Why Reindeer?

500 Cape Douglas reindeer, William Van Valin, 24 March 1913

A few years ago, while going through a scrapbook put together by my great-grandmother, I found an odd photo. It showed a man dressed in fur, some sleds, and what appeared to be a large herd of reindeer.

The photo’s caption was reversed and difficult to read, but I found that it said “500 Cape Douglas reindeer.” In the corner of the photo, there was also a name, “Van Valin,” a title, “Supt. of herd,” and a date, “3/24/13.” The back of the photograph was interesting, too. On a typed slip of paper, it said:

Some of the reindeer up here. We eat some in the winter. Drive them and they are fine. We enjoy the rides very much. There is always something new up here and one is you never know what a reindeer will do.

Some online research determined that Cape Douglas is located in southwest Alaska near where the Alaskan peninsula joins the remainder of the state.[1] This information, while interesting, did not really help me much in terms of understanding the situation. Baffled, I set the photograph aside and went on to other things.

Sometime later, the mystery was deepened by my discovery of additional photographs in a different scrapbook. Several of the photos depicted Native Alaskans or Alaskan scenery while one, titled “White pop. of Sinuk Alaska 11/17/11,” showed several men and women, one with a baby, dressed in heavy winter clothing. All the photos included the name Van Valin in a corner and were dated between 1911 and 1913. Sinuk (also called Sinrock), I soon learned, no longer exists but was located in the southwest portion of the Seward Peninsula, 30 miles or so northwest of Nome, and was inhabited by the Iñupiat people.

White population of Sinuk, Alaska, 17 Nov 1911. Olive, Ethel, and Will Van Valin are shown in the middle of the photo.

At this point, I was determined to figure out what was going on with these photos. Deep dives on Google and into my family tree revealed that my great-grandfather’s first cousin Ethel Barnhart married a man named William Van Valin who later became an Alaskan explorer and author of a number of books about Alaska Natives. The pictures I had found are ones she sent to various family members, updating them on her adventures.

Ethel and Will both grew up in Pennsylvania. It’s not clear how they met, but they were married in 1906 in Chicago, Illinois, and then settled in Seattle, Washington, where their daughter Olive was born in 1910. A newspaper profile says that Will Van Valin’s first visit to Alaska was as missionary and that he and Ethel, together with their infant daughter, then moved to Sinuk, Alaska, to work as teachers in a school run by the U.S. government (LeBerthon, 1942).

Cover of fundraising pamphlet, Woman's Home Missionary Society, Methodist Episcopal Church, between 1887 and 1907

In the late 1800s, the federal government began to establish schools to educate Alaska Natives, some run by the government and others by missionary societies. These schools, like those coordinated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the lower 48 states, were designed to assimilate Native children into the worldviews of white America (Barnhardt, 2001). In addition, educators in Alaska, beginning with Sheldon Jackson, the first General Agent of Education in the Alaska Territory, were concerned about the negative influence that white miners and frontiersmen, as purveyors of alcohol and solicitors of prostitution, had on Native communities. As a result, they chose to situate schools for Alaska Natives well away from mining communities such as Nome (Ducker 1996).

It was in this context that Will and Ethel Van Valin came to teach in Sinuk, and the curriculum they taught—reading and writing in English together with math, farming, and domestic science—reflected the idea that they were bringing civilization to the needy (Ducker 1996). While Will, in particular, was very interested in learning about and preserving the culture of the the Iñupiat people, he and Ethel certainly saw themselves as white saviors ministering to the less civilized indigenous people. A newspaper profile of Ethel makes this clear, suggesting that she was seen by Native Alaskans as “the great white woman,” who “has served as midwife, nurse, teacher, and spiritual advisor to countless kindly Eskimo families” (Ford 1941).

This takes us back to those reindeer, which are actually not native to Alaska, and raises the question of why William Van Valin, missionary and teacher, might also describe himself as “Supt. of herd.” I’ll leave it to him to explain the connection, in a passage from his autobiography, Eskimoland Speaks:

It was Sheldon Jackson, that great and highly esteemed Presbyterian preacher, frontier missionary, and superintendent of the Alaska Division of the Bureau of Education, who [in 1892] conceived the idea of introducing reindeer from Siberia into Alaska, in order to alleviate the recurrent starvation among the Eskimos which followed the killing off by white men of the great schools of whales and herds of walrus that made their annual migration into the Arctic region…During my four years’ service with the United States Bureau of Education, I was ex-officio superintendent of large herds of reindeer (Van Valin 1944, pp 61-62).

And what a job that must have been, especially since, as Ethel told her family back home, “you never know what a reindeer will do.”

[1] The various Alaskan places discussed in this post can be seen on the map immediately above.

Works Cited

Barnhardt, Carol. 2001. “A History of Schooling for Alaska Native People.” Journal of American Indian Education 40 (1).

Ducker, James H. 1996. “Out of Harm’s Way: Relocating Northwest Alaskan Eskimos, 1907-1917.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 20(1).

Ford, Donna. 18 Nov 1941. “Other Women’s Lives” (column). Shreveport Times, p. 8.

LeBerthon, Ted. 18 March 1942. “Ted LeBerthon” (column). Los Angeles Daily News, p. 25.

Van Valin, William B. 1944. Eskimoland Speaks. Caldwell, Idaho: The Caxton Printers.