Alaska’s Oldest College Is an Island in Sea of Education

Tim Sagoonick’s latest package from home contained dried fish, reindeer sausage and raw whale meat.

For Sagoonick, 18, a freshman at Sheldon Jackson College here in Sitka, home is Shaktoolik, a tiny Eskimo village on the Bering Sea’s Norton Sound, nearly 2,000 miles away.

More than half of the 280 full-time students at Sheldon Jackson College, Alaska’s oldest educational institution, are Eskimos and Indians from small remote villages scattered across the nation’s largest state.

For Sagoonick, the piece de resistance of his “care” package was muktuk, as Eskimos call raw whale meat. “Muktuk is the main part of our diet in Shaktoolik,” he explains.

“All Eskimo students here at Sheldon Jackson have muktuk air mailed to them by their families at various times during the year. It keeps our spirits up, our stomachs happy.”

Sagoonick’s father and grandfather are reindeer herders in his village of 200 Eskimos. They graze 1,800 reindeer on lichen. “We round up the animals on snow machines and sell the meat, hide and antlers. Our village has some of the severest weather on earth-- howling winds off the Bering Sea and blizzards. Fifty below zero happens all the time in winter,” Sagoonick says.

The young man was one of three graduates of Shaktoolik High School last year. He is the first in his family to go to college, where he is working toward a degree in education so he can return to his village as a teacher.

Few outside Alaska know of Sheldon Jackson College, which was founded in 1878 in the old Russian barracks in Sitka, 11 years after Russia sold Alaska to America for $7.2 million (less than two cents an acre). Sitka was the capital of Russian America from 1808 to 1867.

Sheldon Jackson was a Presbyterian minister who lived from 1834 to 1909. He introduced reindeer into Alaska from Siberia as a food source for isolated native villages.

But he was also Alaska’s first commissioner of education. In 1878, he launched the school that bears his name. At first it was a vocational school, later an elementary school and a high school. In 1944, it began offering college courses, and finally in 1967, it became a full-fledged junior college.

During the past three years, the 289-acre campus, with its cedar buildings of English Tudor-style architecture, has made a transition to a four-year college offering Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Science degrees. The school continues to have close ties to the Presbyterian Church, which provides 20% of its $4.3 million annual budget.

Sheldon Jackson has a faculty of 35, with a student-faculty ratio of 9 to 1. Tuition, room and board is $8,600 a year, with 90% of the students receiving some form of financial aid and 20% on full scholarship for tuition and expenses. In the last five years, there has been $11 million of new construction on campus.

This is one of the most out-of-the-way colleges in the United States. Located on Baranof Island in Southeast Alaska, it is accessible only by plane or boat. There are only 18 miles of road on the densely forested, mountainous, 100-mile-long, 30-mile-wide island, which has a population of 10,000; of those, 8,000 live in Sitka.

The school has provided teachers for remote native villages ever since its establishment. Now, however, the teachers are getting college degrees. In the past, they taught after two years of college education, before that with only high school education, and many years ago, they became teachers after completing elementary school.

“Sheldon Jackson is no longer a natives-only school. Today, nearly half the students are not Indian or Eskimo, and one-fourth are from the Lower 48 States,” says the school’s eighth president, Michael Kaelke, 50.

“The college has made a transition to a multicultural institution in the past few years. We feel it is important that young people coming from remote villages are introduced to, and have personal contact with, men and women their age from other backgrounds. Eskimos and Indians from the tiny villages are rooming with, and getting to know students from, other parts of Alaska, from other states like New York, Massachusetts, California and Washington, who come from large schools and from large cities.”

Kaelke said Eskimo and Indian students for the most part major in education or in business administration to return to their villages to teach, or to work for the government or for Alaska native corporations.

Most of the non-natives attend Sheldon Jackson because of its excellent natural resources programs, majoring in aquatic resources or marine sciences. The school boasts a multimillion-dollar hatchery that incubates 16 million salmon eggs each year and releases them as “fry” in spring. It is the largest such facility on any campus in the United States.

“Many students from the Lower 48 are attracted to Sheldon Jackson because of the Alaska adventure, the Alaska mystique, the uniqueness of its student body and remoteness of the campus,” said Kaelke.

Bald eagles soar over the school throughout the year. Bears roam the wilderness in the woods adjacent to classroom buildings. Humpback and killer whales, sea lions, seals and porpoises swim in the waters of the Pacific Ocean, a stone’s throw from the school. Towering mountains form a backdrop.

It was here in a cottage on the school grounds that James Michener worked as author-in-residence from 1985 to 1987 while researching and writing his novel “Alaska.”

Indian and Eskimo students fish in the ocean, in a fleet of boats owned by the school, for giant halibut weighing 80 pounds and more. They hunt in the nearby woods for game. They cook the fish and meat in the school kitchen, from time to time, to make the college feel more like home.

“We are more relaxed here than we would be if we went to a larger school in a city,” said Anita Andrews, 20, an Eskimo from Mountain Village, 1,500 miles to the north on the Yukon River. “For us, Sitka is a big city.

“We are more comfortable being with others from small villages who know and understand our culture, yet at the same time, we are getting to know people of other cultures from Alaska and the Lower 48 who also attend Sheldon Jackson.”