4 Special Coverage

The U.S. Department of Justice says the Alaska Division of Elections is discriminating against voters with disabilities.

The federal agency sent the state a letter alleging multiple violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act over the past four years, at polling places and on the elections website.

“We must advise you that, if we cannot reach a resolution, the Attorney General may initiate a lawsuit under the ADA,” the letter, from the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, says.

It reports that voters have complained about muddy parking lots, ramps that have a 2-inch step to reach and other features that hamper people using wheelchairs. Once in the polling place, the letter says voters found that voting machines meant to be accessible were often not working, or not assembled. Voters with impaired vision said audio components were unintelligible. That left some with no choice but to vote a paper ballot with the help of a poll worker, compromising the voter’s privacy and independence.

The Justice Department included a 32-page spreadsheet listing specifics, such as parking lots that lack designated accessible spots, paths and corridors that are too steep and doors that require too much force to open. The polling locations in the spreadsheet are primarily urban and along the road system, from Fairbanks to Homer. Federal investigators found nine alleged violations at the Anchorage headquarters of the Division of Elections, mostly in the parking lot.

Elections Division Director Carol Beecher said her agency strives to find polling places in every precinct that meet ADA requirements.

“We follow the ADA checklist for polling places as closely as possible,” she said in an email. “Election supervisors personally check locations when feasible, and for more remote areas, city and tribal clerks assist by filling out a survey of a location.”

Beecher said the division will review the findings and work with the Justice Department on a resolution.

The federal letter warns that the U.S. attorney general may file a lawsuit if the issues aren’t addressed.

Haines Republican Bill Thomas is signaling that he will withdraw from the race for House District 3, though he has not formally done it yet.

Thomas, 77,  is a lifelong Chilkat Valley resident and served as an Alaska State House member from 2005 to 2012. He registered as a candidate for the seat on May 29.

But after just over two weeks on the ballot, Thomas told friends and supporters that campaigning takes up a lot of time and it interferes with the commercial fishing season. In a recent Juneau Empire interview, Thomas said his boat is having a lot of mechanical issues delaying his ability to start fishing.

The Alaska Public Offices Commission still has him listed on its website as a candidate, as does the state’s Division of Elections. Election’s Program Manager Brian Jackson confirmed Thomas’ withdrawal, saying that he spoke to Thomas by phone.

But Jackson said his office has not yet received the official paperwork from Thomas to withdraw from the Aug. 20 primary. Candidates have until June 29 to do so.

Thomas’ opponent, incumbent Democrat Andi Story, will join the two other unopposed Juneau candidates, Sen. Jesse Keihl and Rep Sara Hannan.

Thomas refused an interview request, but Story says she still has a lot of work to do.

“I wish Bill [Thomas] well in the future. He is a valuable member of the community,” she said.

Story, 65, said she is working on scheduling a visit to Haines to meet people and get to know them.

This story originally appeared in the Chilkat Valley News and is republished here with permission.

Juneau Mayor Beth Weldon has announced that she plans to run for a third term in October’s local election. 

In an interview on Tuesday, she said the decision to run didn’t come easy. 

“It’s been an extremely tough decision to make, especially with my husband, Greg’s, passing,” she said. “But I just come back to the same thoughts that I’m committed to Juneau, and I think I still have some things to offer.”

Her husband died in a motorcycle crash in Arizona in late April. 

Weldon is a retired division chief with Capital City Fire/Rescue and owns Glacier Auto Parts. She has two adult sons and is a lifelong resident of Juneau. 

She’s been mayor since 2018. Before that, she served two years on the Assembly before resigning to run for mayor. She was reelected in 2021 and will finish her second three-year mayoral term in October. 

Weldon said some of her priorities if reelected are supporting child care development, more housing and keeping the city’s spending budget in check. 

She said she thought about not running after her husband died, but ultimately decided to press forward.

“Before Greg passed away, I was going to run anyway. And then that kind of gave me a little bit of pause,” she said. “Then I decided that he would want me to continue to do it because he was a quiet supporter, but he was the type of guy that if I got home late one evening, there’d be leftovers from dinner for me.”

October’s election will also feature five other open seats: two on the Juneau Assembly and three on the school board. There are a few citizen initiatives that could also land on the ballot.

The two Assembly seats up for grabs are held by Michelle Hale and Wáahlaal Gídaag Barbara Blake. Both of them say they don’t plan to run again.

No one else has publicly announced their intention to run for mayor so far, but Weldon said she’d be surprised if she ran unopposed. 

“I’ve always said your voice, your vote, so get out and vote. And I think we’ll see some candidates,” she said. 

The filing period to run for local office opens July 12. 

Last Thursday’s show at Juneau’s Goldtown Nickelodeon began with a blood-splattered formline title card on the screen. It read: “Macbeth through Alaskan eyes.” 

Beating drums marked the entrance of the three witches. They danced and slinked across the screen wearing masks that showed the barred teeth of a shape-shifting otter from Lingít folklore. 

As flashing stage lights evoked the stormy night that sets the play’s murderous plot in motion, actress Lily Hope delivered the familiar first line — when shall we three meet again? 

“Xeitl tóox’, séew kaa ch’u k’eeljáa gé,” Hope said — in thunder, lightning, or in rain? 

That line opens every performance of Macbeth. But the translation, and the elements of Lingít culture throughout, put a twist on Shakespeare’s tragedy. 

The production first ran at Juneau’s Perseverance Theater in the early 2000s. It even had a 2007 run at the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. 

“I remember going in the subways in D.C. speaking our lines together, in packed subways,” said Juneau actor Jake Waid, who played Macbeth. “And it was just like — to be in the nation’s capital, speaking our lines around the city — it was just a powerful experience to just feel like we were claiming the play.”

Recordings of the play were originally captured during those performances, but for years the footage was stored away in the Sealaska Heritage Institute archives. Now, it’s finally been adapted for the big screen as a film presented for 2024’s Celebration.

Director Anita Maynard-Losh came up with the idea for the play after spending more than a decade living in Hoonah. She’s not Alaska Native herself, but the Shakespeare expert said she saw similarities between Lingít culture and the Scottish values portrayed in the play.

“The Scots and the Lingít were extremely feared for their fierceness and their warfare” Maynard-Losh said. “And they had a deep connection with the supernatural. And they had a cultural value of putting the good of the group ahead of any one individual.”

Maynard-Losh says valuing community is a virtue that prevails in Macbeth, and one that’s infused into the Lingít translation, which was originally done by the late elder Johnny Marks Kooteix’téek. While most of the characters deliver their lines in Lingít, some of the play, including most of the soliloquies and clandestine meetings between Macbeth and his sinister wife Lady Macbeth, are in English.

“We decided that we were going to lean into the metaphor by having the people who were adhering to that cultural value speak in Lingít,” she said. “And when the people were not adhering to that value, and going for personal ambition, they spoke in English.”

But delivering the rest of the lines in Lingít was a challenge. Though all of the actors are Alaska Native, and many are Lingít, none were fluent speakers. 

Waid said watching his performance brought back memories of rehearsing the difficult stanzas over and over with his castmates.

“It feels like a miracle that we got up on stage and we got the words out,” he said.

The play also incorporates cultural elements beyond language. The costumes and set feature formline designs. When Macbeth is crowned king, he dons a Ravenstail robe and a headdress adorned with ermine skins. When Banquo’s ghost haunts his killer Macbeth, he wears a raven costume. 

And when the righteous Macduff finally vanquishes Macbeth, they face off with shields that are drums and swords that are drum sticks, punctuating each blow. 

But in a lot of other ways, it’s just like any other Macbeth production, right down to superstition. Macbeth, in the world of theater, is often considered a cursed play. Hope recalls how, when they were putting the original production together, stage lights that fell from the ceiling and stage pieces that broke constantly felt like bad luck. 

“I think it was four-fold with the Lingít language being 10,000 years old, where we were like ‘Oh, let’s pull out some really dark energy in here,’” Hope said.

For Waid, all the Lingít elements enhance the play for new audiences and actors without changing Macbeth’s core meaning. 

“It’s one of the great plays in the English language. This is part of our history too, as English speakers, and also as people who want to dig deeper into our own culture and find meaning,” Waid said. “We’re not relegated to just what people might think of as Lingít things.”

Sealaska Heritage Institute staff said they’re hoping to screen the film again later this summer.

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

This is Tongass Voices, a series from KTOO sharing weekly perspectives from the homelands of the Áak’w Kwáan and beyond. 

Last week was Nick Alan Foote’s first time at Celebration in almost two decades. In the time he’s been away, he’s made a home in Seattle, left a job in corporate graphic design, and become a full-time Lingít artist alongside his sister, Kelsey Mata Foote. His formline piece, “Sacred Embrace,” was chosen to represent this year’s Celebration. The theme was “Together We Live in Balance.”

He performed at Celebration with the Sheet’ka Ḵwáan dancers, who honored the 50 year anniversary of the Sitka Native Education Program, during their performance at Centennial Hall.

Listen:

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

My name is Nick Foote, Nick Alan Foote. My Lingít name is G̱at X̱wéech. I’m kind of from all over Southeast Alaska. I’ve lived in Juneau, Ketchikan, Sitka and Klawock in the summer. And I currently live in Seattle, but I’m up here for Celebration this year. 

My mom is in Arizona, and my sister’s in Texas, and my grandma is in Ketchikan. So everybody’s spread out, and it’s hard to get everybody together. And we are joining a dance group that we used to dance with in Sitka — the Sheet’ka Ḵwáan dancers. 

Yeah, so the piece I created for Sealaska Heritage Institute’s celebration this year is “Sacred Embrace.” On the outside, there’s a spirit embracing a human, and within that is a raven and an eagle. This represents tradition and culture and our connection to it. And then within it, in the very center, at the heart of it, is a salmon, which represents the connection that Alaska Native people have to the environment and the land. 

My parents always kept a lot of Alaska Native artwork around the house. My Aunt Kathy is an artist, and she would give us a lot of artwork. It was always on our walls. So I would just try to mimic and trace the shapes. And just, that was definitely, you know, the starter, the kicking off point into formline. 

But I also was just being exposed to it through the Johnson O’Malley program. I was also part of the Sitka Native Education Program, so I had a lot of exposure to the artwork because we would make our own regalia. So we would sew on, you know, clan crests to our robes. And by the time I got to college, I was learning Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, and so I kind of took what I knew about formline design and started bringing it over into the digital aspect.  

I think I really started to take formline design seriously as like a career when I moved to Seattle because I kind of got homesick a little bit for, you know, Alaska. And so I started drawing a lot, creating my own designs to kind of cure my homesickness.

It’s something that I feel like I’ve always been pulled to, but it just had to slowly evolve into making that leap from graphic design corporate world to making my own art. 

I would say, just keep drawing. That’s really…if you love it, do it every day, draw what you love. There’s a place for you in the creative world, and your art.

Every year, one dance group is chosen to lead the procession of dancers that begins and ends Celebration — the biennial gathering of Lingít, Haida and Tsimshian people in Juneau. 

About 1,600 people in regalia paraded up Willoughby Avenue to the entrance of Centennial Hall last week. Some of the 36 groups danced to the beat of a leader’s drum and calls. Babies in button blankets sat on their parents’ shoulders. The dancers came to Celebration from across Southeast Alaska and beyond.  

The Dakhká Khwáan dance group led that procession into the hall — and back out on Saturday. The group’s name means “people of the inland,” and many of them came all the way from Canada for this year’s festival.

Yadułtin Marilyn Jensen leads the group. She said Celebration was a chance for inland Alaska Native people to reconnect with their coastal relatives. 

“Another big theme for us is the unity between the coast and the interior, because there is an artificial, you know — like a boundary between us,” Jensen said. “And so, so much of our journey has been about reconnecting with our relatives here.”

The group formed in Carcross in 2007, but its roughly 40 members are from across Lingít Aaní. Jensen said she remembers how she felt at the first Celebration the group performed at, 16 years ago. 

“We were just a brand new group,” she said. “And you know, we came to Celebration just so unsure of ourselves, so scared, but you know, our people just lifted us up, encouraged us, supported us, loved us, and made us feel welcome.”

Jensen said leading the procession this year was a huge honor. 

“Never in our wildest dreams, ever thought that we’d be invited to be the lead group,” she said.

On the second night of Celebration at Centennial Hall, Jensen introduced a song the group wrote. 

“I don’t know about you guys, but we like to pick berries like nobody’s business,” Jensen said on stage. “So this song is in honor of our aunties, all our aunties, that take us out picking berries. So this is our song, and it’s also in honor of our relationship with the animals. So this is a song that honors our berries and our bears and our aunties.” 

Dancers — tiny and full grown — emerged from backstage and mimed berry-picking. Others, wearing bear pelts and masks, joined them and started picking their own berries. The people and the bears startled each other on stage, and Raven took the opportunity to swoop in for his own berries.

That was one of several songs the group performed over the course of the week. You can watch videos of the group’s performances — and the rest of Celebration — on the SHI youtube channel.

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