A Schoolteacher in Old Alaska: The Story of Hannah Breece - Softcover

Breece, Hannah

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679776338 ISBN 13: 9780679776338

Publisher: Vintage, 1997

Synopsis

When Hannah Breece came to Alaska in 1904, it was a remote lawless wilderness of prospectors, murderous bootleggers, tribal chiefs, and Russian priests.  She spent fourteen years educating Athabascans, Aleuts, Inuits, and Russians with the stubborn generosity of a born teacher and the clarity of an original and independent mind.  Jane Jacobs, Hannah's great-niece, here offers an historical context to Breece's remarkable eyewitness account, filling in the narrative gaps, but always allowing the original words to ring clearly.  It is more than an adventure story:  it is a powerful work of women's history that provides important--and, at times, unsettling--insights into the unexamined assumptions and attitudes that governed white settler's behavior toward native communities at the turn of the century.  

"An unforgettable...story of a remarkable woman who lived a heroic life."--The New York Times

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

Over fifty years ago Hannah Breece bestowed upon her great niece, Jane Jacobs, her manuscript, roughly culled together from diaries and letters from when she was a school teacher in Alaska and the Yukon. In the summer of 1994, Ms. Jacobs traveled to Alaska to do the research necessary to complete her great aunt's book.
In 1904, Hannah Breece set off for Alaska, where she was sent by the American government to teach Aleuts, Dina'ina, Athabascans, and people of mixed-European and Native blood. She remained in Alaska until 1918 and in this book tells her story. Diary-like in is mingling of domestic matters, work, public events and chance encounters, Hannah Breece's narrative is spiced with litany of adventures, for she was a women who went anywhere and stood up to anybody.
What Hannah Breece could never have guessed was just how relevant her story is today, both in its study of an independent woman and in its early clues to white North America's treatment of the Native populations. In her introduction and comprehensive notes on the book, Jane Jacobs examines her great aunt's story and reveals and illuminates the mysteries behind this most unusual life.

From the Back Cover:

Hannah Breece braved the Alaskan wilderness nearly a century ago to teach native children how to become Americans. A proud and fiercely independent woman, she struggled against great odds to establish federally sponsored schools in remote settlements. This is her own story of her many adventures on the Alaskan frontier. Breece compiled a draft of her experiences from her diaries and letters, but never completed the project. Before she died, she entrusted the manuscript to her great-niece Jane Jacobs, and this delightful book is the results. Jane Jacobs visited the communities her great-aunt described to fill in some of the gaps in her story. Her original research complements Hannah Breece's story to give us a vivid picture of old Alaska, of the infant settlements of Juneau, Kodiak, Seward and Fairbanks, and of the amazing woman who conquered its frozen wilderness, loved its children and, for nearly fifteen years, made it her home.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0679776338
• ISBN 13: 9780679776338
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336