Yvonne Krumrey

A beloved maintenance employee at the University of Alaska Southeast starred in a low-budget sci-fi comedy a decade ago. This week, some UAS students screened “Space Trucker Bruce” to honor their friendly campus handyman, and to satisfy their own curiosity.

It’s about a space trucker hauling hog fat through the galaxy who picks up a hitchhiker whose ship has broken down. Hijinks ensue.

The low budget sci-fi comedy just so happens to star UAS handyman Karl Sears. It was made by local filmmaker Anton Doiron. He and Sears are old high school friends who reconnected in adulthood. 

Years ago, they wanted to make a short film for the JUMP Society festival in Juneau. On a drive one day, they came up with the idea of making a comedy about a space trucker. 

But the ideas kept coming, and it spiraled into something bigger, said Doiron.

“It grew from making a short to making, like, a full-length movie,” he said. 

Six years later, “Space Trucker Bruce,” starring the two of them, debuted at Juneau’s Gold Town Theater. 

Sears said it’s neat that the kids wanted to show it and invited them, but he finds their interest a bit odd. 

“It’s a little strange, and like, ‘what are you guys doing with your lives?’” he said.

The film has been out for 11 years now, and it’s available for free on YouTube, so sometimes people stumble upon it. 

“People talk about it,” Sears said. “And occasionally a student will come up to me and say, ‘I just watched it. It was so funny,’ or ‘it was good,’ you know, or, ‘I watched it,’ and they don’t elaborate.”

Sears said the film has been shown before, but this is the first screening he decided to come to. 

Ella Kelly is a residential advisor at UAS. She organized this screening and, like many students, she considers Sears a friend.

“He’s the only maintenance guy for housing,” she said. “So everybody’s had an encounter with Karl, and they’re all like good interactions, because he’s so nice and friendly.”

Kelly said she didn’t know about the film until she saw the poster for it outside of Sears’ office

“It’s always made me very curious,” she said. “Because I’m a big fan of a low budget film.”

About a dozen students came to the screening, and they filled the room with laughter.

Doiron said he has a new project coming soon that Kelly may like. It’s called “Girl, Yeti, and a Spaceship,” and there are some thematic similarities to his first film.

“There’s a bored state worker,” he explained. “He’s in management, and he’s bored, and he takes his dog out hiking one day, and he sees Bigfoot, and he starts following Bigfoot, and he finds this cave with a big spaceship in it, and the spaceship is broken.”

Hijinks ensue. Doiron said the new project comes out next year.

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Normally, this time of year, Juneau’s largest craft store would be full of plastic pumpkins, skeletons, ghosts, and, of course, fabric. But instead, the former Joann store in the Nugget Mall sits dark and empty — a spooky reality, say local costume makers.

Months after the chain closed across the nation, the gap in craft supplies is being put to the test at a crucially creative time of year: Halloween.

Elizabeth Bauer makes her five-year-old daughter’s Halloween costume every year, and usually, she wants to be something a bit unusual.

“Last year, she knew for months she wanted to be a white bat,” Bauer said. “So it’s like, you can’t find a white bat costume anywhere.” 

Bauer found white furry fabric at Joann, and made wings and a headband with bat ears for her daughter. 

But this year, Bauer is scrambling to find the material she needs to make another unusual costume, a hybrid jaguar and parrot from her daughter’s favorite cartoon, “Elena of Avalor.” She needs to make a pink base outfit, leopard spots, wings and a tail. And she has to find all of the materials and finish sewing by Friday. 

“But there’s not one store that you can go to and get all of those items that you’re looking for for a craft project,” she said. “You have to piece it together between all these different places.” 

Meanwhile, in Maggie Hyde’s costume closet, she held up a blue and green dress with scalloped ribbons of different colors. The shade of the fabric she bought online is not quite right. 

“I made it work, but these two shades were supposed to be a lot more different,” Hyde said. “They were not supposed to be the same shade, but on a website, they looked very different to what they look like in person.”

Hyde is a costumer. She participates in Juneau’s annual Wearable Arts show — where creators show off costumes they’ve made themselves — and she designs outfits for renaissance fairs, cosplay photoshoots and, of course, Halloween.

She said it’s a gamble to buy materials online for her creations. And she doesn’t want to support online retailers that don’t treat their employees well and often sell lower quality materials. Shipping costs are often high, if a company even ships to Alaska. 

“Now it’s this whole process of shipping, of looking and that just makes it a lot more difficult,” Hyde said. “You kind of have to adapt.”

Juneau Drag Mother Gigi Monroe said she and her fellow drag performers have been doing just that. 

“For professionals, we know how to get what we need and figure things out,” she said.

But this year, she had to pivot from a costume idea for Juneau Drag’s Halloween show because she couldn’t find more niche materials anywhere. Monroe said Joann usually had that kind of thing. 

And she said the store’s closing also impacts her methods. She would often go to the store with parts of an idea in mind, and figure out the rest based on what fabric she could touch and see in person. 

“So there’s a lot of designing that actually happens in the store, and you don’t really always have to go in knowing exactly what you need,” Monroe said. 

When they first heard the bad news, Monroe and other performers went to Joann’s closing sales and stockpiled on some heavy-hitter supplies — like rhinestone glue.

Monroe said other stores in town — including Juneau’s two quilting shops — help fill some of the gaps. 

And for Juneau’s more casual costumers, there are still options. Kathy Buell is owner of local party store Balloons by Night Moods.

“Halloween is our busiest season for anything that is not balloon-related,” she said.

The store’s shelves are stocked with ready-made costumes that fit infants, kids and as many sizes for adults Buell can find. It also has pieces that can be added to home-grown costumes. 

“We have makeup, we have wigs, we have hats,” she said. “Prosthetics that you put on with latex, blood, lots of blood.”

There is still a lot left for holiday procrastinators, she said. 

“We still have a lot of stock, because honestly, I’ve already—and it’s not even Halloween yet—I’m already buying for next year,” Buell said.

Still, the hole left by the Joann closure is a hard one to fill. But Monroe said there’s a letter-writing campaign asking national craft chain Michaels to step in. 

In Juneau, young people have a new way to find their voice. 

This fall, a digital media club for youth is teaching technical skills and encouraging kids to explore their creativity through audio and video. And their first big project — inspired by Halloween — puts a new twist on an old fairy tale. 

“Quiet on set! Roll tape,” said Levi Spaulding as he directed a room full of middle schoolers in front of mics and mixing boards wearing headphones and costumes.

The kids meet in the new Indigenous Sciences Building on Sealaska Heritage Institute’s campus, which features a recording studio. 

Penny Maes practiced her interviewing skills under a bright red hood.

“Hi, everybody, it’s me, Little Red Riding Hood, and we’re here today with Mr. Wolfie Wolf Wolferson,” she said into the microphone. “Give a hand and get your bear spray out.” 

Recording their on-camera interview in front of a green screen, Penny demanded answers to the hard questions. 

“So, Wolf, why did you eat my grandma?” she said.

Lucas Kelleher answered her through a plastic wolf mask. 

“I didn’t!” he said.

Cory Wolf is the instructor. He has a background in documentary film, and wants to use his skills to help kids find theirs. 

“By giving them a space where they can learn the technical skills, it also gives them a space where they’re working with others as a team,” he said. “So just allowing each of the different gifts that come into the room, allowing those gifts to flourish.”

He said the kids are inspired by podcasts, which have blown up for younger audiences over the last few years. 

“All of the kids have their favorite podcasts,” Wolf said. “A lot of them that come to my class actually have a vision for their own podcast.”

And while they’re working on a Halloween-themed exclusive interview now, upcoming programs will continue to build the skills they need to launch their own projects. 

“Kind of the motto of that space is to give our young people a voice,” Wolf said.

The podcast – audio and video – will debut on Halloween at the Zach Gordon Youth Center. 

In the packed and dark Gold Town Theater, Karen Miceli watched home movies flick across the screen, while a two-man band played along. They were her own family’s videos, filmed in Juneau between the 1930s and 50s. 

Miceli’s grandparents, Harry and Lucille Stonehouse, lived in Juneau in the mid-20th century. Harry worked for the railroad and made enough money to buy a piece of advanced technology — a Kodachrome film camera.

But until now, Miceli had never seen the footage from her mother’s childhood.

“We heard stories about fishing and ice skating and when the lake was frozen, or when Mendenhall Glacier lake was frozen, and my mom would talk about ice skating on it,” she said. 

Two years ago, Miceli’s sister donated the family’s 36 color film reels to the Juneau-Douglas City Museum, and with a grant from the Alaska State Museum, the curators sent the reels to Anchorage to be digitized. 

Miceli came to town from Washington state to see the films. They show a part of her family history that had only lived in stories before now, and it brought her to tears. 

“So that’s why I think I’m so emotional, is just, you know, seeing my mom when she was little,” she said. 

Museum staff organized clips into a presentation according to the season, and many of the shots feature landscapes around Juneau. A much larger Mendenhall Glacier drew gasps from the audience. People ice skate on frozen lakes, and ski down sharp turns. Cows lie down in a pasture in Mendenhall Valley. Men and women fish for salmon together along a rocky shoreline. A toddler plays on the beach at Auke Recreation Area.  

Some footage shows the 1946 Fourth of July parade, with its marching band, intricate floats and the beloved soapbox derby — where young men built mini cars and raced them through the streets of downtown Juneau.

But some shots were just snapshots of everyday life. Museum Director Beth Weigel said it’s exciting to see even the more mundane parts of life from that time, like kneeling in the flower garden and having a picnic at Sandy Beach, as often, that isn’t what people would choose to document in expensive color film.  

“There’s only a limited amount of what we can see into the past,” Weigel said. 

And even though this isn’t her family’s footage, Weigel said it can make anyone sentimental. 

“They’re just sort of, ‘Oh, what a time to have that ability to be with your family so much and picnic and hang out and do fun things,’” she said. 

But, Weigel said, so much of that joy and connectedness is a part of Juneau today. 

“I think Juneau’s like that, though, still in many ways,” she said. 

And Miceli, with the Stonehouse family, said the full theater gave her a sense of Juneau’s community.

“So many people came out,” she said. “I mean, that’s just amazing to us, because we thought it would be the four of us, and then the Museum people. And then to have this whole thing practically full when we got here—I mean, that’s pretty amazing, the community support and all of that.” 

Museum staff say they plan to make some of the digitized films available online in the future. 

At a ceremony on Monday, Lingít language Professor X̱’unei Lance Twitchell said that bringing traditional ways of being into the present isn’t a contradiction. 

“It’s not a ‘living in two worlds’ situation,” Twitchell said. “It’s living as an Indigenous person with multiple languages and multiple identities, and being just fine with it. You don’t have to be just one thing.” 

The new Sealaska Heritage Institute Indigenous Science Building carries that sentiment in all the services it offers. 

The building on Heritage Way hosts a digital media lab with a podcast booth and video production software, an Indigenous science research lab that studies cultural resources like seaweed and clams and a makerspace with a digital woodcarving machine. That last one made nametags instructors wore as they led tours of the new building on Monday. 

In the Traditional Foods and Medicine Kitchen, instructor S’eiltin Jamiann Hasselquist said she and others are bringing old ways to process and preserve food into the present.

“Whatever people can dream up that they would like to do in this kitchen,” Hasselquist said. “I think that we could try to make their dreams happen”

With freeze dryers, pressure cookers, dehydrators and space to build traditional drying racks, Hasselquist said they are making and preserving traditional foods that elders would make when she was a kid, like cheese kaháakw  — a rich and smoky paste made of fermented salmon eggs. 

She scooped some out of a glass jar, and spread it on a cracker for anyone who wanted to try it. 

“Someone tasted that cheese kaháakw, and they took one bite, and they said, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m getting emotional. I haven’t tasted this for 30 years.’ It’s been three decades, and they thought that they would never try it again,” she said. 

Elders have been approaching Hasselquist with foods they remember from childhood, but don’t know how to make. 

“So if we could have workshops and share that knowledge,” she said. “And we’re rebirthing, you know, this, this Indigenous way of living and being.”

Next, she wants to find out how to make cold-pressed seal grease. 

Inside the clan house in the Walter Soboleff building, Sukteeneidí clan members stood in front of a large poster depicting a totem pole that represents their clan story. They offered thanks to other clans, carvers, and  SHI leadership. 

In a ceremony held on Indigenous People’s Day, the latest pole in Sealaska Heritage Institute’s Kootéeyaa Deiyí — totem pole trail — was dedicated. 

The pole is called a kooteeyaa in Lingít and was funded by the National Parks Service. It was raised near Juneau’s Overstreet Park, but organizers held the dedication inside due to weather. 

Edward Thomas is Sukteeneidí and he said he’s excited to see his clan join the handful of others already represented by the Kootéeyaa Deiyí.

“As I look at the walk of the totem pole along the waterfront here, I’m proud to see that all of our clans are being represented,” he said. 

Thomas went on to thank the carver, Lee Wallace, and his apprentices for the thought and work they put into the pole. 

Wallace is a Haida master carver and lives in Saxman, but he said this kootéeyaa is a part of his family’s legacy, too. 

“My great grandfather has a totem pole in the state building, Dwight Wallace. My grandfather, John Wallace, has a totem pole that was outside the city museum,” he said. “So now, with this particular kootéeyaa pole, there’s three generations of Wallace totem poles standing here in Juneau.” 

Wallace was helped by apprentices, including his son Charles Peele. 

And Peele held the youngest member of the carving team — his five-year-old daughter Jáadsangaa Elizabeth — as he described the design of the pole.

“And at the top, we have the current clan leaders. We want to acknowledge that this is representation of a living people,” he said. “That this isn’t just something that’s from the past, this is something that’s tying history together. We often look at totem poles as things that are coming back from the past. And we wanted to add a piece that represents the present.”

Below the current clan leaders, the pole features a spirit man, Raven, and a box that represents the abundance of knowledge and history held in the Sukteeneidí clan, whose homelands are near Kake.

At the base is the clan crest — dog salmon swimming in tall grasses. 

SHI plans to raise a total of 30 poles along Juneau’s waterfront. So far, 13 poles have been installed.