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2004.05.28 JUNEAU EMPIRE :
Master carver dies at 83
Wallace's Native carvings appear in museums, collections across the
country
Friday, May 28, 2004
By KORRY KEEKER
JUNEAU EMPIRE
Tlingit master carver and fisherman Amos Wallace was
remembered by family and friends Thursday as a gentle and generous
father, a devout Orthodox Christian, an inventive artist and idea man and
a champion of Native rights through his work with the Alaska Native
Brotherhood.
Wallace, 83, was pronounced dead at approximately 1 a.m. Thursday
morning at Bartlett Regional Hospital. He broke his hip in January and
was staying at Wildflower Court since then.
"Amos was one of the artists that was really doing art through
the middle of the 20th century and keeping Tlingit art alive to the
present day," said Steve Henrikson, a curator at the Alaska State
Museum. "There really weren't that many people doing the kind of
work he was doing. I think he deserves a lot of credit for preserving the
living link between the old culture and the contemporary
culture."
Wallace's Tlingit name was Jeet Yaaw Dustaa of the Duk dein taan
clan of the Sockeye house of Glacier Bay and Hoonah by way of Lituya
Bay.
"His last words were 'Take care of mama,'" said his son,
Brian Wallace, a Juneau Empire photographer. He visited with his father
shortly after 8 p.m. Wednesday evening.
"Mama" is Dorothy Wallace, Amos' wife of 44
years.
A memorial service will be held for Wallace at 7 p.m. Monday, May
31, at the Alaska Native Brotherhood Hall. Well-wishers can send flowers
to ANB Hall. Wallace was a member of the Alaska Native Brotherhood since
he was a young man and he served three times as the group's president. He
held every office with the ANB. His final title was grand president
emeritus.
"His main thing was that he fought for civil rights his entire
life through the ANB Hall," Brian Wallace said.
Longtime friend Richard Stitt, the Tlingit and Haida
self-governance coordinator and a member of the ANB Grand Camp executive
committee, met Wallace soon after moving to Juneau from Anchorage in
1964. Wallace was the local ANB camp president
"He was easy to get along with and a wonderful fellow,"
Stitt said. "He was a real dedicated ANB member and always worked
strenuously for the organization. From his work and his carving and such,
he certainly developed a great reputation that extended quite
far."
A funeral service will be held for Wallace at 1 or 2 p.m. Tuesday,
June 1, at the St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church. The exact time will
be announced soon.
Wallace was a lifetime member of the church, where he was a reader,
the church council president, the treasurer, the choir director and a
caretaker of the building.
Nora and Richard Dauenhauer lived in the house next door to Wallace
on North Douglas Highway for 25 years. Richard and Wallace were both
readers at the church.
"He was one of the real movers and shakers, and he just kept
the place going," Richard Dauenhauer said. "He had a very quiet
tenor voice. He did all kinds of carpentry. I have pictures of him
climbing around the rafters and climbing around the roof with a
paintbrush. And to the very end, he was still there when he could make
it."
"We're going to miss him," Nora Dauenhauer said. "He
was very nice, very laid back and gentle, soft spoken."
Wallace is also survived by a sister, Betty Govina of Juneau; four
sons, Brian, Roger Jack of Seattle, Kenny Jack of Cordova, Darrell Jack
of Juneau; three daughters, Beverly Brisco of Wichita Falls, Texas, and
Marjorie Peters of Anchorage; a daughter from a previous marriage, Anna
Beaver of Washington, D.C.; many grandchildren and great-grandchildren,
and numerous cousins and other relatives.
Three daughters, Lois Jack, Kathleen Jack and Merle Jack, died
previously.
"He was talking about going fishing and going home earlier
this week," Brian Wallace said. "You name the fishing, he did
it."
Wallace was born to Anna and Frank Thomas at the government
hospital in Juneau on Nov. 28, 1920. His family lived in Hoonah and they
returned there after his birth. They moved to Juneau in 1926.
Wallace had two sisters who died at a very young age. He also had
an older brother, Lincoln. His father died when he was a young boy. Years
later, his mother remarried to Frank Wallace.
Wallace was 7 when Lincoln taught him to carve. They sharpened
their own tools out of steel and carved small totems. Amos and Lincoln
attended the equivalent of grade school at the Pius X Mission, a Catholic
school in Skagway. They went to the Wrangell Institute boarding school in
Wrangell.
Dauenhauer's cousin, Horace Marks, studied and carved with Wallace
at Wrangell.
"When (Wallace) went to school he didn't lose his ability to
speak Tlingit," Dauenhauer said.
Wallace joined the U.S. Army early in 1942, after the Japanese
bombing of Pearl Harbor, and was shipped to the Aleutians. He was serving
as a mate on a boat in Dutch Harbor one night when he was swept
overboard.
"He was just swimming in this raging torrent in Dutch Harbor
during the winter storm, and someone noticed that he wasn't on the
boat," Brian Wallace said. "And they did a big U-turn on the
boat and lo and behold they came right up to him. They said he was in the
water for 15 minutes. This guy, he doesn't remember a thing about him
except he was a big Swede, grabbed a pole and stuck it down there and
said something like, 'You only have one shot of this. Grab hold of this
or we're going to lose you.' He grabbed the pole so hard they had to saw
it off. He had extreme hypothermia that put him in the hospital for six
months."
After the war, Wallace returned to Juneau. He and Lincoln made
small poles - 6 to 8 inches or 10 to 12 - and eventually traveled to
Seattle to try to sell their work to shopkeepers. They met one who was
particularly impressed and spent a year in Seattle, then 11 years in
Portland, Ore., where they carved for a wholesaler.
Wallace traveled to Southeast to fish in the summer of 1958. He
heard that a department store executive in Brooklyn wanted a totem pole
carved in the store for eventual display in the Brooklyn Children's
Museum. He carved a 14-foot pole with a Northwest Coast-designed Statue
of Liberty at the top. That summer, Jack Parr interviewed him on
"The Tonight Show." The New York Daily News and Herald Tribune
profiled his work.
"I was the first national television Tlingit star,"
Wallace told the Empire in 2001.
On Jan. 15, 1960, Wallace married Dorothy Jack in Vancouver, Wash.
He had met her in Juneau, and he adopted all of her kids. That summer,
Walt Disney invited him to carve a totem pole in "Indianland,"
a display in Disneyland. The state of Oregon also asked him to carve a
pole for Oregon's centennial.
Wallace carved and spoke in schools in Minnesota and Wisconsin in
the late 1950s and early 1960s. He has also carved poles for museums in
Cincinnati, Toronto and Boston.
In 1963, he turned down a request to build a pole for the
University of Alaska Fairbanks. But the university asked again the next
year, and he agreed, constructing a 49-foot high pole for the campus. He
created two more poles in Fairbanks in 1967 for Alaskaland Park.
According to an Empire story, one of the poles slipped into the Chena
River during a flood. Wallace and some friends jumped in a skiff and
retrieved the runaway art from the water.
"Today you can walk into any storefront on Franklin Street and
find handmade Alaska Native art," Henrikson said. "We owe a
debt of gratitude to people who, in spite of whatever pressure they might
have been under, persevered and really kept it alive until the next
generation could take off with it."
In the mid-1960s, Wallace began teaching himself to engrave silver.
He quickly became adept at the medium, and his work sold in retail
shops.
"Once I got started it was great," Wallace told the
Empire in 2001. "It was fun. I got a mill - you could roll a coin
through it and it would flatten it, then I could cut it to shape. I could
get two bracelets out of a silver dollar."
Wallace still has two poles in the Federal Building, one at the
Juneau-Douglas City Museum, one at the Mendenhall Glacier Visitors Center
and untold numbers in private collections around Southeast and the
world.
Wallace was a heavy equipment operator during work on the
Trans-Alaska pipeline. He created an 8-by-22-foot wall panel for the
Alaska Marine Highway terminal in Bellingham, Wash. And he made a set of
panels for the Juneau-Douglas High School commons in the mid-1980s.
Wallace carved his last large pole in the late-1970s for a collector in
Denver.
Wallace also served on the board of the Alaska Native Arts and
Craft Association and the Douglas Indian Association.
* Korry Keeker can be reached
at
korry.keeker@....
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