50 Year Friendship Captured in UAF Archive
September 2007

On a hot summer day in 1940, the phone rang at the home of Dr. Samuel Berenberg in Greenbelt, Maryland. Dr. Berenberg, a public health doctor for the US government, had a brief conversation. He then called out to his wife, sitting in the backyard, “Would you like to go and live on St. Paul Island in the Bering Sea?” Fredericka Martin replied, “Absolutely, it will be much cooler there!”

It took a year for the government paperwork to be put in order so Fredericka and her husband could travel to St. Paul. They arrived on the island during the summer of 1941. Fredericka and her husband Samuel were appalled at the conditions they found on the Island— poverty, oppression and poor medical care among them. One day, Dr. Berenburg, a pediatrician, returned home and told his wife, “I have found the girl we will take back to New York City with us!”

The child he met was Alexandra “Alice” Gromoff Tu. Alice was 15 and suffering from Tuberculosis, which had settled in her leg.

During their year on St. Paul, Fredericka gave birth to a daughter, Tobyanne Berenburg. Their stay was to last only a year due to the evacuation of the island in 1942. However, it provided Fredericka with many lasting impressions. The Berenburgs accompanied the people of St. Paul to Wrangell during the evacuation of the Island. Once they arrived in Wrangell, Fredericka and her family departed and returned to New York City. Alice Tu was left behind to study at the Wrangell Academy.

Fredericka Martin had already earned a reputation as an advocate for social causes well before her arrival in St. Paul. She was a dedicated anti-fascist and had served as a head nurse establishing hospitals on the front line during the Spanish Civil War. Upon her return to New York, Fredericka began her fierce advocacy for the Aleut people. She wrote articles describing the Pribilof struggle and documented her observations from living on St. Paul in a book titled "The Wind is No River". Because the book was based on non-fiction, her publisher advised her to fictionalize the story to make it publishable. The results of her efforts were "The Hunting of the Silver Fleece".

She is also credited with editing the Aleut dictionary, The Aleut Language: The Elements of Aleut Grammar with a Dictionary in Two Parts Containing Basic Vocabularies of Aleut and English.

Fredericka took the Pribilof story to many native American rights groups: The National Congress of American Indians, the President’s Advisory Commission on Indian Rights, the Navajo Institute, the United Nations Ad Hoc Committee on Slavery, the International Labor Organization, and many others. The National Congress of American Indians took a leading role in organizing the protest against inequities on the Pribilofs. In 1947, the story captured the attention of two prominent Washington, D.C. attorneys - Curry and Cohen. Felix Cohen was considered the foremost authority on Indian law in the nation and had been the major architect of the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act.

Alice Tu traveled to New York to live with Fredericka during her senior year at Wrangell Academy. “As you can imagine, it was a real culture shock for a girl from the Pribilofs!” she said. Over the next few years she studied at several colleges. Her first year was spent at Babcock College in upstate New York, where Fredericka’s own mother was a housemother. Later, while studying at NYU, she was an offi cer for the Girl’s Service Club, which had over 200 members.

One summer, Alice completed an internship with Dr. John Harrington, a linguist from the Smithsonian. She collaborated with Dr. Harrington to document and capture the Aleut language and culture. She also assisted a PhD candidate at Columbia University with his research on the Aleuts. Although Alice never completed a formal degree, she leveraged her background and education to continue to teach the native ways.

After nine and a half years in New York, she returned to Alaska. She lived and studied in St. Paul and Unalaska until 1965 when she moved to Seattle.

Over the years, Alice has taught in the Indian Heritage program, the native mental health programs and, most recently, in the United Indians of all Tribes Head Start program.

Alice and “Freddy” continued their friendship until Fredericka’s death in 1992. This friendship was captured in correspondence between the two. Fredericka continued to write letters of support and references for Alice over the years.

There are two archives for Fredericka’s papers. NYU houses Fredericka’s papers from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. The University of Alaska at Fairbanks houses her collection of work on the Aleuts. The latest edition to these archives will be the letters between Alice and Fredericka. Alice and Fredericka’s correspondence spans five decades, from the 1940’s until the late 1980’s. “The correspondence is signifi cant,” says Tobyanne Berenberg, “because it captures the conditions and challenges for the Aleuts.”

This summer, Fredericka’s daughter, Tobyanne Berenburg, traveled to St. Paul with her mother’s ashes. “It was not a direct request,”her daughter said. “She never dreamed it would be possible. However, she cared very deeply about the Aleuts and St. Paul was a place very close to her heart.”