Remembering Angela ‘Unakelrea’ Baker, 1940-2025

Those who knew and loved Angela “Unakelrea” Baker are sharing her story as they bid her farewell:

Friends,

With gratitude and sadness we announce the “wedding day with the divine” for Angela “Unakelrea” Baker, née Joseph, September 22, 1940 – August 17, 2025.

The middle child of 13 children, she was born into a Yup’ik Inuit tribe in Akulerak, Alaska, in 1940, a remote, now-extinct village on the Yukon river near the Bering Sea. Her father Jasper was a reindeer herder, hunter, fisherman, and tribal leader. Her mother Alma, was a strong, determined, and powerful matriarch.

Anyone who met Angela knew her sweet, kind & gentle spirit and usually loved her from the moment upon meeting.

Taken from her family as a child, she survived the brutality of Catholic boarding schooling for Native Alaskan children all the way up through high school. Always resilient in tough situations, she turned that experience into a 40-year nursing career. She graduated from the University of New Mexico, Roswell, as a Licensed Practical Nurse in the early 1960s and moved to Los Angeles to begin her long and venerable nursing career. While there, she cared for many Hollywood movie stars of the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. While in Los Angeles she was thrust into the hippie generation’s “free love” movement and the Summer of Love in 1967, whereby she attended many Love-Ins in Griffith Park and concerts of 1960s music. She maintained her love of 1960s folk & rock music all her life and attended many great concerts. She was one of the uber-cool ones…

Ever a restless and adventurous spirit, she worked a short time as a nurse in Fairbanks, Alaska, before moving to Medford, Oregon, where she was a highly regarded Intensive Care nurse at Rogue Valley Memorial Hospital from 1970 to 1984. She also worked locally at various nursing facilities before moving to Seattle in 1989. While in Seattle, she worked at numerous clinics, hospitals, qnd nursing facilities, including a nursing project in the Portland area, before retirement in 2005.

She was fiercely independent, brave, adventurous, and a voracious reader. She was active in AA and practiced meditation to maintain her sobriety. After retirement she spent her days at the beach in West Seattle with her sweet dog Lily, beachcombing for treasures and visiting every bookstore she could find.

In 2019 she moved back home to Alaska to spend the remainder of her years living with her eldest sister in Anchorage, where she concluded her life outside of Alaska by speaking only her native “Yugtun” language to the end of her days.
She had only one child, Patrick, who lives with his wife Kathryn in Bremerton, Washington. She is survived by her oldest sister, Christine, a grandchild in Vermont, and scores of cousins, nieces, and nephews in tribal western Alaska and Northern Virginia.

In memory of beloved Angela, kindly consider donating to a local nursing organization, an Alaskan Native or Native American tribe.

As Angela would say amidst the chaos of life….”Easy does it…”

(WSB publishes West Seattle obituaries and memorial announcements by request, free of charge. Please email the text, and a photo if available, to westseattleblog@gmail.com)

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