1. Della Keats was an Inupiaq healer and midwife who grew up and came of age in the Northwest Arctic region of Alaska during the first half of the 20th century.
23 Facts About Della Keats
1. 2.
Della Keats was a tribal member of one of the ten communities in the Kotzebue region, Nautaaq.
3.
Della Keats was born January 15,1907, along the upper Noatak River, in a place named Usulak, at a time before immigrant teachers arrived to the area.
4.
Della Keats began school at Point Hope at the age of six, learning her ABCs in English by writing with a flat rock on slates, not tablets.
5.
Della Keats's father was a handyman who was in charge of facilities, but he took time off for trapping and was a member of a whaling crew.
6.
Young Della was one of six siblings, five surviving into adulthood.
7.
Della Keats's uncle was Mark Mitchell, her brother Marion died, her older brother was Gordon, her oldest sister Isabella, her younger brother Clyde, and younger sister Maneta.
8.
Della Keats lived in a sod house as well as a log house and spent time in tents during hunting and fishing season.
9.
Della Keats's mother sewed with a machine discarded by the school, and Della continued to sew with it in adult life.
10.
Della Keats's bedding was caribou skins but grass mats on wooden beds in the log house.
11.
Della Keats's father made a stove and pipe out of kerosene cans.
12.
Twine was used for fishing and ptarmigan nets, but Della Keats knew about willow bark nets from her mother.
13.
Della Keats's father hunted with a rifle, but he knew and taught her brother to make and to hunt with a bow and arrow.
14.
Della Keats has an early memory of having a pet eagle.
15.
Della Keats reported in her autobiography that she started making mukluks and mittens by age 8 and was making her father's mukluks by age 11.
16.
Della Keats made ugruk bottoms with her own teeth by age 11, and was beginning to sell and trade some items in Kotzebue.
17.
The US Geological Survey Field Party in the summer and spring of 1925 had not been able to hunt successfully, so Della Keats' family shared their food and helped the party to survive.
18.
Della Keats worked as the Postmaster at Noatak Village to support her children.
19.
Della Keats made a living by selling things she sewed and by actively participating in subsistence harvesting with her larger family group.
20.
Della Keats exhibited an interest in anatomy, the circulatory system, and midwifery from a young age.
21.
Della Keats was in private practice in the Kotzebue Sound region through the late 1960s, but she began to travel more in the 1970s, with the support of Native corporations, to share her knowledge more widely.
22.
The healing hands of the Inupiat people like Della Keats was not unique but characteristic of other Alaska Native groups.
23.
Practitioners like Della Keats found a way to integrate traditional Alaska Native medicine with Western medicine in complementary fashion.