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Juneau Chilkat weaver, performing artist and fashion designer Lily Hope performs “One Square Inch in Chilkat Weaving” as part of the Red Carpet Celebration Sessions, a video series featuring Alaska Native artists filmed during Celebration 2018 in Juneau.

The Red Carpet Celebration Sessions are a collaboration between  Kindred Post,  Trickster Company and KTOO Public Media. You can watch other Red Carpet Concerts with Silver Jackson, Chantil Dukart and Stephen Qacung Blanchett in this YouTube playlist.

“I more often have it imposed on me as a Native writer of what I should be writing,” said Vera Starbard to a ballroom of 70 people at a recent social justice summit in Juneau. Starbard is an Anchorage-based playwright and writer who is Tlingit and Dena’ina.

“And it either needs to completely conform to a dominant society norm, or it needs to be completely what they consider cultural acceptable traditional,” continued Starbard.

The summit, Social Justice Doers: Partners for the Next 10,000 Years, was hosted by the First Alaskans Institute and gathered diverse community members who worked to make Alaska a more equitable and just place. Among the discussions was social justice and the arts that brought together four prolific indigenous artists.

Listen to the story here:

In 2016, Perseverance Theatre staged Starbard’s play “Our Voices Will Be Heard.” As that play was being developed she allowed others to compromise her vision.

“There is a huge section I feel was just completely lost, because in the end, I got told over and over and over again by non-Native audiences that this didn’t make sense, or it wasn’t quite that way. And I look at it now, and I’m like, I lost the most pure part of my heritage in that,” said Starbard.

She said the institutions of art, and the decision makers are generally white, upper class, often male. These are what she refers to as gatekeepers.

“So, we as artists of color, often female, have to navigate that and have to sort of go, well I know you don’t understand my perspective at all, but trust me, it’s a story that will relate to an awful lot of people,” said Starbard.

Starbard’s next story is a play called “Devilfish” set to stage in the fall of 2019. She says what happened to her previous play will not happen again.

“It’s different from ‘Our Voices’ in that I’m standing much more firmly in what I know is good storytelling practices told from a Tlingit perspective,” said Starbard.

“Devilfish” was inspired by a traditional clan story, set in a backdrop imagining the beginning of the Tlingit people.

“It needs to be grounded in Tlingit history, Tlingit culture, Tlingit arts, Tlingit sensibilities and Tlingit values,” said Starbard. “Much more than it needs to be a Western piece of art. A Western stage piece.”

For the gatekeepers reading, Starbard has this request.

“I would say just starting with helping us tell our own stories. … Share the power,” said Starbard. “This is a pretty strong social justice concept of power. Where does the power lie? Not with people of color. Not with women of color certainly. … Sharing the power is such a huge one and something that as people of color we can’t make you do. You just have to do it.”

Watch the one-hour discussion here:

Editor’s note: 360 North was under contract with First Alaskans Institute to produce video coverage of the summit.

U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith is making a stop in Juneau on Wednesday. It’s part of a national tour that’s bringing her to rural communities in Alaska, South Dakota, Maine and Louisiana.

She’s excited to take poetry to parts of the country where literary festivals don’t always go.

Smith won a 2012 Pulitzer Prize for her collection of poetry called “Life on Mars.” Here she is reading from her poem “The Weather in Space.”

Her visit to Juneau culminates with a public reception at the Father Andrew P. Kashevaroff State Library, Archives, and Museum at 5 p.m. with a reading and discussion 6 p.m. Alaska’s State Writer Laureate Ernestine Hayes will provide an introduction.

Smith will give away copies of a new anthology “American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time.”

The program will be recorded by 360 North for the series “At the APK” for later broadcast. Smith will also appear on Wednesday’s “A Juneau Afternoon.” 

Three bronze house posts will be installed at the Walter Soboleff Building on Sunday. Each of the 8-foot posts were carved from cedar, then cast in bronze. They weigh close to 1,000 pounds each.

Traditionally, the posts would have been the main pillars that held up a clan house.

Sealaska Heritage Institute President Rosita Worl said, “It’s exciting to see these posts carved in a traditional way in wood and then cast in a contemporary material. These pieces demonstrate that our cultures and our art are alive, thriving and evolving through our younger generations.”

Each is from a tribe that Sealaska Heritage Institute represents. The Tlingit post was made by Stephen Jackson, the Haida post by TJ Young, and the Tsimshian post by David Robert Boxley.

On A Juneau Afternoon, Sealaska Heritage Chief of Operations Lee Kadinger said these posts are part of a bigger plan.

“We see that there is a need for more northwest coast art in our community. If you go to a community like Sante Fe, where you see all types of indigenous art work in the whole community. Here, you see it in some small areas and so we see this as a contribution to continue to educate the community on Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian cultures,” said Kadinger.

The posts will be erected on at 1:30 p.m. Sunday at the corner of Front and Seward streets in front of the Walter Soboleff Building. The raising is free and open to the public and will also be streamed on SHI’s Facebook page.

Amish Robots is a band with Southeast Alaska roots.

After their breakout set at this year’s Alaska Folk Festival in Juneau, they headlined a KXLL Showcase concert filling the Hangar Ballroom to capacity.  

Now the band’s got a new EP and name change inspired by its members’ hometown of Ketchikan. 

Hear guitarist and songwriter Patrick Troll talk about the band’s formation and latest release as Revilla: 

Seattle’s Amish Robots began as Ketchikan teenagers Patrick Troll and Alejandro Chavarria’s musical duo.

The pair played under the names Baby Shower and Really Cool Guys before settling on Amish Robots.

After moving to Seattle and welcoming Juneau musician Alex Nelson into the fold, Troll said the group outgrew the Amish Robots sound.

“I’m kind of the sensitive one about the name change because I was the one who came up with Amish Robots,” Troll said. “Of course, once we changed it, it came out of the woodwork that people didn’t like the name Amish Robots — or not that they didn’t like it, they just thought it was too much of a gimmick.”

Their new name “Revilla” is inspired by Revillagigedo Island where Ketchikan is located on the Alexander Archipelago.

Their four-track EP is an homage to the trio’s first Alaska Folk Festival performance together in 2007, when they performed together as The North Sea.

Though based in Seattle, Revilla hasn’t forgotten their Southeast Alaska roots, calling on visual artist Matt Hamilton to create the group’s album artwork.

Listen to the North Sea EP and hear Patrick Troll Friday nights on KXLL as DJALTERNATIVE on his electronic music program Burger Church.

Each spring in southeast Alaska the Sitka spruce tip harvest happens suddenly and only lasts about a week. With the flavor’s growing popularity and short harvest season, Alaska businesses have come to rely on a small town commercial operation to meet the growing demand.

On a blustery May afternoon, Molly Kelly and her family spread out along the Gustavus treeline near its sandy beaches. They’re picking spruce tips, the bright green nubs that grow on the branches of the coniferous Sitka spruce. The harvest has become an annual tradition in Gustavus that locals refer to as “spruce tipping.”

With a bucket hung around her neck, Kelly grips the branch with a gloved hand and slowly drags down the limb, pulling away a handful of spruce tips. Kelly and her sister Cassie Parker say it can take anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes to collect a pound, depending on energy level and kid interruptions.

“I have not picked many at all, maybe 50 pounds,” said Kelly.

Parker says she’s only got maybe 75 pounds, nothing compared to their nephew Caleb who is nowhere in sight. He’s already already amassed a thousand pounds picking spruce tips both day and night.

The Gustavus “spruce tipping” season all started back in 2000, when the Alaskan Brewing Company approached the family owned fish processing plant Pep’s Packing to provide the spruce tips.

The Juneau brewery’s inaugural order of 500 pounds eventually became their seasonal Winter Ale, an English Old Ale style honoring the history of Captain James Cook who brewed spruce beer on his voyages to prevent scurvy.

Now the brewery uses Gustavus tips in their many spruce beers, including the Spruce IPA which took home a Gold Award at the bi-annual World Beer Cup Competition this spring.

At Pep’s Packing, families unload garbage bags full of spruce tips into special vacuum sealing bags that owner Pep Scott weighs and records.

“One of the families that has been picking from us from the very beginning now has three generations that’s been picking and now they have this rivalry where grandpa tries to pick more than his son,” said Pep.

She says around 50 people partake in the annual harvest, from small children to their oldest picker at 75 years old who used his past earnings to go to Mexico to have dental work.

“Another kid bought a lawn mower a couple years ago with his spruce tip money and then he mowed lawns the rest of the summer,” said John Scott.

With the season beginning right after the school year gets out, the Scotts believe it brings an economic boost to the town.

Because of a cold spring, this year’s spruce tipping season ran extra long, allowing that nephew, Caleb Warren, to collect more than 3,000 pounds in two weeks at this year’s price of $3 a pound. He was this season’s top picker.

After weighing, the spruce tips are packed in 50-pound fish boxes stored in the freezer. When they have enough to fill orders, Pep’s Packing charters a Cessna aircraft to move the product to destinations around Southeast.

Pep’s largest customer is still the Alaskan Brewing Company, but the spruce tips go to smaller outfits like Coppa ice cream in Juneau, and as far as Rogue Ales in Oregon.

In Juneau, Amalga Distillery owner Maura Selenak says they’ve relied on Pep’s packing to provide the spruce tips for their syrups, spruce tip soda, and small-batch Juneauper gin that’s distributed across the state. She says the spruce tip taste is indescribable until you’ve tried it.

“People come in from out of town and they’re expecting a piney flavor, and it’s actually more of a bubble gum sweetness,” said Selenak. “A lot of times people will come in and say this gin tastes like Southeast Alaska or it tastes like the rainforest.”

The distillery could buy ingredients from growers in the Lower 48, but for them  it’s a source of pride knowing their product was hand-foraged by Alaskans, creating economic opportunity in rural communities, and not to mention, a taste of Southeast in every glass.