Tom Kizzia is an award-winning Alaskan author and journalist, who traveled widely in rural Alaska during a 25-year career as a reporter for the Anchorage Daily News. He is the author of the bestseller Pilgrim’s Wilderness and the Alaska village travel narrative The Wake of the Unseen Object, recently re-issued in the Alaska classics series of the University of Alaska Press. His journalism has appeared in The New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, the Columbia Journalism Review, and in Best American Science and Nature Writing 2017. He received an Artist Fellowship from the Rasmuson Foundation and was a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. A graduate of Hampshire College, he lives in Homer, Alaska, and has a place in the Wrangell Mountains outside McCarthy. His latest book, Cold Mountain Path: The Ghost Town Decades of McCarthy-Kennecott, Alaska, 1938-1983 (Fall 2021) covers a period in McCarthy’s history when the town was nearly abandoned.
Presentations
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 7, 10-11:30am: CONFERENCE OPENING & KEYNOTE ADDRESS
Welcome: William Schneider & Rachel Mason
Keynote Speaker: Tom Kizzia – The Impermanent Past: Living in the Space Between
The ghost town story provides an essential counterbalance to the boom narrative of the frontier. We visit these places in the American West, haunted by a beguiling absence, and a mortal question hovers: Is this where we’ve been, or where we’re going? The story of the “lost decades” in Alaska’s iconic ghost town, McCarthy-Kennecott, carries special power, given the state’s engrained historical fear of becoming a ghost state.
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 7, 1:30-3pm: THE GHOSTS OF FORMER MINES
Chris Allan, Moderator
Trish Hackett Nicola – The History of the Lost River Tin Mining Company
Laury Scandling – Treadwell, The Impermanent Town with a Permanent Impact: How a Big Mine on a Little Island Launched Alaska’s Development and Had Worldwide Significance (presented by Rich Mattson)
Karen Brewster and Angela Schmidt – Walking with Ghosts: Two Historians Hike the Chilkoot Trail
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 7, 3:30-5pm: MYTH AND DELUSION IN SOUTHEAST ALASKA
Anastasia Tarmann, Moderator
Rebecca Poulson – Alexander Baranov, the Man, the Myth: Reality, Distortion, and Why it Matters
Niko Sanguinetti – Centennial Delusion: The Carving of the Juneau Centennial Totem Poles
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8, 10-11:30am: SOUTHCENTRAL ALASKA
Ian Hartman, Moderator
Doug Capra – The Last Homesteaders: John and Carolyn Davidson at Driftwood Bay
Tabitha Gregory – Valdez Rises: One Town’s Struggle for Survival After the Great Alaska Earthquake
Laura Koenig – “New York or London will have nothing on Anchorage”: Music in Anchorage, 1915-1930
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8, 1:30-3pm: BRISTOL BAY
Katie Ringsmuth, Moderator
Tim Troll – Images of Nushagak – Gone, But Not Forgotten
John Branson – Ivan Petroff’s “Malchatna Villages” c. 1880-1888
Bob King – Where the Hell was Hallerville? And Why No Canneries Survived on the Kvichak, Bristol Bay’s Most Productive Salmon River
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8, 3:30-5pm: FOOD AND DRINK IN ALASKA
Pennelope Goforth, Moderator
Yoko Kugo, Kazuyuki Saito, Yu Hirasawa, Michael Koskey, Go Iwahana and Shirow Tatsuzawa – Food Life History in the Arctic Communities: Usages of Underground Cache and Food Preservation Practices
Douglas L. Vandegraft – Bars of Alaska’s Past: Gone, But Forever Notorious
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 9, 10-11:30am: WORKSHOP
Karen Brewster, Moderator
Melissa Barker – Techniques of History
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 9, 1:30-3pm: CROSSING INTERNATIONAL BORDERS
David Ramseur, Moderator
Chris Allan – Flag Wars: George M. Miller and the Battle over the U.S-Canada Border in Southeast Alaska
Melissa Chapin – Forging an International Community: A Path to Friendship Across the Taiga
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 9, 3:30-5pm: FORUM ON TEACHING AMERICAN HISTORY
Ian Hartman, Moderator
Songho Ha, University of Alaska Anchorage
Katie Ringsmuth, Alaska State Historian
Michael Hoyt, Nome-Beltz Middle High School and University of Alaska Fairbanks Northwest Campus
Perry Lewis, Eagle River High School
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 14, 10-11:30am: ANCSA: A CONVERSATION ON NATIVE HISTORY
Meghan Sullivan, Moderator
Panelists: Emil Notti and Sam Kito
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 14, 1:30-3pm: ANCSA AT 50: LOOKING BACK
Patuk Glenn, Moderator
Panelists: Willie Hensley, Kotzebue/Anchorage; and Oliver Leavitt, Utqiaġvik
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 14, 3:30-5pm: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ANCSA
Bill Schneider, Moderator
Philip Wight – Right of Way: The Trans-Alaska Pipeline System and the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act
Daniel Monteith – William and Frederick Paul and their Contributions to Alaska Native Land Claims
Stephen Haycox – Shock and Awe: Understanding Early Perceptions of the Passage of ANCSA
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 15, 10-11:30am: ALEUTIANS
Ray Hudson, Moderator
Michael Livingston – Aleutian Ghost Towns? Call OpenStreetMap!
Tom Kizzia is an award-winning Alaskan author and journalist, who traveled widely in rural Alaska during a 25-year career as a reporter for the Anchorage Daily News. He is the author of the bestseller Pilgrim’s Wilderness and the Alaska village travel narrative The Wake of the Unseen Object, recently re-issued in the Alaska classics series of the University of Alaska Press. His journalism has appeared in The New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, the Columbia Journalism Review, and in Best American Science and Nature Writing 2017. He received an Artist Fellowship from the Rasmuson Foundation and was a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. A graduate of Hampshire College, he lives in Homer, Alaska, and has a place in the Wrangell Mountains outside McCarthy. His latest book, Cold Mountain Path: The Ghost Town Decades of McCarthy-Kennecott, Alaska, 1938-1983 (Fall 2021) covers a period in McCarthy’s history when the town was nearly abandoned.
