helen c. frost's missionary images of the inupiaq...

Helen C. Frost's Missionary Images of the Inupiaq (Eskimos)

by JULIEANNA FROST

In 1926, a woman celebrated her thirtieth birthday with the realization of a long-held dream. For years she had felt called to

be a missionary and here she was finally aboard the steamship Victoria arriving at Nome, Alaska. It proved to be worth the wait in order to serve God in this remote and wonderful land. For approximately the next thirty-five years, she would work among the indigenous Inupiaq peoples, then called "Eskimos," serving them in various capacities, as health care worker, teacher, preacher, music director, postmistress, shopkeeper, and friend. Her memoirs and her photographs share her story.

This biographical study, grounded in feminist studies and historical-comparative social science research, examines the photography and missionary work of Helen C. Frost (1896—1986). As the daughter of a Lutheran pastor in the Midwest, Frost felt called from an early age to help others. She studied to be a teacher and a nurse and eventually served for over thirty years as a Lutheran missionary, primarily among the Inupiaq in Alaska. This study used interviews, Ufe history, archival research, and especially her photographs to document her response to the Inupiaq. Frosts photographic images underscore how she incorporated aspects of Inupiaq culture into her own life and how she, unlike many other missionaries of the period, did not portray them as "primitive others."

Initially, the missionary focus of the Norwegian Lutheran groups was upon inner missions. Many of the pastors who came to America did so in order to provide religious guidance to Norwegian immigrants. Early settlements often relied upon lay workers to serve the isolated newcomers. Norwegians in America also developed their own institutions of mercy, such as children's homes, deaconess' homes and hospitals, and homes for the aged. Donations from congregations went to support these endeavors and any additional funds would go to foreign missions.

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LUTHERAN QUARTERLY Volume XXIII (2009)

HELEN C. F R O S T ' S MISSIONARY IMAGES 297

One type of group that emerged to raise such funds was the Ladies'Aids. Mrs. Gustava Kielland has been noted as the founder of these groups, the Kvindeforeninger, in Norway in 1840. Its primary purpose was for women to gather once a month to make goods such as quilts in order to sell them and donate the proceeds to missions. It is assumed that immigrant Norwegian women transplanted these types of groups to the United States upon their arrival, although few records exist.1 These Ladies'Aids were typically connected to the congregation, and members often had to pay a small fee each month. Not all members of the congregations were positive about these groups. "Opponents of the societies were, on the one hand, worried that the women would spend their time in unedifying gossip. On the other hand, they feared that the women would form a divisive clique which would become a church within a church."2 In 1862, a small sewing circle in Decorah, Iowa, was created to raise building funds for Luther College. By 1865 it became a society that also mended and made clothes for these students.

This Lappeforening (Mending Society) continued its labor of love for many years . . . Another group in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, started out by buying a whole bolt of heavy, warm, red flannel from which they made substantial underwear for the Luther College boys.3

By 1867, this Wisconsin society also raised funds for the Zulu Mission in South Africa, which may make it the first to send money directly to a foreign mission. More often the money raised was given to the Norwegian Mission Society in the home country to disburse.4 The first attempt to link together the various congregational women's societies was in the Hauge Synod in 1901, called the Mission Dove.5

Two years later the Norwegian Synod and United Church also created church-wide women's organizations, with a particular focus on funding educational institutions.6 Eventually, the various Ladies' Aids groups combined in 1917 along with the merging of the synods in order to better coordinate their efforts and to support the missions as the Women s Missionary Federation (WMF).7 One of the missions that began as an inner mission and received WMF support was the Teller Mission in Alaska, which was started in 1900. The town of

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Teller and its environs was considered a foreign mission field at the time, even though it was on United States territory.

The purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867 had devastating consequences for many indigenous groups. Unlike the Russian American Company, which had quotas implemented to conserve sea mammals, the Alaska Commercial Company expanded dramatically the harvesting of sea otters and seals.8 The goal of this company was to harvest as much as possible, as quickly as possible, thereby increasing profits. This led to scarcity; groups such as the Inupiaq were threatened with starvation. As a solution to this problem the U.S. government began to import reindeer for the Inupiaq to herd. The government also imported groups of Norwegian Sami, an indigenous people of Northern Scandinavia called "Lapps" at that time. As Lutheranism was Norway's state religion, a Lutheran pastor was also recruited. The Rev.Tollef Brevig related in his diary: "An inquiry came from the Rev. H.A. Preus, president of the Norwegian Lutheran Synod, whether my wife and I would be willing that I go as pastor for a few families of Norwegian Lapps, whom the government was importing to northern Alaska for the purpose of teaching the Eskimos the art of reindeer raising."9 Although the initial main mission was for the Norwegian Sami, outreach to the indigenous Inupiaq eventually occurred as well. This was especially true after a measles epidemic in 1900. The Teller Orphanage, Helen Frost's eventual base, was begun by the Brevigs in order to take care of the children, as approximately half of the population of Teller had died.10 The Teller Mission utilized missionaries provided by Home Missions to serve in a variety of roles. In the early twentieth century, the Women's Missionary Federation encouraged women's support through fundraising, prayers, and staffing of the missions.11 Female missionaries, some of them deaconesses, soon outnumbered men in this foreign mission field.12 One of these missionaries was Helen Frost, who arrived in 1926.

Helen C. Frost

According to her memoirs, Helen Frost was born in Council Bluffs, Iowa, in 1896 to a Danish immigrant family. Her father Hemming

HELEN C. FROST'S MISSIONARY IMAGES 299

(fluent in English, Danish, and Norwegian) was employed as a pastor for several Lutheran mission churches in the Midwest. Helen related that her mother was a sickly woman who died from consumption when Helen was about six.13 For approximately two years Helen and her brother Herbert lived with a few different relatives until their father remarried. Four more children were added to the family over the years and when Helen was sixteen, her father took a position in Minnesota serving three congregations—Riceford, Newberg, and Blackhammer. Helen attended the Sioux Falls Normal School for two years and received a second-grade teachers certificate in 1914.

Helen planned to teach full-time, but when her stepmother Gina asked her to stay home to help take care of the family, she postponed her plans. While still living at home, Helen attended a talk about missions by Dr. Birkelund, a missionary to China, and it made quite an impression upon her. She later recalled, "that Mission Festival touched me and I prayed that if the Lord wanted me on the mission field I would be shown in some way. I told some people how I felt but they claimed that it was just my fantasy. But to me it was more than that."14

Once again Helen s dream had to be deferred when a flu epidemic struck her community. She provided health care to her family who had all become sick. It was this experience, along with an article on the Lutheran Deaconess Hospital, that influenced Helen to become a nurse. In the fall of 1919, she began study at this Chicago hospital. During her second year, Helen herself became ill with the flu and nearly died. Despite the delay of three months of convalescence, Helen still managed to graduate from the program and then spent the next two years working at the Lutheran Deaconess Hospital.

In 1923, Helen began a Registered Nursing program at Ancker Hospital in St. Paul, Minnesota. In a year she graduated and then worked as a private duty nurse in Minneapolis. In 1926, Helen received a letter from an old friend encouraging her to join the mission field. She boarded that steamship for Nome and for the next thirty-six years practiced her vocation as a missionary, primarily in Alaska. Although initially recruited as a nurse for the Teller Orphanage, over the years she took on other occasional roles, such as storekeeper, postmistress, musician, and teacher, in the Lutheran missions at Teller, Igloo, Shishmaref, and Sitka.

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So here I was, supposedly only a nurse by profession, but later finding myself preaching, teaching, baptizing, even giving communion privately, when we had no pastor. The day also came when I was given a license to perform marriages. Many times I felt very inadequate, but when there was no one else to do it, I did what had to be done. With God all things are possible if we are in His will.15

Susan Tjornehoj has commented that "Helen Frost was only one of the women preaching and leading worship long before Lutheran churches (ALC) voted to ordain women in 1970."16 After she retired in 1961, Frost moved to California and wrote her memoirs in 1969 about her life in Alaska. Published as Frost Among the Eskimos in 2001, her reminiscences mainly focus on describing the type of work she was engaged in, her exterior life, with little background information or details about her interior life. Although she talks about her service among the Inupiaq, there was not much about her relationships with them. Unfortunately for the historian, she did not leave behind an abundance of additional written documents, although this is not too surprising given her heavy workload.

No scholar has all the evidence that he or she would like for solving the conundrums of mission history. The data are always fragmentary . . . the archives are not only incomplete but skewed . . . missiologists working today who specialize in the history of mission are challenged as scholars by the fact that foreign missionaries dominate the accumulated reserve of texts at our disposal.17

Frost s archives certainly reflect this fact as to written evidence. However, she did leave behind many photographs.

Frost's Photographs

Historians are recognizing that photographic records are significant and may be used as a source to explore mission history. Traditionally, scholars have held a bias for written sources, yet in recent decades other overlooked primary texts, such as scrapbooks, have provided historical evidence. "Snapshots are paradigmatic historical documents precisely insofar as they are inherendy partial (meaning both slanted and fragmentary); as such, they call for creative reconstructive labor on the part of the historians."18 Historian Nell Irvin Painter has encouraged biographers to utilize photographs to explore a subject's


life. "We need to separate the insight from scholarship's bias against images and in favor of words. We need to recognize what can be learned from images in historical space . . . biographers can also use images to explore their subjects and their subjects' cultural milieux."19

In analyzing photographic evidence, it is important for historians to understand that the images held some type of personal relevance to the photographer.

As individual creators produce these artifacts, they remake themselves as they work out ideal, alternative or potentially trasgressive identities. Omissions are crucial. The process of forgetting—that is, editing the extraneous or the unwanted, first through photography and again through album-making—begets a remembered self. Once it is complete, an album's narrative function achieves primacy. It becomes a record, destined to be replayed as a special chapter in one's life story.20

Skreslet has emphasized that "other forms of nonliterary self-representation are among the means available to scholars to recover more of what may otherwise be missing from what we know of the history of mission."21 Thus Helen Frost's photographs can be used to gain a greater understanding of her Lutheran mission.

Frost's photographs reflect her singular focus upon missionary work. In the Region 3 Archives of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, five large photo albums survive with approximately 100 photographs in each, along with many loose photographs and slides, and two home movies. On the ELCA website, the "Daughters of the Reformation" fundraising film (ShishmareJ) also features Frost. These images date from the 1930s through the early 1960s, although there are far fewer photos from her time in Sitka just prior to her retirement. Most of the photographs lack labels and have no particular arrangement, except for two of the albums, one from the 1930s, with images from Igloo and Wittenberg, Wisconsin, and one from the early 1950s when Frost served in Shishmaref.22 Some of these photographs Frost displayed during her fundraising tours, but there were also pictures from her personal scrapbooks in the archives. Frost often projected the slides that she had developed as an important part of church programs for the Inupiaq.23 She would also show these photos as part of her outreach. For example, when she was serving in Sitka she would often visit the hospital.

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One week I showed my Eskimo movies to the T.B. patients in the different sections. Later a nurse in the occupational therapy department asked if I would show them to a group of children. "Please show especially those of the children playing in the snow, the dog teams and ice skating." I did and it was surprising how quietly the patients sat, looking and listening. Another time the nurse and staff asked if they could see the pictures. So I felt I was making good use of my far-north pictures, even in Sitka.24

The majority of Frost's photographic images, whether for public or private use, were focused upon daily life in Alaska and the Inupiaq people. Niece Helen Frost Thompson recalled that "She was a photographer—she took lots of pictures. She also loved going around in her boat. She was very outdoorsy I think that is why she loved Alaska so much. Her main hobby was definitely photography"25 In many ways, Frost's photographs inadvertently provide an ethnographic record of this indigenous nation and her relationship with this group. (See photograph #i . )

#1 Elizabeth Facktuo and Helen Frost


The Inupiaq people have lived in Alaska for approximately 10,000 years,26 adapting to the difficult environment and terrain. The basic social unit was the nuclear family with help from extended kinship groups in order to have allies in the struggle for survival. Hunting, fishing, and gathering of wild plants, like berries, sorrel, and scurvy grass provided sustenance for the people. Women's work primarily consisted of cooking, making clothing, gathering plants, and taking care of the children.27 Residency was influenced by the seasonal pattern of their food sources, which also led to the wide variety of housing styles, for example, living in seal-skin tents during summer encampment and in snow houses during the winter camp.28 "By 1910, the traditional Inupiaq nations had ceased to exist as autonomous social systems. The Inupiaq people survived, but they were beginning the long process of colonization by the United States."29 By analyzing Frost's photographs, it is possible to explore some of the interactions between this one missionary and the Inupiaq. For Frost, "Alaska is my home; the Eskimos my people,"30 and the photos show that this was not a one-way street. Skreslet has noted that there is often "the misconception that mission history is an unvarying story of missionary initiative followed by indigenous response; . . . a missiological perspective on the history of mission must be broader."31

Frost readily adapted to Inupiaq clothing. There are many images of Frost dressed in the traditional style, especially during the wintertime. She recalled, "some time later I had the thrill with the temperature of 30 or 40 degrees below zero. But with a fur parka, fur pants, fur cap and mittens, home-knit stockings, woolen underwear and shirt, together with for mukluks up to my knees, I was warm and comfortable."32 As the above passage indicated, the main motivation for adapting some indigenous dress was for comfort and survival in the extreme temperatures. In contrast, there are a few photos of Frost dressed as a Winnebago when she served at Wittenburg Indian School in Wisconsin, but this was not her regular dress during her three years as a missionary there. Instead she dressed as a Winnebago during special school programs, such as for Thanksgiving. One of the main reasons for this difference was due to the environment. Trott describes it: "missionaries came to realize through their own experience that Western woolen clothing is useless in the Arctic


context and that, indeed, Inuit skin clothing is much more effective."33

Frost also adapted Inupiaq methods of food production and preparation in her daily life. There are countless images of Frost with the Inupiaq harvesting and preparing various food sources. There are images of fish and seal processing, as well as berry collecting. Frost did not discourage the traditional diet; she learned to cook various Alaskan recipes and even helped create an Eskimo cookbook for the Teller school. The proceeds from the sale of this book went to the school.'4 Frost loved salmon35 and especially looked forward to berry picking season.36 At times she went fishing and utilized seal pokes (skins) to store food.37 (See photograph #2.) She also prepared foods from her own culinary heritage. One particularly popular food that Frost would make the Inupiaq was the doughnut.

#2 Filling Seal Pokes

H E L E N C. F R O S T ' S M I S S I O N A R Y IMAGES 305

Yesterday morning I got up bright and early because I wanted to make some

doughnuts for the mens meeting in the evening and also for the women's

meeting next Friday p.m. So I made about 100 doughnuts and put some of them

out to freeze. In this way, I can keep them fresh, just taking in those wanted,

heating and dipping in sugar. Then they are just like fresh. So that's what I served

the men last night, besides coffee and a Jersey cream with jam 0η.3 8

For church events, there was typically a mixture of traditional

foods and foods from the "lower 48." Frost would not have dreamed

of replacing the traditional foods, because the Inupiaq liked them.39

For example, Frost described one Easter meal:

Dinner was served to all present. The natives had brought some cooked fish,

rabbit meat, and frozen berries. Reindeer meat has been very scarce this year,

so there was none of that. Then I brought bread, cupcakes, cookies, and a

ketde of beans, some fruit pudding and cocoa. The store furnished the coffee.

Everybody was happy and felt that they had a nice dinner.40

There was a lively intercultural exchange of food traditions

between Frost and the Inupiaq. There are home movies where Frost

proudly picked berries, and numerous photographs of drying fish

and seal pokes.

Frost also adjusted to Inupiaq transportation technology for her

mission. When first in Alaska, she often went from place to place by

kayak or dog sled. This was typical among most missionaries in

Alaska. Trott relates that, "northern travelers, including missionaries,

quickly adopted Inuit technology as being far more effective given

the environmental conditions."41 As time progressed Frost, as well as

the Inupiaq, adopted new modes of conveyance, such as the airplane

or motorboat, although these methods were not always as reliable.

Frost once described to her brother a common problem, namely,

breakdowns. (See photograph #3.)

I got one of the native men to go with me in our boat and my motor (4 HP).

Everything went fine until we were on our way back. We have a large lake 15

miles across which we had to cross and sometimes it can be very treacherous

in storms.We were halfway across the lake when we heard a click and a bang.

The shaft of the motor had broken. The only thing we could do then was to

row, but by this time it was beginning to blow again. We started to row for

3θ6 L U T H E R A N Q U A R T E R L Y

#3 (Boat)

shelter and had gone about 2 miles when we heard a motor. Three of our

Igloo boys were going up the river so they came and towed us into shelter, but

of course they did not like to leave us there. It was too stormy to do anything

then, so they waited around for a while, made some coffee and by that time it

started to calm and they decided to take us to the end of the lake which was a

great help. From there we rowed for about five miles more and then another

boat took us the rest of the way . . . however there was not shaft to be gotten

in Teller and it had to be ordered, so I guess I'll not have a chance to use my

motor again this year perhaps.42

There was also a partial appropriation by Frost of residing in

traditional housing styles. Frost primarily lived at the missions where

she served or nearby them in a small wooden framed house. However,

when she traveled to visit with Inupiaq families she stayed with

them in their traditional homes.43 During the summer months she

traveled from fishing camp to fishing camp and lived like the Inupiaq,

in a tent. She took photos of both the summer homes, as well as the

winter homes. For example, near one image she noted in her

scrapbook, "a winter Eskimo home in the wintertime, when it is

covered with snow is barely visible except for a smoke stack." It was

not unusual for missionaries to take photos of this unique type of

housing; what is unusual is that Frost also took photos of the Inupiaq


at their summer homes. (See photograph #4.) Unlike other missionaries Frost showed Inupiaq life as multi-faceted and diverse.

#4 Coffee in the Open

Okpowruks

One area where there was a lack of adaptation by Frost was linguistics; she never learned much of the Inupiaq language. She learned a few words and phrases such as oogruk (sea lion) and mukluks (shoes),44 but she primarily had to rely on interpreters45 to communicate with many Inupiaq people. For example, in a letter from 1954 she wrote, "then this evening we have our mid-week meeting. One of the Eskimo men will be leading the meeting, talking in Eskimo, announcing songs, then prayers by the natives

3 θ 8 LUTHERAN QUARTERLY

themselves in the Eskimo language."46 One possible reason for the

lack of language acquisition by Frost, who was at least nominally

bilingual prior to moving to Alaska (she was taught some Norwegian

by her father)/7 could be the complexity of the language group.

Garbarino and Sasso note that it "has been classified with languages

spoken in northeastern Siberia—Chukchi, Kamchadal, and other

tongues—as belonging to the Paleo-Siberian linguistic phylum. It

bears no resemblance to American Indian languages, and is the only

North American language group that shows clear linguistic ties to

any Old World tongue."48 There is also a possibility, with the speaking

of English by the younger generation (see photograph #5) and the

use of translators for the older generation, that Frost believed it was

not necessary to become fluent in the language.

#5 Children With Dolls

The final area with little cultural interchange was between

traditional religious beliefs and Christianity. This is reflected in that

she had no photos of shaman in her albums. According to Trott, this

was an image that many other missionaries had in their collections.

"In their representation of the angakkut (shaman), the missionaries

depicted wild-looking people, with long unkempt hair and a startling


look in the eyes. The opposition was represented as devilish, within Western conceptions of the devil, despite the fact that most angakkut were indistinguishable from their fellows in everyday life."49 Frost knew of the existence of shaman,50 yet in her photographs she depicts the Inupiaq as Christianized. For example, there are images of Inupiaq children in the nativity play for their Christmas programs and attending confirmation class. (See photograph #6.)

#6 Confirmation Class

These types of portrayals were more accurate for the majority of Inupiaq, because most readily adopted Christianity.51 In the film Shishmaref, Frost was also seen leading a worship service with many Inupiaq taking part.52 In her early years as a missionary Frost did seem to describe the Inupiaq as heathens, and thus needing missionary help. In her fundraising article, A Trip to Alaska, she wrote,

With God's help, who is using the D O R [Daughters of the Reformation] as an instrument in His Hand, we are hoping that this year, the wishes of these natives may be granted. There are over 200 people waiting to hear that Gospel, which means so much to our happiness.You have all heard it. Are you going to be so selfish, as to keep it to yourself? Won't you please share your joy with these people by helping to make the beginning of this station, a possibility in 1929?53


By at least the 1950s Frost referred to the Inupiaq as being Christian, for example, in the magazine, Lutheran Youth, "they take part in the service, sing in the choir, and go regularly to Holy Communion."54

Frost did not seem to need to justify her missionary service at this point in her career. It is telling that at this time some authors were still portraying the Inupiaq as "primitive others." For example, in a study for the Board of Charities of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, Dr. Henriette Lund reported that, "it is hard to know whether evil spirits of the past still plague them. Here and there one catches glimpses of the strong hold of paganism on even the Christian Eskimo."55 The photographs that Frost took did not support this view.

Conclusion

In his analysis of Anglican missionary photographs of the Inuit, Christopher Trott noted that this indigenous group has often been portrayed as the "primitive other." In contrast, Helen Frost in her body of photographic work represented the Inupiaq as being part of her family, as brothers and sisters in Christ. Her images show a respect and love of this Alaskan culture, a culture that she adopted in many ways as her own. This is apparent in her acceptance of Inupiaq food ways, transportation, housing, and community life. Frost's photographs also raise questions in the history of missions, Lutheran or otherwise, and reveal the complexity of interactions between missionaries and those they served. There is much work to be done in reviewing missionary photographs, yet a tentative conclusion can be offered. In contrast to those in Trott's study, it appears that Frost was unusual in the degree of her acceptance of indigenous culture. It is probable that various elements—such as Frost's years of uninterrupted contact, the relative isolation from other missionaries, and her own personality—all worked together to create such close relations with the Inupiaq. As she said, "I love the Eskimo people, and I doubt that I could ever be happy anywhere else but working for and among them in some way."56 It is very possible to see this merely by looking at one of her photographs. (See photograph #7.)

HELEN C. F R O S T ' S MISSIONARY IMAGES

#7 Mother & Child

N O T E S

i. J.C.K. Preus, ed., Norsemen Found a Church.An Old Heritage in a New Land (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1953), 371. (To be cited as Preus, Norsemen.)

2. L. DeAne Lagerquist, From Our Mother's Arms: A History of Women in the American Lutheran Church (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1987), 32.

3. Preus, 373-374·

4. L. DeAne Lagerquist, In America the Men Milk the Cows: Factors of Gender, Ethnicity, and Religion in the Americanization of Norwegian—American Women (Brooklyn: Carlson, 1991). 54· (To be cited as Lagerquist, In America.)

5. Lagerquist, In America, 50. 6. Lagerquist, In America, 52.

7. Martha Reishus, Hearts and Hands Uplifted: A History of the Women's Missionary Federation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1958), 43-

8. Colin F. Taylor and William Sturtevant, The Native Americans: The Indigenous People of North America (London: Salamander Books, 1996), 411.

9. J.L. Maakestad, ed., The Lutheran Church in Alaska (Alaska: Ken's Print Shop, 1978), 3·

10 Ross Hidy, ed., Frost Among the Eskimos: The Memoirs of Helen Frost Missionary in Alaska 1926-1961 (Concord: Lutheran Pioneer Press, 2001), prologue. (To be cited as Memoirs.)

11. Lagerquist, In America, 186. 12. Lagerquist, In America, 187. 13. Memoirs,/^.


14. Memoirs, 5. 15. Memoirs, 11. 16. Susan Tjornehoj, "Helen Frost," Lutheran Woman Today (April, 1990): 35. 17 Stanley Skreslet, "Thinking Missiologically about the History of Mission," Inter

national Bulletin of Missionary Research 31.2 (April, 2007): 59-64. (To be cited as Skreslet, "Thinking Missiologically")

18. Joel Smith, "Roll Over: The Snapshots Museum Afterlife" Afterimage 29:2 (Sept./Oct. 2001): 8-11.

19. Nell Irvin Painter, "Ut Pictura Poesis; or the Sisterhood of the Verbal and Visual Arts," Writing Biography. Historians and their Craft, Lloyd Ambrosius, ed (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 104.

20 Catherine Whalen,"Finding Me," Afterimage 29:6 (May/June 2002): 16-17. 21. Skreslet, "Thinking Missiologically," 59-64. 22. Memoirs, 169 23. Helen Frost, Igloo, to Mrs. Stoctroen 3 January 1949. ELCA Region 3 Archives,

St. Paul, Minnesota 24. Memoirs, 144-145 25. Helen Frost Thompson, interview by author, tape recording, Ft. Wayne, IN, 10

July 2006 26. Colin Taylor, ed., The Native Americans· The Indigenous People of North America

(NewYork. Salamander Books, 1991), 204 27. Merwyn Garbarmo and Robert Sasso, Native American Heritage (Prospect

Heights, IL. Waveland Press, 1994), 119. (To be cited as Garbarmo and Sasso, Heritage.) 28. Ernest Burch, Social Life in Northwest Alaska The Structure of the Inupiaq Eskimo

Nations (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2006), 215 (To be cited as Burch, Social Life.)

29 Burch, Social Life 12 30. Memoirs, prologue by Hidy. 31 Skreslet, "Thinking Missiologically," 59—64. 32. Memoirs, 12. 33. Christopher Trott, "The Dialectics of 'Us' and 'Other'. Anghcan Missionary

Photographs of the Inuit," American Review of Canadian Studies (Spring/Summer 2001): 171. (To be cited as Trott, "Dialectics ")

34. Memoirs, i n 35 Memoirs, 16. 36. Helen Frost, Teller, to Reuben Frost, 1 August 1939. Private collection of Helen

Thompson Frost. 37 Memoirs, 14. 38. Helen Frost, Shishmaref, 9 February 1954. ELCA Region 3 Archives, St. Paul,

Minnesota. 39. Memoirs, 13. 40. Helen Frost, Igloo, to WMF and LDR Minneapolis, 5 April 1945. ELCA Region

3 Archives, St. Paul, Minnesota. 41. Trott, "Dialectics," 171 42. Helen Frost,Teller, to Reuben Frost, 1 August 1939. Private collection of Helen

Thompson Frost. 43. Memoirs, 27.


44. Memoirs, 27. 45. Memoirs, 10. 46. Helen Frost, Shishmaref, 9 February 1954. ELCA Region 3 Archives, St. Paul,

Minnesota.

47. Memoirs, 4. 48. Garbarino and Sasso, Heritage, 105-106.

49. Trott, "Dialectics," 171. 50. Memoirs, 64. 51. Trott, "Dialectics," 171.

52. Tex Zeigler, producer. ShishmarefDOK film, circa 1952. Accessed at: www.elca.

org/archives/film/shishmaref.html.

53. Helen Frost,"A Trip to Alaska," The Friend (August, 1929), 21. 54. Helen Frost,"Alaska.. .the State of," LutheranYouth (August 2,1959), 14.

55. Henriette Lund, "Lutheran Eskimo Missions in Alaska Report on a Study,"

Board of Charities of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. October-November 1959, p. 2.

ELCA Region 3 Archives, St. Paul, Minnesota.

56. Helen Frost, Shisfmaref, 9 February 1954. ELCA Region 3 Archives, St. Paul,

Minnesota.

http://www.elca

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