fellow Alaskan linguist, James Kari, who later received the award. In the summer of 2006, John met with Aeronwy Thomas-Ellis (Dylan Thomas' daughter) in London to establish a literary prize in her father's name in the United States. It took almost three years, but the prize was eventually approved in 2009. John is appointed by the estate to serve as the life-time judge of the prestigious prize.
John’s formal education and professional experiences are eclectic. Aside from his many university degrees, his education also includes advanced studies in English literature at Oxford and Cambridge, as well as doctoral studies in comparative literature, English and creative writing. At Cambrige, John was at the same college as physicist Stephen Hawking (A Brief History of Time, et al). They sometimes took tea together in the college's Buttery. He even has undergraduate credits in creative writing from Northwest Indian College in Washington and a certificate in Native American museum management from the Smithsonian Institution. John also earned a post-master’s Certificate of Advanced Graduate Study (CAGS) in health care administration from Texas A & M University, which came in handy when he was an administrator at the Alaska Native Medical Center in Anchorage. For over twenty years, John has taught at colleges and universities around the world, as far away as Russia and Australia, directing over 80 masters and doctoral theses, and serving variously as director, chair, and briefly as a vocational college dean. In the fall of 1994, only a few years after the fall of communism, John was invited by the Gorky Institute to travel to Moscow to lecture at various colleges and to particpate in a national discussion of how to revitalize the book publishing industry in Russia (until the fall, the government subsidized all publishing). Since 1995, John has been the associate publisher and poetry editor of Rosebud, one of the premiere journals of contemporary literature in the nation. As editor, he has edited and published major writers and pop icons from around the world. For well over a decade, his friend and mentor, Bard Young, has edited everything John writes and publishes. Ironically, John's chair for his master's degree in literature and creative writing, a professor he esteemed, once told John "not to waste postage sending out his poems for publication." Some people wither under such disparagement, others become driven to succeed. Almost all the poems in John's thesis were later published, including one in The Atlantic Monthly. In the 1990s, John established a scholarship for Alaska Native students attending the University of Alaska. Recently, Prof. Smelcer established a scholarship for students majoring in social work or English at Binghamton University.
Sir John Smelcer was raised in Alaska to know his Native ways, beliefs, and customs. He has dedicated his life to preserving his Ahtna heritage, language, and the knowledge of traditional Indian ways. John Smelcer's novels, short stories, poems, essays and articles, anchored in Alaskan culture, have been published and translated worldwide. Like you, John Smelcer is the product of the people who raised him and loved him and instructed him, as well as of a place and a culture. He can be no other.