By Allison Sayer

Alumni from the Copper Valley School met on the grounds of the old school site over the weekend of August 6. 

The Jesuit-run Copper Valley School was attended by students from throughout Alaska. Students from around the local area attended as well. Some attended as day students. Other Copper Valley students, including Arnold Bell-Hand who was born in Kenny Lake, lived at the school. Travelling back and forth between Copperville and Kenny Lake was more consequential back then, with colder winters and less reliable roads and vehicles. 

Not all of the Copper Valley School students were Alaska Native. Several non-Native students from small communities around Alaska attended. There were even children from Kenya who attended through connections with missions that were based in that country. Valdez students of all backgrounds attended the Copper Valley school in the wake of the devastating 1964 earthquake. 

One important part of the weekend that occurs every year is the dedication of cinder block bricks with names of community members who passed away over the past year. These could be former students, teachers, volunteers, or other people who had been part of the school. The background of the bricks is painted coral, after the exterior color of the school building, which has since burned down. This year, people who had passed away over the past two years were remembered because the reunion did not occur last year. 

After a brief service, the bricks were loaded up and transported to the ceremony. The new bricks were stacked, and the lawn was mowed and graves were tidied. People can still be buried on the grounds, and some graves were recent, reflecting the lasting impact the school had on those who chose it as their final resting place. Alumnus Ron Emmons shared that several people have scattered ashes there as well. 

Emmons drove me down to the cemetery, along a one lane road where I marveled at the stands of diamond willow. He remembered that he and his friends would “freeze our feet off to get it,” and told me that whittling was a constant and popular activity in the evenings in the dorms.

A massive wood stove sat at the edge of the cemetery. Emmons explained that when the school building burned down, a group of alumni salvaged “Sister Ida’s stove.” He went on, “That was how she cooked all our meals. I can still see her spirit standing there.” 

Several Copper Valley School students recalled the effort of keeping everyone fed. The school operated on a shoestring budget, and students and staff described many meals of opportunity. Students gardened, salvaged, butchered, and hunted for food. They received and processed damaged or overstocked goods from local businesses. One student, originally from the interior, vividly remembered his shock at his first sight of an enormous halibut in the freezer, donated by someone on the coast. Alumnus Sam Demientieff recalled a multi-day journey in the freezing cold to Fairbanks to retrieve hundreds of chickens from a farm that was going out of business. 

Former students had varied stories of how they came to the school. Alumni Association president Guy Gemmell said that in his original hometown of Nenana, there was a high school but it did not have as much to offer as the Copper Valley School. Emmons, originally from Anchorage, said that after the death of his father, the school presented an opportunity for his mother to keep him and his sister together. 

Jerry Curry of McGrath and Lois Schaeffer-MacGillivray of Kotzebue came to the Copper Valley School because there were no high schools in their home communities. “Most of the parents wanted their kids to go on to high school,” said Schaeffer-MacGillivray, “Everybody would leave.” She described villages without teenagers. It made me imagine the pied piper marching across Alaska. 

“This was before Hootch,” explained Curry. Curry was referring to the suit that then teen-aged Molly Hootch and other plaintiffs brought against the State of Alaska in 1971 demanding local education options. The appellants’ brief in the Molly Hootch case stated, “School attendance by [appellants] is conditioned on their giving up, for many months during this critical period of their development, contacts with their families, their villages, and their cultural heritage.” They reasoned that this placed an undue burden on Native students’ pursuit of education at the high school level. In 1976, after five years of legal convolutions, the Alaska Supreme Court approved a consent decree on the case, renamed Tobeluk v. Lind. This resulted in a requirement for the State of Alaska to provide high schools to local communities. 

Active members of the alumni association, including President Guy Gemmell, have a strong interest in documenting and publicizing stories about the school’s history. Newspaper clippings about the school’s history or notable alumni have been carefully collected and displayed. I was not the only writer who was invited to attend events that weekend; a graduate student from the University of Alaska Fairbanks spent time there as well. 

Gemmell emphasized that students were trained to be future leaders, and that many alumni went on to positions of leadership within the state of Alaska and Alaska’s Native Corporations. He clearly feels that his own opportunities in life were strengthened by his education, and is passionate about having school stories documented before his generation passes on. 

Emmons acknowledged that some of his desire to tell his story comes from a desire to tell the public that “Not all mission schools were bad.” He did agree that the bar was low, and acknowledged that “We did have problems with a few priests.” Emmons went on to downplay some of the allegations. 

The love Emmons has for this place and his time there is apparent. How to tell the story of the fatherless boy joyfully stomping feeling back into his feet with an armful of diamond willow, without rendering invisible the students whose experiences were damaging? It’s a tough question.

Another story about the Copper Valley School site:

Native Village of Tazlina Works to Reclaim its Homeland