In Klukwan, a village 20 miles northwest of Haines, a Presbyterian Church was just returned to the Chilkat Indian Village after a century of ownership under Presbytery USA.
KTOO’s Yvonne Krumrey spoke with Lex Treinen from the Chilkat Valley News about what this change means for Klukwan.
This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Lex Treinen: It’s a place that people just went to, especially a few generations ago. It was just sort of standard that you went there. One church elder I spoke with, Lani Hotch, talked about her earliest memories and in life being going to the church with her grandmother. She described her grandmother’s blue polka-dotted dress and walking along the wooden boardwalks that used to serve as sidewalks in Klukwan. And so it seems to me that it’s a pretty important part of this small community.
Yvonne Krumrey: And in your story, you wrote about how some of the leaders in the church have been reckoning with the negative impacts that the church has caused in the community in the past. Can I ask what negative impacts were caused by the Presbyterian Church in the area?
Lex Treinen: Yeah, so it’s sort of an interesting question, because there is a Presbyterian Church presence in Haines that has what some consider to be a darker influence with the boarding school that was in Haines, the Haines House. And that school, like many other residential schools, took Alaska Native children from their homes from different areas around the state and brought them here to get a Western education.
In Klukwan, there wasn’t that explicit negative history. I asked some of the elders about that. And they said, interestingly, that in Klukwan itself, there never was sort of that animosity about what the church was doing there.
But it always did feel a little bit, I think, foreign for some of the people to have this outside influence of a denomination that was coming from outside. In that sense, there’s sort of this overarching, negative idea about some of the aspects of the church at least. And I think that was what Klukwan was trying to reckon with here, during this deed transfer.
Yvonne Krumrey: I know that some of the leadership in the church has been looking into reparative work for a while now. Can I ask what initiated that work? And who started looking into what could be done to kind of reconcile with the Presbyterian Church’s role in Southeast Alaska?
Lex Treinen: The person that got interested in it was a pastor who arrived in Klukwan in 2017. Her name is Jami Campbell. She served as pastor for a few years, and she said it was a little bit after she arrived that she became aware of an apology that Presbyterian USA — that’s a denomination within the Presbyterian Church — that those leaders made to the Alaska Federation of Natives conference in 2016.
In May of 2019, Pastor Campbell decided to give a sort of a local apology on behalf of the Klukwan church or the leadership of the Klukwan church. She sort of apologized generally. As I mentioned before, there weren’t specific abuses, per se in the Presbyterian Church in Klukwan. But she sort of spoke to the physical, sexual and emotional abuse that happened as a result of assimilation practices.
And it seemed like it was a pretty meaningful event in the church’s history. Campbell said that she had members of the community approach her years later and recite portions of that apology to her, even though they hadn’t been there at the time.
Yvonne Krumrey: And can I ask what’s now happened with the church?
Lex Treinen: All this sort of reckoning led to this idea of returning the property of the Presbyterian Church to the tribe of Klukwan, the whole area is owned by the tribe without one exception of the church. Pastor Campbell reached out to the Presbyterian leadership. And interestingly enough, the Presbyterian leadership was all on board. They didn’t even give it a second thought.
At the time, it wasn’t really a marked event. It was a time that there were still some COVID concerns. And so they decided not to hold a ceremony. But that changed this last year, and they finally decided to recognize it formally.
Yvonne Krumrey: What does it mean for it to be owned by the village now?
Lex Treinen: Pastor Campbell spoke of sort of how it was a ceremony of healing. She talked about how it just felt like a deep emotion of broken things being put back together. And it’s sort of interesting to compare her account of it to some of the other perceptions from other community members. Lani Hotch, who I mentioned earlier, one of the elders, when I spoke with her, the 2019 apology, she sort of talked about that, as something that she had actually already moved on from. Not to say that she can’t agree with it, but she thoumght it was something that was sort of already in the past. And here is what she had to say about that.
Lani Hotch: So do you just wait and suffer? Because so-and-so did me wrong and they never apologized? No, you gotta just let go of that and move on. It was great that there was an apology after the fact. But in my heart, I’ve already moved on.
Lex Treinen: So there were sort of some interesting feelings going on, from some of the church members, I think.
