Collecting The Voice of Brotherhood

Last week one of our Board of Trustees, Dr. Walter A. Soboleff, donated some additional Alaska Native Brotherhood (ANB) papers to SHI Special Collections. (Over the years Dr. Soboleff has donated a large collection of his ANB papers to SHI, some of which can be viewed online by clicking here.) Dr. Soboleff has been involved with the Alaska Native Brotherhood for decades, and even served as its Grand President and in other ranking ANB offices. Of special interest concerning this most recent donation, it contained numerous issues of the ANB & ANS periodical The Voice of Brotherhood. This periodical was produced monthly by ANB and ANS from 1954 to 1976 and is quite rare today. WorldCat, a database of international library holdings, shows that only 12 libraries in the world have partial or complete runs of Voice of Brotherhood (most all of these 12 have incomplete runs). While our collection is not complete either, as we are missing issues from a few years, we are working to collect all the issues produced by ANB & ANS. If you have any copies of Voice of Brotherhood and are interested in donating them to us please contact the archivist.

Regarding the Voice of Brotherhood, this periodical is especially important for researchers because it contains very informative information about historic ANB & ANS activities. The periodical talks about ANB’s efforts to fight for land claims, stop racism, improve conditions for Alaska Natives, and their work on various other important issues. Before 1971 when ANCSA (the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act) was passed and Native corporations were established, ANB regularly served as the voice of Alaska Native people. ANB first hired the lawyers (like James E. Curry and I. E. Weissbrodt) worked on the judicial settlement of Southeast Alaska Native land claims. ANB and ANS truly worked tirelessly for the betterment of Alaskan communities. SHI Special Collections is proud to make available to the public our historic collections of ANB papers and issues of the Voice of Brotherhood.