Alaska Native Magazine — Voices Across Alaska
Angela Schmidt with UAF’s Alaska Film Archives, sharing stories from KUAC’s television history as we celebrate National Library Week.
This National Library Week, we invite you to take a look back at Alaska Native Magazine.
What does it mean to tell Alaska’s story…
In the mid-1970s, KUAC Television produced a program called “Alaska Native Magazine”… host Moe Wassilie traveled to communities across the state to document the lives, knowledge, and work of Alaska Native people.
Each episode brought viewers into real places…
hearing directly from the people. Where they lived and worked…
You might see families practicing subsistence hunting and fishing…
artists shaping materials into objects of beauty and meaning…
or individuals working in clinics, construction camps, and fisheries – helping to build and sustain their communities during a time of rapid change.
And you might even get to sit in with a couple of famous dog mushers, George Attla and Lena Charlie as they visit together on Alaska Native Magazine in 1975…
Clip 6-Alaska Native Magazine-5sec clip and Clip 6-Alaska Native Magazine-12sec
These were not outside perspectives looking in.
They were real conversations – grounded in place, in experience, and in time.
Today, these recordings offer something powerful, and they’re all available for viewing online.
Through a partnership between KUAC and the Alaska Film Archives at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Rasmuson Library, these programs have been digitized and preserved…
Through a project that is part of the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, a national effort supported by the Mellon Foundation, GBH in Boston, and the Library of Congress.
To start exploring, visit americanarchive.org and search for “KUAC Alaska.” Or visit KUAC.org for links.