In the early 1950s, Diane Carpenter was a young mother in Kentucky, juggling raising her daughter and studying music while her husband fought overseas. She told the story in a 2023 interview with former KYUK reporter Rhonda McBride.
“And then 10 years later I was chopping wood for our wood stove and running a shortwave radio, operating a power plant, running a trading post and buying furs,” Carpenter said.
Carpenter passed away earlier this year at the age of 92 in Alamos, Mexico.
Before she retired south, Carpenter lived a life embedded in social change and community betterment on the Yukon-Kuskokwim (Y-K) Delta.
Carpenter arrived in Bethel in 1955 seeking a different kind of life from the one she and her husband, Bob, had known in the lower 48. After a year in Ketchikan, following Bob’s placement as a dentist, the family moved to Bethel, seeking a more “authentic” part of the then-territory.
Her memoir, “Winter of the Orange Snow,” chronicles a Bethel that was wilder and still becoming before Alaska was a state. That Bethel, population 900, had the airport on the other side of the Kuskokwim River, requiring a boat ride to and from town. It didn’t have cars or municipal government and largely lacked running water.
But Carpenter also described a Bethel, rich in community and Yup’ik culture, which she said drew her into the place that would become her home for much of her life.
“There was just something about Bethel, about Bethel people, Bethel villages, that we just loved immediately,” Carpenter explained.
Throughout her time in Bethel, Carpenter worked as a dental assistant, high school teacher, university professor, and became mayor as well as the region's unofficial first female bush pilot.
“It was a good time to live there, and it was a good way for me to see how people could live together,” Carpenter said. “People we would never have even met in another world, and they would become our best friends.”
After five years in Bethel, Carpenter and her husband began to feel it growing. On a summer boat adventure on the Kuskokwim, the couple had fallen in love with the upriver village of Stony River, with a population under 100. They decided to move there to homestead in a cabin of their own making and spend more time with their four children.
“And then the people there came to us and said, ‘We want a school. Can you help us get a school?’” Carpenter remembered. “And I was just so shocked their children had to leave the village when they were eight years old and go to Wrangell Institute […] And so I talked to the [Alaska] Department of Education, and they said, ‘Well [...] they'll have to live so they don't cross water.’”
The community of Stony River officially began to reconfigure and move to one side of the river.
“And so we got the town going. We laid out roads and the school for people started moving in,” Carpenter described. “The school flourished there.”
During her 10 years in Stony River, Carpenter ran the weather station, post office, and trading post. She worked at times as a health aide and teacher, and she ran the town’s short wave radio before returning to Bethel with her family in the late 1960s.
Through the 50s, 60s, and 70s, the region began to grow and develop economically.
“It was the terribly rapid social change that changed everything within less than two generations,” Carpenter explained.
Carpenter not only witnessed a boom in resources and social change in those years, she was the reason why much of it happened. She experienced a period when Alaska was coming into statehood, and with that the potential for reimagining what a state could be.
“We felt this tremendous sense of the possibility of creating something that could be better than life had been before,” Carpenter said. “It was wonderful.”
In 1977, Carpenter traveled to the first federally funded women’s rights convention in Houston, Texas. After returning, she helped organize an Alaska Women’s Conference.
In Bethel, Carpenter was part of the team that spearheaded the formation of the Tundra Women’s Coalition, Bethel’s shelter for victims of interpersonal violence. She was instrumental in the formation of what's now the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF)’s Kuskokwim Campus. She kept early meeting records and class syllabi when she became one of the campus’ first professors.
Carpenter was also instrumental in bringing electricity to the Y-K Delta, particularly to the villages outside of Bethel. She helped found the Alaska Village Electric Cooperative, or AVEC, in 1968, which powers rural communities via a network of individual powerhouses.
She later lived in a place called the Pacifica Institute — a compound she and her husband built into a bed and breakfast, restaurant, dental clinic, and conference space. There, she stored her archive before retiring to Alamos, Mexico in the early 2000s.
“I thought this was such a unique time and place that I did not want the people, and the events, and the values, and the way of life just to disappear without people knowing about it,” Carpenter said.
Carpenter saved many documents and notes from this time, artifacts of her own lived experience that she would consult in writing her memoir, which was published in 2023 when Carpenter was 90 years old. Now those artifacts continue to have a legacy.
Former UAF Kuskokwim Campus acting director Linda Curda, along with help from Kuskokwim Consortium Librarian Theresa Quiner, worked with Carpenter and her staff in Alamos before her death to find a permanent home for her documents.
“Only librarians and history nerds will probably understand how thrilling it was to look through the boxes,” Quiner said.
Quiner traveled with Curda to Alamos to help whittle down Carpenter’s boxes of documents packed full of photographs, letters to senators, and resolutions passed by different agencies experiencing the economic boom in Bethel in the 70s.
“Going through the boxes with [Carpenter] while she was still alive was so great because every time we opened a box she would start telling a story,” Quiner remembered. “This woman is a natural storyteller.”
In her memoir, Carpenter wrote about always having people in her house, her living room floor hosting a revolving door of guests passing through to the villages or stranded in a snowstorm.
“You could see someone that you haven't seen for all those years, and they still carry the values within them that they acquired in Bethel,” Carpenter said.
A team at the Alaska Center for Energy and Power at UAF researching the formation of AVEC became involved in funding and housing the archives project after stumbling across her name in a document. Quiner said that the group’s work is an example of the documents already being valuable for research, how she hopes the public archive can be used.
“These aren't just dusty old papers in a box. They're really important historical documents about the history of this region,” Quiner said. “And I'm really excited that the project is finally nearing completion, and we'll have this archive available online.”
Quiner said the hope is that within the next year, the archive of over 600 documents will be fully available online, which can be accessed through the Kuskokwim Consortium Library’s webpage. There, Quiner said, the work and legacy of Diane Carpenter can continue to be a resource for years to come.
