[Interview of Margaret Pauline Stenson on serving with her husband as a teacher in the American Indian Native Service in the Alaskan territory during WWII].

Margaret Pauline Stenson talks about serving with her husband as a teacher in the American Indian Native Service in the Alaskan territory beginning in 1933 and later at a Navajo reservation in the southwest. Stenson talks about how the couple was first assigned to teach at an Eskimo village on an island off the Seward Peninsula, returned to the University of Michigan in 1937 to complete their graduate degrees and then went back to Alaska to work in 1938. She recalls learning about the start of World War Two and the Japanese invasion of the Aleutian Islands over the radio, describes the native school where she taught, war security measures, receiving supplies via freighter once per year, the severe cold, cooking reindeer meat, her class sizes, and her fellow teachers. Stenson says that the only real adjustment she had to make when she and her husband finally returned to the lower 48 was remembering how to drive a car. Stenson is interviewed by Elsie Hornbacher.

Interviewee, Margaret Pauline Stenson ; interviewer, Elsie Hornbacher.

Recorded 1984 February 10