Alaska Native Arts & Culture

Sealaska Heritage Institute started moving into its new home in the yet-to-be-opened Walter Soboleff Center this week.

Chief Operating Officer Lee Kadinger hopes Sealaska Heritage Institute will be relocated by the end of January. The grand opening of the Walter Soboleff Center is May 15.

“Next door will be our new home,” Kadinger says from his current office at One Sealaska Plaza. “So every time you hear we’re having a Native Lecture Series, it’ll be at Sealaska Heritage. Every time you hear that we’re having weaving classes, it’ll be at Sealaska Heritage. Everything that we do isn’t going to be scattered around in different places or classrooms or meeting rooms; it’ll be at Sealaska Heritage.”

The building will have space for art exhibits, demonstrations and education. The main collections vault will be in the basement, the retail shop on the first floor, Sealaska Heritage offices on the second and office rental space on the third.

In the very center of the building, visible as soon as you enter, is a traditional clan house.

“If we want to have lectures in there, if we want to have presentation in there, if we want to have smaller performances in there – it’s really a flexible space. It’s a multiuse space and it’s an educational space,” Kadinger says.

The clan house front will be carved and painted by Tsimshian artist David A. Boxley. The inside will feature a carved glass house screen and two house posts depicting Eagle and Raven warriors made by Tlingit glass artist Preston Singletary.

Other permanent art work includes 40-foot panels by Haida artist Robert Davidson that will go on the building’s cedar-clad exterior.

Formline design expert Steve Brown created the glass sidewalk awnings that are already installed.

Having raised around $20 million for the construction of the Walter Soboleff Center, Sealaska Heritage continues to fundraise for added artwork and exhibits. Kadinger says more than a thousand individuals, businesses and organizations have already donated.

The Earth’s crust is more flexible than you think – especially in Southeast Alaska. Growing and shrinking icefields and glaciers, and rising and falling oceans have altered the region’s coastline over time.

Understanding those changes is helping scientists learn more about the area’s early human habitation. A Southeast geologist talked about what’s been discovered during a Nov. 25 Sealaska Heritage Institute Native American Heritage Month lecture.

We’ve all pretty much grown up with the assumption that the land we live on is when it’s been for thousands of years.

Sure, we have volcanoes and earthquakes and, if you paid attention in school, plate tectonics. But the big stuff happened millions of years ago, right?

Wrong. In this part of the world, drastic changes have happened in the past 6,000 to 15,000 years.

Forest Service Geologist Jim Baichtal explains.

“The ice came out on the landscape. It pushed down on that land. The sea reinvaded as the ice started to melt. And now that land has risen up,” he says.

He knows that because he – and others – have been mapping shell beds. They’ve been found from below today’s shorelines to hundreds of feet above.

Once you figure out where the shore used to be, you can make an educated guess of where early inhabitants lived – and what they saw.

“If you and I would have been, 10,000 years ago, on the shoreline and we lived to be 50 years old, sea level would have risen 10.2 feet in our lifetime,” he says.

And that matches some oral history.

Some of the settlements moved up and down rivers and streams as the ocean rose and fell, flooding coastal waterways, then receding.

Scientists have found campsites with tools and other signs of occupation.

Baichtal says they include agate and obsidian, which is only accessible in a few areas.

“So these people had been on the landscape long enough to find all those sites, and develop trade back and forth from those sites throughout all of Southeast Alaska by 10,500 calendar years ago,” he says.

The findings have larger implications for the region’s human history.

For example, Baichtal says flooding could have made it easier for early inhabitants to travel.

“So [when] people were coming into Southeast Alaska, they might not have been paddling down rivers. They were coming down the fjords,” he says.

And once here, travel would have continued on the water.

“Admiralty Island was a multitude of islands. If you look at the Cleveland Peninsula, it was a multitude of islands. The same [is true] for Gravina Island and Annette Island outside of Ketchikan,” he says.

Baichtal and other scientists have continued expanding their discoveries. He says before 2009, only five early settlement sites had been located. Since this type of research began, 17 more have been added to the list.

Excavation has also provided a look at Southeast Alaska’s climate history.

“Throughout 10,000 years to about 6,000 years, I’ve got a lot of evidence out of these muds that suggests that we were as much as 3 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit warmer, with half the rainfall, and that fire was part of our ecology,” he says.

Baichtal says weather patterns settled down around 5,500 years ago. That’s when human settlements really began to grow.

“The sea level balances, fish probably started getting established in big numbers in the streams, the streams no longer were being as dynamic and down-cutting and the sea level was no more rising, and I think people began to greatly flourish at that time,” he says.

As they’ve found more sites, Baichtal and his fellow scientists have developed more detailed maps of past Southeast coastlines.

He says other coastal areas could do the same.

“I’m sure all the way along the Gulf of Alaska, when you get out to Kodiak and up north, the same processes are going on. We’ve just not taken a look at applying this strategy on the landscape,” he says.

Another type of early settlement research still needs to be undertaken.

That’s exploration below current tidelines. Researchers in nearby northern coastal British Columbia have found evidence of settlements – 300 to 500 feet below the ocean’s surface.

The Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle recently opened an exhibit called “Here and Now: Native Artists Inspired.” Among the new works by contemporary artists are two skateboard decks that Juneau-based Tlingit artist Rico Lanáat’ Worl designed and painted. KTOO’s Scott Burton visited Worl at his store in Juneau and produced this artist profile.

“Here and Now” will be exhibited at the Burke through July 2015. Other regional Native artists in the show include Tsimshian artists David A. Boxley and David R. Boxley, Haida artists Lisa Telford, Evelyn Vanderhoop and Christian White and Tlingit artists Alison Bremner, Shgen George and Tommy Joseph.

Ishmael Hope may be best known for his storytelling, but he is also a poet. His first book of poetry titled “Courtesans of Flounder Hill” will be released this Sunday.

The 69-page book was published by the Ishmael Reed Publishing Company—Ishmael Reed, the renowned African-American writer from whom Ishmael Hope got his name, and who published his mother’s writing 30 years ago.

Hope says writing poetry is unlike theater and his other arts. “I have more control, and in a lot of ways you don’t want to control it though,” he says with a laugh. “But I have more of a say on what I can do with it.”

As for his process, Hope says, “Every now and then you’re just taken with this thought, and it’s your body and your whole experience is connecting to something powerfully and then you just have to write. When that moment comes, that’s often where the most intense kind of poetry can come out of.”

Speaking to the underlying theme of the collection, Hope paraphrases his friend Robert Bringhurst.

“The powerful Haida artists and the renaissance painters, they had a narrative tradition that they followed, but it wasn’t just that. They had the talent to put in the shock of the real. And so that’s what I try and tune myself into: multiple traditions, and then, there’s just the raw experience of being alive–and somehow, it should have that flavor in there.”

The book release party will be 4 p.m. Sunday at Kindred Post, where the book will also be carried. Hope will be joined by Christy NaMee Eriksen and Nora Dauenhauer who will also read.

Juneau Schools Superintendent Mark Miller says the district will remove four controversial readers from the elementary school language arts curriculum. He announced his decision at a press conference Thursday at the Zach Gordon Youth Center.

Back in August, community members raised concerns about texts depicting Alaska Native and Native American tragedies. The readers were called distorted, inaccurate and insensitive. A district committee reviewed the curriculum materials and voted 7-2 to remove them from classrooms.

Superintendent Mark Miller didn’t announce his decision alone – he brought along three Native elders who had all attended Native boarding schools.

Charlotte McConnell was 7 when her mother died and her father sent her and her siblings to boarding school.

She was told by her aunt, “‘You can’t speak no Tlingit, you got to speak English, you’re going to school.’ And so that’s where I got understanding English only.”

McConnell attended schools in Juneau, Seward, Wrangell and Sitka.

The loss of cultural identity at Native boarding schools is one of the experiences depicted in the McGraw-Hill Reading Wonders curriculum. Others were the Trail of Tears and the excavation of Native burial grounds.

Miller says the readers don’t meet the needs of Juneau students, but he thinks it’s positive the curriculum includes instructional time for understanding Native experiences.

“I am calling on the community to come together with the school district to document and tell your truth. Come into our classrooms. Help us teach our children about our local history,” Miller says.

Most copies of the readers will be returned to the publisher, he says, and replaced with materials developed by the district in collaboration with Goldbelt Heritage Foundation and Sealaska Heritage Institute. A few copies will be kept at the district office for students who wish to read them.

He says understanding culture and race is an important part of any student’s education.

“Whether in Ferguson, Mo., Juneau, Alaska, or anywhere in between, difficult conversations and debates need to occur. We are all products of both our own personal experiences as well as those of our ancestors. Academic institutes, by their very nature, are an important forum in which to have these conversations and debates,” Miller says.

Paul Berg is a curriculum developer and cultural specialist at Goldbelt Heritage Foundation. 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. Berg is pleased with Miller’s decision.

“It’s an opportunity to confront some uncomfortable historical facts and historical realities and it’s an opportunity to bring about healing, healing within the Native community but also within the non-Native community,” Berg says.

Freda Westman is Grand President of the Alaska Native Sisterhood. For her, the decision was the only one Miller could’ve made.

“This was not a Native issue; it was an issue for all children. All Alaskans want their children to be educated correctly and be given the information no matter what, but it depicts it truthfully. That’s what history is about,” Westman says.

She’s grateful for all the community members – Native and non-Native – who came together to make sure the materials were removed.

“We have been fighting these battles for a long time. Over 40 years, I’ve been doing this,” Westman says.

She hopes the district and the Alaska Native community will work together more closely from now on.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story said Juneau School District will be working with Sealaska to develop replacement materials. The district will be working with Sealaska Heritage Institute. 

Sealaska Corporation would get land within the Tongass National Forest in a bill that’s moving quickly in the final days of Congress. The long-awaited Sealaska bill is one piece of a Public Lands package that’s been added to a must-pass defense bill.

It would turn over about 70,000 acres of the Tongass National Forest to Sealaska, the regional Native corporation of Southeast Alaska, mostly for logging and development.

Sealaska has been pressing Congress for such a bill for years, to complete its land selections under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. Jaeleen Araujo, Sealaska general counsel, is pleased but cautious.

“Well, we haven’t had activity on our bill since they both passed through the committees of the House and the Senate,” she said. “They’ve been waiting for well over a year, probably a year and a half, since we’ve had any action on them. So for us we’re just happy to have some movement.”

Nationally, the bill moves 110,000 acres out of federal control, enables a controversial copper mine in Arizona and expands a BLM program to streamline drilling permits. Outside of Alaska, it also establishes more than 200,000 acres of wilderness and designates new national parks.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski says it’s the culmination of weeks of negotiations. Leaders of both parties, in the House and Senate, have approved the deal. If it passes, it will be the most extensive public lands legislation to become law in years.

Murkowski spokesman Robert Dillon says the package has widespread support in Congress because it includes a variety of measures that appeal to different lawmakers.

“It’s a large, comprehensive package. But it really strikes a good balance between conservation — there’s wilderness bills in here, there’s new parks — and economic opportunity and development,” he said.

The collection of land bills came together just this week, but Dillon says all of the elements have been thoroughly discussed in public.

“Sealaska especially. Sealaska had seven years of public process,” he said.

The land conveyance, he said, will serve as a bridge as the industry lessens its reliance on old-growth harvest.

“The Sealaska bill will help keep the timber industry alive while the Forest Service moves over to a second-growth strategy. It will give the timber mills in Alaska enough timber for the future to get through,” he said.

Among its other Alaska provisions, the bill would sell an old DEW Line radar station within the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska to Olgoonik, the village corporation of Wainwright. It also clears federal interests in three municipal lots in downtown Anchorage. In Nome, it turns over an Air Force tank farm at the port to the city government. In the defense portion of the bill, lawmakers affirmed the process the Air Force used when it selected Eielson Air Force Base to house the first F-35A squadrons, indicating Congress won’t block the decision. It also authorizes $40 million to improve and expand the missile defense system at Fort Greely and blocks a potentially competing missile site on the East Coast.

The Sealaska transfer is one of the high-profile items in the land bill, and it divides environmental groups. While the bill conveys 70,000 acres on Prince of Wales and other islands, it also conserves more than 150,000 acres in eight areas of the Tongass for salmon habitat and wildlife. The Alaska Wilderness League sees that as significant. But Athan Manuel, who has been fighting the Sealaska bill on behalf of the Sierra Club, says it’s little consolation.

“Even though the bill did get a little bit better, the fact that it privatizes part of the Tongass National Forest is a deal-breaker for the Sierra Club,” he said.

Manuel, though, says he sees no opportunity to stop the bill now.

“This is a very historic win for Sen. Murkowski, a very audacious win for her. The fact that Sealaska is going to be able to operate outside the boundaries of ANCSA is a pretty good plume in their hat,” he said.

The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act promised acreage to Alaska Native corporations, and Sen. Murkowski says her bill fulfills that commitment to the shareholders of Sealaska. In what could be taken as a sign of its balance, the bill is opposed by both the Sierra Club and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which complains it would lock up federal land in Western states. The House is expected to pass the bill tomorrow and then it moves to the Senate. Republican Sens. Tom Coburn and Ted Cruz have already objected to the public land bills hitching a ride on the defense bill.

“A bill that defines the needs of our nation’s defense is hardly the proper place to trample on private property rights,” Coburn wrote in a letter to Republican leaders.

Joe Viechnicki, of member station KFSK, contributed to this story from Petersburg.