Alaska Native Arts & Culture

Easter was last weekend but some Russian Orthodox Christians will observe it this Sunday. That’s where Easter, or what they call Pascha, lands on the Julian calendar. There’s a special treat that goes along with the celebration. It’s not a chocolate bunny. It’s called kulich.

Siouxbee Lindoff has been making Easter bread for over 40 years. It’s what she’s known for.

“I’m in such high demand. I posted on Facebook, ‘I’m only making two batches of bread. I’m only making two batches and no more,'” she says.

In the kitchen of the Juneau Tlingit Haida Community Council Building, she sifts flour and sugar into a large mixing bowl. Adding a dab of salt.

“I will add nutmeg, cinnamon, vanilla, cranberries, raisins, pecans,” Lindoff says.

After mixing in the yeast and cracking eggs, she stirs the dough with a spoon.

“My dream is to invest in a big commercial mixer but everything is still done by hand,” she says.

Lindoff measures all of the ingredients by sight. The whole process, she says, is intuitive. If you want to learn how to make kulich from her, she says it’s a hands-on process.

“People will look and say, ‘Well how can you make something and not measure?’ And I thought, ‘By the feel.’ And I don’t mind sharing, I don’t mind teaching. Cause to me, it’s like, saving our traditions,” she says.

Lindoff grew up in the Russian Orthodox church. Her family split their time between Sitka and Hoonah. Her dad was the only Tlingit priest ordained from St. Herman Theological Seminary in Kodiak. She says being a pastor’s kid could sometimes be a burden.

“My mom used to say, when they look at you they say, ‘There’s that father Michael’s daughter.’ Especially when I was doing bad.”

She says her parents were strict but fair. They tried to protect her from the same discrimination they’d endured growing up. But it came at a cost. They refused to teach the Tlingit language.

“My dad said, ‘You will speak the English language. You will use the correct pronunciation. You will enunciate your words correctly. I don’t want to hear no slang.’ He was adamant about that. He didn’t want us to suffer like they had, ” she says.

Lindoff’s father paid for his high school education. Her mother went to Wrangell Institute, which was a boarding school.

“And of course Tlingit was the first language that was spoken at home and she used to have to sit at the head of the class and have a dunce hat on her head. She died never wearing a hat,” she says.

Although her mom didn’t teach her how to speak Tlingit, she did show her the traditional way to make kulich.

“My mom tasted my first bread dough and she said yours taste better than mine. She never baked Easter bread again,” Lindoff says.

Russian Orthodox missionaries landed in Kodiak and the Aleutian Islands around 1780. The religion spread to Southeast almost 100 years later.

Sergei Kan, a professor of anthropology and Native American Studies at Dartmouth College, says the Russian Orthodox offered Christianity that was somewhat more tolerant of Native customs and also open to the use of Native languages. He says the Russian Orthodox Church translated the gospel into Native languages, like Tlingit.

“And I think the fact that the orthodox has survived in Alaska means that it was becoming a true Native church,” Sergei says.

After Siouxbee Lindoff incorporates the ingredients for the kulich, she sets the dough aside to let it rise for the next few hours.

“You can get frozen bread dough and you can go to the store but I don’t think you’ll be able to find kulich in the store,” she says.

Lindoff compares making the bread to other Native customs, like gathering herring roe. It’s a skill she’s passed down to her children.

“When I do things like this, it makes me feel like it’s part of the healing, like not being able to speak Tlingit because of that era where my mom and dad spoke it fluently and we didn’t and they didn’t want us to. But I feel like this is part of that healing now. This is part of us going forward with the traditional ways and saving what we can,” she says.

She’s excited to teach her great-granddaughter how to make kulich. She’s 5 years old and learning to speak Tlingit in an immersion class.

For the first time, a Tlingit name for a peak in Juneau will be included in the Geographic Names Information System or GNIS. This makes it possible for that name to be printed on federal maps and publications. Getting the indigenous name for a Juneau peak officially recognized actually began as an attempt to give the point a Western moniker.

To Lance Twitchell, the point east of Thunder Mountain has always been called Tlaxsatanjín.

“From the Tlingit prospective, nothing has really changed,” he says.

He’s the assistant professor of Native languages at the University of Alaska Southeast. In Tlingit, Tlaxsatanjín means “idle hands” or “hands at rest.” If you looked at a topographic map, the peak had been nameless.

“I think you’d see Heintzleman Ridge is what would be there. And that’s it,” he says.

Twitchell wasn’t the only one who proposed a name for the peak to the Alaska Historical Commission. It almost became Mount Scribner, after the late Jon Scribner. He was a longtime Department of Transportation official in Southeast who died in 2005 in a hiking accident.

“He had sort of uncommon passion for the land here. For the people here,” says Mandy Mallott, Jon Scribner’s daughter. She’s non-Native.

“But I was adopted into the Kwaashk’i Kwaan clan out of Yakutat. And I was given a Native name, Ach Kwei,” she says.

Friends of the late Scribner submitted a proposal in 2013 to have the peak named in his honor. The commission approved it, unaware of its Tlingit name. That proposal was then sent to the U.S. Board of Geographic names, which also conducts a review.  

The U.S. Board of Geographic Names added it to their list of things they would consider. But it didn’t take action. Then a proposal was submitted by Lance Twitchell. He says it wasn’t necessarily a counterproposal.

“It had nothing to do with the individual. It just has do with sort of reaching a capacity of saying, we can’t just keep naming stuff for people when these things already have names,” Twitchell says.

After Mallott found out about the peak’s indigenous name, she and her father’s colleagues withdrew their proposal.

“When we heard about the other proposal, absolutely very quickly did we decide that that was the name of that mountain,” Mallott says.

Mallott says she’s interested in seeing Native names being restored to the entire region. She believes her father would want that, too.

“His spirit would have been right there with us and that is to restore indigenous place names of this whole region. It’s not just this one peak,” she says.

Lance Twitchell says he hopes people will learn the Native names for these landmarks.

“So when they see that and they drive by that mountain, they can drive by and say ‘Tlaxsatanjín.’ And just look at it and think that’s what it’s been called for well over 500 years,” he says.

Tlaxsatanjín will be on federal maps starting next month.

The Juneau School District has chosen a book to replace the controversial texts it decided to remove from the fourth grade language arts curriculum.

Last August, community members raised concerns about school texts depicting Alaska Native and Native American tragedies, including the boarding school experience in Alaska. The texts were called distorted, inaccurate and insensitive.

The district has chosen “Shin-chi’s Canoe” by Nicola Campbell.

Nicola Campbell is a First Nations writer from British Columbia. Her children’s book, “Shin-chi’s Canoe” depicts life in an Indian boarding school from a child’s perspective.

In the free-verse picture book, a character describes being punished for not understanding English – “They cut her long braids and threw/ them away/ and washed her head with kerosene.”

Paul Berg is a former teacher and a cultural specialist at Goldbelt Heritage Foundation. He says even though “Shin-chi’s Canoe” describes a boarding school in Canada, he thinks it’s accurate to what Alaska Natives experienced.

“The stories, the accounts that I’ve heard from elders have been pretty brutal treatment during the boarding school years in Alaska, so that would not be an exaggeration,” Berg says.

Berg evaluated the controversial texts, which are part of the McGraw-Hill Reading Wonders program. His report on the readers was the formal complaint that led to their removal. He said the texts misrepresented the historical reality and marginalized the experiences of the victims.

“Shin-chi’s Canoe” and other books the district is ordering for the classroom are interim solutions. When the superintendent decided to remove the McGraw-Hill readers, he said they’d be replaced by place-based material developed locally in partnership with Goldbelt Heritage.

Berg says this takes time and involves historical research, like interviewing elders. He says the local material will depict real events and share the cultural life of the Native community. He says it would be great to have material describing Tlingit cultural ceremonies that are still part of the Native community in Southeast.

“And just having an account of that even, for example, in the reading program would be a great cross-cultural sharing. But also, for the Native students, an affirmation in the school system of a part of their lifestyle,” Berg says.

Ted Wilson is the district’s director of teaching and learning. He says the district spent about $1,300 for 90 copies of “Shin-chi’s Canoe,” which will be distributed to fourth grade classrooms for use in small reading groups.

He says McGraw-Hill plans on replacing the four readers the Juneau School District removed with new readers at no cost.

A 74-year-old totem pole that once stood at the Auke Recreation Area in Juneau is being restored for a second time. The Yax té pole had to be taken down in 2010 after it was damaged by woodpeckers and heavy rains. Now after being in storage for five years, it’s getting a new life.

In 1941, The Yax té pole was carved by Frank St. Clair, a Tlingit from Hoonah as part of the Civilian Conservation Corps. Originally, it was intended to be one of many in an Auk Village totem park. But World War II broke out and funding dried up. Fred Fulmer, Frank St. Claire’s great-grandson, is helping with the restoration.

“Whenever great-grandpa’s pole needed to be restored redone I wanted to be a part of that. My nephew told me about Wayne over here doing the totem pole so I stopped by and he said come on over,” says Fulmer.

Wayne Price is the master carver for the restoration and has been doing this kind of work for over 43 years—making dugout canoes and totems. He’s a Tlingit from Haines and says he found his calling watching his dad.

“I remember looking up watching him carve. That’s it. That’s what I want to do. I got the opportunity to start sweeping up the wood chips,” Price says.

He’s worked on 36 different totem poles in his career, and he says the feeling he gets is the same every time.

“You walk into the room and smell the red cedar and see the tools and create the artwork that means so much and goes so far back,” he says.

In Tlingit, Yax té means “Big Dipper.” The raven sits at the top of the 47-foot tall pole. Price says it’s one of the tallest totems he’s ever worked on.

This isn’t the only time the pole has been restored. In the 90s, the base was vandalized by arson. The carver who worked on that first restoration made a startling discovery: several bullets had been shot into it. Rosa Miller is the tribal leader for the Auk Kwaan. She remembers being heartbroken seeing it in that state before.

“I don’t understand why people shoot at things like that,” Miller says. “It’s obviously there for a reason. The reason it was put there was to honor us. We are the original settlers here. The clan of the area.”

Fred Fulmer, the original carver’s great grandson, says he has childhood memories of taking care of the totem. He’s from Hoonah but when he would come to Juneau, his mom would want visit the pole at Auk Bay Village.

“She would go around and pick up garbage and start weeding. All of us would jump in and start cleaning. She didn’t say anything. She just went to it. You know, you got the cue, get in there and do that,” Fulmer says.

He’s passed on that reverence for the Yax té pole to his daughter, Yolanda.

“The feeling I get is just one of connection with my ancestors,” she says. “You know with my great-great grandfather. I can imagine the hands that worked on this pole. So it’s a real visceral feeling. I get the tingles and I get the chills.”

The restoration will be completed in the following weeks. The wings will be put back on the totem. It’s being repainted turquoise, yellow and red. Wayne Price says story poles like this one are, essentially, a history book of Native culture.

“We didn’t have paper but we carved the whole tree. This is classical example of that. Being a part of keeping that book so people can read it is very, very rewarding,” he says.

Yolanda says it’s going to be wonderful to see the pole return to its home.

“Know that our ancestors are with us and that we can sing and celebrate and bring this pole back to life,” she says.

But it might be a while before the Yax té totem returns to the Auke Recreation Area. The Juneau Ranger District is still looking for funding to put the pole back in its place.

The Alaska Court of Appeals has affirmed a lower court’s decision that Yup’ik fishermen who fished for King salmon during a state closure should be convicted. The decision was issued Friday.

The Attorney for the Yup’ik Fishermen is James Davis with the Northern Justice Project. He says the court asked the wrong question.

“The court asked ‘should the Yup’ik fishers be allowed to be allowed to catch any fish when there are not fish to be caught?’ and therefore got the wrong answer which is, ‘No they shouldn’t be allowed to catch any fish,” said Davis.

In 2012, dozens of Yup’ik Alaska Native fishermen living a subsistence lifestyle were charged with violating the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s emergency orders when they fished for king salmon on the Kuskokwim River. Thirteen defendants are appealing.

The defendants moved for dismissal of the charges, asserting that their fishing for king salmon was a religious activity, and that they were entitled to a religious exemption from the emergency orders under the free exercise clause of the Alaska Constitution.

Davis says there are two right questions he asked the court to consider and they ignored:

“If there were no king salmon to be caught by the Yup’ik fishers, why did the state open up the fishery to allow 20,000 king salmon to be caught the very next week after citing the Yup’ik fishers for catching any king salmon? And the second question which the court ignored as if it hadn’t been asked is, if there were declining runs of king salmon on the river over the last few years, why did the state continually vote for high salmon bi-catch by the pollock fleet, which the court of appeals effectively ignored,” Davis said.

Davis says he plans to appeal the case to the Alaska Supreme Court. Myron Naneng is President of the Association of Village Council Presidents, the regional tribal non-profit. He says their organization is pleased the case will be appealed but they are also considering taking the case to federal court.

“We should have gone to the federal court in the first place because the feds did not do their responsibility under Title VIII of ANILCA, section 807, where they’re required to give priority to rural Alaska and they’re supposed to have federal management first instead of requiring the state of Alaska to issue citations like they did in 2012. That’s something that we’re gong to be looking into,” Naneng said.

Federal managers took over the Chinook fishery in 2014 and have requests to take over management again this season. Naneng cites a case from the 1970’s upon which Attorney Davis’s case for the fishermen was built: Frank versus the State of Alaska, in which a judge ruled an Athabascan man from the Minto area could take moose out of season for a funeral potlatch, on religious grounds.

“When there’s a death in families, there’s a law in the state of Alaska that currently exists where families can go harvest a moose for religious purposes, and we feel that being able to harvest salmon for food as well as for the well being of (our families), that’s part of our life and has been our livelihood,” Naneng said.

Naneng and Davis reason that the Yup’ik Alaska Native fishermen’s spiritual connection to the salmon as their primary food source, should be reason enough for the exemption.
Laura Fox is the Assistant Attorney General with the state who argued the case before the Court of Appeals. She says the decision is sound.

“It will allow the state to continue to protect threatened fisheries by enforcing fishing restrictions when necessary, when there’s a shortage like there was on the Kuskokwim in 2012,” Fox said.

The District Court said the state’s responsibility to protect the declining species of fish outweighed the men’s claim of religious rights. The Court of Appeals decision affirms the lower court’s decision.

An Ojibwe woman and independent journalist Mary Annette Pember recently visited Alaska for a series of stories on historical trauma and Native American mental health practices.

Pember says the troubled lives of Native Americans reflect their troubled history.

In one of her articles, Pember tells the story of Oseira. In 1944, at the age of five, she was removed from her home in a Bristol Bay area village and sent to a Catholic boarding school in Interior Alaska. There Oseira says she and her sister joined dozens of other children in a strictly regimented life of hard work, harsh punishment and little schooling.

Pember says her interest in historical trauma has its roots in her own family history. Like Oseira, Pember’s mother was removed from her Wisconsin family as a child.

“My mother was a boarding school survivor,” Pember said. “She’s passed on now. But as I began this whole looking at historical trauma, I wanted to look at myself and my own family’s struggles with disease, health issues.”

Pember says the history of Native Americans is one of overwhelming trauma such as widespread death from war and disease, dislocation from their homelands, and removal of children from their families:

“That seems like it’s a common human response is that when I’m really hurting I want to stop the hurting. I’m going to do that, and I’m going to want to do it with what is most readily available and sometimes that’s with alcohol or drugs, or, you know, some other aberrant behavior,” Pember said. “We have a lot of that kind of stuff in our communities. There’s a lot of hurt. There’s a lot of pain. As humans I think it’s a pretty human response to want the pain to go away. And I think that’s what folks are doing.”

Dr. Dewey Ertz, of Rapid City, South Dakota visited Alaska last fall to speak at a conference on substance abuse hosted by the Aleutian Pribilof Islands Association. He’s a member of the Cheyenne River Lakota, survivors of a notorious massacre.

“I descend from the people who defeated Custer at Little Big Horn, but we’re also the victims of Wounded Knee,” Ertz said.

During his 40 years as a psychologist, Ertz has treated trauma survivors and conducted research about trauma. He says people’s reactions vary depending on the type of trauma, and the individual, their support system and resilience. But he says many people find ways to numb overwhelming emotions:

“One very commonly is addictions or substances, including food. Another is anger, because anger is a secondary emotion and covers up other emotions very effectively. Another is bad relationships because if you’re in bad relationships you have somebody else to blame for everything,” Ertz said. “And the last one actually is sex, people are not numb during sex but that’s all that they’re thinking about.”

And, Ertz says, some people use more than one of those numbing techniques.

“And then you have gladiators, who say if one thing is good to numb with, I will use all four,” he said. “So they partner up with someone they can drink and use drugs with, have a bad relationship with and be angry at, and have sex with, and that produces lots of children.

Ertz says children learn these adverse maladaptive coping mechanisms from their parents, and later model them for their children. He says there’s also now a theory that trauma alters the way genes express themselves. He says the idea behind epigenetics is that in the right – or wrong – environment, a person may be predisposed to unhealthy psychological reactions.

Still, Ertz says healing is possible – therapy helps. And in an article published March 16, Pember describes the success of a Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corporation program headed by Rose Dominick that uses ancient Yup’ik traditions in healing. Pember says healing occurs when survivors of trauma are in a safe environment and can share their story:

“I think awareness is a big deal,” Pember said. “One of the things that Rose Dominick and her people talked about is laying it out on the table, on what you’re dealing with, whether it’s substance abuse, sexual abuse, really just talking about it and putting it out on the table really helps you gain perspective on it.”

Pember says that sharing helps people understand that they’re having a normal human reaction to repeated or prolonged stress, and they can learn to behave and respond differently.

“It’s not an excuse but understanding,” Pember said. “Understanding leads to healing: maybe there’s a way not to feel this way.”

You can see Mary Annette Pember’s work at websites for Indian Country Today, and Daily Yonder, or at mapember.com