Anore Jones oral history transcript

              INTERVIEW WITH ANORE JONES

BY ROGER KAYE DECEMBER 16, 2002

MR. KAYE: This is an Oral History interview with Anore Jones who was Anore

Bucknell in 1959. It is conducted in Fairbanks, Alaska by Roger Kaye on December 16,

2002. Anore maybe we can begin with a brief biographical sketch. Maybe you could tell

us where you came from and what brought you to Alaska and what you did here.

MRS. JONES: Actually, I came to Alaska when I was sixteen, after my junior year in

High School in Seattle. I had grown up for six years on a small island, Waldron Island in

the San Juan Islands, which are northwest of Seattle. This island had no ferry, no

electricity and it was actually very pioneer type living. I used horses to farm. I also

milked the cow, raised a garden and fished. I learned a lot of that. I was very tuned in to

the land and farming and subsistence as a child growing up. It gave me a background of

relating very closely to the land, and appreciating it. I went to Alaska a sixteen with an

American Friends Service Committee work camp. It is a silent Quaker’s branch. They

have work camps all over the world. We went to the village of Beaver on the Yukon

River. It’s in the middle of the Yukon Flats. Twenty-five of us, mostly college age and

up lived there for the summer and built thirteen log cabins. It was a relocation for the

village because the river was wearing away their houses. That was my first Alaska

experience. It was light all of the time. It was a new environment with new plants and it

was really exciting. I didn’t really want to go home after that. I went to the University of

Alaska and started in on a special program that let people start without having finished

High School. Celia Hunter was really the person who was instrumental in putting

together that work camp. Hence, she was my contact in Alaska. And she was always

my very dear friend and helped me get started. She was the one. She influenced me a lot,

probably more that any other single person throughout my whole life, or, my time in

Alaska. From that work camp, I didn’t go home. Actually, after the work camp, nine of

us loved it so much we really didn’t want to just jump on a plane and fly back. So with

the help of the villagers in Beaver and their equipment, we put together a log raft and

floated down the Yukon; two hundred and fifty miles to Tanana. We gave the logs to the

Indian Chief there and flew back to Fairbanks. It was an incredible trip to see the

wilderness of Alaska. My start was in a native village learning as fast as I could, in three

months, about the subsistence, food and lifestyle there. Then I was traveling through this

wilderness, the Yukon travels through Rampart. We were camping. My picture of

Alaska was quite different. And again, I didn’t want to go home so I started at the

University in Biology. The next summer, I worked with Celia and Jenny at Camp Denali.

There was a lot of influence there. I was definitely biased on their side in first of all their

camp spirit in trying to let people enjoy the wilderness by traveling there and seeing it.

This was the spirit of Camp Denali. Out of this was growing the budding consciousness

of needing conservation awareness. That’s what they were trying to teach at camp.

They and Les and Terry Garrett and Fred Dean and quite a few others, and us students in

the Biology Lab we’d take our lunches and sit around a table in one room and talk and

visit. That’s how the concept of the Alaska Conservation Society formed and actually

began. There was a lot of very strong feeling about saving the wilderness, and

appreciating it in the first place, and saving it from the atrocities that seemed to be

happening all of the time right close at hand in Alaska. In the news in Alaska and around

the world it was shocking that people has so little sensitivity. And with the energy of the

era, or time, we were indignant. We were incensed. We were highly motivated to take

action and try to do something about it, on whichever front [we could]. Most or many of

us in the group that I was with were also into getting out and camping, hiking and going

mountain climbing and skiing. We were really quite comfortable in getting far out, and

away just like it’s your own backyard. It’s a very different feeling that unfortunately a

lot of people don’t share because when they get away from civilization like roads,

phones, cars and houses they have a fear. It needs to be tamed. It’s not a friendly thing.

We were seeing the wilderness, and we were comfortable in it. We also saw; it’s always

been very important in my life, and continues to be; the cycle, I mean the

interconnectedness of everything. The interconnectedness meaning the soil that grows the

plants that feed the animals, and all of which may feed us. The water cycle and pollution

and the lack of it. The health of the land and the plants and the people and the intense

interconnectedness in a million ways of directions and levels has always been a big theme

of mine. Since Waldron and since everything that’s happened in my life, it’s just very

interconnected. And I think a lot of people miss that sense of how interconnected it is. I

remember a very intense argument with on of my professors about that back in those

days when Biology was taught as studying discreet things as if they were the truth to

themselves, as systems and individuals. I was really arguing that it was worthless to

study this animal unless you studied it in its whole context through time. I mean

everything was related. And, as it turns out, I have to proudly point out; in the forty

years since then, I was right. It has become more and more obvious that it is all

interconnected. I was just able to feel it sooner. That’s what prompted taking action and

trying to do anything possible; stand up and testify, write letters, talk to everybody in

any direction to try and influence saving the health of the wilderness and it’s ecosystems

because of the interconnectedness. And ultimately, it’s all connected to each of us

because the health of this ecosystem we live in determines our health. It is so direct.

Since then, the next summer after that winter when I testified I went up north and worked

on the Cape Thompson Project. That was just a continuation of fighting for preserving

the Arctic Wildlife Range from oil. Way back then, it was obvious; the negative and evil

influence of oil was having in our world. It’s only continued to grow. We were acutely

aware of it long before it was an issue. Even today, it’s continued to be an issue. We

need to get away from the world exploitation, on so many levels. We need to not be

dependent on oil and there are so many other solutions. The next summer I was

employed up north in [sounds like] Temilina north of Point Hope in [unintelligible] in the

Cape Thompson Project.

MR. KAYE: What year was that?

MRS. JONES: It was the summer of 1960. That was just a continuation, only it was a

real battle. It was very serious. I worked with Les and Terry Garret and Les lost his job

over it. Les and I spent the summer talking about the ethics of science. That was some

very acute training I had about the ethics and principals. He lost his job because he

wouldn’t budge on his ethics. In reporting, and doing science for pure science as apposed

to doing paid science, where you were paid to get a certain answer because someone

wanted you to support their theory. That was the lesson of that Project Chariot [?] The

University was paying us to give the answers that they wanted. They didn’t want us to

give them the truth and we were fighting it. The Firecracker Boys, a book, talks about

that. That was the summer of 1960. In 1961 and 1962 during the summers I was in

Colorado. I was assisting Joan Foote, doing her Master’s thesis in the Needles. We

spent six weeks camping out in the Needles. Then I had the opportunity to work with

Dr. John Maher [?] doing an undergraduate research project. They were giving

undergraduates a research project to work on. I studied the downward migration of tree

islands, the wind and Alpine tree islands that grew layers and grew downwind. I did

some climbing. And again, I was pretty well insulated in my own group that was fervent

about ecological issues. But then 1962, during the spring before the second summer in

Colorado six of us climbed Mount McKinley. We did it by skiing through Park for a

week and then climbing up [name] Glacier, up the Carson’s ridge route, which hadn’t

climbed since the glacier had surged. This broke the old trail up there. The trail had been

smooth ice and after the surge it was very broken up glacier, which we were barely able to

find a way through, with all the crevasses from when the glacier dropped. That was

another wonderful experience that took six weeks. Just spending time out in the natural

world, the wilderness, and feeling comfortable and completely at home just like it’s a back

yard. You get a sense of peace, and rightness, and wholeness and satisfaction from being

at home with the land, or in that case, the ice for six weeks. I would wish it for the whole

world. It seems like a human ought to have that by rights, as opposed to the chaos and

political problems that are in the news every day, throughout time it seems like. There is

enough space for us to have that. After that, in 1963 I was really just disgusted with the

way that science dissected everything up and studied it with an agenda

instead of seeing the overall picture. That’s when I was going with Keith. We met

climbing in 1962. And that’s when we dropped out of school and went to Kobuk. We

went up there assisting John Henshaw on a Caribou survey. He was studying the

pressure it took; I forget exactly, but it was something about the Caribou tracks and ice

hardness. It was an obscure piece of science. It was the kind of stuff that was disgusting

as far as the value of it. We went up with him and camped and worked on that. He left

when his project was finished and we just stayed. One day, one month, and one year led

to the next. It wasn’t planned, but it’s just the way life evolved. We built a sod igloo for

the first winter and several winters after that. We lived the winter and did subsistence

living. It was all consuming in the fascination and the effort that it took. The fascination

to learn it and do it and the effort it took. We’d work enough to get the minimal

requirement of food and materials that we needed to live. We also tried to, we were

traveling, sort of playing with the old Eskimo style of, they would move from one food

source to the next. We lived up in Ambler for the winters, where there was fuel. And we

moved down to [sounds like] Coskabu for the summer to work and commercial fish. We

did some spring and fall camps, which again, were following the food. We’d move out of

the winter camp, at Ambler in April by sled and go out and camp over breakup. Then

we’d come back and go to Coskabu for the summer season and return. Then we’d go to a

fall camp for ice fishing. It was a lot of moving and packing and moving and packing.

And traveling, even with our modern gear, it was a lot of work. It was an interesting

lifestyle. Even through the time we were raising two daughters, we were camping and

traveling. It was pretty neat in a lot of ways. Of course the last sixteen years have been

here in southern California. But there was about twenty-three years in the Kobuk.

MR. KAYE: What year did you leave Ambler?

MRS. JONES: We left Ambler in 1986. We had twenty-three years up there, and five

years in Fairbanks.

MR. KAYE: And you live in California now?

MRS. JONES: Right, now we are care taking a ranch in the Sierras with some horses,

cattle and fifty some goats.

MR. KAYE: O.K. well, lets move on to the Arctic Refuge. I am interested in what

motivated people like you who worked to help establish the Refuge. I know that you

offered statements at the Congressional or Senate Hearings here in Fairbanks, as many

others did. The question is; Why did you get involved and was it a motivation to go and

visit the area as a recreationist, or was there some other motivation for you?

MRS. JONES: Again, I guess I jumped from history into sort of the whole thing. I had

hoped, vague hopes perhaps to visit there along with hundreds of other places, but the

real reason was this sense that we have to preserve the natural world for many reasons.

There are two main reasons. One being it’s been running forever, by itself, taking care of

itself, doing just fine and we’d best just leave it do that without messing it up. And the

reason we need this natural world, the wilderness, the land, the ocean, is because it’s our

life support on this Earth. What supports our lives the best is the wisdom of biology

running as it’s done for millennia because it’s doing it right. It is trial and selection and

man cannot improve on that. I guess it is seeing beyond the foolishness that man can fix

things better. We need to protect this because it’s our support. We need to protect the

natural ecosystem. And everything is so interconnected that protecting the Arctic

Wildlife Range is in many ways saving our health and our sanity as humans. That’s

protecting every little bit from being exploited and changed and civilized and having

people that move in and pollute and displace the animals. I guess the pollution has

always been a big thing. I cannot stand the way humanity pollutes the earth that feeds it.

That, in a nutshell, is important.

MR. KAYE: In your testimony, you stated, and I’ll just quote you here you talked

about this golden opportunity to preserve what was described as virgin ecological balance

of this land. You were referring to the proposed Arctic Refuge here. Was ecological

thought on this idea of natural processes prominent in this small group that you had, that

you got together in Fairbanks?

MRS. JONES: It was very strong. We knew it was important. We knew it was right.

And we knew that a lot of people didn’t know that. They needed to know it. I guess

that’s how everyone feels, but we really felt strongly on it.

MR. KAYE: You talked about your disagreement with the kind of biology that previous

type that more or less dissected and was reductionist, rather than looking at the whole,

the interconnectedness like you described. Is that kind of what your focus is, is larger

process in reaction to the more reductionist approach?

MRS. JONES: Right, definitely. Sensing that an ecosystem in order to work has to be

enormous. You can’t take out an acre and save it and say ‘O.K., now we did our part,

let’s pave over the rest’. You need a huge area. People say ‘Oh look at that wasted,

empty land, let’s use it’, but it is doing just what it’s supposed to do. It is recycling

water and growing plants that feed animals, or are harvested. Hopefully an appropriate

amount is harvested. But this gets to the point that I am not sure, I think then, I was

saying that man was the one going in and ruining it, as opposed to all of the rest of the

biology that is there. Since then, after having lived up north in particular, I have a very

different sense about, I would say, the modern civilization as we know it is what has been

changing and wrecking things. Man has been a part of the natural balance since the

beginning of time. The native people that lived before modern contact literally walked all

over every bit of Alaska and the world. They traveled way more than we do today even

with all of our modern help. Because they lived of the land and they traveled constantly.

They had to. They were just like the animals and had to move and be fluid. They were a

piece of the balance that needed to be reckoned with. So, taking man out of the picture;

that’s how we thought in the conservation circles then. Now, I realize that that is not

realistic. Man is a part of the natural balance. It’s just how man interacts that is at

question. The modern technology and thinking given to man today makes him quite

dangerous. Man has always been part of the system.

MR. KAYE: In looking at your testimony here, you offer this variety of reasons, largely

based on natural process for protecting this place. But you don’t even mention

recreation; that it would be a recreational ground. So was your motivation not oriented

towards your use, or potential use?

MRS. JONES: Recreation, I guess I didn’t then and don’t consider recreation like the

word is used because my living and my recreation are not distinguishable. I don’t go do. I

don’t go and take my boat on a trailer and go to a lake and play with it. That’s just not in

my vocabulary. My boat use was because I needed to go from here to there. My

walking, hiking and climbing mountains; that could be recreation, but it didn’t feel like

that. I didn’t use that word. It was more like; “If I am going climbing I am going up there

because I am curious”. I wanted to go up there, or I wanted to spend my time that day

walking. I never thought about it as going to recreate. Most of the time up north in the

Kobuk Valley and Coskabu area in northwest Alaska was what we were doing boating

around, dog sledding around, or whatever, fishing or flying, it wasn’t for recreation. It

was because we were living. The wholeness of life; one the health of life, the health of

growing good food that feeds us and keeping the air and rivers clean. The health of it and

the psychological health, the sanity, the beauty, the peace, the rightness of it the sense of

appropriateness and balance that come from the full ecological circle. The ground

growing plants that feed the animals that give birth that give food that goes back to the

ground. I mean, it’s just that we are biology. We forget it, but we are mammalian biology

basically. And we are part of the cycle very, very deeply. That’s more my sense.

MR. KAYE: Do you think at that time your, I guess, just knowing that a place existed or

would be preserved to maintain those qualities was important, just in knowing it’s there?

MRS. JONES: I think so. I think that’s part of the psychology of it. Knowing that it’s

there. Knowing that it’s working like it’s supposed to work. It’s a resource, and a

treasure. It should be the basis or ground work for everyone, but if we have to put in a

museum, draw lines around it and save a piece, I guess it becomes ever so much more

important to save it.

MR. KAYE: When you folks established the Alaska Conservation Society it was based

largely, I understand, on the notion of setting aside what became the Arctic Refuge; what

was it like, that group you were with? Tell me about some of the people, and what

you’ve described as a youthful idealism and enthusiasm that surrounded this proposal.

MRS. JONES: There was a bunch of students and a bunch of teachers, and some other

people in the community like Jenny and Celia. There was a lot of intense indignation

over wrongs to the precious natural world. There was a lot of sincere in depth talking

about understanding the problem, searching for solutions and realizing that we needed the

help of a lot more people. And there was a lot of problem solving to figure out how we

could help, and what we could do. We needed more people. We needed more

consciousness. There was a lot of idealism, for sure.

MR. KAYE: Who were some of the people? You mentioned Jenny and Celia. Who else?

MRS. JONES: Fred Dean, Jerry [unintelligible], Les and Terry Garrett, were the main

people who I was associated with. There were more because each of them had their

friends. Joan and Bruce Foote, Keith and I. There were quite a few more students but I

can’t remember names of other people.

MR. KAYE: Was George Schaller one of those students?

MRS. JONES: I think I was just after George Schaller’s time. If he was there in 1959, I

wasn’t personally really closely acquainted with him.

MR. KAYE: O. K. He was earlier, in the mid 1950’s.

MRS. JONES: There was David Klein. I am probably forgetting some obvious people,

but those were the people that I most remember, and remember working closely with.

We really did some problem solving and it wasn’t just, it was many, many lunch sessions,

many, many meetings through the years. It gathered energy and it kept growing. The

focus of course was the Arctic Wildlife Range, but there were a lot of other issues that we

had to deal with.

MR. KAYE: Where did you get your information on the Arctic Range? I mean, was it a

movie or books or articles?

MRS. JONES: For me, it was sitting and talking with people who had been there. It was

actually quite abstract for me. A slide show perhaps of those gorgeous pictures of it. It

was very abstract. I have learned a lot since then. There is a lot more than I was aware of

then. My information was mostly from Jenny and Celia. It was all second hand. There

was nothing direct.

MR. KAYE: So you didn’t need to be there yourself to be motivated, or to be concerned

about this place?

MRS. JONES: No, because it was a piece of the wild, natural land that had to be saved.

Whether it was that piece, or northwest Alaska where the Project Chariot was going, or

anywhere, even anywhere on the globe. But we were really into Alaska at that time. It

was what seemed to be most threatened at the moment. It wasn’t because it was that area

in particular. It was because that was the issue of the moment.

MR. KAYE: So the Arctic Refuge represented a bigger concern, you’re saying, that you

folks had?

MRS. JONES: Right.

MR. KAYE: Quoting your testimony again, you made the statement, “Our western

frontier the last century had a similar situation. Its Bison herds were comparable then to

our great Caribou herds of today.” Then you kind of go on, talking about the Bison. It’s

interesting, the comparison that people make between the Caribou and the Bison. Do

you feel that the Caribou became a symbol perhaps of creatures like Bison who had been

lost due to these human qualities of civilization that you described earlier?

MRS. JONES: I think so. I think the Caribou and the Wolf have become the symbols of

the Arctic’s wildness. The Grizzly [has as well]. The Bison were just the only example I

could think of, not being familiar with the African herds and situations there might have

been some good examples there, but the Bison no less than the Indians themselves could

have been.. it was just an example. The interesting thing is what we realized that we at

that era, at that year in Alaskan history were fighting some of the issues that were faced a

century ago on the Plaines. The education, learning and feedback that had happened in

that century gave us a whole new perspective with the same issue up there. In a way,

what happened in the history of our country with the clash of the white and Indian

cultures, by the time that clash came to northwest Alaska there was a powerful backlash

and reevaluating how to do it. It’s just like northwest Alaska got off the best of all

because before it could be consumed and destroyed like the east coast Indians there was

this counter-feeling, this consciousness that had grown out of a century of destroying the

land and its people for the new culture. It was just interesting, and this was sort of the

tail end of that.

MR. KAYE: Were Bison then, representative of the excesses and the problems of the

past that the Caribou symbolized that we could avoid today?

MRS. JONES: Right. Definitely. There seemed to be so many Bison in those days, and

there were. It’s the same; when you’re watching tens of thousands of Caribou, you think,

“My goodness, what doesn’t it matter what I do to fifty?” And that’s the way it goes.

It seems like that’s part of what’s happening. And the feeling then was more of a direct

wrong that had to faced, period, for it’s own sake. On that line, I often think about the

horses standing around, and not being used and being fed. It’s almost atoning for the past

several centuries of all of the horses that died being overworked. If you are thinking of

atoning for the last century’s wrongs; that’s an example. That could be part, but it was

also just in it’s own right.

MR. KAYE: A few times, you said, “preserve for it’s own sake”. Are you suggesting

that perhaps this place had intrinsic value beyond how it might serve ecological needs of

people or other needs? Would it be a value just in itself?

MRS. JONES: Oh yeah!

MR. KAYE: How so?

MRS. JONES: Just not touch it and let it keep going just being what it is, is immensely

valuable. To save, like now, just to save a gene pool that’s not manipulated. Then, it

wasn’t a consciousness. [An issue] It was just to save an example. Because when we

start messing it up, it gets changed so far in two generations, we forget.

MR. KAYE: The last thing in your testimony that I wanted to point out was that you

talk about the frontier. I’ll quote you, “All too often the apparently endless Alaska

frontier will take its place in history along with previous frontiers”. You are almost

bemoaning the fact that some part of the American frontier might be lost here, and that

this place perhaps holds a cultural value. Is that what you might have been thinking?

MRS. JONES: I was always attracted to the native culture. I made a point to really learn

it and appreciate it for itself and it’s own wisdom. That is still what I am working on. I

am watching this frontier, which is where two cultures interact and coincide, watching this

frontier sweep across. It’s always been sad for me, to see the old ways dissolve. They

have a lot of wisdom that we haven’t acknowledged or recognized before it’s gone. It’s

gone before we can ….[words unclear as if Mrs. Jones moves away from phone. Sounds

like “reap the values of it”.]

MR. KAYE: I want to thank you for this interview about the past, Anore. I think we’ll

move on for a second part here on another tape, and talk a little bit about where you are

today in your thinking. Is there anything else you’d like to say about that era, or your

involvement at that time?

MRS. JONES: I guess it just struck me that I am still working on that. I wrote on ethno

botany book the Eskimo’s traditional use of plants in northwest Alaska. Now I am

working on one on fish. And I am still fascinated with what is called traditional ecological

knowledge now, TEK. I am fascinated with this and appreciating it and bemoaning its

loss.