Yaayuk Bernadette Alvanna-Stimpfle was born in 1955 to a family on King Island. Although she did not grow up on the Bering Sea island, her family made sure to raise her as close to it as possible.

“My generation was the first to not grow up on the island, but we still grew up on the east end of Nome,” she said. “They still spoke the language with us.”

In 1959, the Bureau of Indian Affairs closed the school on King Island and relocated the children to Nome. By 1970, all King Island residents lived in Nome year-round.

But before that, a visitor to the island, a man from Juneau, had taken hundreds of photos of the people and their way of life. Some of these photos appeared in National Geographic in 1954. In 2005, more were published in a book.

Yaayuk says the elders of King Island use these photos to teach her about their community.

“They told me who the names of the people on the island were,” she said. “They explained things to me. They used the pictures.”

A couple from Juneau on King Island

Late last month, Juan Muñoz Jr. pointed to a photograph high on the wall at the Rie Muñoz Gallery in Juneau.

“This is one of my favorite photos – here is a huge ice cave that existed on King Island,” he said.

At the bottom center of the photo is a small man in a fur parka, framed by towering walls of ice.

“They caught seals and walruses and stored their meat in different areas, and different families had their own rooms for meat supplies and blubber,” said Juan Jr. “Of course, if a family didn't have much, they shared it.”

Juan is the son of Rie Muñoz, an artist who painted watercolors of Alaskan life for over 60 years. Soon after Rie first came to Juneau in the early 1950s, she took a job as a teacher with the Bureau of Indian Affairs on King Island.

Her husband, Juan Muñoz Sr., came along. And he brought a camera – a Hasselblad.

“He took hundreds of these wonderful photographs of everyday life on King Island,” said Juan Jr.

Shortly after the Muñozes returned to Juneau, the BIA closed the school.

“A few years later, the whole village moved to Nome,” said Juan Jr. “And so they were able to see and record the last part of this culture – a culture that had existed for tens of thousands of years.”

“A living time capsule”

Juan Jr. had thought that all of his father's King Island photographs were included in the 1954 edition of National Geographic.

“But when my father died in 2005, I went to clean out his locker and found this suitcase full of hundreds of negatives,” he said.

Rie and Juan Jr. then produced a book called “King Island Journal,” which included more photographs as well as letters the couple had sent to their families while living there.

Juan Jr. has now digitized all the photos with the help of his long-time friend and cultural conservationist Jerrick Hope-Lang.

“It's a living time capsule. And those people are still there, you know. There are people connected to it who are still among us,” Hope-Lang said.

This year they donated the prints, negatives and digital copies to the Katirvik Cultural Center in Nome. Juan Jr. says his mother, who died in 2015, would be happy if these memories of her time on the island could be returned to the descendants of the people who lived there.

“It was just a wonderful experience for my mom,” Muñoz said of the year his parents lived on King Island. “And she said she was ready to go back the following year.”

Hope-Lang says he sees the photos as an opportunity to look back at what happened to King Island and the people who had to leave the island.

Yaayuk is now an Inupiaq linguist. She says some of the images show traditions that are no longer widely practiced today – like making rope from rawhide or sewing pants from sealskin – and these photos could be particularly valuable.

She also hopes the photos can help King Island elders remember some parts of their language that have fallen out of use since her people were forced to relocate to Nome, as some words were only used on the island.

“Our language is based on the environment,” she said. “Of course, some of the words were not used on the mainland in the same way as on King Island, where it was steep.”