Alaska Native Arts & Culture

Ketchikan’s Totem Heritage Center has a new pole, relatively speaking. It’s actually 30 years old, but the pole is a new addition to the center’s collection of historic Alaska Native artifacts. Alaska State Museum conservators from Juneau traveled to Ketchikan to help clean and preserve the pole, and to find out what kind of stories might be hidden in the wood.

Ellen Carlee has a tiny lump of metal twisted up in a piece of paper. She’s been trying to find someone who knows what it is.

She shows it to John Radzilowski, a summer guide at the center, who also happens to be a history professor at Ketchikan’s University of Alaska Southeast campus. He doesn’t know either, so she puts it away for the moment.

The Boxley pole where that bit of metal was found is a 30-year-old totem pole, donated to the center by master carver David Boxley.

Carlee is based in Juneau and says she got a call last summer from two Heritage Center employees.

“They said, ‘Hey, we’re under a house in Metlakatla looking at this totem pole, it’s covered with lichen, we think it has an infestation problem. David Boxley wants to donate it to the museum. What do you think we should do?’” she says. “I’m like, ‘Well, I’m in Fred Meyer right now, but here’s what I think.’”

A year later, Carlee and two graduate-level conservation interns have flown to Ketchikan to clean the pole and prepare it for display. She says the artist didn’t really want the pole restored, just preserved.

The cleaning process is meticulous. They had to remove the lichen without damaging the paint. As they gently nudged the vegetation away, that’s when they found the imbedded lumps of metal.

“It looked like it may be some sort of pellet,” she says. “Now that we cleaned it, we’ve seen this in a couple of spots. This pole stood outside the Boxley family home for decades, so probably I should send a picture of this to somebody from Metlakatla and say, what is this? What was it doing in the pole? Because that’s part of the story.”

As Carlee continued talking, intern AnnMarie Guerin carefully wielded a bamboo skewer, scraping remaining bits of lichen tendrils from the pole’s many cracks.

“So, I’ll just test it and see if maybe it’s falling off on its own, and if it is, then I keep going, but if it’s stubborn, I just kind of let it be,” Guerin explained. “I would definitely call it meditative. That was one of the reasons I wanted to get into conservation. I knew there was a lot of meticulous and long-term work, and I know I liked doing that kind of thing. So, I could spend hours doing this. It’s great!”

Leaving the Totem Heritage Center, senior curator of programs Anita Maxwell walks up to say that Radzilowski had found out what the metal pellets are.

“It is from a pellet gun,” Maxwell says. “There’s a specific kind of hollow-core lead pellet, and he even has the website to buy some more. Google is amazing.”

The next step was to find out how it got there. A call to the artist revealed BB guns as the culprit.

“Oh, I’m pretty sure that’s where that came from,” Boxley says, laughing. “There’s lots of little neighbor kids without a whole lot of supervision.”

Boxley says he carved the pole in 1982 to coincide with a potlatch he organized in honor of his grandparents, who raised him. He says it wasn’t the first pole he ever carved, but it was the first large one, for the first potlatch in that community.

“The actual putting on of the potlatch, I didn’t have a lot of help because our people had not had one up ’til then, and I’d never even seen one, been at one. It was all research,” he says. “A few people in my family and a few people from the other clans helped put it together. It was something I had to do.”

While a replacement pole, carved by Boxley and his son, has gone up in the original pole’s place. Boxley says the original is an important part of Tsimshian Native culture and history in Metlakatla.

“It was kind of the symbol of the revitalization of potlatching in Metlakatla,” he says. “It was the first one: first potlatch, first ceremony, first pole-raising.”

Much of the Native culture had been left behind, he says, when the first residents followed missionary Father William Duncan from British Columbia in 1891.

“The education process has been slow, but it’s come a long way,” Boxley says. “I’m pretty proud of my people for everything they’ve done. All the other clans, all the artists who are doing their best.”

With the pole that Boxley donated, the history and significance of an event that began the Tsimshian renaissance will be preserved for generations to come.

The country’s oldest theological school is selling off its Native art collection, and Sealaska Heritage Institute is asking the feds to investigate. Tlingit and Haida pieces are among the works–some of which might be sacred.

At Sealaska Heritage Institute, culture and history director Chuck Smythe walks down a flight of cedar steps to the basement, the place where Native artifacts are kept.

Behind a locked door are some of the pieces in the collection.

“We’re going into the conservation room. You hear the freezer going,” he says.

Items that arrive at the institute are cooled to 40 below to kill insects before the pieces go into long-term storage in a temperature controlled room. Smythe shows me a Southeast Native tunic, probably from the 20th century.

“It’s a green tunic with red border and it has flowers and designs.”

It has delicate beading on the sleeves and collar, a raven on the front. But that’s all we know. The tunic was repatriated from a museum in 2007. Information about which tribe and clan it belongs didn’t follow it back home.

“It’s hard. A lot of museums have very generalized identification of objects,” he says. “I used to work at the Smithsonian in the repatriation office and they have hundreds of objects that are just ‘Northwest Coast.’”

Even harder to track are the Native artifacts that fall into private collectors’ hands. That’s what the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts says could happen to 80 pieces in its care because the owner wants to sell.

The museum has housed the collection since the 1940s; The Andover Newton Theological School is the owner.

Dan Monroe, the museum’s director, says the school informed him a few months ago.

“The 80 works are works that they’ve selected that have the greatest monetary value,” he says.

The college says it’s not an art curator; it’s an educational institution.

Sealaska Heritage Institute is questioning whether the artifacts are sacred–pieces used in ceremony.  A federally supported entity, like a school or museum, is barred from selling those and obligated to return them to the tribes.

Rosita Worl, the president the institute, says the spirits of her ancestors are associated with those objects.

She notified the feds that some of the Tlingit and Haida pieces in the theological school’s collection could be subject to repatriation laws–particularly a halibut hook with a wolf crest and shamanic doll.

“We believe that everything has a spirit and that includes animate and inanimate objects,” she says.

Worl is Tlingit of the Eagle moiety and Thunderbird clan. She says she’s been trying to “get over the history” of how the theological school acquired these artifacts in the 19th century.

“We know they were well meaning in terms of trying to Christianize us, but we went through a lot of difficulties with that,” she says. “And I really want to respect all different religions but having the history of that overt suppression of our beliefs was difficult to take again.

The college is estimated to turn a million dollar profit. But Martin Copenhaver, the school’s president, says the pieces for sale are not sacred items. He believes the museum is engaging in an “ugly disinformation campaign.”

“I think the status quo works for them. They have the pieces. They’re able to display them for free. They did not pay for those,” he says. “I think it doesn’t work for them now if those pieces are in other museums.”

He says the school plans to sell to other museums, not private collectors.

“Unless those are ones who intend to then in turn donate them back,” says Copenhaver.

But museum president Dan Monroe says it typically doesn’t go that way.

“I would say it’s fair to summarize the frequency of that happening as highly infrequent,” says Monroe.

Appraisers have already been sent to assess the items but there’s no date for the sale yet. Worl says the willingness to sell the artifacts contradicts the school’s mission statement: “We will strive to be good stewards of the sacred tradition we have inherited.”

“My first wish is that they would say, ‘OK we recognize that Native people have these spiritual relationships to these objects.’ That they are significant,” Worl says. “I would hope that they would recognize that.”

Federal repatriation agents have opened an investigation.

Central Council Tlingit Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska is boycotting FedEx.

The Juneau-based tribal organization announced Thursday that it has sent notice to all employees to stop using FedEx services, citing the national delivery company’s sponsorship of the Washington Redskins football team.

In a news release, Central Council says FedEx is a top sponsor of the football team, and economic pressure might encourage the delivery service to reconsider financial support of the Washington, D.C.-based team.

The issue is the team’s name. The word “redskins” dates back to colonial times, and refers to Native Americans. It is considered offensive by many with Native heritage.

Tlingit Haida Central Council President Richard Peterson says he understands that the team name has a long history.

“There’s debate even among Native Americans on whether it’s derogatory,” he said. “But I think most people feel like the name Redskins is derivative of racial slurs against Native Americans.”

According to the Central Council, other tribes and tribal groups also are boycotting FedEx, including the Native American Rights Fund and National Congress of American Indians.

Central Council Tlingit Haida is a federally recognized tribe with a membership of about 30,000, and Peterson says he hopes the membership will join tribal employees in the boycott.

“Who better to take a stand and to exercise our concerns and voice that through our spending?” he said. “Just saying, we’re not going to spend our dollars with folks that are going to be supportive of what we consider racism.”

Peterson stressed that this move isn’t an attack on FedEx or the Washington Redskins.

“We would just ask that they really take a look at what they’re doing,” he said. “If I’m doing anything that has a negative impact on people, I would certainly take a look at that and do some self-examination. I’d hope that the ownership of the Redskins would do that, and the corporate sponsors that endorse them would realize it’s time to take down our Confederate flag, so to speak.”

A message sent to FedEx public relations resulted in a written email statement. It says “FedEx has closely followed the dialogue and difference of opinion regarding the Washington Redskins team name, but we continue to direct questions about the name to the franchise owner.”

A bill creating corporations for Native residents of five “landless” Southeast Alaska communities had its first hearing in Congress today.

Haines, Petersburg, Wrangell, Ketchikan and Tenakee were left out of 1971’s Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. That bill gave land, money and corporate status to those in many other Alaska communities.

Wrangell’s Leo Barlow represented landless residents at the hearing, before the House Subcommittee on Indian and Alaska Native Affairs.

“Those of us who enrolled to these five communities during the ANCSA process did so because they are our traditional homelands and places of origin. Our families and clans originated in these communities and have lived here for hundreds if not thousands of years,” Barlow said.

He said about 3,500 Tlingits and Haidas were affected. They still became shareholders of the Sealaska regional Native corporation.

Congressman Don Young, who authored the legislation, chaired the committee hearing. Sen. Lisa Murkowski introduced a similar bill earlier this year. Sealaska is also lobbying for its passage.

A report by the University of Alaska’s Institute of Social and Economic Research found no clear reason why the five communities were excluded, other than Congressional intent.

Federal officials continue to oppose inclusion, saying it would break precedent and allow others to follow suit.

At the hearing, Young said the timber industry lobbied Congress before ANCSA passed because it wanted to keep more of the Tongass National Forest available for logging.

“The communities involved here had large lumbering, timbering operations. And there was effort put into this Congress at that time not to recognize them because it might have affected the long-term leases for that timber,” Young said.

Similar legislation has been introduced more than a half-dozen times.

Supporters have suggested it would only get serious consideration after a bill turning Tongass timberlands over to Sealaska passed.

That happened last year.

Celebrating the first salmon of the season is a long and important tradition in Bristol Bay. Last Thursday, we turned Hannah Colton around on her way to work because we heard some boys had caught theirs on the beach and were going to take one to an elder. She followed along, and brought this report…

A text message from Robyn Chaney told me her boys had caught three kings on the morning tide. They and their grandpa were going to deliver them. Here’s Triston Cheney:

Yeah we caught three this morning… gave one to my mom, kept one, and then one to Ofi.

So why do you bring one to Ofi? — Cause we always give some of what we catch to elders. And then if you give some to elders then you’re gonna catch more. 

Hyalmer Ofi Olson is an elder who has left a mark on Bristol Bay as few have. He fished these waters for some five decades, starting as a kid in the sailboat days.

Among other leadership roles, Ofi was longtime director, CEO, and president of the Bristol Bay Native Corporation – but he’s retired from all that now.

Ofi is in bad health. His kidneys are failing, and these days it’s tough to get too far from the house.

He was sitting on the couch when the Chaney boys and his old friend Robin showed up with that king.

The boys caught you a king salmon! King Salmon? Yeah! Oh yeah, small one! We caught it this morning! Yeah yeah that’s alright…

He sized up the boys who brought him the fish and gave Robin a nod.

 “Okay Ofi, enjoy! Bye! – thank you Robin, boy, that’s gonna be a treat and a half – good, good…”

Later that evening, some old friends and fishermen came together to eat that fish with Ofi. They gathered around a humble table at Jerry Liboff’s house, off Chuthmok Road, named for Liboff and his patchy clothes.

Dave Bendinger grilled the fish for an hour on top of a cedar plank … and Ofi again asked for the recipe:

 “So you put the plank on the grill, wet it first, let it cook maybe ten minutes, then flip it so it’s charred, put the salmon on top skin side down….lid down, let it cook”

Set netter and Russian Orthodox priest Father Victor Nick stopped by for a bite and gave a blessing

 “Okay before we eat too much more, why don’t you bless the meal? ….prayer… You don’t want any? Oh, maybe a little bit…”

Ofi said the fish was small – but there was plenty of to go around. And it was the best.

“The first king melts in your mouth. Yeah…”

Liboff asked Ofi about the first kings when he was a kid…

 “That first king salmon was a big deal even then right? Your mama and grandma, how’d they cook it? — Well the head and the tail, and the eggs, they make chowder out of it. And out of the collars. And then you fry the steaks, either fried or boiled. Good. Every bit of the king salmon was used, nothing left but the bones.”

The night went on and around the table they sat … They talked boats, they talked prices, they talked nets and canneries and can sizes.

They cracked jokes and talked about fishermen from the old days.

And they talked about getting older.

“The greying of the fleet. The last of the hardasses trying to hang on. – yeah – Him, Ofi put up the white flag a couple years ago. I’m hangin in there. — I don’t wanna be the richest man in the graveyard. *laughs* Maybe Skagerrack is bumpin somebody else for that position.”

That’s Ofi, giving Skagerrack skipper Paul Friis-Mikkelsen a hard time. Friis-Mikkelsen took a hard fall a few weeks back and may not fish this season.

“You know, at this point, it’s not really about the money so much. It’s just good being a part. You know, it’s a lifestyle… If I was well, I’d still be out there floatin’ around too. The thing I was trying to say is, it’s like bein part of this whole cycle.”

The whole Bay is a cycle…The fish run out and back, tides go out and in, and nets need mending year after year. And people gather around the table each summer to tell stories and to fellowship around the first king salmon.

“What I miss, Dave, is when I was small, young guy, even my first few years in high school, I used to go with my dad and some older people and, say we went camping or something. And then when the light went out, you stay there and listen to stories. Boy, interesting. Lots of stories, hunting stories, stories about ghosts. Sometimes I felt a little scared, but I never seen anything in my life. Never heard anything.”

With a twinkle in his eye, Ofi had a captive audience… and we all kept nibbling on that fish for hours after it got cold.

Alaska’s branch of the Inuit Circumpolar Council is building a report to assess and address food security, and insecurity, from a traditional perspective.

“Food Security” has become a buzzword, and Carolina Behe, who presented the project Tuesday at Kawerak’s Regional Conference in Nome, says the term now has over 800 definitions. But the Inuit people of Alaska see the Arctic holistically — the health of culture directly connects to the health of ecosystems. The goal of the project is to define food security and insecurity, identify what drives it, and create a framework for how to address it — all while keeping the Inuit perspective central.

Traditional knowledge was gathered from over 100 contributing authors spanning 15 villages from the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta up to the North Slope. However, the driving factors for food security were identical across the regions. To represent it, they designed a drum diagram, labeling the different parts. At the center of the drum is food security characterized by environmental health; the handle is food sovereignty; around the edges, tools like traditional knowledge sources, co-management and policy; and the sinew holding it together is the spirit of all that is within the Arctic.

“The advisory committee really wants me to stress here that if any one piece of this is gone, or if any one piece of this is not very strong or missing from the drum, then food insecurity exists,” Behe said.

To address food insecurity, the ICC-Alaska report calls for increasing co-management and forming an Inuit food security council that would move away from single-species management strategies.

“So for example, with walrus, you know about the walrus stomach content, you know about sea ice thickness, you know about how much food somebody needs, you know about weather conditions, the wind, even salinity, all of those things have to be considered,” Behe said. “That includes what’s going on with ice seals and all of this information as opposed to just the population of walrus.”

Other recommendations include developing regional research protocols, where a region has the authority to approve or deny research projects taking place on their land.

A few contributing authors to the report were present at the session, offering suggestions to refine language before the project is shared with tribal councils and state and federal governments next month. Behe says the report may be used as a model for other nations within the Inuit Circumpolar Council.