"Etta Jones, single, 42 years old and an accomplished teacher and nurse, arrived in Alaska in August, 1922. One year later, she married gold prospector Foster Jones. For the next 19 years, they lived, worked and taught in remote Athabascan, Alutiiq, Yup’ik and Aleut villages. Their last assignment was Attu.
After the invasion, Etta spent 39 months in Japanese POW sites located in Yokohama and Totsuka. She was the first female Caucasian taken prisoner by a foreign enemy on the North American Continent since the War of 1812, and she was the first American female released by the Japanese at the end of World War II."
Most of the book is Etta's letters. Since Etta did not like speaking about her time as a prisoner in Japan, Breu compiled most of that section.
Etta's 19 years in Alaska is remarkable and worth a book by itself, but reading about her years of imprisonment, starvation, and brutal conditions in Japan, when she was in her sixties(!), left me dumbfounded. She and Foster lived in Old Harbor for a few years, but Etta also taught in extremely remote villages, where no one spoke English, none of the villagers has seen a white woman before, and they received mail service just three times a year. Funny to think that some teachers have tough times in villages today. For Etta and Foster, Old Harbor in the 1930s was quite posh in comparison to the other villages they served. In one part Etta wrote how at Russian Christmas she received a bear gut bag (with eagle feather if I recall). Seal gut is common, but I did not realize bear gut was also used.
No comments:
Post a Comment