YGSNA Member Holly Guise Presents Poster at 2014 Ford Fellows Conference

October 16, 2014

Story: YGSNA member Holly Miowak Guise (History) advanced to doctoral candidacy in Spring 2014 and has continued her extensive oral history and archival work with Alaska Native communities. She recently presented her initial findings at the 2014 Conference of Ford Fellows at UC Irvine.  As a 2013 predoctoral fellowship recipient, Holly attended the Ford Fellows Conference for the second consecutive year, meeting new, returning, and former Ford fellows. Her poster session, entitled “Confronting World War II Alaskan Indigenous Exclusion, Separation, and Assimilation,” detailed her dissertation project, which aims to establish a synthetic World War II Alaska Native ethnohistory. 

Her project began as her senior undergraduate thesis in Native American Studies at Stanford, advised by Matthew Snipp. It centers Alaska Native oral histories drawn from elders across Alaska who remember World War II.  Recently, Holly returned from a research trip in Juneau where she interviewed elders who married soldiers during a time of Indigenous racial segregation, and she also interviewed two Alaska Native WWII veterans in Metlakatla. Her research goals aim to center Alaska Native voices within Alaskan and US history and to understand how oral histories illuminate the ways that Alaska Native memory shapes contemporary Alaskan Indigenous identity. 

Holly received great feedback from conference attendees, and she is continuing to visit Alaska for research travels.