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As a college student, Andrew "Andy" John Hope III would come to Nora Dauenhauer's office just to listen and watch her read and write Tlingit, the language of his people.

"He loved Tlingit, as I remember, and wanted to do something good for it, and make sure it continued," Dauenhauer, the scholar, said. "And in a written form."

That passion for his culture defined Hope's life and career. Hope died Thursday after a brief battle with cancer at the Mount Edgecumbe Hospital in Sitka. He was 58.

Hope was an organizer who used his skills at recruiting and connecting people to preserve and document Tlingit culture from the past, and grow new Tlingit culture.

The longtime Juneau and Sitka resident was born into a prominent, powerful Alaska Native family.

"There's always this looming presence of these people who accomplished a lot," his son, Ishmael Hope, said. "Rather than looking at it as something like a birthright, it's really about doing the work."

And he did a lot of work. A lot of it was organizing. Andy Hope dreamed up and organized the Sharing Our Knowledge Tlingit Clan Conference that first brought Tlingit elders and scholars together in 1993; the next one is March 2009.

He was an administrator of the Sitka Tribe of Alaska, a tribal enrollment officer for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the regional coordinator of the Alaska Rural Systemic Initiative for the University of Alaska, among many other roles.

Hope pushed strongly for place-based Alaska Native education - incorporating Tlingit history and literature into school curriculums after it had long been ignored or trivialized.

But he also produced his own work. He spent years producing and revising a poster, now widely circulated, that laid out, for once, the complicated clans and clan houses of the Tlingit. And he co-edited with Tom Thornton a volume of Tlingit history called "Will the Time Ever Come? A Tlingit Sourcebook," co-edited by Hope and Tom Thornton.

His attitude, said longtime colleague Peter Metcalfe, can be summarized as "sharing our knowledge."

That influence began in his family.

"I tried to look sideways at him once in a while, but I did definitely look up to him," said his brother, Gerry Hope, six years younger.

Gerry Hope said his brother was responsible for pulling him back into Tlingit culture.

"In my youth, there was a big effort not to be Native," he said. "To be white. It was hard to get back into my culture. It was intimidating because it's such a complex culture," he said. "He strongly felt that we as Tlingit people needed to take ownership and write our own story."

This man was not a peaceful man, many said.

"If you are a visionary, if you are a dreamer, sometimes you get frustrated when the establishment or the bureaucrats don't pick up on the dream or the vision," Dick Dauenhauer said.

That anger is why Ray Wilson brought the helmet and war-stained hammer of Katlian (K'alyaan), the Tlingit warrior who fought in the battle of 1802 against the Russians, to the Sunday ceremony for Hope.

"He did a lot of work for the Native people. And we considered him a warrior because he fought for his people's rights," said Wilson.

But Hope is remembered warmly.

Ishmael Hope wrote a play recently, "Brother," performed in Juneau earlier this year. His plays are always a little autobiographical, he said, but in this one he took a lot from his father.

"The point where the dad is talking about how an older man was speaking at a Tlingit memorial, and truth was coming out of his whole presence, and it was also an expression of hurt and healing from that hurt," Ishmael Hope said. "I got that from my dad."

Andy Hope wrote poetry. Ishmael Hope has a binder of it and will publish it with the help of writer Ishmael Reed. That was Hope's last request to his longtime friend Reed.

Over the phone, Ishmael Hope read a stanza his father wrote about his Killer Whale clan:

Killer whales multiplying

Like grains of sand along the shore

Killer whales multiplying

Killer whales multiplying

"It's very simple. But it's like the droning of time, and the clan that just transcends everything," Hope said. "It lasts forever."

A funeral was held Monday afternoon in Sitka. There also will be a Juneau ceremony. For more information, contact Gerry Hope at 738-3377.

• Contact reporter Kate Golden at 523-2276 or kate.golden@juneauempire.com.