Della Keats (Putyuk) was an Inupiaq healer and midwife who grew up and came of age in the Northwest Arctic region of Alaska during the first half of the 20th century.
This was a time of rapid shifts, and Della Keats and her family lived a traditional subsistence lifestyle while gradually incorporating new materials and entering into trade with a cash economy.
[1] Della Keats (Putyuk) was born January 15, 1907, along the upper Noatak River, in a place named Usulak, at a time before immigrant teachers arrived to the area.
It was a treeless tundra, and her family lived in a sod house with ugruk skin windows and a door of brown bear hide.
She began school at Point Hope at the age of six, learning her ABCs in English by writing with a flat rock on slates, not tablets.
[1] Adapted to seasonal cycles, the family ate from the land and waters of the region: caribou, grayling, trout, sheefish, whitefish, ptarmigan, marmot, muskrat, ducks, beluga.
After the school season ended in April, the family would travel by dog team to the coast to hunt seal, camping along Rabbit Creek in tents, with other people from the region.
They traveled to Kotzebue in July/August to trade seal skins for oil and ammunition and returned to the Noatak River in late August/September to fish for salmon with cotton twine seine nets.
[1] According to the editors of her autobiography, she had married a reindeer herder when she was 16 but was the sole parent and provider of three children in her 20s—Perry, Priscilla, and Sylvester—who ranged in age from 3-9 in 1943.
[1] Residents of the Kotzebue Sound region recognized her as a general medical practitioner, and she served both white and Inupiat patients and delivered lectures and health education across cultures.
She was in private practice in the Kotzebue Sound region through the late 1960s, but she began to travel more in the 1970s, with the support of Native corporations, to share her knowledge more widely.
[6] Massage and cold and heat helped with diagnosis and treatment of a range of ailments—liver, stomach, constipation, sprains, dislocations, fractures—and could also be used to turn babies in utero or move an umbilical cord[4][6] Due to a history of disease epidemics, the introduction of refined foods, and a lingering distrust from experimental procedures, it was a slow process to establish mutual respect and trust.
[4] A member of the University of Alaska Nursing Faculty, Tina DeLapp, has written about the contributions of Della Keats in an article titled, "American Eskimos: The Yup’ik and Inupiat.
The Della Keats Healing Hands Award is bestowed upon a tribal healer or health care provider and announced at the annual Alaska Federation of Natives that convenes in October each year.