Celebration

More than 1,500 Indigenous dancers from across Southeast Alaska filled Willoughby Avenue and Centennial Hall for the Grand Entrance Procession of Celebration 2024 on Wednesday. 

The procession marks the kick-off of the four-day Celebration festival in Juneau — a biennial gathering that honors and uplifts the culture of Lingít, Haida and Tsimshian people.

Throughout the coming days, there will be dances, cultural demonstrations and art markets and exhibits. 

Here are some images from the grand entrance. Click on any photo for a slideshow view.

Disclaimer: KTOO 360TV is contracted to produce television and online video coverage of Celebration.

Traditional canoes  — or yaakw —  landed in Juneau Tuesday to mark the start of the biennial Celebration festival, a gathering of Indigenous people in Southeast that attracts thousands. The canoes came from across the region and parts of Canada, journeying for days to get here. 

Eight yaakw made circles in front of a crowd waiting at Juneau’s Auke Recreation Area. Some carried over a dozen people, holding formline paddles and wearing life vests over their regalia. 

Leaders on each boat asked permission to come ashore, and Seikoonie Fran Houston, an Áak’w Ḵwáan elder, asked their reason for coming. One paddler who came from Haines answered.

“We’re here for Haa Shagoon, for those before us, and for those yet to come,” he said. “For our kids and our grandchildren on the beaches, so this way of life lives on forever. Aatlein gunalchéesh.” 

Master Carver Wayne Price made several of the yaakw landing in Juneau today. He came in on one from Haines. 

“Five dugouts on one journey, all on one journey, at one time is history in the making,” he said. “How long has it been since we’ve had that kind of gathering?”

Thirteen-year-old Mallory Willard Flanery and her twin brother live in Ketchikan, but they paddled here from Kake.

“Each day would be about a couple hours, we would paddle,” she said.

But she said she wasn’t tired, and she would do it all over again.

Another group of yaakw, including members of the One People Canoe Society, finished their journey to Juneau Tuesday by landing downtown. 

Roberta Jack was on the first yaakw that landed there. It was paddled by Alaska Native veterans and their families. Jack traveled from Wrangell. Three generations of her family waited for her onshore.

“I got teary-eyed,” Jack said. “I got teary-eyed to see them here, watching their grandma paddle in.”

She said she was excited to celebrate her culture, surrounded by family and friends.

Her granddaughter, Summer Woodbury, stood next to her as they watched more yaakw come in.

“They’re beautiful and they’re really big and long and I like the paddles and the flags on them,” she said. 

Over the coming days, events across downtown will honor and uplift the culture of Lingít, Haida and Tsimshian people through dances, cultural demonstrations and art markets and exhibits. It’s hosted by Sealaska Heritage Institute. 

More information and the full schedule of official Celebration events can be found on Sealaska Heritage Institute’s website.

Disclaimer: KTOO 360TV is contracted to produce television and online video coverage of Celebration. 

The beloved festival known as Celebration returns to Juneau this week. 

Since its inception in 1982, the biennial gathering has brought Lingít, Haida and Tsimshian people together in the capital city to celebrate their cultural survival and share it with the general public. 

It’s hosted by the Sealaska Heritage Institute. This year, it will happen from Wednesday, June 5 through Saturday, June 8. But the unofficial kickoff happens Tuesday, when traditional canoes — or yaakw — will land at 11:30 a.m. both downtown across from the Ramada and at Auke Recreation Area. 

The heart of the four day event is dancing. Performances will basically be going on all day, every day.

This year’s event promises almost 1,600 dancers from 36 dance groups, including the lead dance group Dakhká Khwáan Dancers or “People of the Inland,” a Lingít group from Whitehorse, Canada.

They’ll head up Wednesday evening’s grand entrance parade with drumming and singing

In addition to dance, the festival features a Native food contest, a daily Native art market, an Indigenous fashion show, a regalia review and brand-new Chilkat robes on display. 

There will also be an art exhibit at the Walter Soboleff Building and evening film screenings at Gold Town Theater. 

Events are happening across town at Centennial Hall, Elizabeth Peratrovich Hall, the Sealaska Heritage Institute Arts Campus and the Alaska State Library.

Áak’w Rock will also host Indigenous music events on Friday and Saturday and a multi-generational art show opens Wednesday at Alaska Robotics Gallery. 

The full schedule of official Celebration events can be found on Sealaska Heritage Institute’s website. 

Disclaimer: KTOO 360TV is contracted to produce television and online video coverage of Celebration. 

Correction: A previous version of this story mistakenly said canoes will be landing at Douglas Boat Harbor. They will land downtown across from the Ramada instead. 

Inside Kasaan’s carving shed in early May, Eric Hamar is hard at work.

Hamar is a Haida artist and carver, and he spends his days carving in the workshop in Kasaan, a small village of about 30 people on Prince of Wales Island. The thick smell of cedar in the air, Hamar’s surrounded by canoes, paddles, a half-carved totem pole, and tools.

On this particular day, he was busy getting ready for Celebration, the huge every-other-year gathering of Indigenous people in Southeast Alaska. The event lasts four days and is the largest gathering of Lingít, Haida, and Tsimshian peoples in the world.

Hamar’s preparation for the festival is a little more involved than packing socks and a toothbrush. His task at hand was planing wooden paddles.

“Planes are kind of interesting because they’ll chirp,” he said, as he ran a hand-planer tool down the length of the paddle, laughing at its dullness. “But when they’re really sharp, and you run down a piece of wood it goes ‘chirp’ like a bird, which this one is not doing.”

Hamar is part of a group that’s making a 10-day, 250 mile journey from Kasaan to Juneau, where Celebration is held, in canoes they carved themselves.

According to Hamar, paddles aren’t his favorite thing to work on.

“I like three dimensional stuff a lot more,” Hamar said.

There’s also a large totem pole sitting on saw horses in the corner. He’s been working on that for about a year. It has three watchmen on the top and below that, the beak of a raven juts out.

“[It’s] more exciting for me as an artist,” Hamar said of the totem. “But you know, there’s something beautiful about the simplistic nature of something like a paddle as well.”

Across the room, there is a stack of rough pieces of wood carved into a paddle shape, waiting to be sanded.

“It’s pretty exciting to be going on this journey for the first time in our own canoes from our own community and meeting up with a lot of other communities on the way,” Hamar said as he worked. “I think, hopefully, it’ll bring a lot of inspiration to the people and hopefully get some folks excited about maintaining the traditions.”

Twenty-six paddlers were set to depart Kasaan in three canoes. The group is all ages.

“Well, the youngest has to be six months, because that’s my baby,” Hamar laughed.

The carver’s whole family is with him on the voyage — his mom and dad, sister and brother-in-law, and his wife and two daughters. One of the girls is six months old and the other is almost six years old.

To get to the village of Kasaan, you turn off the main route that spans Prince of Wales Island and then follow a dirt and gravel logging road for nearly an hour through dense forest and timber operations and then, suddenly, there it is.

To bolster the group, some paddlers will be coming to join them from other communities all over Southeast Alaska, and according to Hamar, a couple as far away as Seattle.

They plan to make stops in Thorne Bay, Coffman Cove, Wrangell, Petersburg and then camp the rest of the way up the coast to Juneau.

There is an 18-foot canoe hanging in the shop. Hamar said that wasn’t one of the ones headed to Celebration. It wasn’t ready yet. The wood of the canoe fanned out but then curled back in on itself like a flower that hasn’t bloomed. Hamar said it needed to be steamed.

“Basically, you just take it down to the beach and you start a big fire and you put a bunch of rocks in the fire. And then you fill [the canoe] up with saltwater. And then you put the hot rocks in there until it starts boiling and cover it with a tarp. And then it just kind of naturally falls open as the wood heats up,” Hamar explained.

Once it’s steamed, the carvers will prop the hull open with sticks so it holds its shape as the wood cools. Eventually, the seats and crossbars — called thwarts — are what will keep the wooden canoe in shape.

Finally, strips of wood are steamed in and riveted to the sides to act as ribs.

“That’s kind of the last step before finishing it with oil and paint or whatever you’re doing,” Hamar said.

Since the canoes are one large piece of wood, they’re prone to becoming overly dried out and splitting. Hamar paints the bottoms with tar to lock in the moisture.

Hamar said making a canoe is a long and difficult process. In his 20 years carving with his dad, he had built just the three hanging in the shed. He said that’s because it’s hard to find the perfect piece of wood. Plus, they aren’t something you can easily sell.

“So then the person who might be using it isn’t actually going to be able to afford it, unless it’s being sold as an art piece, which kind of isn’t the point, right?” Hamar explained, adding that the canoes require a lot of maintenance. But back in the day, people depended on them to get around.

“You [probably] would have had the time to take care of it. It was important,” Hamara said. “It’s now important in a different way, I think. It’s important for the culture and ceremonial use more than anything.”

That’s not to say that the vessels are strictly ceremonial though.

“This one is covered in pine tar, and seal oil, and blood and guts, and it’s pretty beat up and that’s why I like it,” Hamar said, pointing to a canoe he and a friend had used the previous weekend to catch a 250-pound seal. “It looks good that way! Looks like it gets used, because it does.”

Hamar’s work was interrupted by a group of students from Klawock filing into the shed. They were there to learn about sustainable harvesting and the important sacrifices that trees and animals make to provide for them.

“When we’re talking about something like a totem pole, we have to make sure that we’re not only looking after the ones that we cut down and doing a good job to make sure that — that’s why we make them look really pretty,” Hamar told the kids, gesturing at the totem pole next to him. “And you don’t want to kill something and have it just go to waste.”

Hamar isn’t just a carver. He said he loves the carving shed and his work teaching people the traditional ways. But he said that culture and artists should evolve, as well. In his free time, he is working on an art piece commissioned by the Anchorage Museum.

Celebration kicks off June 5, and Hamar had a stack of paddles to finish before his group would head out in late May. They were scheduled to launch on Saturday, May 25.

Sealaska Heritage Institute bills the Toddler Regalia Review as the most adorable event at Celebration, the biennial festival of Lingít, Haida and Tsimshian culture. It delivers.

For many of the young participants, it was their first time at Celebration due to pandemic cancellations. The event went virtual in 2020 and was canceled in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

That was true for 4-year-old Kai Young, who took the stage on June 10 in a raven robe designed by her father and sewed by her mother.

“This is her first time wearing any regalia,” said her mother, Molly Sharp.

“She was born right before the last Celebration, so we did not get to come and then with it being canceled the last few years this is her first kind of big cultural event. So it’s pretty exciting.”

Each child walked across the stage with a family member while an emcee described their clan regalia, who made it, and what it represents. Some toddlers were shy. Others were ready for an audience, with a few spins or some dancing.

Lori David’s 5-year-old triplet sons wore blue-and-black Kaagwaantaan wolf tunics and waved to their father John from the stage. He said it felt cool to see his boys up there.

All 22 participants gathered on stage at the end of the review for a photo — a showcase of toddler-sized regalia from clans throughout Southeast Alaska.

The Sealaska Heritage Institute’s new arts campus was formally opened and dedicated on Wednesday afternoon.

Its name was announced at the ceremony — Antnané Hít, or House of Art.

Ricardo Worl, communications director for SHI, said the project was funded by over 2,000 individual donors, mostly in Southeast Alaska. 

“To us, that indicates there’s a lot of support for Lingít art or our culture: a recognition of, you know, that we’ve been here,” Worl said. 

Classes have already been happening while the building was under construction. So far, there have been classes to learn how to make Tinaa,  small copper shield pendants, and how to weave cedar hats. 

“The way the building is designed, you know, we have a metals studio, we have a textile studio, we have a wood carving studio,” Worl said.

Upcoming art courses may be halibut hooks and bracelet making. Worl also said that SHI is looking into revitalizing other endangered art forms, too.

It’s not just the material arts that SHI had in mind when designing this campus. The covered outdoor pavilion is designed for musicians and dancers to perform.

“This is just the beginning of making Juneau the Northwest Coast art capital,” Worl said. 

One theme of the opening was unity among Lingít, Haida and Tsimshian people. The totem pole that now looks over the plaza is carved on all sides, which is a first in Alaska. It’s been named the Sealaska Cultural Values Pole. 

The carver, TJ Young, is Haida and he worked with guest carvers Rob Mills, who is Lingít, and David R. Boxley, who is Tsimshian, making the pole a collaborative piece that features all three Southeast Alaska Native groups. 

The opening ended with a carver’s dance, featuring Young, his brother, and apprentices Greg Frisby and Andrea Cook who also worked on the pole. Then, the Aagóon Yátx’i, or Angoon Children Dance, closed out the ceremonies.

Disclosure: KTOO is under contract with Sealaska Heritage Institute to produce video coverage of Celebration.