By CIRI Historian Alexandra J. McClanahan

If official status as a village could be measured by a sense of belonging, then the Cook Inlet village of Alexander Creek would be allowed to take its rightful place among other Native villages scattered throughout Alaska.

The people who today are fighting for recognition and land are descendants of the Roberts and Thiele families who moved to the tiny community 27 miles northwest of Anchorage in the late 1930s. They know that Alexander Creek’s place in their hearts can be described in one word: home.

The village is a 25-minute Super Cub flight from Anchorage, and it is located below Mt. Susitna at the mouth of Alexander Creek, which runs into the Big Susitna River.

Alexander Creek’s 42 members were granted official village status by the Bureau of Indian Affairs under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971. However, in the mid-1970s, the Alaska Native Claims Appeals Board issued a decision that there were only 22 Natives enrolled to the village, which meant that the required threshold for village status of 25 residents was not met.

Continuing efforts to gain official village status are Stephanie Thompson, president of Alexander Creek, Inc., and other descendants of the Roberts and Thiele families. They have summarized their case in a booklet entitled, “These Voices Should Be Heard, The Story of Alexander Creek,” and in a video of the same name. Among those featured in the video are George Thiele, Anna Louise (Thiele) Novak, Bertha (Thiele) Tolbert, Thomas Roberts and Donald Roberts. Even now, Thompson gets tears in her eyes every time she replays the video as she listens to her Aunt Anna Louise talk about how one of her six children is buried at Alexander Creek, along with her parents.

All of the elders featured in the video talk about how Alexander Creek is their home, and Bertha Tolbert notes that when she dies, she plans to be buried there with her parents and other relatives.

According to the classic Cook Inlet place names reference book, “Shem Pete’s Alaska,” the site was the first village on the Susitna River marked on the 1839 Wrangell map. Known as “Tuqen Kaq’,” the village was referred to as a “very rich location, probably the best in the Susitna basin.” The book notes that the Dena’ina called it a “rich place” with “salmon, trout, spruce hen, rabbits, beaver, and berries in abundance.”

The descendants of the original Dena’ina inhabitants of the site were decimated by various illnesses that hit the Cook Inlet region in waves after contact with non-Natives, with the one of the worst being the worldwide flu epidemic that coincided with World War I. The few people who were left in the village are believed to have moved to Tyonek after about 1918.

Thompson said the Thiele family, of German, Yup’ik and Athabascan descent, moved into Anchorage from Bethel in the 1930s. Her grandparents, Carl and Marie Anastasia (Clark) Thiele, and their six children then moved to Alexander Creek in 1938. At about the same time, she said the Roberts family, who are of English and Aleut descent, also moved to Alexander Creek.

According to Thompson, as an ANCSA “group,” Alexander Creek, Inc. has so far only been granted 1,686 acres, a pittance compared to the 69,120 acres available to the smallest ANCSA villages. She and other representatives of Alexander Creek, Inc., are pinning their hopes on efforts in Congress by Alaska’s Congressional Delegation. They have gathered letters of support from CIRI, the Alaska Federation of Natives, the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, and the state.

In the meantime, she and her husband continue building a cabin at the village site and continue to take their children there to spend time with other relatives.

The photo used on Alexander Creek, Inc., materials is emblematic of the village’s history. It was taken by Otto Thiele, who is featured in The CIRI Foundation’s book, “Our Stories, Our Lives.”

Eighty-one-year-old Thiele said he took the photo in March 1941 with a small Kodak box camera because it was such a beautiful day. After he removed the snowshoes made by his father, he looked back and was struck by the straight line made by his tracks.

According to Thiele, it was not unusual for him to snowshoe for 50 miles at a stretch, as he did when his brother Reinhold had blood poisoning in his leg and required medical assistance.

“I just put my snowshoes on and went 50 miles,” he said. Thiele had high praise for his father’s workmanship and ingenuity. “Nothing was bought in the store. My father made those snowshoes, and they are very well made. He could do anything. He cured his own birch trees and made his own sled. That sled goes down the trail like a snake. It doesn’t bounce up and down.”

“He was an absolute perfectionist. Everything he built was beautiful,” Thiele said, adding that commercial snowshoes sold today are “junk” that lack lightness and balance of good homemade snowshoes.

For Thompson, the photo’s meaning is strong and simple: “I think about the fact that the snowshoes are pointing the way home.”


Editor’s Note: Otto Thiele Sr., 81, died March 14, 2003, at the Alaska Native Medical Center.