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Performers exit the hall at the end of Celebration.
Editor’s note: 360 North is under contract with Sealaska Heritage Institute to produce television and online video coverage of Celebration.
Watch Alaska Native veterans, dancers and participants parade through downtown Juneau on the final day of Celebration 2018.
Editor’s note: 360 North is under contract with Sealaska Heritage Institute to produce television and online video coverage of Celebration.
A collection of photographs from KTOO Public Media staff members during Celebration 2018.
Click on a photo to see a larger version and begin the slideshow.
Editor’s note: 360 North is under contract with Sealaska Heritage Institute to produce television and online video coverage of Celebration.
Beneath the covered area at Harborview Elementary School, Nicholas Galanin strikes wood with his adze.
“Definitely the tree’s been carving something in me, something that wasn’t there before the project,” Galanin said of the 40-foot log. “It will be standing when we’re not.”
The 39-year-old Sitka artist is the lead carver on a totem pole for the first time.
The monumental totem pole is the second created for Goldbelt Heritage Foundation and Douglas Indian Association, as part of a healing process for the T’aaḵú Ḵwáan Tlingit tribe.
The pole memorializes the deliberate burning of Akáx Yaa Andagán, the Douglas Indian village, in 1962 and honors the residents who lost their homes.
The construction over the last year also was an opportunity for one generation of artists to share traditional knowledge and craft with another.
“Definitely we did our own prep work before the pole, making sure that we arrive in a good mind frame to engage in the project,” Galanin said. “It shows in the work, so it will come out in the work, and it’s been embedded in the work.”
His five-person team has been working for nearly a year, through late night shifts and winter months.
Now they’re working 16-hour days with additional helpers.
Artist Sam Sheakley uses a round chisel to narrow the ear on the Wolf design. Cedar chips cover the gymnasium floor around him, as he helps finish the pole.
“Working on concrete flooring here, so we leave the wood chips down and just in case we drop some of our tools we don’t need to rebuild the shape of the edge,” Sheakley said. “We’ll sweep once we’re done.”
Galanin’s partner Meritt Johnson, a multidisciplinary indigenous artist, paints the intricate Chilkat patterns.
“We’re going about painting in a way that because they’re still carving, the pole changes so much when it gets painted,” Johnson said. “It lets Nick see the pole in a different way, and he can go back in and recarve, refine and carve in all the details.”
Sometimes painted parts get carved off, then get repainted. The pole is better because of it, she says.
The pole features a Xóots, or brown bear, holding copper tináa or shield, that apprentice carver Lee Burkhart sizes it to the totem.
He gets the copper red hot and pounds it into shape with a ball-peen hammer.
He’s been working with copper since he was 10 years old, but nothing of this scale: 3 feet by 2 feet.
“Right now I’m finalizing the copper tináa getting it cut to shape and ready to install today,” Burkhart said. “Just roughing it out right now and then coming in with files and making it perfect. I’ve seen just wooden tináa’s on totems and I think it adds a little bit of unique style to it.”
His father, master carver Will Burkhart, is helping at the bottom of the totem. The elder Burkhart also is Galanin’s uncle and mentor and one of many familial ties on the project.
Apprentice Shane Brown said they’ve discovered they share relatives.
“We’re finding out our family relations are as tight as they possibly can be, just probably like the meshing and weaving of a Chilkat or cedar had is represented as. That’s how close we are.”
The carving team finished in time for the totem raising ceremony Wednesday at Savikko Park.
This summer, the younger Burkhart and others will keep practicing their carving house post at the Mount Roberts Tramway.
Goldbelt Heritage Association and the Douglas Indian Association sponsored the project and two logs were donated by Sealaska Corporation’s subsidiary, Sealaska Timber Company.
The totem pole was funded in part by a grant from the Department of Health and Human Services.
360 North is under contract with Sealaska Heritage Institute to produce television and online video coverage of Celebration.
There was something different about the food contest at this year’s biennial event in Juneau, Celebration. Along with the usual samples of seaweed, judges also tasted seal oil, which was rendered in communities throughout Southeast.
But the competition wasn’t just about awarding the traditional food. The event organizer says it’s also about a history of cultural resilience that still resonates today.
The judges call this tasting “the breakfast of champions,” and they aren’t kidding. They’re snacking on nutritious jars of seal oil at 10 in the morning.
Jodi Mitchell dips her spoon into a jar the color of amber.
Floating on top of the oil is crackling or crispy seal fat. She says it melts in her mouth.
“You know, my mom used to love these the best,” Mitchell said. “I remember her picking them out of the jar and eating them. She would put seal oil on everything.”
Mitchell is keeping track of the tastings with points and notes, which she’ll share with the other judges later. Some seal oil is heavy. Others are light.
It’s created by simmering the fat over a low to medium heat, a delicate process that can impact the flavor.
For Mitchell, a winning entry tastes like being transported home.
“Just taking a bite of this reminds me of my grandparents,” she said. “Sitting around the table and eating Native food with all of them. Foods is always best when you share it.”
Sealaska Heritage Institute (SHI) President Rosita Worl says that’s the reason seal oil was added to the competition this year — she’d like to see more people proudly enjoying their traditional foods.
Unfortunately, she says it hasn’t always felt welcome, especially at a time when Native people were forced to assimilate.
“I will tell you, when we were growing up, people would make fun of us because of our food.”
But Worl says seal oil is something to be celebrated.
She likes to eat it with dry fish or potatoes. But as a girl, when she was just six years old, she was taken to a federal boarding school in Haines, where seal oil was nowhere to be found.
She says all the kids were homesick for the flavor. So, they gravitated towards something the boarding school had plenty of that tasted similar.
“They would serve cod liver oil. It was like a vitamin, and we would love it,” Worl said. “We would circle back in the line so we could have more of it.”
Although boarding schools are a thing of the past, Worl thinks the policies that discourage Native people from harvesting traditional foods are not.
To hunt seal, a person has to have a certain percent of Native blood, under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and its becoming harder for the younger generations to meet that threshold.
According to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, in the last decade, nearly 20,000 Alaska Native people had less than the federal requirement.
“I went to a meeting and I heard a grandfather say, ‘I can’t even take my grandson out to go hunting seal for me,'” Worl said.
Worl says that means less seal and seal oil is making it into people’s homes for elders and future generations to enjoy. She’d like to see that change.
In the meantime, she says including it in this year’s food contest, serves as a reminder — the taste for seal oil isn’t going away.
Back at the judges’ table, after discussing the nuances of all the different jars, they decide on the winner.
One judge says it’s the seal oil she’d want to crack open and share with family and friends.
Here is a list of all the winners:
Editor’s note: 360 North is under contract with Sealaska Heritage Institute to produce television and online video coverage of Celebration.
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A new perspective on the grand entrance – see it from above with these shots from a drone and a camera on the roof
Editor’s note: 360 North is under contract with Sealaska Heritage Institute to produce television and online video coverage of Celebration.
