KHNS - Haines

If you drove into town from the ferry terminal two weeks ago or from up the Chilkat Valley, you may have noticed something odd about the cedar signs welcoming you to Haines.

In fact, the signs wouldn’t have welcomed you to Haines. Instead, they said “Welcome to Deishú.” That’s the original Lingít name of the area — before missionaries established a settlement here near the end of the 19th century.

Sometime in late April, someone replaced the word “Haines” with “Deishú” on the welcome signs at either end of town — one at Picture Point and the other at 1 Mile Haines Highway.

The perpetrator’s identity remains a mystery. But their actions have reinvigorated a long-running discussion about the town’s name and revitalization of the Lingít language.

The alterations, which according to Kreitzer occurred without the borough’s permission, came just a week after an idea popped up at a local Parks and Recreation Advisory Committee meeting to add the word “Deishú” to the signs. Since the incidents, there have been informal calls to go even further: to change the town’s name, or to put the question to a public vote. But no official proposals are on the table.

Borough manager Annette Kreitzer noticed the change at Picture Point as she drove down Lutak Road on her way back from Chilkoot Lake one morning.

“As I drove by I was just in my mind thinking, ‘Is that really what I just saw?’” Kreitzer said.

She asked Mayor Tom Morphet to take a look; he found the original cedar panel with the word “Haines” carved into it lying in the dirt next to the sign — and in its place was a plywood board with “Deishú” spelled out in similar black letters.

At 1 Mile, a plank with “Deishú” was fastened over the original sign rather than in its place.

Kreitzer said the borough’s public facilities crew took down the new signs and reverted them back to “Welcome to Haines” last week.

“As far as I’m aware those are the only two,” she said.

As of last Wednesday, borough staff hadn’t received any official requests for assembly action or petitions for a special election, Kreitzer said.

Borough staff have consulted with CIA on work to incorporate Lingít names on street signs and in the borough’s tourism brochure. At least five streets now have Lingít language signs, and more are planned, Kreitzer said.

James Hart, who is Chilkoot Indian Association’s council president, said he became aware of the “Welcome to Deishú” signs on Facebook and that he appreciated the conversation that they sparked.

Regarding the idea to change the borough’s name, Hart said the council hasn’t had any official discussions on the issue. “This isn’t a CIA position, but I think it is a discussion that needs to be had with the whole community,” he said.

Hart added that he has a sense of pride saying he’s from Haines but that there wasn’t an agreement in the first place to change the name from Deishú and that it would be nice to see the original name restored. He noted, though, that there used to be other Lingít communities in the area that would get lumped in under the name Deishú.

“These are place names that were thousands of years old, that tell a story about this place, this community, and this place of land,” he said. “Changing the name creates erasure of our culture and our ways of life. Reverting back to Deishú would be revitalizing that aspect of this community.”

The word itself — Deishú — means “end of the trail” or “beginning of the trail.” Hart said his understanding is that it signifies the area’s historic position as a trading route with access to both the ocean and the interior.

The “Welcome to Haines” sign at Picture Point was constructed just five or six years ago, while the one at 1 Mile was put up in the 1960s, according to Lee Heinmiller, director of Alaska Indian Arts. Heinmiller and local carver Greg Horner made the Picture Point sign, which is sandwiched between two halves of a 27-foot totem pole that was carved decades ago and had to be sliced in half to be removed from a California home and brought back to Haines.

Heinmiller said he wouldn’t mind adding “Deishú” to the signs but he added: “Having people vandalize the sign with that idea is not exactly the way you should be going about it. Once the decision is to change the wording on the sign, hopefully the work would be done with quality carving.”

He noted that on one of the welcome signs the “Deishú” lettering was etched into a “pretty crummy piece of wood that you wouldn’t even use to patch a hole in the wall of your house.”

Haines Borough Assembly member Gabe Thomas, who’s a member of Chilkoot Indian Association, voiced indifference about the name. “I don’t care if it’s Haines or if it’s Deishú, you can change the name all you want but you didn’t give the land back, did you?”

He added that he thinks the assembly should focus first on more important issues like infrastructure.

Assembly member Kevin Forster said that having signs that acknowledge the traditional area seems appropriate to him but that the issue of the borough’s name “feels like one of those bigger decisions that has to reflect the will of the people here.”

“It would be really important to understand CIA and CIV’s perspective,” he added, referring to Chilkoot Indian Association and Chilkat Indian Village, the two tribal governments in the valley.

If the issue came before the assembly, Forster said that he’d support a referendum.

On Valentine’s Day, the new cruise dock float was scheduled to be delivered to Skagway’s Ore Dock redevelopment project. Measuring 500-by-50 feet, the float traveled from Anacortes, Washington. But disaster struck near Ketchikan when the float broke into three pieces.

Skagway’s assembly chamber was more crowded than usual at the Feb. 15 meeting and double the number of people watched on Facebook, as news broke that day of the cruise dock float mishap. Traveling from the manufacturer, Transpac Marinas Inc. in Anacortes, the crucial piece of infrastructure for the Ore Dock Redevelopment Project suffered damage near the end of its journey.

Borough Manager Brad Ryan described what happened.

“The barge was being held in the Ketchikan area, doing circles, waiting for the weather to calm down,” Ryan said. “And then it took off Monday morning to come up to Skagway. And sometime shortly after it took off Monday morning, I got a phone call that the dock had broken into two to three pieces and barges out there were wrangling the pieces. It turns out it was three pieces, which left one large intersection and two end pieces.”

According to Ryan, who immediately flew out to survey the damage, barges were able to tow all three pieces back to Ketchikan.

Ryan described the setback as a surprise. He had been following the float’s progress on his phone.

“Very unexpected in the sense we thought they’d made most of the big crossings, the big wider crossings,” said Ryan. “Surely by the time you get to Ketchikan, we were all feeling pretty good about it.”

But Ryan said the float is “fixable.”

“If we can source the metal plate for the new flanges and the pipe, they believe they can get these pieces manufactured and up to Ketchikan and installed in time to still have the dock come into Skagway before that mid-May ship,” Ryan said. “There’s always some caveats to that, you know, supply chain and those kinds of things. But they’re working on that already. And so, we’re working under that timeframe that we think we can still get it on before the first cruise ship.”

It’s not clear how much the dock breakup will cost the municipality. Ryan said the insurance companies are communicating. A special assembly meeting is scheduled for Feb. 22, after press deadline. Part of that meeting will be an executive session.

Mayor Sam Bass said while he is also hopeful Ore Dock will be ready to receive cruise passengers on time this spring, he and all necessary partners “will work to develop alternative options if that becomes necessary.”

Haines elected officials recently learned that the contractor in charge of rebuilding the Lutak Dock has purchased $10 million worth of steel for the project. Borough officials were surprised and angered by the purchase, which represents a commitment to a design that newly elected leaders had expressed interest in changing.

The Lutak Dock is the main entry point for freight in Haines. It was built by the military 70 years ago, and has fallen into disrepair. But the design the borough has settled on has become controversial. The chosen design involves surrounding the existing structure with a wall of metal pipes and adding fill.

Proponents of the design say it will provide the most functionality, and has been approved by the Maritime Administration, or MARAD,  the federal agency that is providing the funds for the project. Opponents say the design is too large for the community’s needs — that it will be expensive to maintain and will have to be rebuilt when the metal pipes eventually rust.

They also say such a large dock would invite mining companies to use the facility for ore transfer, which could attract heavy truck traffic that would pass through downtown Haines.

The debate became central to the last local election, when all the candidates in favor of changing the design got elected. The new leaders expressed interest in pausing the work and considering a design with a smaller footprint. They discussed the situation at a workshop on Nov. 15.

Turnagain Marine Construction is the company in charge of rebuilding the dock. Company president Jason Davis attended the meeting, and two days later he wrote an email to Haines Borough manager Annette Kreitzer to alert her that his company had purchased close to $10 million worth of steel.

“It appears that we had the coil ordered, the steel order converted from a hold to a binding order, I believe it was in August,” Davis said.

Kreitzer says she did not fully grasp the importance of the email until after she returned from vacation, three weeks later. She did not alert elected officials.

“I wanted to talk to MARAD first, and hoped that I would have some kind of an answer for the assembly about the impact or the effect of this action,” she said.

Mayor Tom Morphet says on Dece. 20, he told the manager that he was going to speak with Davis about project costs. That was more than a month after Davis sent the email.

“And that is when the manager shared with me the Nov. 17 letter. And my question for the manager is, ‘When were you expecting to share that information with us?’”

Morphet called a special meeting of the Borough Assembly to find out more about the situation. At the meeting, Kreitzer said she understands assembly members’ frustration, but defended her approach.

“I understand the feeling of assembly members that I’ve been withholding information from them and I apologize for that,” she said. “It is the way that I have done business, in terms of trying to make sure that there is context in whatever I present to the assembly. I try to get the facts so that I can present them to the assembly. You may not like that answer, but that is my answer.”

Assembly members were concerned that purchasing the steel before receiving approval from MARAD to do so might jeopardize the funding.

Assembly member Kevin Forster brought up the case of another grant the borough lost amid allegations of improper management -this one from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, for work on the Porcupine road.

“We are just on the tail of being involved in another grant reimbursement program in which we are still trying to figure out exactly where it went off the rails, but we are left holding the ticket for the bill and we are not being reimbursed by the agency,” he said.

MARAD requested information regarding the steel purchase. Morphet summarized his understanding of the situation.

“Today our project is in limbo,” he said. “The federal department of transportation marine offices, known as MARAD,  which sponsors our $20 million grant, is investigating issues relating to our administration of this grant offer, and why apparently in October, Turnagain purchased $10M of steel without the required authorization of the Haines borough and MARAD.”

Davis, of Turnagain, denied that the company did anything wrong.

“The only reason there is a question about this process is because members of the council want to terminate the project,” he said. “And that’s certainly within your power to do so, but I think that it’s somewhat disgraceful that you are trying to take the borough staff and a contractor that have been working in good faith to execute the agreements and to fulfill the grant obligations and try and find some way to pin fault.”

The meeting went on for more than three hours, and the atmosphere was tense at times. Many questions were left unanswered.

How significant of a breach of the grant’s requirement was it for Turnagain to purchase steel?

Kreitzer recently sent MARAD a letter with a detailed timeline of the purchase. In it, she states that Turnagain purchased the steel at their own risk.

Can the borough still change course and choose a different design under the same grant?

Mayor Morphet says he has been in communication with Sen. Murkowski’s staff and that they are willing to help the borough effect that shift.

If the design is changed, who would be on the hook for the $10 million steel purchase? At this point Turnagain and the borough disagree and point at each other.

The answers will largely be determined by MARAD, and multiple attempts to reach the agency for comments have remained unsuccessful.

It has been three years since landslides took the lives of two Haines residents and wreaked havoc in town.

All residents were affected in one way or another. The recent deadly landslide in Wrangell can trigger that past trauma. KHNS spoke with the mental health professionals who were in Haines during the crisis to care for the community from the first moments.

In early December of 2020, a storm dropped over a foot of rain on Haines. Some parts of town flooded. Landslides destroyed homes. Two well-loved residents died. There was much physical damage, and also much psychological distress.

“I was home when the slide went, and my house faces it, so I did see it,” said Cesre McQuaid.

McQuaid is a therapist in Haines. She was on call, working for the local clinic at the time. She has trained for crisis response, and she says that training kicked in.

“So I kind of knew there were things that needed to be done,” she said. “I knew quickly that we needed to make sure we got in touch with Bartlett (Regional Hospital) to figure out a way to make sure that if we had a psychiatric emergency, how were we going to get someone over to Bartlett if that’s what we needed to do. Some of those early kinds of things helped. Having a job to do. Having a first responder role helped me.”

Twenty-five miles up the valley, Riley Hall, a counselor also on the clinic’s staff, knew his services would be needed.

“We were responding, and we were also impacted at the same time,” Hall said. “I was up the highway, so on that first day it was hard to respond, because there were landslides blocking access to town, and it didn’t feel super safe yet to be on the corridor. But once we were able to, I responded a little bit up the highway, in effect putting an outpost for people to talk if they needed to.”

Hall said he eventually loaded his truck with shovels and a chainsaw, and managed to make it to town. Once there, he joined a team of mental health care professionals who rotated between the legion hall, the public safety building and other places where people gathered. They provided what McQuaid describes as psychological first aid.

“In practice it would be just a lot of psycho education, a lot of normalizing the responses that people are having. Making sure that people are being connected to the resources that they need,” McQuaid said. “It’s pretty important in the very beginning after a disaster, to really help people understand that what they are having, oftentimes they are having new emotions and new reactions, and so to help them understand that these strong responses are normal.”

John Hischer is a therapist in Skagway. He also has helped patients affected by the event. He says during these kinds of emergencies, people go through a series of stages.

“The first phase people are kind of in shock,” he said. “But they also see a lot of altruism in their community, so there are a lot of emotional highs that can happen too.”

McQuaid concurs.

“I still tear up when I think of the volunteers that showed up, the folks that sat in the firehall, the people that were feeding one another, the people that were checking in on one another, the people that wanted to make sure that folks had the information as quickly as possible,” she said.

But Hischer says this phase does not last forever.

“It’s the next phase when people start  leaving or public officials stop talking about it, that a lot of that depression and anger can start coming up,” Hischer said. “It wasn’t immediately after it, but months after the slide happened, I saw a lot of folks feeling abandoned or forgotten.”

McQuaid says during a traumatic emergency, it is important that people understand how their mind is reacting.

“Our brain is designed for survival, it’s not designed for happiness, so our brain is designed to help us psychologically digest in a way that we can manage,” McQuaid said. “You might have a harder time remembering things, or concentrating, but that’s your brain doing just what it’s supposed to be doing right now, which is kind of taking things in in bite-sized chunks just so that you can be able to process what is going on.”

Hall also stresses the importance of patience and connection. He says kids were affected by the deaths, which also happened in the recent tragedy in Wrangell. Jenae Larson, who died in the Haines landslide, was a kindergarten teacher.

“With Wrangell and in Haines, Jenae was so integrated into the school, and the Heller family there in Wrangell had kids in just about every age group,” he said. “It’s really important to give kids some space and some places where they can talk about the loss of their friends or the loss of their teacher. Just allowing kids some channels where they can sort through complicated and hard feelings about what is going on.”

McQuaid says sleep is very important to help process what is going on.

“When you go to sleep at night, your brain is going through the natural process of taking your memory networks and processing those into adaptive resources for us,” she said. “ So it’s like this idea of when you fall asleep, you have a problem that’s going on and then you say, ‘Well I need to sleep on this’, and you sleep on it and you actually do wake up in the morning feeling better, coming up with a couple other ideas on how to handle something.”

Hischer says the slide in Wrangell has no doubt revived some painful feelings for Haines residents.

“I was just thinking about Haines when I saw what happened in Wrangell,” Hischer said. “That can be one of those triggering events that can bring up a lot of distress in folks. Reliving some of that sadness and fear when something like that happens in a neighboring community.”

McQuaid says anyone who feels moved to help or reach out should not hold back.

“I think people shouldn’t be afraid to put themselves out there. You have something to offer,” she said. “Each person has something to offer. You don’t have to wait to be asked. If there is something that you feel personally moved to do, a gesture of support is never worthless.”

Hischer wants communities to prepare for the long-term effects of catastrophes.

“Hopefully, the communities in Southeast Alaska are really thinking about that, not just short term mental health services, but really helping provide long term mental health services after a disaster,” Hischer said. “Because disasters don’t just happen and conclude, they have really long range impact on people’s lives.”

Hall agrees.

“Grief is funny that way. Grief kind of comes to us episodically, we go through periods when we might not think about it as much and then at other times, something will bring it up really acutely,” he said. “I’ve certainly heard from many people that the landslide scarp is still kind of a pretty shocking trigger to witness.”

McQuaid says she is impressed and proud of how the community of Haines came together during the tragedy.

“It’s ok to not be ok. It’s ok to be scared,” McQuaid said. “Collectively, we are going to figure this out. There is a collective impact on us all. Knowing that others care, knowing that people want to show up. Knowing that they are not alone. That makes all the difference in the world. Even if we are all freaking out together.  It doesn’t have to look great, that’s the best way to describe it. You know people are getting upset, we are still in it together.”

She says anyone experiencing distress should not hesitate to reach out to friends, family, or a professional.

You can find recordings of our interviews with McQuaid and Hall on khns.org.

A totem pole carved over half a century ago by Chilkoot artists is coming home. It has started on a cross-country trip and will arrive in the Chilkat Valley in the near future, after spending decades in Delta Air Lines’ museum.

Work on the totem pole was documented in an old black-and-white photo. It shows a group of carvers hunched over the pole, apparently putting the finishing touches on a large face. A sign reads “Chilkoot Indian Carvers,” and the picture is dated March 1969.

Chilkoot Indian Association Tribal Administrator Harriet Brouillette said this week that she recognizes the carvers in the picture.

“I see Wes Willard in the photo, and John Hagen, and Carl Heinmiller,” Brouillette said.

Delta sent Brouillette the photo, when the company contacted her about the totem pole last summer.

“They said that they had a pole that was made by AIA,” Brouillette said.

According to Brouillette, AIA refers to Haines nonprofit Alaska Indian Arts.

“They believe in the ’60s, the pole was built in California during a tourism conference,” she said. “And the pole has been sitting in a warehouse in Georgia.”

The pole has been at the Delta Flight Museum in Atlanta, Georgia. Museum staff contacted Brouillette wanting to return the pole.

On the museum’s website, exhibits director Nina Thomas wrote that museum staff felt the pole was out of place in an aeronautics museum, and should be interpreted by a “cultural institution with expertise in Western indigenous people’s history.”

Museum staff told Brouillette they would ship the totem pole to Haines, where she said the association now has a home for it at Haines’ Fort Seward.

“And this couldn’t have happened at a better time, because we had just received the parade ground back with the tribal house,” she said.

The association has also recently received National Park Service funds to rebuild the tribal house on the parade ground, which has been decaying for years. Brouillette said it will be a great place to display the pole.

The pole is 14 feet tall. Two faces are carved at the bottom, and a beaver sits on top of them.

Lee Heinmiller, the director of Alaska Indian Arts, has some insights into how Delta ended up with the pole. In his youth, Heinmiller was part of the Chilkat Dancers, a traditional dance troupe. They would travel far and wide to showcase ‘Lingit culture.

“When we used to travel with the dancers and the carvers, we used to take a pole that was partly finished to the World’s Fair, or to trade and travel shows, and dance and carve on the pole and finish it there,” Heinmiller said. “And then the airline would end up keeping the pole for providing us with the transportation.”

According to the Delta museum’s website, the pole was a gift to Western Airlines. It sat in front of Western’s headquarters in Los Angeles until 1987, when the airline merged with Delta. Delta then shipped the pole to its museum.

In photos, the pole appears well preserved. The red paint seems faded. Heinmiller said it has probably been repainted.

“It’s got some green on it, that looks way more forest green than the blue-green that we would use normally,” Heinmiller said. “So I’m guessing somewhere along the line, over 30 or 40 years someone must have repainted it, or at least they repainted the blue, because the blue is the color that fades out the fastest.”

Brouillette said she has been making arrangements with the Atlanta museum to ship the totem pole.

“Once we settled on transportation and crating, we picked a date,” she said. “And the pole was packed up yesterday, and is now on its way.”

The pole is currently on a truck to Seattle, from there it will travel by barge to Haines. Because it is relatively short, Brouillette said it will fit well in the tribal house once it is renovated.

Heinmiller said there are other poles like the one headed to Haines around the country, with a similar history.

“I know there’s a couple of smaller ones, and the big one that we did that Alaska Airlines kept — I’m not sure where that one is,” he said. “In the last couple of years a couple of poles we’ve done over the years have resurfaced in somebody’s possession and they’ve written to us and said, ‘When was this done? So-and-so bought it in the early ‘70s.’ So I end up going back through the files and trying to trace that.”

According to Heinmiller, materials on hand in Haines can show when a pole was carved.

“We have pictures of most of that stuff, and details on who worked on them,” he said. “They are all labeled but it’s kind of a huge pile to go through for 50 years’ worth of boxes.”

Brouillette said structural work on the tribal house should be completed by the end of next summer. After that, replacing its carvings should take another year or two.

On Thursday, Klukwan residents led a water blessing ceremony to honor the Chilkat watershed and the life it sustains in the valley.

Under a steady rain, organizers set up shelters and started a fire by the bridge over the Klehini River, 26 miles from Haines. They held hands and listened to Lani Hotch tell the story of how Raven brought fresh water to the world.

”We have very deep roots here, and we feel a keen sense of responsibility to protect the river for future generations who will live here,” Hotch said. “And not just humans. The eagles are our neighbors, the bears are our neighbors, the wolves.”

Hotch said she sees eagles pick salmon out of the river, sometimes out of her own fishing net. She said she often finds the remnants of those fish at the bottom of a tree. The carcasses decompose into the soil and feed the trees, keeping the forest alive. Hotch said this healthy interconnection is threatened by the Palmer project, a large hard rock mine that is being planned upstream from her village.

“We don’t want the mine, we don’t need the mine,” Hotch said. “Extraction economies, they are destructive, it’s not something we should build our hopes on. It doesn’t pay off in the long run. These salmon have supported our people for countless generations.”

The crowd had grown to over 150 people by noon. Organizer Nancy Keen led children in songs and activities.

“We place a message onto a piece of wood. A prayer to the water,” she said. “Klehini River. And just say a prayer, and give it back to the water. So now we have these kids here, and they are about to do the same.”

Finally, the crowd moved toward the bridge carrying signs: “Nurture our wild river.” “We are all in this together.” “Protect the Klehini.” “Our rhythms are connected, and irreplaceable.” “No to the Palmer project, keep the river clean.”

They stopped in the middle of the bridge and waited for Lani Hotch to speak. She was wearing the Chilkat River robe, with symbols representing the five species of Salmon that return to spawn in the watershed.

Hotch began the ceremony: “Father God, Our Creator. Ever present Spirit. We need your help today. Out river, we want to protect it. We want it to flow in good health, in perpetuity, forever.”

Participants cast their pieces of wood and their blessing into the river, and Tribal Council President Kimberley Strong spoke.

“I think that we’ve never come out and said we are in opposition to the mine,” she said. “We support the environment and the way of our lives that our ancestors have taught us. I am afraid of this hard rock acid mine, and what it will do to us.”

The crowd then slowly walked off the bridge.

Daniel Klanott is a resident of Klukwan, he was at the event.

“I’m here today to stand with everybody else on protecting the water,” he said. “We need to protect the water to protect the salmon, because salmon is a way of life in this valley.”

Resident Jack Strong agreed.

“I live in Klukwan. This is our life, it always has been our life for thousands of years. And I can’t see why we would want to change anything. For what? What is the gain for the world? To take and ruin this? Nothing,” he said.

Strong described her own role at the event.

“I’m not the person that developed this event, I am here because as a community leader, you follow your people. And so I’m here following my people who want to protect the environment and our river and our way of life.”

An international tribunal has recently agreed to hear a case brought by a coalition of Southeast Alaska Native groups. They claim upstream pollution from Canadian mines violates their right to life, health, wellbeing and the “benefits of culture.”

Nancy Keen said she sees this regional organizing as positive.

“We are going to be at the table and speak to these things that we know we have a right to speak to,” she said. “The inherent right to our traditional foods. The way that we are going to take care of our world in a good way.”

Hotch agreed.

“Why is it ok to dump toxic waste? Is it because our people don’t count? What’s up with that? We need social justice for all people. We are not going to sit back and be quiet about it, this is our life, this is our way of life, this is our home,” she said.

Representatives for Constantine Metals, who owns the Palmer project, did not respond to a request for comments on their relationship with the Chilkat Indian Village.