Friday, October 20, 2000

A Web Site's Tales of Northern Culture Aim to Help Alaskans Understand Each Other By SCOTT CARLSON Ronald Spatz says that Alaskans know better than most people what it's like to be separated from the modern world -- and from each other. People from dozens of cultures, speaking as many languages, live in the republic's largest state, much of which has never been traversed by roads or rails. "People talk about the 'digital divide,'" says Mr. Spatz, a professor of creative writing at the Ronald Spatz University of Alaska at Anchorage and the founding editor of the Alaska Quarterly Review. "We've got a digital divide -- and a cultural divide, and a geographic divide. Name the divide and we've got it." But Mr. Spatz believes that a Web site dedicated to stories of Alaskan culture and profiles of its people can help bridge some of those gaps. He also hopes that his project, called LitSite Alaska, will be a reading and writing tool for elementary-, middle-, and high-school students. The Web site, which was unveiled just this month, was started with a $13,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and is supported by the university. "I thought we could really use the Internet in Alaska to put together a Web magazine that builds windows into people's lives through narrative. If we can tell people stories, we can build an amazing resource," he says. "To me, telling people's stories and thinking about them is a way to shape self, is to do something to find an identity for a place." The site already features a number of folk stories, journalistic articles, and first-person accounts. Most of them are short, merely attempting to capture a snapshot of unique fixtures of Alaskan culture. Nearly all of the site's pieces focus on themes of education, literacy, and storytelling. For example, there is an article about the "Shopping Cart Ladies," two women who read supermarket ad fliers on a public radio station as a service to the blind. There are informational features about Alaska Native community centers and newspapers. There's a first-hand account by Sophie Prosser, a 76-year-old woman who, as a teenager, went on a hunger strike to persuade her parents to let her leave their tiny village and go to Anchorage, where she would be able to get a high-school education. Alexandra J. McClanahan, a former journalist who interviewed Ms. Prosser and edited her story, has worked on Alaska Native issues in the state. She's excited about LitSite's potential. "Even if you could afford to go to a tiny, remote village -- say Point Hope, Alaska -- what are you going to do to connect with people there? Are you just going to drop into the community? It's difficult for the people in Anchorage to understand what the rural people are facing, and it's even difficult for the rural people to understand Anchorage." Ms. McClanahan brings up an ongoing political battle as an example: Rural people, and many Alaska Natives, have been trying to secure a "subsistence preference" that gives them first hunting or fishing rights if there is a shortage of animal resources. The issue has been extremely divisive, she says. "I think that if you lived in Anchorage and you were on the fence about the issue, you could access [LitSite] and learn about what rural people face -- about the fact that they don't have a grocery store," she says. "It might make a difference in how you felt about the issue. "I'm not saying that LitSite will solve all these problems, but it could be a very important piece for getting people to communicate with each other." Some of the site's vignettes simply capture a romantic side of the solitary Alaskan life. Mr. Spatz got one such piece from Toby J. Sullivan, who recently returned to the university as a creative-writing student after working as a commercial fisherman for 20 years. In his piece, "Read Another One!" Mr. Sullivan recalls sitting in a cabin with his crew after a long day on the water and listening to distant neighbors chatting on their shortwave radios. Late at night, after the conversation died down, Mr. Sullivan and his crew began reading poems by Robert Service and William Butler Yeats over the airwaves. "We would pause for long minutes between readings, and at first there were only calls for more, but after awhile when we stopped other voices in other cabins came out of the darkness, reading poems from books they had pulled down off their own fishcamp bookshelves," Mr. Sullivan writes. "People began reading amazing things -- poems, passages from novels, lyrics from songs right off the backs of the cassette tape boxes, even the manifesto-like statement of quality from a case of beer." Mr. Sullivan met Mr. Spatz at the university. "I told Ron the story and he thought it would be the kind of thing that he would want for the site," Mr. Sullivan says. "So I went home and wrote it down, and he put it up there." Like most of the writers who contribute to LitSite, Mr. Sullivan didn't get paid for the piece. As part of the literacy mission of the project, the site also features online workbooks with lists of reading and writing exercises. And there are stories from Alaska parents, discussing how they teach their children to read. Although the Web site is a 21st-century idea, it's being pitched to an Alaska that's partly premodern. Some of the state's villages are accessible only by airplane or boat -- in these areas, there certainly aren't wires connecting villagers to the rest of the world. Although many far-flung Alaskan communities import the world's media via satellite dishes, using that technology for the Internet can be expensive and unreliable. So Mr. Spatz has come up with a way for LitSite to overcome Alaska's peculiar technological limits. Each year, a version of the Web site will be downloaded to CD-ROMs, which will be distributed to every library and school in the state. "This gives people immediate access," he says. "In some areas there maybe only one phone line or one connection. This allows the site to be used freely." Mr. Spatz would like to see individual LitSite chapters spring up at schools in villages across the state, each producing pieces that convey the character of a particular place. LitSite is sponsoring a "post-card contest" as one of its ongoing projects: Twice a year, the site will post the best submissions describing a favorite Alaskan place in no more than 100 words. The winners will get a small, literary-oriented prize, such as a book or a bookstore gift certificate. Features like the post-card contest -- which promote literacy while conveying a sense of place or culture -- have earned the enthusiastic support of E. Lee Gorsuch, chancellor of the University of Alaska at Anchorage. "I think the real power of the project is that those aspects naturally blend," he says. "It's powerful when you see fourth-grade students trying to give voice to their traditions." LitSite's potential to offer accounts from distant places in Alaska could "create enormous appreciation for the different cultures out there," he says. "When the sun goes down in Barrow" -- on the state's northernmost tip -- "and doesn't come up for months, that's a new experience to people in the lower latitudes." Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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