Art and Eskimo Power: The Life and Times of Alaskan Howard Rock - Hardcover

Lael Morgan met Howard Rock in Skagway, Alaska in 1965 while she was on assignment for the Juneau Alaska Empire and he was taking the only real vacation he ever had from the Tundra Times. In addition to working for Rock under an Alicia Patterson Fellowship, she traveled the bush as a roving editor for National Geographic, continuing to fill in at the Tundra Times in emergencies.

A talented though moderately successful Eskimo painter, Rock (1911-1976) gained real prominence as founding editor of the Tundra Times and for his instrumental role in the legislation of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act in 1971. Rock's intriguing story merits telling, as it charts the awakening not only of a gifted, sensitive and resilient individual but of his people, while offering a "portrait of the artist" that is suggestively universal. Morgan ( The Aleutians ) weaves an impressive body of research into an effective novelistic format. We follow with interest the progress of a promising but assimilative art career at the University of Washington; Rock's conflict-ridden, alcohol-dependent years in Seattle and, finally, his instinctive return to Alaska in 1961. As Rock's despondency gives way to renewed ethnic pride, Morgan, without editorializing, makes clear the just irony of Rock using his Western education as a weapon in the battle to save aboriginal Alaskans threatened by economic collapse and loss of their land. Illustrations not seen by PW.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.