KNBA - Anchorage

An Alaska Native comic artist will release a book heavily influenced by stories passed down to him by his grandmother.

Growing up in Alaska, Dimi Macheras loved drawing and illustrating and comic books.

“My mom’s got pictures of me before I could even talk just constantly drawing and doodling,” Macheras said. “In some of my earliest memories were cartoons on the cereal boxes and action figures, toys like He-Man and stuff.”

Macheras is Ahtna, a citizen of the Chickaloon Native Village and was born in Anchorage and grew up around the Matanuska-Susitna area.

As a kid, Macheras says he was obsessed with animals taking on human characteristics — or anthropomorphism.

“When the (Teenage Mutant) Ninja Turtles cartoon came out and I think it was ‘87, that was it for me, that was kind of like my entry point,” Macheras said. “It’s something that I just became obsessed with … I found a connection there with the traditional stories that grandma passed down because she would explain that the animals and humans could talk and that they’d have human characteristics.”

Macheras says he would illustrate his grandma’s stories and she would encourage him.

“How we got the sun in the moon and, you know, she would, you know, describe Raven as being, you know, unkempt and kind of mysterious and always up to no good. And so, you know, I draw him kind of line around being lazy with pizza boxes kind of strewn about. And it wasn’t traditional, but like it wasn’t like how you might traditionally view it. But grandma really encouraged it. And I kind of kept pushing on.”

Macheras would find a love for comic books, anime and manga.

Macheras said that when his grandmother passed away, his mother began doing more storytelling. And he began illustrating those stories, and they eventually made their way through the education department at the Chickaloon village.

“Those kind of like took off. They were very successful, especially with the help of my mom, who would take those images and bring them to classrooms around Alaska and share our stories with classrooms full of kids with the lights down and projector up with the images, illustrations behind her,” Macheras said. “There’s an entire generation of kids up there who would have otherwise maybe never heard or realized the the history and the stories of the land that they live in. And that was kind of her legacy that she left behind.”

Macheras’ mom, Patricia Wade, passed away in 2014.

Eventually Macheras moved to Seattle to pursue his dream of illustrating and there he met Casey Silver and formed their comic book studio, called 80% Studios.

“I feel like in my own way, I’m trying to evolve that storytelling thing to the next level,” he said. “And Chickaloonies is like kind of evolving that storytelling legacy.”

Silver grew up in Rhode Island and moved to Seattle in 2006.

“I think that this project that we’re doing now, Chickaloonies, is really the best thing that we’ve done,” Silver said. “It’s something that I think is the most probably accessible of what we’ve done. And I’m just really excited to share it with everybody.”

Chickaloonies follows the journey of two Alaska Native characters living in perpetual darkness. They leave their village for the first time on a quest to become the greatest storytellers ever. Guided by teachings from their grandma, the two characters explore foreign worlds and learn from new cultures.

“But it’s a real fun coming of age story, kind of in the vein of, like ‘Dragonball’ or ‘Avatar, The Last Airbender,’ where we really wanted to bring together the ideas of like storytelling, of legends, language, magic, you know, really bring these themes together into a story that at the first and foremost is entertaining,” Silver said. “But is also educational, makes people aware of, you know, not only their own culture, but of cultures that exist throughout the world and how similar we all are and yet different at the same time.”

For Macheras, one of the challenges and main inspirations was how to tell non-linear traditional stories in comic book style, a format that is linear.

“One of the main inspirations for this book is we wanted to tell an Alaska Native-style story and kind of more of a more modern way. And we’re still learning how to tell that kind of a story. … And it’s a learning curve.”

“We didn’t want to use a preexisting story. We wanted to create our own story,” Macheras said.

One of the most striking aspects of the book is how the two artists depicted Indigenous words or sounds from nature.

“We’ve definitely inspired by Japanese comics manga. And I just love the look of the sound effects and the symbols that they use. And even if you can’t read that language, you kind of can understand the effect of the emotional impact behind that language,” Macheras said. “There’s no written language for Ahtna Athabascan, so how would we convey that in a comic book? We’re reading it and looking at pictures, and I just kind of came up with the idea of inventing a symbolic language that would denote that a character person is speaking the language.”

One of the main characters – Sasquatch E. Moji – only speaks through representations of emojis.

“There’s a lot of different viewpoints of of language and communication is a big theme in this country, how people and how characters can relate to each other, even if they might not speak the same language,” Macheras said. “Then in turn, communicating to the reader. It becomes sort of like a communicator, a communication on and off the page.”

Macheras enlisted the help of his cousin, Melissa Shaginoff (Ahtna and Paiute), to help advise on cultural matters.

“We are working with my cousin Melissa, who is a wealth of culture, knowledge from my Tribe and really trying to work in some of the nuances of how these characters can behave and can act more authentically like the people like the Tribe would act.”

“I’m learning about my history as I go through this process,” Macheras said. “That’s part of the reason why working with Melissa has been so exciting, because I’m getting to learn more about my own heritage.”

Macheras says that representation was an important and central focus of the project.

“Alaskan Native kids are underrepresented in pop culture and comic books,” Macheras said. “I’m looking forward to be able to give something back to the place I grew up, to my culture. So I’m doing this for my mom, doing this from grandma to kind of carry on the legacy. My hope is that it shows that this culture is alive and it’s thriving and it can make really interesting modern stories and modern art. This is just kind of taking, you know, taking the culture and heritage and finding a new way to put a new spin on it. I feel like and I really do hope that inspires kids.”

The name Chickaloonies comes from what Macheras’ mom called all the “crazy kids from Chickaloon.”

As our climate changes around us, the unusual is becoming more frequent — whether it’s shorter snow seasons, intense wildfires or more recently, storms and lightning across the Chukchi and Beaufort seas.

Alaska climate specialist Rick Thoman says thunderstorms need a few different ingredients.

“One, they need moisture, and they need a fairly steep decrease in temperature aloft,” he said.

Storms over the oceans aren’t particularly rare, but Thoman says these storms form differently.

“We have very warm, moist air, moving off of Siberia and across the Chukchi and Beaufort seas. And that’s intersecting in this case, in the last few days, a slow moving weather front thats then providing the mechanism to cause that warm, moist air well above the ocean surface,” he said.

As the storms rage on, they bring smoke to parts of northern and western Alaska as well.

“The same winds aloft that have brought this warm, moist air, the smoke is coming with it — and that is all Siberian fires in the interior right now. Everything across the North Slope and out over western Alaska, that is all Siberian smoke, where they have had a lot of wildfire activity this season.”

Thoman says that the likelihood of these storms becoming more frequent in the next couple decades is high and will continue to rise as our climate changes at a rapid pace.

Special thanks to Rashah McChesney & Tripp Crouse for edits

Content warning: This story contains accounts from descendants and others of boarding schools and may be distressing for some audiences. A list of available services and organizations is available for people in Alaska, Canada and the Lower 48 at the bottom of the story.

At the turn of the 20th century, the federal government created boarding schools in an attempt to assimilate Indigenous children into “American society.” The lasting legacy of the boarding school era devastated Native cultures across North America.

Now, people all across the country are demanding accountability and working to bring the remains of boarding school students home.

Sophia Tetoff is the first Alaska Native student buried at the former Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania to return to Alaska. She wanted to come home.

“Sophia is my grandmother’s aunt and so she’s my great-grandfather’s stepsister,” said Lauren Peters, who is Unangax̂ (Agdaagux Tribe of King Cove) and the Alaska Native adviser at Fort Ross Conservancy in California.

Up until four years ago, Lauren Peters didn’t even know Sophia existed or that they were related. The way Peters tells it, Sophia found her.

We’ll get to that. But first — a little bit about Sophia.

She was orphaned in the early 1900s.

For most of the 19th century, Russia had used Unangax̂ people as forced labor in the fur seal trade — transporting many of them to the Pribilof Islands. Sophia came from a large family. Her father had been married previously and had 13 kids. He remarried after his first wife died. The new couple later had Sophia’s older sister, Irene, and then Sophia.

In the 1900s, a measles epidemic — called “The Great Sickness” — hit Alaska. Many Unangax̂, Yup’ik and Inpuiat became infected. First Irene and Sophia’s father died, then their mother.

The two girls were moved from St. Paul Island to Unalaska where the Jesse Lee Home housed mostly coastal Alaska Native children.

“There are quite a few orphans that were removed — a lot of them just went down to the Jessie Lee home,” Peters said. “And then from what I’ve read, if they found the children either troublesome or promising, they would send them to Carlisle.”

Irene died in Unalaska. Sophia was sent on to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania.

“Going from St. Paul to Unalaska was, what, 400 miles? It’s still Unangax̂ and it’s still treeless and volcanic and windswept and all the beautiful weather,” Peters said. “And then to go 4,000 miles, imagine landing in Washington state and then going all across the Plains into the big cities and whatnot, and then ending up at Carlisle. And I saw the actual tracks that she would have ridden the train up on and get out. And there’s a platform right there that would walk up into the school.”

Carlisle was established in 1879. It was a non-reservation, federally-funded boarding school established by the military. Carlisle was considered a flagship model for other institutions of its kind. Similar boarding schools were later established in Alaska.

“I was imagining how foreign that had happened to her and how frightening that had been to end up in this landscape that you don’t know anything about. You don’t know what’s poisonous. You don’t know what’s edible,” Peters said. “Must have been really disorienting.”

While the Carlisle site returned to military use in 1918, other schools continued to operate into living memory. Many Alaskans have heard stories of schools in White Mountain, the Copper River Valley, the Wrangell Institute, and even Mount Edgecumbe — which continues to run as a public boarding school in Sitka.

Traditional and cultural ways of knowing and being were intentionally severed as Native children were removed from their homes and families and forced into boarding schools in an attempt to assimilate them.

Barbara Landis is the former Carlisle Indian School archives and library specialist for the Cumberland County Historical Society in Carlisle.

Landis said she first became involved with the boarding school when Tribes began reaching out to the society to track down information on Native students.

“But there are some universal issues. For example, children dying at boarding schools. That touched every nation. And so, it’s a very conflicted response that descendants have to what happened to their relatives who were at the boarding schools. And there’s not just one black and white. So it’s a really tricky episode in United States history and clearly in Canada’s history also,” she said.

In 2021, news surfaced that ground-penetrating radar was used to uncover the location of hundreds of unmarked graves at residential schools in the community of Kamloops in Canada.

Since the announcement about Kamloops, Landis has been fielding phone calls from families and media outlets.

“I really believe that the Kamloops discovery has been a catalyst for people starting to become aware of the residential boarding school system, the mission schools and the government-run schools,” Landis said. “And then, Deb Haaland’s assignment as cabinet secretary and her dedication … to investigating the children from the boarding schools, the deaths and all the children, what happened to them. That adds a whole layer of heft to the importance of getting to the bottom of these stories.”

U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland announced a national initiative to investigate the traumatic legacy of boarding schools run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

“Our communities are still mourning,” Haaland said in June. “The federal policies that attempted to wipe out Native identity, language and culture continue to manifest in the pain our communities face, including long-standing intergenerational trauma, cycles of violence and abuse, disappearance of Indigenous people, premature deaths, mental disorders and substance abuse.”

The new initiative will document boarding school policies and also identify burial sites near schools.

“I come from ancestors who endured the horrors of Indian boarding school assimilation policies carried out by the same department that I now lead, the same agency that tried to eradicate our culture, our language or spiritual practices and our people. To address the intergenerational impact of Indian boarding schools, and to promote spiritual and emotional healing in our communities, we must shed light on the unspoken traumas of the past, no matter how hard it will be,” Haaland said.

She ordered a final report from the investigation of BIA boarding schools to be issued by next April.

Back in California, Peters often plans an Alaska Native Day for Russian-era Fort Ross. She incorporates dancers, artists, storytellers, and more. Four years ago, she invited Tlingit Elder and storyteller Bob Sam. He’s a cemetery caretaker from Sitka who also works on repatriation.

“In 2017, he called me and said, ‘Hey, I’ve been trying to get the orphans at Carlisle deemed wards of the state.’ But when they were taken, there wasn’t a state. That was just proving impossible and time was ticking,” she said.

Sam asked whether she could track down information on students in the Unangax̂/Alutiiq region and gave her six names — three from St. Paul and three from Kodiak.

Sophia was first on the list.

Again during a summit with the Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition that Peters attended, Sophia’s name was on another list. Peters still had no idea they were distantly related.

Peters researched Sophia’s origins on St. Paul Island, tracing the student’s family tree when branches with Peters’ own family history matched up. She worked with others to ensure Sophia’s remains were returned to St. Paul Island, Alaska.

In May 2016, the Northern Arapaho Tribe began the process to exhume three of their children from the Carlisle cemetery. But one of the graves contained two sets of remains — and neither were the child supposed to be buried there. In 2018, four children were returned to their family and Tribes; and six in 2019.

After COVID-19 complicated repatriations in 2020, 10 children are scheduled to be returned, at full cost to the Army. Nine were Rosebud Sioux. The other was Sophia.

Peters hopes Sophia’s story inspires others to seek the return of their ancestors.

“She felt clever and brave and leading the Alaskans out of the cemetery, you know, through Bob and me. And I just really admire her and felt really at peace and good about the whole process and some other people who are trying to get their kids out of the cemetery. At the same time, we’re feeling the anguish of these children that are still stuck in there. And several of us got together and said, I feel like these children are saying, ‘What about me? Aren’t you going to take me?’ And it was very powerful. But Sophia, with the process, I felt really good at the end. And I’m really happy to be taking her back to St. Paul and I’m really happy to be reuniting her with our family up there. It’s a really good feeling,” she said.

Lauren’s 21-year-old son, Andrew, joined her at Carlisle to begin the process of returning Sophia’s remains to St. Paul.

“He was my absolute rock up there. He took care of her person,” Peters said. “That’s not something I could do. I didn’t have the strength as a mom to look at some, you know, at her person. And he checked in with her. He made decisions about how he wanted her to be handled respectfully. And he put her to bed at the end and carried her to the ceremony and carried her out to be placed in the container that is taking her to St. Paul. And I’m really proud of him. But as a parent, you know, she’s my girl. I’m really fiercely protective of her,” she said.

Lauren Peters was scheduled to return to St. Paul after the Fourth of July holiday to re-inter Sophia’s remains but travel was postponed due to weather.

Years ago, the military relocated the graves at Carlisle but the information became misplaced.

Eleanor Hadden’s great-aunt is one of about 180 buried at Carlisle, but she’s one of many under a marker labeled unknown.

For Hadden, the return of one student and the larger conversation around boarding schools is a good first step.

“I’m glad it’s happening now. It would have been nice if it happened earlier, but there’s too much that has gone on within the Native community that, you know, how many battles can we fight? How many things can we get out in the open to let people know these things are happening, or these things did happen to us?” Hadden said.

Because of some Indigenous cultural taboos against further disturbing remains, the graves can’t be disinterred, nor can DNA testing be performed, despite Hadden’s willingness in an effort to find her aunt.

“We get overwhelmed with all the sad news that’s making us want to fight more, which is good,” Hadden said. “I would say it’s a very complicated scenario that we all have to go through. And to heal from all of this.”

Family members of Carlisle students must fill out the Army-required affidavits to return the remains. But in many, many cases, the children were orphaned when they arrived at Carlisle. Family can be hard to find.

For more information contact the Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition. You can call them at 612-354-7700.

KNBA’s Hannah Bissett contributed to this story. Special thanks to KTOO’s Rashah McChesney for the story coaching and editing. 

This story has been updated.

Gwich’in artist Colleen Firmin Thomas is from Fort Yukon and is known for her abstract paintings.

In her piece, “Boundaries as Battlelines,” Thomas uses a brush to make vertical stacks of gray and brown. In the gray, porcupine quills and moose fur are placed in a way to demark and mark a boundary between the layers of earthen-colored streaks.

“For me, painting is a way to process the world,” she said. “I tell people, it’s kind of like a therapy.”

Where gray is more prominent, porcupine quills and moose fur is laid toward the horizon acting like a boundary to the mountain-looking void in between.

Thomas has been creating artwork since childhood. She received her bachelor’s in fine arts at the University of Fairbanks and has been showcasing her work in shows since then.

“My work is mostly inspired by nature and language and culture,” she said.

Her work intertwines traditional painting methods with porcupine quills, fur and feathers to showcase different intricacies in nature, the life around her and her own life experiences.

“In a lot of my paintings, they have little circle shapes, or look like hoops or something,” she said. “To me, those represent snares, like in trapping, and represent things that can catch you up — or a warning to beware of what’s around you. Even just a reminder that, you know, death is close by.”

In June, the Anchorage Museum selected Thomas to be its virtual artist-in-residence of the month. Her next show will be from Aug. 6 through Aug. 31 at Well Street Art Company in Fairbanks.

To see Thomas’s art online, go to colleenfirminthomas.com.

The University of Alaska Anchorage will offer Unangam Tunuu courses as part of its Alaska Native Studies coursework.

This fall, students can take a course in Unangam Tunuu — the Unangax̂ language — at the university.

Course instructor Haliehana Stepetin says it’ll be a regular part of the school’s offerings for the next two years.

“It’s really wonderful to include it in the Alaska Native Studies curriculum because it shows this density and it will hopefully teach more people about who we are and where we come from in our differing experiences and our similar goals of cultural revitalization presence,” Stepetin said. “And more than just that, but thriving.”

Stepetin is Unangax̂ and a Ph.D. candidate in Native American Studies at the University of California Davis. She will teach the course with help from her longtime mentor and Unangax̂ Elder Moses Dirks.

“I think this is our opportunity to try and convey to people that there are differences in language and cultures, so Unangax is so unique,” Dirks said. “With very few speakers, I think it’s important to pass it on to interested Unangax people that would be interested in taking it.”

Dirks is a longtime Unangam Tunuu linguist and has taught it at Alaska Pacific University and University of Alaska Fairbanks to culture camps.

He says that for the last 10-20 years, he’s continued to seek out people willing to learn and document Unangam Tunuu.

“My hope always was to try to preserve the language, but everything was spoken in terms of verbal language and it was passed on from generation to generation. And nothing was documented,” Dirks said. “My primary goal was to document the true Unangam Tunuu and to keep the dialect separated so that they have their own identity in each of the villages.”

The course will be one of several Alaska Native language courses offered at the university through its Alaska Native Studies program.

In the past, Unangam Tunuu was taught at the university on a trial basis, but this will be the first time that it’s regularly taught at UAA.

Stepetin says the course will be offered virtually as a way to be more inclusive to Unangam Tunuu learners, including those that may live outside of Anchorage:

“I know that people aren’t going to get fluent in a semester or two, but the focus of language learning that Moses and I have been doing is fluent in conversations of conversations about the weather, conversations about who you are and where you’re from and or cooking or fishing,” Stepetin said. “I want them to get interested enough to keep going because I think having more people interested in learning the language is really valuable. And over time they’ll continue to carry on the language.”

The course will be Tuesdays and Thursdays from 5:30 to 7 p.m. For more information, visit the UAA website.

The remains of an Alaska Native student buried more than 100 years ago at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania will return to Alaska.

Beginning June 19, the U.S Army started the process to return the remains of 10 Native students buried at the Carlisle school.

According to a U.S. Army news release, nine students are from the Rosebud Sioux Tribe and one student — Sophia Tetoff — is identified as an Alaskan Aleut.

Sophia entered the school on June 26, 1901, and died there May 6, 1906. According to WITF, a public radio station in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania — Sophia’s remains will be returned to Saint Paul Island, Alaska.

The Carlisle boarding school operated from 1879 to 1918. The site continues to be part of the U.S. Army War College.