Yvonne Krumrey

Lingít Master Carver Wayne Price is returning to the University of Alaska Southeast as part of its Northwest Coast Arts program. 

“The attention being paid to all branches of Northwest Coast Native art. I really feel the support out here at UAS,” Price said.

He will be teaching carving courses and formline design classes.

Both art forms have beginning, intermediate and advanced curriculums, but some of the classes are combined. Price says the formline class is intensive. 

“In my formline class, they were sweating,” Price said. “It seems they were trying so hard.”

Price said he only found out last week that he would be teaching this term, but he thinks his classes will fill up fast. Students in the beginning carving class will be making paddles, while intermediate and advanced students can choose their projects. 

“So they have the benefit of an artist who’s got 50 years of Northwest coast art under my belt. And I bring that all here to the University of Alaska, at Áak’w,” Price said. 

Price has taught at UAS before. Since then, he has carved dugout canoes — or yaakw — with high schoolers across Southeast Alaska and most recently unveiled a healing totem at Twin Lakes in Juneau, which was built in remembrance of missing and murdered Indigenous women. 

Price lives in Haines with his wife, but he moved to Juneau for the semester. He said he doesn’t yet know if he’ll teach in the fall.

“I’m just taking it one semester at a time,” he said. “And let’s see how it goes.”

A UAS spokesperson said that anyone interested in taking one of Priceʼs classes can call the registrar’s office to ask if there is space.

More than two weeks after Neilga Koogéi Taija Revels’s regalia was stolen from her Juneau home, she says it’s been returned anonymously by someone who refused the reward she offered.

“It was just shocking,” Revels said. “When she ripped open the garbage bag, she was like, ‘This is yours, right?’ And I started crying on her.”

Revels said the woman had bought the regalia from someone who was walking around downtown, trying to sell it. Later, she learned it was stolen from social media and news coverage.

Revels said sheʼs still missing over $15,000 worth of stolen possessions, but sheʼs at peace.

“Everything else compared to the regalia is just stuff we can replace or I can move on,” Revels said. “The regalia, having it back home feels like having a family member back home.”

After the regalia was stolen, Revels told KTOO that it represents an important piece of Hoonah’s history and a treasured connection to her late grandmother, who made it.

Police arrested Juneau man Anthony Perry for the burglary earlier this month, but at the time, the items were still missing. Perry was charged with five counts of burglary related to the break-in. The next hearing for the case is scheduled for March.

This story has been updated.

JAMHI Health & Wellness will have a new facility thanks to $870,000 that Sen. Lisa Murkowski earmarked for the project in the federal omnibus spending bill.

The organization says the project will help them serve more youth amid a growing mental health crisis that’s led to a waitlist for services.

Rachel Gearhart leads operations at JAMHI, which provides care for people with severe mental health needs. She says the need is urgent. 

“If you are asking for services, you’re not asking for services a week, three weeks, a month down the road. You want services now,” Gearhart said. “So once you’re ready to do that, you want to be able to strike while the iron is hot.”

In December, the Department of Justice released findings that Alaska is failing to provide behavioral health services to youth “in settings appropriate to their needs” — leading to children being institutionalized who don’t have to be. Gearhart agrees that when patients can’t get the treatment they need in town, they may have to go to Anchorage or the Lower 48 for inpatient care. 

The new facility — which will be in the former Juneau Youth Services building on Jordan Avenue — should help with that. There will be more offices where providers can see patents individually, and larger rooms for group therapy and play therapy like yoga. JAMHI will continue to use its current location on Glacier Avenue for administrative offices.

Gearhart says the organization is focused on making sure they won’t outgrow the new building, too.

“We’re spending the time right now to work with the architect and the providers and leadership at JAMHI to really decide, what does this building need to look like?” she said.

Gearhart said she doesn’t know when the money will land at JAMHI’s door, but the renovations will hopefully be completed by summer. 

Ellen Bradley is a professional skier, but a trip to Eaglecrest last winter was the first time she’d ever skied in her traditional homelands. Now sheʼs working to help Alaska Native youth in Juneau get the same benefits that she has from the sport.

“Spending time on the land can address so many things in a person’s life,” she said. “But I think mental health is especially one of them — to just move your body with the land.”

Bradley hosted the Native Youth Snow Sports Community Night at Elizabeth Peratrovich Hall in Juneau on Friday. The event offered prizes, like a formline snowboard designed by Lingít artist James Johnson, and featured live music by Southeast Alaska favorite Ya Tseen. It’s part of a broader effort to remove some of the barriers that face Alaska Native youth who want to ski. 

Bradley, who is Lingít, learned to ski from her dad as a young child in Washington State. She says it helped her feel connected to the land, but she didnʼt see many other Indigenous people on the slopes while she was growing up. 

“I had my brother and I had my dad, and everyone else I skied with was white,” she said.

She says the sport can seem off-limits — even to people who are Indigenous to the land a ski mountain sits on. One program she hopes will start changing that offers ski trips for youth to Eaglecrest, hosted by the Douglas Indian Association. 

Benson Bullock with DIA was at the event, helping sign kids up for the trips. He says they started last spring.

“My supervisor said I should figure out a way to take kids up to Eaglecrest in March and April and get them lessons, get them gear, just get kids out on the mountain,” Bullock said.

This year, he wants the program to get even more kids on the mountain. The first trip will be in January, though the dates aren’t set yet. Another is planned for March.

Bradley thinks that efforts to get kids on skis could mean more Indigenous people in the skiing industry as a whole.

“So they can become the professional skiers, so they can become the ski instructors, the lifties. So they can eventually become the people running Eaglecrest and making the decisions about what skiing is, where it happens,” Bradley said.

Ryland Tompkins, one of dozens of kids at the event, could be one of the future pros Bradley is thinking of. He hasnʼt skied or boarded yet, but his uncle Joe Tompkins is a Paralympic ski champion.

Ryland said he wants to learn, too. 

Bradley is hopeful that more and more Indigenous kids will start participating in snow sports.

“I think the future of skiing in Alaska is Indigenous,” she said. 

Neilga Koogéi Taija Revels lost a lot of her things when someone broke into her home last month, but the theft of her grandmotherʼs regalia was the most devastating.

Police arrested Juneau man Anthony Perry for the burglary this week, but the items are still missing. Revels says the regalia represents an important piece of Hoonah’s history — and some of the few things she had left from her grandmother.

Juneau Police Department Public Safety Manager Erann Kalwara said the investigation isnʼt over. 

“I would say there’s always hope,” she said. “They’re still following up on leads and still working through things.”

Revels said she feels hope, too. A lot of that comes from the support she’s received from investigators and the Juneau community as a whole.

“I’m just really humbled at the amount of caring and energy that folks have been putting into this,” Revels said. “And it does help me have hope and keep hope that the regalia will come home.”

Police also arrested Perry for a break-in at a local business in early December. He’s been charged with seven theft and burglary counts related to the break-ins and additional charges related to his arrest.

Perry is currently being held at Lemon Creek Correctional Center. 

A preliminary hearing is scheduled for Jan. 12.

Each year, Dr. Lindy Jones and his wife Colleen say they’ll stop making the baby boats. But each year they keep making them. It’s a tradition that took root back when Lindy delivered babies at Bartlett Hospital, where he said he formed deep connections with parents.

The couple — who’ve been woodworking together since college — makes one of the little, rocking boats for the first baby born in Juneau each year. They also make them for nurses and friends when they have children, about four or five boats a year. 

Lindy is an emergency room doctor now, but when he was working in the delivery room 20 years ago, he found he wanted a way to acknowledge the connections he formed with parents who were experiencing infertility and challenging pregnancies.

“There’s certain families that I had a connection to and kind of being with them through the process, and it was a way just to acknowledge that for myself and for them,” he said.

The couple builds adult-sized boats, too — like the 30-foot fishing boat they started last January. Standing in the Joneses’ woodshop and guest house — which they also built themselves — Colleen gestures towards the hull, recently coated in resin. 

“This is usually the woodworking room, and it has been transformed into a boat,” she said.

Colleen says she spends about four hours a day in the woodshop, working on their bigger projects and on the gifts the couple gives out around the holidays.

“It’s one way that you can just share something at the start of the year, for somebody special,” she said. 

They used yellow cedar for this year’s baby boat, grown and cut in Hoonah. Lindy has been working with Wes Tyler, the owner of Icy Straits Lumber, for years.

“He actually, this year, donated all the yellow cedar for the boats,” he said.

The baby boats are labor intensive — at one point, the couple stopped building them for about a decade. But Lindy said it’s not wasted time for him. 

“Shop time doesn’t count against life, you know?” he said. 

Lindy said he feels deeply committed to Bartlett as a place of work, and that drives him to keep making and gifting these boats. 

“It’s given me an opportunity for the most challenging, fulfilling career I could ever imagine,” he said.

This year’s boat went to Ethan Weed, Juneau’s first baby of 2023, born Jan. 3.

Lindy said he never plans to sell anything he makes. And he plans to have their new boat ready for the Outer Coast by king salmon season.