Mystery of 60-year-old Alaska tourist photos is solved

(CNN) — It was an ordinary Friday for Susanna Stevens-Johnson. She woke up in snowy Mountain Village, on the Yukon Delta in Alaska, and checked her Facebook account.

An old school friend had posted a link to a just-published CNN Travel article showcasing beautiful color photos from mid-20th century Alaska under the headline: "Do you know the mystery behind these Alaska travel photos?"

A Yup'ik Alaskan who grew up in and around Mountain Village, Stevens-Johnson was intrigued. She clicked the link and read how German creative director Jennifer Skupin found a box of slides at a Dutch flea market back in 2008, digitized them, and discovered stunning shots taken across the then-newly inaugurated US state.

Skupin tried to identify people in the photos at the time, but had no luck. Over a decade later, she'd rediscovered the slides languishing in her closet.

Now, she hoped that by sharing the pictures with CNN, people in the images might recognize themselves or the photographer, who she reckoned was a Dutch traveler. Skupin asked anyone with information to comment on a Google Drive containing 200 photos of people, places and scenes.

After a quick glance through the gallery, Stevens-Johnson moved her attention to a sewing project, lining a down jacket with velveteen for her granddaughter.

It was only later, when her husband Peter came home and she told him about the article, that curiosity prompted her to take another look.

Stevens-Johnson clicked through the images, marveling as she recognized landscapes, old classmates, neighbors and friends. Many of the people in the photos are Yup'ik, part of Alaska's indigenous community.

Then she saw it. Her sister Marcia, instantly recognizable. Stevens-Johnson took a sharp intake of breath.

"I said, 'Well if she's in the picture, I've got to be in there somewhere.'"

She continued clicking through. Sure enough, two photos later, there she was -- pictured alongside Marcia, two other childhood friends, Irene Moses and Augusta Alstrom-Lang, and an older family friend called Agnes Eirvak-Devlin.

"I practically jumped off the couch and I exclaimed to Peter, 'This is me!' And I showed him the photo and he said, 'Yeah, that is you.' So, I was really excited."

Clicking back to the previous image, Stevens-Johnson realized she was also in that first photo with Marcia. Her head is bowed, so she's less immediately identifiable.

"I'm probably playing with the tip of my scarf because I was very shy then and I didn't like being photographed."

Stevens-Johnson, a graduate of the University of Alaska who taught elementary school for over three decades, was around 10 years old when these two photos were taken. She'll be 71 this year.

She sent the photo to her family and to Augusta Alstrom-Lang's daughter, and then spent hours combing through the Google Drive, adding comments and relishing this unexpected trip through time.

"I was so elated all weekend," she tells CNN Travel.

That Sunday marked the one-year anniversary of Stevens-Johnsons' mother's death, but the discovery of the photographs helped her through the day.

"It just kind of made the whole weekend real happy."

Capturing a moment

Susanna Stevens-Johnson, pictured center today, recognized herself and her sister Marcia Pete in the rediscovered photos.

Susanna Stevens-Johnson/Jennifer Skupin

Jennifer Skupin's Google Drive was inundated with messages within hours after the CNN story publishing.

"I believe that's my aunt," read one comment. "That's my grandmother," said another.

Walkie Charles, an associate professor of Yup'ik, the language of the Yup'ik people, at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, stumbled across the photos on Facebook.

The 63-year-old is pictured in the collection aged 3, wearing a check jacket, alongside his sister, Mary Keyes.

The location of the photo, scrawled on the back of the slide, is pinpointed as Kwiguk, a village that Charles says was relocated downriver in 1964 due to threat of erosion, becoming Emmonak.

Clicking through the Google Drive was an emotional experience for Charles, as he saw faces of people who have since passed away.

One photo in particular had a special resonance. He recognized his brother, who died young in 1973, as a boy, standing beside a dog sled with a bucket of snow, ready to melt for household cleaning and bathing.

"We don't have any photos of my brother when he was little, or even when he was older," says Charles. "And so that captured our hearts so, so dearly."

Charles was speaking to CNN Travel from his office at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Also on the video call was Jennifer Skupin, finder of the photos.

"Jennifer, it was meant to be that you found this," says Charles. "Little did you know that that story that was contained in these slides would be so emotionally charged, they would shake a part of the world that you have never even heard of."

The photos, says Charles, offer the younger generation of Yup'ik people a glimpse of their communities in days past. Color photography was rare in the 1950s and 60s and the photographs are high quality.

"You could almost touch these people," says Charles.

Alaska became a state in 1959. The photos in the collection were taken on the cusp of, and just after, statehood.

Charles says another important detail regarding the photos' context is the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, which took a deadly toll on Alaska's rural villages.

"My generation are the children of the survivors," says Charles. His own grandparents, on both sides, died during the outbreak.

The community was also impacted by Tuberculosis in the mid-20th century. Some of the photos appear to show a drive for TB testing and vaccinations.

Walkie Charles found a photo of him and his sister in the collection.

JR Anchetta, University of Alaska Fairbanks/Jennifer Skupin

"These photos present the resilience of the survivors and the hope for the new generation to move forward with a new vision, new sense of life, and a lust for challenge," says Charles.

"Most of the stories/histories were taken away by the pandemic and TB epidemic, but these photos show the beginning of a new story."

In Yup'ik culture, when someone in the community dies, their soul is passed on to a recently born baby. This newborn also takes the name of the deceased elder.

This adds another layer of meaning to the photographs for many, says Charles.

"For this generation, to see those older photos of older people and say, 'I'm named after this person, I have never had a photo, I've never seen a photo of this person.' It's finally connecting."

Charles says he recognizes some 100 people in the slides, around half of whom have since died. He's commented on many of the photos on Skupin's Google Drive with names, information and locations.

The mid-1970s were a turning point in Alaska's recognition of its indigenous people, language and culture, says Charles.

During his career, Charles worked as a teacher, elementary education curriculum writer and now works at the University of Alaska, where he received his PhD.

"I head the Yup'ik Eskimo program," he says. "It's the only bachelor's degree program in the world in an indigenous language."

"And it all started in Kwiguk. It all started in in Emmonak. And it all started from those photos."