A Fairbanks junior high school teacher, Karen Dullen, who is Inupiat Eskimo, will spend the next year learning about the contacts between Alaska Natives on the Koyukuk River and the Episcopal Church. She is going in search of a history which has been little told; in school, she told a reporter, she and many other Alaska Native children were placed into a “bilingual classroom” in which they spoke Spanish and “cooked tortillas.” Such an odd situation reflects the fact that there was little to no acknowledgment of Native cultures in the 1960’s era Alaskan school system.
