Columbian Journalism Review

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GOOD MORNING, TUNTUTULIAK!
Beyond "Dance and Dysfunction" in Alaska

Before television arrived in 1977 in Alaska's tiny native villages -- places with names like Tuntutuliak and Kivalina and Noatak -- storytelling and visiting were: the dominant forms of entertainment. Today. in many villages. TV seems ubiquitaus, blasting a constant stream of crime shows and Burger King commercials, And then there's Heartbeat Alaska, the brainchild of Jeanie Greene. an Inupiat with more previous experience in dinner theater than in journalism.

Heartbeat is aggressively unprofessional. In addition to its low technical quality. the show is unabashedly hokey. Greene says that's because it belongs to the native people who record the raw video and watch the edited product, "This is who we are, this is where we live, with no apologies." she says, "I've given us permission to be on the air as ourselves, My stuff is working
because I'm not trying to do it the white way."

In one segment, children from Nulato honor their elders. using such traditional compliments as "You build fish traps and you used to be a great dog musher": in another the camera lingers for minutes on a North Slope elder talking about how the federal government`s dumping of nuclear waste may have harmed the land his village subsists on: in others, villagers use their video cameras to demonstrate traditional food gathering -- berry picking, whaling - and how to make Eskimo ice cream, "If an
elder tells me something, that's good enough for me." Greene says. "That's my dictionary, an elder's voice."

Three years ago Greens had the idea to broadcast amateur video from the villages on the stair's Rural Alaska Television Network. which reaches 247 communities, She started producing the show in 1992, in her apartment: now she has a studio with a small staff. But the result is still as far from mainstream TV journalism as Noatak is from New York.

Rural Alaska TV Network, known as RATNET, has not conducted a popularity survey since the show went on the air, but Heartbeat appears to be hugely popular in rural Alaska. The program is also broadcast across northern Canada and in Greenland. the Russian far east. and Arizona.

The mainstream news media's relationship with indigenous Alaska has never been easy, There are only a handful of native journalists in Alaska, and native leaders often complain that white reporters overemphasize their people's problems without bothering to understand their culture -- or even what constitutes polite behavior in the villages. For example. a white reporter's attempt to make eye contact with an Alaska native interview subject could he taken as an insult in a culture in which keeping eyes downcast is a sign of respect.

Gary Fife. a Muskogee Creek-Cherokee from Oklahoma who seven years ago helped found National Native News, a public radio program now playing on 171 stations, says the failure of the mainstream media to tell natives stories left a void for Heartbeat to fill, He quit National Native NEWS in January over editorial differences with the network and has gone to work with Greene.

Some in the mainstream say heartbeat by telling natives' stories only from their own perspective. takes a shortcut around traditional journalistic standards. Fife disagrees. "All you got from the mainstream media was either dance or dysfunction,'' he says. Greene and Fife insist they will still cover tough stories, like the alcoholism and suicide ravaging rural Alaska. But Fife says such stories. too, must come from the inside: "Our own people have to come to these very harsh realizations themselves."

Charles Wohlforth

Wohlforth is a freelance writer and a city assemblyman who lives in Anchorage.