SITKA, ALASKA
Sings:
Children we of the land and sea
That is close to the polar star.
We’re Native-born, we do not scorn
To be just what we are.
Alaska’s sons and daughters we
Good citizens we wish to be.
That’s why we’re here, you see.
Hail to Old SJS…

Nancy Yaw Davis – on an average day – is energetic, enterprising, even joyful. But today she is downright ebullient. When she learned that Sheldon Jackson was being handed over to the Sitka Fine Arts Camp, she says she marched down the street singing the Sheldon Jackson Fight Song, to visit 95-year-old alum Florence Donnelly.

 …Rah, rah, rah
Hail to Old SJS!

“Who wrote that song?”
“I haven’t a clue. It was just something we were raised with. And I would go to different parts of Alaska when I had my career up north, and if there was anybody in town who had gone to SJ we would reminisce about some key teachers and the Sitka fight song. There are a lot of good memories throughout this state.”

Yaw Davis didn’t attend Sheldon Jackson, but she grew up there, and witnessed the early stages of the school’s transition to college. She left Sitka in 1952 for her own career in academic anthropology and consulting. Her return to Sitka in retirement more or less coincided with the closure of the college. Since then she’s been a relentless agitator – not for a return to the past, but for an energetic push to the future.

“It’s been a tortuous time for a lot of us. Now, with this new decade and this announcement, we have the opportunity to rally creatively around a gifted leader, a seasoned leader, and around the ideas of arts, the sciences, the humanities. The richness of our cultural diversity right here in town and throughout this state. I was touched to tears when I read it in the paper yesterday.”

Although the new Sheldon Jackson will physically resemble the historic institution, the school’s roots in Alaska Native education will be severed. Yaw Davis says that transition has long been underway, and she’s excited by the chance to redefine the campus for all students.

“No, I think that was changed in the early fifties. I think it’s a shared humanity we have now, a shared intelligence, a shared future. We can relish those differences, appreciate them, validate them, celebrate them! But it is a shared humanity ultimately, and a shared responsibility that we have here in Sitka.”

Sheldon Jackson himself was a missionary, the first General Agent of Education in the territory. Yaw Davis says she’s personally felt alienated from the Presbyterian Church for some time. The college has been out of formal Presbyterian control since the mid-seventies. Yaw Davis believes now is the time to move on spiritually as well.

 “I’ve felt quite strongly for some time – and I’m so excited by something positive and creative happening out there now – I’ve felt that Sheldon Jackson was a late 19th and early 20th century person, and that the name Sheldon Jackson had a missionary context that was no longer appropriate in the 21st century. Acknowledging that there was a quality of passion – of compassion – and a belief (this is what I saw in the old Sheldon Jackson and that I see in their descendents) that there is respect for the rigor of an education.”

Nancy Yaw Davis is the daughter of former Sheldon Jackson College president Les Yaw.
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