The Alaska Historical Society held their annual conference, “New Directions in Alaska History,” at Homer’s Kachemak Bay Campus last week with people attending from across the state. Coordinators suggested that the conference theme invited attendees to explore the impacts of global forces on local communities’ experiences, environmental changes and contributions of Alaska Native peoples. The first day of the event was devoted to “exploring the expansive work of the late University of Alaska Anchorage historian Steve Haycox.” This year’s conference also featured two keynote speakers: on Friday Japanese American history educator Sam Mihara spoke about his experience being imprisoned at a remote Wyoming internment camp. On Saturday, former North Slope educator Jana Harcharek spoke about the preservation of Native culture and languages. Mihara’s presentation was titled “Mass Injustice Against Japanese Americans During WWII” and Harcharek’s was “The Inupiaq Learning Framework: What We Learned.” Both speakers' presentations left plenty of time for questions and comments from the audience. YouTube recordings for the keynote speakers' 90 minute presentations will eventually be available on the Alaska Historical Society website: alaskahhistoricalsociety.org.
The conference closed on Sunday at noon with final comments from coordinator Jeff Meyers and Rich Mattson.
The annual business meeting for the Historical Society was also held over the course of the weekend and included a review of the past year’s activities, a review of financial affairs and announcement of the results of the election of new members to the board of directors. The weekend conference included an evening banquet at the Kannery on Friday.
Jeff Meyers provided an overall review of last weekend’s historical event:
“We had about 150 people register for the conference. About 20 were virtual, so we think at any one time on campus we had 120 people here. They were in concurrent sessions, as you know, we had over three dozen people make presentations. This year more than other years, we tried to make a really special outreach to students. So, we had not as young of a crowd as we wanted, but it was younger than last year, and hopefully it'll be younger next year. We're really trying to recruit students to present and to come, so that's kind of our main goal,” Meyers said.
Meyers also provided some background information on the two keynote speakers for the event:
“So, our keynote speaker Sam Mahara was chosen mainly because we had a couple different people on our board who knew him and had seen him talk before. We thought that it would be a good time for him, if he was willing, to come and talk to us about the internment camps in Japan. The reason why we wanted to do that is because of just kind of everything that's happening in the world right now. Jana Harcharek, the other keynote, we chose because once again, a lot of us, a lot of people on the board knew her. She lived in Homer. We wanted her to give a talk about education and language, and then have a really robust panel afterwards about language revitalization. We really thought that was important because it's happening a lot in Alaska right now, and it's really important. and I thought she did wonderful,” Meyers said.
Meyers concluded by thanking the Kenai Peninsula college campus staff for their contributions to the event:
“I just want to thank all of my coworkers and Jill Burnham and Gareth Chesley. Jill did all of the food coordinating and the tables and chairs and kind of moving people around, and Gareth did the IT, and we're just getting rave reviews about the campus in general. The campus did a really nice job of making it intimate. We had a lot of people here and they were great,” Meyers said.
Reporting from Homer, this is Emilie Springer.
