Atka

Atka is a village on Atka Island almost to Adak on the Aleutian Chain in Alaska.  It has a latitude just above 52 degrees north and 174 degrees longitude west- 280 miles south of Ketchikan.  It is WAY out there - closer to Japan or Russia than the continental United States.

I read a fascinating book by Ethel Ross Oliver.  Here she is on the book cover.

 

For the most part, it is her journal record when she and her husband, Simeon Oliver, helped rebuild Atka Village after World War II in 1946 and 1947.  The reason it needed to be rebuilt is that our own military burned the village to the ground so that Japan could not occupy it.  I can understand that but I think it might have been nice to allow the villagers a half hour to get their packed suitcases out of the houses before they had to get on the boat to Southeast Alaska.  (The conditions that they faced there is another story for another time.  Suffice it to say the conditions were awful.)

Ethel Oliver was a renaissance woman: teacher, collector of local flora for 5 botanical museums, excavator of several archeological sites, recorder stories of inhabitants, nurse/doctor, and writer.  The journal style gives a glimpse into the people and the day to day life that they all shared.

The book is organized into chapters that are also the 12 months that the Olivers were on the island.  Here is a picture of the newly "rebuilt" village.  


Ms. Oliver was also not only respectful and understanding of Native Aleut culture, but appreciated the people and culture and tried to integrate culture and language into her classroom.  This was quite unusual at the time.

While Ms. Oliver was there, she meets two Aleut prisoner of war survivors who were captured and transported to Japan in 1943: Mike Lokanin and Alex Prossof.  These unedited stories, in the book Appendix, were fascinating all by themselves.  


The whole Alaskan war theatre is interesting in its immensity and complexity and its notorious bad weather.