Dr. Alf Walle

Walle, who has worked as a trade journal editor and taught at several colleges and universities, describes his style as eclectic. He has spent some time in the tourism industry as well as in the classroom, and that's how he explains the connection between marketing and the A.A.S. degree he earned in substance abuse counseling.

"In my work in the tourism industry in Alaska, I noted that just as people were doing better economically because of marketing successes, they often began to sink into drug and alcohol abuse," said Walle. "Because of this trend, I came to believe that working to help prevent these tragic occurrences was an important part of my job as a marketing professor."

After obtaining his substance abuse counseling degree, Walle interned with the Old Minto Recovery Camp, a Native American recovery program in Alaska. "A key part of the program was to reintroduce participants to their traditional ways of life by residing for 30 days in a remote camp accessible only by bush plane," he said.

"We lived together in an old Indian town, once abandoned, but now restored for use as a therapy facility," said Walle. "We ate moose, beaver and other native foods. The therapy was about half mainstream alcohol abuse counseling and half a celebration of the cultural heritage of the participants."

Walle's latest book, currently in press with Information Age Publishing, is entitled "The Path of Handsome Lake: A Model of Recovery for Native People." The book is based on the life and work of Iroquois leader Handsome Lake and the model for recovery he forged for alcoholics in the early 19th century. "The message is that recovery comes both from personal self-help and by being at home with one's cultural heritage," Walle said.

Now that Walle and his wife Judy are living in Due West, he is looking for ways to apply what he has learned about alcohol abuse to his new region. "I have thought about expanding my work so it could be used by all people, not just Native Americans," he said.

Walle observes that in many rural areas of the United States, there is a tendency for people to become alienated and depressed by a a rapidly changing world. "When that happens, they can become vulnerable to addiction, just like the Native Americans who have been denied their heritage," he said.

"Believe it or not, a lot of similarities exist between the southeastern United States and Alaska," Walle said. "In important parts of both regions, the economy is based on 'extractive' industries, such as mining, lumbering and fishing, and the economy is largely controlled by outside interests.

"The people in both regions have a fierce love of their land," he said.
While living in Alaska, Walle traced a thread running through the culture of Native Americans in Alaska and that of the rural South, in one of the popular types of folk music in Alaska, Athabascan fiddling. It is the Native Alaskan version of the music learned from the white miners in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

"I went to hear some Native Alaskan musicians and was surprised that what they called Athabascan fiddling is what we call 'old time country music,'' said Walle. "I found myself listening to Jimmie Rodgers and Carter Family songs that I heard in East Tennessee when I was a kid. I guess good music has no racial boundaries."

Walle, new to the Erskine faculty this fall, is enjoying the transition from a state university to a small liberal arts college. "In large colleges, students and faculty can find themselves trapped in the little 'ghetto' of their departments," he said. "Here at Erskine, I rub shoulders with historians, English professors, scientists, and everybody else on a daily basis. That's much more intellectually exciting than sitting around preaching to the converted all day."

Walle said he likes teaching a variety of courses, including courses in advertising. "That field is a melding of the humanities and business, much more so than most courses," he said.

"And in my spare time I'm taking a graduate course at Erskine Seminary," Walle said. "I sure couldn't do that at a state school."

Walle is a native of Tennessee, and earned his Ph.D. in English at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He also holds the M.B.A. from the University of Akron and the M.A. in Social Anthropology from the State University of New York at Binghamton.

One of Walle's 10 books, "Cultural Tourism: A Strategic Focus," has been published in Korean, and another, "Exotic Visions: Qualitative Methods in Marketing Theory and Practice," is moving toward publication in Chinese and is now in the marketing research stage with a Chinese publishing house and consulting firm.