Juneau

Eaglecrest Ski Area is opening this year ahead of schedule. Skiers and snowboarders will be able to the ride chair lift up the mountain this weekend.

Eaglecrest’s general manager, Matt Lillard, said the snow is about 50″ deep at the summit and 20″ at the base.

“It’s certainly still early season conditions. It’s thin in spots and there are some bare areas where water is flowing,” Lillard said. “But overall we’re going to be able to open the hooter and black bear chairlift for skiing … the conditions for skiing are actually really nice and we’re looking forward to a fun opening weekend.”

Lillard said last year’s snow was the worst on record. The upper mountain was only open for five days.

To celebrate the early start, Eaglecrest is having a season pass sale. It starts Nov. 27 and ends Dec. 6. Unlimited season passes are $519 for adults and $469 for seniors.

After this weekend, the ski area opens back up on Dec. 5 with regular business hours.

By talking about boarding school experiences, Tlingit elders in Juneau are turning painful memories into sources of healing – healing for themselves and generations still living with the consequences.

The nonprofit arm of the local urban Native corporation is using those stories to create a K-12 curriculum that will focus on the impacts of colonization on the Tlingit people.

Della Cheney and other elders have been meeting once a month at Goldbelt Heritage Foundation since August.

“We’re helping to write down the story of how boarding schools are affecting us and our families today, so that our children and grandchildren will know the history and realize the changes our families, our people faced,” said Cheney, who’s originally from Kake. She was part of panel of Tlingit elders during the recent clan conference in Juneau.

From the late 1800s to the mid-1900s, the federal government split up families and forced Native children into boarding schools to assimilate. Many were also raised in orphanages.

“That time is still walking with us today,” Cheney said. “The people who were raised with no love or affection in a very hostile environment also raised their children without much nurturing or affection. So today we see some of our families suffering from abuse.”

Cheney said both her parents attended Sheldon Jackson School in Sitka. Her mother was only 10 when she was brought there in 1923.

“It just breaks my heart to think that I was raised in such a loving family and to know that my mother and father weren’t,” Cheney said.

But those who went to boarding schools persevered, Cheney said. In Kake, they fought to make the village a first class city in 1951, allowing the community to operate its own school system.

Emma Shorty is from Teslin, Yukon. She was 4 years old when she was taken away from her home in 1937 to go to residential school in Carcross.

“We were never allowed to go anywhere,” Shorty said. “We had to stay in one yard. They put a fence around the school. They used to lock the fence and when we went to bed, they would lock our doors and there were no bathrooms to go to, so we got into trouble for wetting our beds.”

Shorty said she was molested at the school.

“I learned to forgive. I wasn’t always kind. Residential school just about killed my spirit. Today I forgive them,” Short said.

She fought hard to have her first daughter go to public school, even though she was turned away again and again for being Tlingit.

John Martin went to boarding school in Eklutna and then to the St. Pius X Mission in Skagway, “but instead of Christianity, there were some ugly things that went on.” Martin said he would not speak about it.

Martin said many of the elders are still hurt.

“By putting us in boarding schools, it was a form of prison,” Martin said. “They disrupted our learning process of the language. They actually took a way of life from us when our elders were teaching us how to gather food.”

Martin said telling the stories from that time and identifying the hurt is the beginning of healing.

Developing the new Goldbelt Heritage curriculum is a multi-year process. Besides boarding schools, it will also share the history of the Douglas Indian Village burning and the Douglas Indian cemetery relocation.

The curriculum will be used during summer academic programs at Goldbelt Heritage and will be available for the Juneau School District.

Firefighters say they assisted a good Samaritan in rescuing a dog that fell through the ice on Mendenhall Lake.

Ed Quinto, Capital City Fire/Rescue assistant chief, says the rescue took place before noon on Monday on the west side of the lake.

Quinto said the dog and its owner were on a walk when the dog ran out onto the ice and fell in. “The dog owner attempted to retrieve the dog, but was unable to get to the animal,” Quinto said.

An unidentified bystander went out onto the ice and entered the water to help the dog out. An ambulance, fire truck and ATVs were on scene. The Forest Service and Juneau Police officers then used an all-terrain vehicle to pull the man to shore where he was evaluated for hypothermia and released.

“He didn’t have any injuries and he was taken back to the car in the parking lot,” Quinto said. “All personnel and animals were accounted for.”

Juneau’s Gunakadeit Park will soon be torn down. The park will serve as the staging area for the larger demolition of the Gastineau Apartments. Rorie Watt, the city’s engineering director, said the contractors should have the park dissembled within a couple of weeks.

“They’re going to be moving pieces of art and the decorative fence, and setting up barriers and traffic control signs,” Watt said.

The decorative metal pieces would be salvaged, but the city hasn’t identified a use for them yet.

The flow of traffic isn’t expected to be interrupted until after the holiday season. That’s when some of the riskier demolition will take place, and the front facing wall of the Gastineau Apartments will be torn down.

CBC Construction was given the notice to proceed after a Nov. 10 Juneau Assembly meeting.

The Gastineau Apartments burned in November 2012. The city and owners James Barrett and Camilla Barrett have been in a long dispute over the maintenance of the building. The Barretts were served numerous times over the years with notices to clean up or secure the site.

The project is supposed to be completed by the end of April.

Seattle-based Letters Aloud will perform Tuesday night at the Juneau Arts and Culture Center. The group of reality theater actors formed in 2013 with the mission of connecting modern audiences to an endangered form of communication — the handwritten letter.

Tuesday night’s show is themed “fame.” On a Juneau Afternoon, Letters Aloud actor Todd Beadle read an unusual appeal from a young Sidney Poitier.

Dear President Roosevelt,

My name is Sidney Poitier and I am here in the United States in New York City. I am from the Bahamas. I would like to go back to the Bahamas but I don’t have the money. I would like to borrow from you $100. I will send it back to you when I get to the Bahamas. I miss my mother and father and I miss my brothers and sisters and I miss my home in the Caribbean. I cannot seem to get myself organized properly here in America, especially in the cold weather, and I am therefore asking you as an American citizen if you will loan me $100 to get back home. I will send it back to you and I would certainly appreciate it very much.

Your fellow American,
Sidney Poitier

Letters from Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and Andy Warhol will also be read and accompanied by a slideshow. Curator Paul Morgan Stetler says the project gives listeners unique insight into the lives of heroes and celebrities of the past.

“It’s like a time travel to a certain degree — you feel like you’re really connecting to these people in a way that you wouldn’t normally have access to.” Stetler said.

The live performance begins 7 p.m. Tuesday at the JACC.