Alaska Native Arts & Culture

In 1962, the Douglas Indian Village was set ablaze to make way for a new harbor. This month marks 53 years since the city displaced households of Tlingit T’aaku Kwáan families. Little to no restitution has ever been offered.

The Douglas Indian Village was a winter spot for the T’aaku Kwáan people. Water flowed underneath a row of about 20 structures on pilings. There was a saying, “this was where the sun rays touched first.”

The village had no running water or electricity. But to John Morris it was home.

“That was the trail I used to walk to go to school right here. But my house was right where that truck is right now,” he says.

Where we’re standing has been filled with gravel. The water no longer comes up to this point. It’s been turned into Savikko Park, a place where children play Little League and families grill out hamburgers.

Morris remembers seeing his childhood home here going up in smoke.

“We left everything as is in the house with the thought that if they saw that we hadn’t moved anything out that they would maybe prolong the burning. It didn’t stop them.”

Fishing nets, clothing, dishes–everything.

“There are no pictures of my childhood. It was all burned up in that house,” he says.

Morris is a carver, teacher and tribal leader. At 75 years-old, he’s also one of the last living members of the tribe to witness the burning of the village in 1962. He remembers, back then, racial tensions were high. He delivered newspapers as a kid.

“And I had a paper sack that had Juneau Empire on it. And as long as I had that paper sack I could go anywhere in Douglas. Once I took that sack off people would tell me, ‘Get down to your village.’”

In 1946, the Douglas Indian Association was looking for boat loans. At the time, boats were kept under the house. But that wasn’t deemed suitable. So the city and the Army Corps of Engineers were asked to build a harbor where the village stood–with the understanding the village would be rebuilt.

That plan didn’t go anywhere.

“But the plan for the harbor stayed on the books and in 1962, the City of Douglas destroyed the Indian village to build that,” says attorney Andy Huff. He put together a formal report in 2002 on what happened for the Montana Indian Law Resource Center.

Back in the 60s, the City of Douglas found a loophole to condemn the Native village: Most of its occupants were gone to fish camps in summer.

“Even so, the city didn’t have jurisdiction over the houses in the first place. It was a federally protected enclave.”

Huff  says when he was doing his research, two more red flags stood out. One was the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the agency that’s supposed to help, did nothing to intervene.

“They just flatly refused to get involved even though there was this plan to kind of destroy the village,” Huff says.

The other red flag was a possible conspiracy.

“I found that two members on the city of Douglas zoning commission, which was the entity in charge of destroying this village, were also members of the Bureau of Indian Affairs at the same time. ”

They were Charles Jones and A.W. Bartlett. Both men resigned from the zoning and planning committee citing conflict of interest. But the plans to burn the village were already underway. Huff says that’s an obvious breach of trust. When he put the report together 13 years ago, he thought it would affect change but no restitution has been offered. He thinks, even after all this time, there’s still a legal case.

“I don’t think the federal government can argue it doesn’t know exactly what happened and what the issues are in light of the report coming out and being released by the tribes,” he says. “Something should have happened by now.”

The Bureau of Indian Affairs could not be reached for comment.

After the controlled burn in 1962, the village was never rebuilt. The Douglas Harbor and eventually the park were constructed in its place. Morris, who was on military leave at the time, says he went back to Fort Hood, Texas, changed.

“I went back with a bitterness. A bitterness that I’m not going to have anything to come back to. I don’t have a home. The people I grew up with, I got to see firsthand, how they treated us people, us Natives,” Morris says.

It took years for him to come back to the Juneau-Douglas area but he did. He says sometimes friends tell him he should file a lawsuit; he could be a millionaire.

“My response is that’s not what I’m after. I do want to see that corrected but it will never leave me. It will never leave me. It lays dormant and I don’t like to touch it unless I have to,” he says.

Morris says he forgives but he doesn’t forget. He would like to see restitution for the T’aaku Kwáan people.

Saxman resident Lee Wallace testified Wednesday in Washington, D.C., during a hearing in front of the House Subcommittee on Indian, Insular and Alaska Native Affairs.

The subcommittee is chaired by Alaska Rep. Don Young, who has sponsored a bill that would change the Federal Subsistence Management Program’s process for designating a community’s rural status, which allows community members to harvest subsistence food.

Wallace heads up the Saxman IRA, and has been outspoken about reinstating the Organized Village of Saxman’s rural designation.

Saxman lost its designation during a 2007 Federal Subsistence Board review. The board decided that Saxman’s connection to the larger community of Ketchikan meant that Saxman can’t be considered rural.

Saxman has about 400 residents, compared to about 7,000 in the City of Ketchikan.

Wallace recalls coming home after the board’s vote to make Saxman non-rural.

“Upon arrival, the Cape Fox dancers and elders, they came and met the plane from Anchorage,” he said. “They knew I was sad and downhearted. They wanted to lift me up. They greeted me with a song and prayer for encouragement that we should continue on to fight our battle to regain our rural determination status.”

Since then, the Federal Subsistence Board has proposed a rule change that would allow more flexibility when determining rural designations, and has conducted public hearings on that rule. Numerous Southeast Alaska residents – including Wallace — commented during those hearings in support of Saxman’s claim to subsistence rights.

Wallace told the subcommittee that while a rule change would be a step in the right direction, Young’s proposed bill would provide more security.

“Saxman supports this legislation because it creates permanent and procedural protections for rural communities,” he said. “It eliminates the fear and anxiety caused by the unnecessary process in which the FSB essentially evaluates whether we can carry on our traditions and our way of life.”

Young’s bill would require congressional approval before a community’s rural designation could be removed in the future. Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski has sponsored a similar bill in the U.S. Senate.

Young said during Wednesday’s hearing that removing Saxman’s rural status didn’t make any sense.

“Saxman was a Native village long before Ketchikan was ever created. And then Ketchikan became a fishing town and a timber town and sort of grew up next to them,” Young said. “Then for some reason, someone had an issue that they weren’t rural anymore, because the city grew to them.”

Rep. Don Young’s bill has not yet passed out of subcommittee. If it does, its next stop would be the House Natural Resources Committee.

The first people to set foot in the Americas apparently came from Siberia during the last ice age.

That’s the conventional wisdom.

But now there’s evidence from two different studies published this week that the first Americans may have migrated from different places at different times — and earlier than people thought.

The human race has walked or paddled or sailed until it covered the globe. Scientists can trace those migrations from the stuff these people left behind: tools, dwellings or burial grounds.

Geneticists can now trace these patterns of travel, too — by examining the genes of living people and comparing them to each other, as well as to genes extracted from ancient bones. Rasmus Nielsen of the University of California, Berkeley and a large, international team of scientists have done just that for native people of the Americas. And they think they’ve figured out how the very first people got here.

“They came in a single migration wave into the Americas,” Nielsen says — “people who diverged from people originally in Siberia and East Asia about 23,000 years ago.”

Now, that confirms the standard view that people first got here across a frozen “land bridge” between Siberia and Alaska, albeit a few thousand years earlier than many had assumed.

But there’s long been a lingering puzzle: Some ancient skulls found in the Americas look rather like Europeans, or maybe Polynesians. Did another group come from somewhere else?

Writing in this week’s issue of the journal Science, Nielsen says no. Genetically, no Native Americans match up with Europeans or Polynesians, in terms of these markers of ancient migration. Instead, he says, there was just one major, founding wave of people moving into the continent; any diversification of Native American groups must have evolved on its own after the first bunch of people got here.

“Diversification of modern Native Americans happened in the Americas,” Nielsen says — “not because people came from all over the world into the Americas.”

But there’s often a twist when you’re teasing apart the threads of ancient history with genetic tweezers. David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, says his research — published Tuesday in the journal Nature — suggests a more complicated story.

When Reich studied groups of indigenous people in South America, he found that some of them had a peculiar genetic fingerprint. He searched the world for other copies of that fingerprint and found it far away — in modern Australasia.

“What we found,” says Reich, “was that Native American people from Amazonia — from present-day Brazil — are more closely related to some populations in Asia than are other Native Americans, for example from Mexico, or from western South America and many parts of North America.”

The Amazonians’ modern relatives — the Australasians — are native Australians, and people of New Guinea and the Andaman Islands.

Reich says what may have happened is this: Members of a now-extinct population of people in what’s now Southeast Asia — Reich calls them Population Y — crossed the land bridge as well, either before or after the first wave of people made it to the Americas. This splinter group from Population Y kept going, and some members got all the way to Brazil. Meanwhile, those who stayed behind in Asia populated what is now Australasia. But the two groups still are linked genetically.

Says Reich: “We now have the possibility of there being two different streams of ancestry penetrating south of the ice sheets, so that’s a very exciting new observation.”

That observation adds yet another branch — or root — to the American family tree.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

An education bill  the U.S. Senate passed last week includes several provisions that boost the role of Alaska Native tribes. The bill, called “Every Child Achieves” rewrites the law known as “No Child Left Behind,” a key piece of the domestic legacy of President George W. Bush.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who sits on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, says she added a provision requiring states and school districts to consult with tribes and Native parents as they develop education plans.

“I think it’s time that our tribes and our Native organizations throughout the country will be part of designing the plans and shaping the programs used to improve schools that serve our Native students,” she said on the Senate floor.

The bill establishes a competitive grant program to support Native language immersion schools. The legislation doesn’t authorize a specific amount of money for the grants.

Murkowski also used the bill to revise the Alaska Native Educational Equity Program.  The long-standing grant program last year gave some $30 million to Alaska school districts, the University of Alaska, tribal groups and nonprofits. Murkowski says if the bill becomes law, future grants will go directly to tribes and Native organizations that have expertise running education programs, or to tribes that partner with school districts.

“This will not only honor our constitutional relationship to Alaska Natives but ensure that they can take on more responsibility for helping their children succeed,” she said.

The bill passed the Senate by a wide margin. U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan praised it for easing the mandates of No Child Left Behind and reducing the amount of testing that eats up classroom time. But Duncan also says the bill doesn’t do enough for low-performing schools.

The 2015 World Eskimo-Indian Olympics, or WEIO, kicked off in Fairbanks Wednesday. Miss Cama-i 2005, Mary Kernak, will represent the YK Delta. The new Miss WEIO will be named Friday evening.

Scores of athletes are competing in games like the Alaskan high kick, seal hop and ear pull. The Alaska Native traditional games were originally developed to teach important hunting, survival skills and teamwork.

Competition kicked off Wednesday at the Carlson Center in Fairbanks, along with the Miss WEIO contest.

The games started in 1961 and they’re now an annual competition drawing competitors from tribes across the state. WEIO runs through Saturday.

In 1967, Larry Davis snow machined from Nome to Cape Espenberg, about 150 miles north. When he returned, he brought with him 200 reindeer — a herd that would eventually swell to 10,000 in the 1990s. But that’s just a piece of recent history.

Larry’s son, Bruce Davis, is the owner of the Midnite Sun Reindeer Ranch. On Monday, he sat down with members of the Reindeer Club to talk about the big picture.

He asked: “What year do you think reindeer herding came to Alaska?”

The Reindeer Club is a program borne from collaboration between Davis’ ranch and Nome Eskimo Community. Now in its second summer, the club meets Mondays to learn about different aspects of reindeer herding.

Davis focused on history, explaining how reindeer were introduced to Alaska in 1892. He touched on topics from corral construction to vaccinations to the lichen his reindeer like to eat.

His goal is to educate young people on the ins and outs of reindeer herding. He says it’ll take time for Alaska — having herded for just over 100 years — to catch up to places like Chukotka, Norway, Finland and Sweden, countries that have been refining their techniques for 4,000 years.

“We’re trying to revitalize the reindeer industry again, but it’s dying out,” Davis says. “So we have to get the young people involved again, it takes a while. This is part of our outreach — to let you guys know that reindeer herders are still here.”

For the Midnite Sun Reindeer Ranch, “here” means 13 miles out on the Kougarok Road. The ranch opened in 2010, and its herd now includes 100 reindeer. The most beloved is Brownie, a yearling that was orphaned before being adopted and domesticated by the Davis family.

While the kids in Reindeer Club called Brownie back to her trailer on the ranch, the rest of the herd ranges across an area 50 miles wide and 30 miles deep. Davis says he eventually hopes to grow the herd to 3,000 or 4,000 reindeer, a process that could take 10 to 15 years. He also has plans to evolve the small summertime club into a larger 4-H program.