In 1962, Tom Snapp and Howard Rock started a modest statewide newspaper, Tundra Times, which would prove central to the run-up and then passage nine years later of the largest Native American land claims in U.S. history.

The Alaska Press Club board in early December voted to re-name its annual First Amendment Award after these two courageous newspapermen.

The late Tom Snapp, a Korean War veteran and native of Virginia who would never lose his lilting southern drawl, first came to Alaska to visit his sister with no plans to stay. As a journalist, Snapp took a keen interest in Alaska, including Native issues. The late Howard Weyahok Rock grew up in the remote Inupiaq Eskimo village of Point Hope in Northwest Arctic Alaska, located a couple hundred miles up the coast from Kotzebue. An Army Air Force veteran, Rock served in North Africa during World War II.

Rock was a lifelong artist who knew little about journalism when he and Snapp launched Tundra Times in Fairbanks in the early 1960s. But only if Rock would be the paper's editor and publisher, said Massachusetts philanthropist Dr. Henry S. Forbes, a descendent of American author Ralph Waldo Emerson, would Forbes capitalize the project.

Snapp, Rock Joined Forces

Snapp agreed to train Rock in newspaper publishing. The pair created the first issue of Tundra Times after setting up shop in Snapp's sister's trailer in Alaska's small, rough-hewn Interior city of Fairbanks, where the paper would publish throughout Rock's editorship but eventually move to Anchorage.

In the fight for passage in the U.S. Congress of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, Tundra Times grew into a potent and unifying voice for Alaska Natives. Rock's little newspaper picked up enormous political clout in the 1960s throughout Alaska and in Washington, DC.

ANCSA recognized Native land claims and made way for construction of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez. Signed into law by President Richard Nixon on Dec. 18, 1971, ANCSA granted Alaska's Indians, Eskimos and Aleuts title to 44 million acres of land. For lands lost in the settlement, Natives received $962.5 million to capitalize some 206 village corporations and 13 Native regional corporations, which today continue to wield considerable social and economic influence in Alaska.

Neither Snapp nor Rock ever made much money for themselves in the journalism profession. Indeed, they were lucky to cover living expenses-if that-as they dedicated themselves to shoe-leather, against-the-grain journalism in an era when reporters still filed their stories using manual typewriters. The age of computer and Internet ubiquity, round-the-clock news cycles, and a media-saturated society was still decades away in Alaska as elsewhere in the 1960s, 1970s, and even into the 1980s.

 

Making History

The two journalists had history on their side. They worked feverishly in their craft at a time of dramatic social and economic change in Alaska and nationwide. That afforded them the opportunity to shape, not just report on, major events in Alaska history.

Fearlessly, they advanced the values so crucial to a functioning democracy and more equal society, particularly freedom of the press and freedom of speech, two of the five freedoms guaranteed in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Lael Morgan worked for Rock and wrote a short history of Tundra Times as a 1972 Alicia Patterson Foundation fellow.