Juneau man’s vintage photos could help preserve King Island culture

Yaayuk Bernadette Alvanna-Stimpfle was born to a King Island family in 1955. She wasn’t raised on the Bering Sea island, but her family kept it as close as they could in her upbringing.

“My generation were the first ones to be raised away from the island, but we were still raised on the east end of Nome,” she said. “They still spoke to us in the language.”

In 1959, the Bureau of Indian Affairs closed the school on King Island and made the children move to Nome. By 1970, all King Island people were living in Nome year-round. 

But before all of that, one visitor to the island, a Juneau man, took hundreds of photos of the people and their way of life. A few of those photos appeared in National Geographic in 1954. Then in 2005, more were published in a book. 

Yaayuk says King Island elders would use those photos to teach her about her community.

“They would tell me who the names of the people were on that island,” she said. “They would explain things to me. They would use the pictures.”

A Juneau couple on King Island

Late last month in the Rie Muñoz Gallery in Juneau, Juan Muñoz Jr. pointed to a photo high on the wall.

“This is one of my favorite photos — here is an enormous ice cave that they had on King Island,” he said. 

 A man in a fur parka appears small in the bottom center of the photo, framed by towering walls of ice.

“They’d get seal and walrus, and then they would keep all their meat in different sections, and different families would have their stash of meat and blubber rooms,” Juan Jr. said. “If one family didn’t have very much, of course they’d share it.” 

Juan is the son of Rie Muñoz, an artist who painted watercolors of life across Alaska for over 60 years. Soon after Rie first came to Juneau in the early 1950s, she took a job as a Bureau of Indian Affairs teacher on King Island.

Her husband, Juan Muñoz Sr., came with her. And he brought a camera — a Hasselblad.

“He took hundreds of these marvelous photos of everyday life on King Island,” Juan Jr. said.

Not long after the Muñozes returned to Juneau, the BIA closed the school.

“Then several years later, the whole village moved to Nome,” Juan Jr. said. “And so they got to see the last bit of this culture and record it — culture that had been in existence for tens of thousands of years.”

‘A living time capsule’

Juan Jr. had thought that all of his father’s King Island photos were in that 1954 issue of National Geographic. 

“But when my dad passed away in 2005, I went to clean out his locker, and I found this suitcase full of hundreds of negatives,” he said. 

Rie and Juan Jr. then made a book called King Island Journal, which included more of the photographs along with letters the couple had sent to their families while they were living there. 

Juan Jr. has since digitized all the photos with the help of Jerrick Hope-Lang, his longtime friend and a cultural preservationist. 

“It’s a living time capsule. And these people are still around, you know. There’s people that are connected to these that are still present with us,” Hope-Lang said.

This year, they donated the prints, negatives and digital copies to the Katirvik Cultural Center in Nome. Juan Jr. says his mother, who died in 2015, would be glad these memories of her time on the island can be returned to the descendants of the people who lived there.

“It was just a wonderful experience for my mom,” Muñoz said about the year his parents lived on King Island. “And she said she was ready to go back there again the following year.”

Hope-Lang says he thinks the photos are an opportunity to look back at what happened to King Island and the people who were made to leave. 

Yaayuk is an Inupiaq language scholar now. She says some of the images show traditions that aren’t widely practiced anymore — like making rope out of rawhide, or sewing sealskin pants — and those photographs could be especially valuable. 

She also hopes the photos may help King Island elders remember some parts of their language that havenʼt been in use since her people were forced to move to Nome, because some words only pertained to the island. 

“Our language is based on the environment,” she said. “So of course, some of the words weren’t used on the mainland like they were on King Island, where it was steep.”