Alaska Native Arts & Culture

It has long been forbidden for men to weave in the Chilkat tradition, but Tlingit artist Ricky Tagaban is an exception. Using techniques practiced for thousands of years, Tagaban creates his trademark iPhone bags, hair clips, and head bands, putting a modern spin on an ancient tradition.

In his living room overlooking the Gastineau Channel in Juneau, Ricky Tagaban is spinning wool and wet cedar bark together on moose hide.

The process joins the fibers together creating something called warp which will give Tagaban’s bags their structure. With the big Celebration cultural event just a few days away, Tagaban still has several commissions left to fulfil. Though his finished pieces vary in size and intricacy, they all begin the same way – as cedar bark softening in a crockpot.

“Cooking it is kind of the longest and then I soak the bark in hot water and spin it with the wool and I have to wash it and groom it – and that part’s called grooming your balls and you have to go along and cut all the fluff,” Tagaban says. “And that’s all before weaving.”

Tagaban is weaving in the Chilkat tradition. The textile technique is passed down through Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian families and there are strict rules guiding its practice. Created on an upright loom, Chilkat use abstract shapes and patterns inspired by nature.

Much of what’s known about Chilkat came from the late master weaver Jennie Thlunaut.

Juneau weaver Lily Hudson Hope has been practicing both Ravenstail and later Chilkat weaving since she was a teenager.

“I feel that the traditions and the rules and taboos are set there, and they’re there to protect us,” Hope says.

One of the taboos in Chilkat is to never place a human hand in designs. Another is to always cover up your work after you’re finished.

The one that applies to Tagaban is that men can’t weave. But Hope says there is one exception.

“We don’t know why it started or where it started, but when Jennie was teaching my mother and other weavers in 1986, she would scream – ‘we don’t teach men, I don’t teach men, we don’t teach men,’” Hope says. “And then she made the exception that if they’re funny, and she said, ‘If they’re funny, I teach them.’ They’re funny in the way that they’re two spirited.”

By two spirited, Hope means gay.

In the summer of 2010 Tagaban was invited to learn from Thlunaut’s apprentice and Hope’s mother, Clarissa Rizal because he fit the tradition, and was identified as someone who could carry it forward.

“I was asked to learn this style of weaving because of my sexual orientation and because it’s a Native art form so learning this and practicing it and
really identifying as a weaver had really reconciled my Nativeness and my gayness,” Tagaban says.

Since learning Chilkat, Tagaban’s works have become more elaborate and experimental, incorporating more modern materials like shot gun shells. This spring Tagaban was awarded his second Rasmuson grant and one of his iPhone bags appeared on the Red Carpet in Los Angeles at the GLAAD Media awards. Hope thinks it’s exciting to see the way Tagaban has brought Chilkat to new audiences.

“He’s taken an ancient art form and put it in the hands of the masses in a way that’s revolutionary,” Hope says. “We don’t have to wait for Celebration or cultural gatherings to share our art form with other people. It’s not just for Tlingit people or just for Haidas or Tsimshian. If you like this and you want to wear this, come have some. Come get it.”

Back at Tagaban’s home studio, he lets me try on a pair of leggings decorated by deer hooves. They’re a work in progress, an old world object with a twist. Embedded in the traditional Chilkat pattern is a small patch of geometric Ravenstail weaving, a hybrid design that’s beginning to gain acceptance in Chilkat weaving.

For Tagaban, harmonizing both aspects, the modern and traditional is important.

“It’s cool to have a really specialized skill but it’s also a lot of pressure,” Tagaban says. “It’s not like we’re saving it, it’s just that we’re holding onto it while we’re here.”

The leggings are almost finished. Tagaban just has to sew sea otter fur to the tops before he can see them on a dancer at Celebration.

A bill allowing traditional gull-egg harvests in Glacier Bay is on its way to the president’s desk. It’s the culmination of years of lobbying to resume a centuries-long practice.

The measure is one of 16 included in a package of land-use bills recently passed by the United States Senate. It’s already made it through the House, so it just needs President Obama’s signature to become law.

The bill is called the Huna Tlingit Traditional Gull Egg Use Act. Hoonah, 40 miles west of Juneau, is across Icy Strait from Glacier Bay. Many current residents are Tlingits who call the area their ancestral home. (Huna is the traditional spelling; Hoonah is contemporary.)

During a congressional hearing earlier this year, Hoonah Indian Association Tribal Administrator Robert Starbard said the bill will restore a practice that should have never been blocked.

“Since time immemorial, the collection of gull eggs on South Marble Island and elsewhere in Glacier Bay has been a traditional cultural practice of the Tlingit people,” he said.

Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve was established in 1925. Harvesting continued until the 1960s, when a migratory bird treaty and park regulations changed the rules.

(Read about Tlingit history in Glacier Bay.)

Limited harvests have been allowed. But Starbard says they should be managed by Hoonah Tlingits, not federal agencies.

“What is being conserved is not biodiversity in the abstract, but a living community that requires, as a condition of its continued existence, the sustainable management of the resources on which it depends,” he said.

Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski and Congressman Don Young authored versions of the bill, with support from Senator Mark Begich. It’s been in the works for several years.

The gull-egg act has been opposed by the Sierra Club.

Lindsey Hajduk is with that organization.

“The members of the Sierra Club Alaska Chapter had been somewhat concerned about just the precedent of allowing any collection of wildlife from any national park,” she said.

Board member Jack Hession campaigned against the gull-egg bill.

“There is a risk that if Glacier Bay is opened Alaska Native people living around these other parks might seek the same privilege. And who knows how far this could go,” Hession said in a 2011 interview. He could not be immediately reached for comment.

He said several locations outside the park and closer to Hoonah were better collection sites.

But Hajduk says the club stepped back from that position.

“I think it’s a safe assessment to say that it’s not up to us where we recommend traditional collection of subsistence resources. It’s really up to those tribes and tribal members that are engaged in it to decide,” she said.

The act applies to only glaucous-winged gulls, among the most common of Southeast’s seabirds. It also limits the number and location of egg harvests. (Read more about egg harvesting in the bay.)

 

Three Alaska groups have received more than $142,000 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The money will go toward a Tlingit clan hat exhibit in Juneau, the Whale House exhibit in Haines and a training workshop for small museums.

The grant supports Native American and Native Hawaiian museum projects.

Sealaska Heritage Institute President Rosita Worl says their grant will go toward the costs of an exhibit on the history and significance of Tlingit clan hats.

“A clan hat is not just something you put on for protection from the weather or something like that. In Tlingit culture, clan hats have very significant and complex meanings. And so that is our goal is to teach the public about the meaning and place of clan hats in our culture.”

The $49,000 grant will be used to design the exhibit.

Jan Yaeger is the museum curator for the Seldovia Heritage Institute. She says that finding instructional materials for museum workers is almost impossible.

“You know I always hear that everything in the world is on YouTube. But from my experience this is something that’s not on YouTube, in terms of how to actually create exhibits and mounts and so on. There’s very little information out there, freely available.”

Yaeger says as far as museums go, Seldovia’s is probably one of the smallest and like most small museums in Alaska, it’s hard to get training. The institute is using its $38,000 grant to develop a training workshop.

“Rather than take the expense to send one person outside, we could spend the same amount of money, put on our own workshop and educate staff from multiple museums. So we’re going to hire a consultant who has a great deal of experience and put together a workshop and invite up to 10 staff from a variety of Alaska museums to take part in that workshop and that way we’d be able to spread some of the knowledge and the skills.”

A third grant of nearly $48,000 was awarded to the Chilkat Indian Village in Haines for the installation of the Whale House exhibit and instruction from the Alaska State Museum in best practices for curating exhibits.

Lani Hotch is the executive director of the Jilkaat Kwaan Cultural Heritage Center and the project manager for the construction of the exhibit.

“We’ve even harvested trees from our land to create that exhibit. It’s going to really reflect who we are in this community, who we are as a people, our cultural traditions and the land we all stem from.”

Alaska State Museum employees also will teach staff at the heritage center to develop best practices for conservation, exhibit design and curation.

Juneau police are looking for additional witnesses to a racial incident that marred the parade at the end of last month’s Alaska Native Celebration.

Lt. Kris Sell hopes witnesses who haven’t yet talked to the police will come forward.

“Some of those people may be assuming that we have plenty of witnesses because lots of people were talking to the police that day, and we did get a handful of witnesses. Unfortunately, not all of those people got a good look at the suspect,” Sell says.

The suspect reportedly kicked over traffic barricades on Main Street during the Celebration parade June 14, says Sell. He was then found in front of the Goldbelt Hotel chanting a racial slur to the beat of a drum. He grabbed the American flag from an Alaska Native man’s hand, spit on the flag and tried to run away with it.

“Some people who were attending the parade, some participants, chased him and got the flag back. And we don’t know the names of those people but we would like to talk to them,” she says.

Sell says Alexander Libbrecht, 32,  is a person of interest. Libbrecht was sentenced last week to a year in prison. He changed his plea from not guilty to no contest on an assault charge for yelling racial slurs at a black woman on Gold Street and threatening to beat her with a baseball bat.

He also is under investigation by the U.S. Secret Service for verbal threats against President Barack Obama as well as a New Jersey attorney, who represented him in a previous case.

Sell says Libbrecht’s behavior fits the description of the suspect connected to the Celebration incident, although none of the witnesses Juneau police interviewed have positively identified him. Sell says eye witnesses can be difficult.

“Some people described him as wearing shorts. Some people described him as wearing khaki pants or blue jeans. We had different descriptions about his weight and age and other clothing descriptors,” Sell says.

Sell says Libbrecht has not been specifically questioned about the Celebration incident.

Juneau police had witness interviews scheduled Tuesday evening. Anyone else who believes they saw the face of the suspect can contact Lt. Kris Sell at 586-0600.

Alaska Native leader Don Wright has died. He was 84 when he passed away at home on July 5.

Wright was instrumental in developing the tribal lands compensation legislation, Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, signed by President Richard Nixon in 1971. Wright was leader of the Alaska Federation of Natives that year.

Wright helped organize AFN during the 1960s, and fought to get the best settlement possible for Alaska Natives. Wright and other Native leaders traveled to Washington, DC to lobby for the law, even though funds were scarce. Wright often used his own money for airfare and expenses, since AFN in its early days had no funds at all. Despite the odds, Wright was successful in getting Nixon administration backing for the settlement.

ANCSA compensated Alaska Natives for loss of lands and established regional and village Native corporations with the right to select 44 million acres of land and appropriated $962.5 million to them.

Wright was born in Nenana in 1929. He became a pilot and established his own air service. He later formed a construction company, and helped build airstrips and roads in the Interior. He also helped build the first oil field camp at Prudhoe Bay.

Wright’s family says he was a champion for Alaska. His funeral will take place July 26th in Nenana.

For the second year in a row, the number of walrus harvested for subsistence on St. Lawrence Island is far below normal.

“It’s about half of what the average take has been over the last 10 years or so,” said Jim MacKracken, who supervises the walrus program for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which tracks population numbers based on strikes and successful harvests hunters report back.

Though some hunters are still boating as far as 70 miles north to the retreating ice edge, the majority of walrus pods are now past the island, and the preliminary harvest figures are low.

“The total for both Gambell and Savoonga so far is about 345 animals,” MacKracken said. “But we still are getting a few certificates back in, and I hear that people are picking up a walrus here and then. And as they migrate back South in the fall they may get a few, also.”

That’s split about evenly between the two communities, 176 in Gambell and 169 in Savoonga.

Based on what MacKracken has heard from hunters, the cause of the poor harvest is the same as last year.

“Generally it’s weather and ice conditions. You know the winds weren’t blowing quite right and the ice was packed in along the shore. A lot of the days the wind was blowing pretty hard so the sea was pretty rough and the fetch was high. It’s hard to get a boat out and go hunting in that kinda condition. Then of course a lot of times it’s foggy and it’s hard to hunt in the fog, ‘cause you can’t see where you’re going or see the animals,” MacKracken explained.

Walrus are the staple subsistence source on the island, and an essential economic and cultural resource. Last year the state declared an economic disaster because of the record low harvest.