Alaska Native Arts & Culture

About two-dozen Native dancers and drummers performed at the Sealaska Plaza as nearly an equal amount of spectators watched on Friday afternoon.

Most of the dancers were in their regalia and a few held up signs that read: Idle No More.

Similar events are underway in Canada where First Nations people are protesting their treatment by the federal government. Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence is now in the fourth week of a hunger strike in her effort to meet with Prime Minister Stephen Harper over aboriginal equality and treaty rights.

Ishmael Hope of Juneau calls it a powerful and positive movement.

“It started with us being supportive of our inland relatives,” said Hope. “It’s been happening all over now, all over the world. We’re not going to sit back and take the injustices that come at us.”

Hope says this was the third event organized for Juneau and more are planned. He credited Harold Jacobs for organizing the recent events.

Idle No More was planned for the State Office Building atrium during the noon hour on Friday. But the event was moved to the Sealaska Plaza because it conflicted with the weekly performance of the Kimball pipe organ.

When Juneau voters approved an extension of the city’s temporary one-percent sales tax and a $25 million bond proposition earlier this year, it created a dilemma members of the CBJ Assembly are probably happy to have: When to fund the nearly 20 projects identified in both ballot measures?

Engineering Director Rorie Watt presented a preliminary funding schedule for the sales tax and bond projects to the Juneau Assembly Finance Committee this week.

The bond package contained six projects, including renovation of the old terminal at Juneau Airport, a new Learning Center at Eaglecrest Ski Area, and deferred maintenance at Centennial Hall. The plan is to do an initial $2.4 million bond sale in February to get those projects underway, and sell the rest of the bonds at a later date.

Watt says the sales tax funding schedule is a little more complicated.

“You can’t do it all in year one,” he told the Finance Committee.

The tax extension doesn’t take effect until October 2013. It’s expected to bring in about $44.5 million over five years. Ten million of that will be used to pay down debt on the bonds.

Of the remaining $34.5 million, Watt proposed funding three projects in the first year – the Juneau Airport’s snow removal equipment facility, a new Dimond Park Library and Sealaska Heritage Institute’s Walter Soboleff Center.

“All three of them, I think it’s fair to say are most advanced,” Watt said.

The library project is estimated at $14 million, and has secured all funding except sales tax. Watt says it’s ready to go to bid next winter.

Airport Manager Jeannie Johnson says she’s working with the Federal Aviation Administration to get $17 million for the snow removal facility. Ten million is available this year. But Johnson says if the Airport waits a year, when the sales tax dollars become available, she thinks she can get the full amount.

[quote]”The reason that they’re asking me to do this and I’m trying to make it work is that they’ve come up with other projects in the state of Alaska that they want to spend that $10 million on right now,” Johnson said.[/quote]

Of the three projects Watt proposes appropriating money to right away, Sealaska Heritage Institute has the most aggressive building schedule. SHI Chief Operating Officer Lee Kadinger told the Finance Committee the Soboleff Center will hopefully be ready to go to bid in early 2013.

“We have expectations of other gifts to come in in the next probably six to eight months,” Kadinger said. “We’ve been working a lot of these relationships with foundations for some time that are very interested in the project. It’s just more or less a formal public decision.”

Kadinger says the goal is to have the facility built by June 2014 in time for the heritage institute’s biennial Celebration festival.

Two other items from the sales tax initiative would get funding next year, under Watt’s proposed timeline. About a million dollars would go toward both deferred maintenance and the city’s rainy day reserve fund, with additional sales tax revenue set aside for those items in future years.

The rest of the individual projects, including a water filtration system for the Salmon Creek Reservoir and borough wide parks and trail improvements would be funded over the five-year extension.

The Assembly is expected to adopt the funding schedule as part of its Capital Improvement Projects list next year.

Most Decembers, Albert Kookesh is making plans to move to Juneau for the legislative session.

But this year, he’s spending more time at his Angoon home, enjoying the view.

“I see really calm waters because it’s high tide right now. And all of the beaches and all of the woods are covered with snow. And so is my dock right in front of my little house here,” he says.

Democrat Kookesh lost his Senate seat to fellow incumbent and Sitka Republican Bert Stedman in the November general election. The two became opponents when parts of their separate Southeast districts were combined.

The new district has less than a third of Kookesh’s old constituents, dropping communities in the Interior and Prince William Sound. Stedman kept more than two-thirds of his old district, including two of the region’s three largest communities.

“I wasn’t surprised. I thought if we worked very hard we could pull a little bit of an upset here, but that wasn’t to be. People knew Stedman in his old district and they voted for him,” Kookesh says.

Out of office, 64-year-old will remain busy. He’s chairman of the Sealaska regional Native corporation’s board of directors. He also co-chairs the Alaska Federation of Natives board.

“So I’m not going to be sitting around not doing anything. I’m going to be pretty busy, in fact. I’m even contemplating getting back into commercial fishing,” he says.

Kookesh, once a seiner and a store- and lodge-owner, spent two terms – or eight years – in the Senate. That came after four terms – another eight years – in the House. Before that, he spent two years in the Capitol as Governor Tony Knowles’ special assistant for rural affairs. (View photos from Kookesh’s legislative career.)

“Albert’s going to be a definite loss,” says Kim Metcalfe of Juneau, a Democratic Party leader who has been active in the Alaska Native Sisterhood.

“He’s a very powerful guy with the positions he holds with both Sealaska and AFN. So, he’s not going to go away. He’s going to be around for a long time and use his speaking skills.
He’s a powerful speaker and I think we’re going to hear a lot more from him,” Metcalfe says.

She says Kookesh has been a strong advocate for education — statewide and in the villages he represented. She also says he used his leadership and oratory skills to urge young Natives, as well as others, to attend college.

Kookesh and Sitka’s Stedman worked together in the Senate’s bipartisan majority. Their race was largely respectful, and Kookesh continues speaking in positive terms.

“I think he’s going to do a good job for our district. I’m just a little disappointed that they weren’t able to put the coalition back together where he could have been the co-chairman of Finance again, or something more,” he says.

Kookesh headed up the Transportation Committee, while Stedman assembled the capital budget as co-chairman of the Finance Committee. But this election’s Republican gains broke up the bipartisan majority. And the new leadership shut him out of budgeting.

Instead, Stedman was offered chairmanship of the Health, Education and Social Services Committee. He accepted, saying he looked forward to an opportunity to broaden his horizons.

Kookesh isn’t so sure.

“I don’t really think he’s cut out for HESS. But maybe we’ll see something different out of him. I think he’s more of a numbers man. He’s very powerful in that area and he has a very good background in it. Finance is right up his alley,” he says.

Kookesh has been active in the Alaska Native Brotherhood, serving as regional president and secretary. He played Gold Medal basketball, a major Southeast competition, for three decades.

But it hasn’t always been a smooth ride.

He’s a regular target of Sealaska shareholders critical of the corporation. And he earned an ethics violation for comments some took as threatening the city of Craig to gain support of the corporation’s land-claims legislation.

He was also among those cited for overfishing subsistence sockeyes near Angoon. His case was dismissed.

Despite all that, he says he still has a role to play.

“My name is well-enough known that I can still be a little bit of a force in Alaska. If it’s through the Native community, that’s fine. If it’s through some other venue, I’d be glad to look at whatever comes down the pike. Maybe we’ll have a Democratic governor in the next election and I could be involved in that somehow,” he says.

Technically, the Angoon Democrat remains a senator until the next Legislature gavels in January 15th. But there’s little to do before then.

Read and hear earlier reports about Albert Kookesh:

• Kookesh session issues: Water, sewer, clinics
• Legislative panel reprimands lawmaker for comments
• Sen. Kookesh to contest subsistence fishing violation
• Fishing citations against Kookesh, three others, dismissed

Officials with Sealaska Heritage Institute and the City and Borough of Juneau are working on a deal to let SHI out of the city’s historic district standards for the proposed Walter Soboleff Center.

The four-story, 29,000 square foot education and cultural facility will be built on the edge of the downtown district, which celebrates the late 19th and early 20th century architecture of Juneau’s original mining period.

The Soboleff Center will also present a historic look. After all, the history of Southeast Alaska Native architecture goes back over 10,000 years.

Sealaska Heritage Institute Chief Operating Officer Lee Kadinger says the facility at the corner of Front and Seward streets downtown will pay tribute to that history, incorporating elements of traditional Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian design. It also will take advantage of modern advances in building materials to meet LEED Gold standards.

A glass and cedar façade will give way to an interior that will include exhibits, work and performance space for artists, as well as offices for SHI’s staff, and climate controlled storage for the institute’s collections.

“We just feel that it celebrates the rich cultural diversity of Southeast Alaska,” Kadinger says. “And we feel that it really represents Juneau’s original habitants in a wonderful light.”

Kadinger says SHI is not looking to re-write the city’s historic district code. Rather, the institute would prefer the Juneau Assembly pass an ordinance providing an exception to the property where the center will be built.

“Native culture is part of the history of Alaska, and a non-code exemption would not change the historic district standards in the rest of the district,” he says. “But it would provide for an inclusion of what may have been an oversight.”

The Juneau Assembly this week directed the city law department to draft an ordinance fulfilling SHI’s request.

Mayor Merrill Sanford said the city could put conditions on its exemption. The only suggestion he made would be maintaining the same parking standard.

“The parking standard has been made more flexible in the past five to 10 years,” Sanford said. “And I think we’ve held everybody accountable to that standard within the downtown district that I don’t think that we should step out away from those rules.”

Design drawings for the Soboleff Center show no additional off-street parking. Surface parking would be available at the Sealaska Plaza lot directly across the street.

Other than that, Sanford said he was comfortable changing requirements for building materials, color schemes, architectural style and the like.

“Here we have our Native heritage that has a bright, diversified color scheme to what they do and all their arts and culture,” Sanford said. “They want to build that into this building, and right now that can’t be done.”

SHI’s Kadinger would like to hammer out details of the exemption in the next two months.

Juneau voters in October approved an extension of the city’s temporary one-percent sales tax, which included $3 million for the Soboleff Center. Kadinger says construction is estimated at $20 million, and that SHI has raised about 75 percent.

The facility will be named after the Reverend Doctor Walter Soboleff, a renowned Tlingit elder who passed away in 2011 at the age of 102.

The National Park Service and Hoonah Indian Association are inching closer to a new tribal house on federal land in Glacier Bay National Park.

The 3,500 square foot structure will be built on the waterfront at Bartlett Cove.

Park Superintendent Susan Boudreau says it will be the first tribal house in the Huna Tlingit’s ancestral homeland since advancing glaciers forced the people to move more than 200 years ago.

“The Huna people stayed in Hoonah, and there’s people in Sitka, there’s people in Yakutat, there’s people in Juneau,” Boudreau says. “This started about 18 years ago with some elders [wanting] to start linking the Huna people back to Glacier Bay National Park.”

Boudreau says the tribal house will serve as a meeting place and visitors center, allowing the Park Service to expand educational programs in Glacier Bay. The agency already partners with Native groups on programs for school kids and some of the more than 500,000 cruise ship passengers that visit the park each year.

In addition, the Hoonah Indian Association will be able to use the tribal house for traditional ceremonies. The design is based on historical accounts and photographs, and will feature a gabled roof and thick plank walls carved with Native imagery.

Master carvers and Hoonah students have already finished the main interior wall, or screen. Boudreau says it depicts the history of the four Glacier Bay clans, and is currently on display at the Hoonah School District’s auto shop.

“It is absolutely beautiful,” she says. “This building has got oil on the ground, it smells like an auto shop, and the screen takes you away from all that, and brings you right into what’s so important about Glacier Bay and the clans. It is pretty incredible.”

Boudreau says the finished building will cost $3.2-million, with funding from the National Park Service already appropriated. Construction is scheduled to begin next summer.

The Environmental Assessment was released Friday. A public meeting on the project will be held in Hoonah on Tuesday and another in Gustavus on November 5th.

Officials from the Hoonah Indian Association could not be reached for comment.

Links:
Huna Tribal House Environmental Assessment Available for Comment
Tribal House Project

Sealaska Heritage Institute has received a total of $4.5 million for educational programs and the Walter Soboleff Center to be built in downtown Juneau.

The federally funded Alaska Native Education Program has awarded three grants; the first for about $2 million over two years, dedicated to construction of the Soboleff facility.

The second grant is $1.2 million over three years for cultural orientation programs for teachers in the Juneau School District and University of Alaska Southeast.

The heritage institute has already signed an agreement with the school district and UAS for educational programs. SHI president Rosita Worl says the program for teachers’ began informally this fall.

“It (the grant) will also allow us to develop culturally relevant resources,” Worl says. “We know that teachers are extraordinarily busy and we know they have definite requirements they have to teach to, so providing supplemental materials that speak to our culture, I think, will also help them.”

A third grant over three years is for $1.37 million for math summer camps for Southeast Alaska middle school students. Worl calls the proposed classes math “boot camp.”

“We have partnered with the University of Alaska in the teacher-training program and we see where our students are coming into the university not prepared in math — in general. I mean we do have students who are doing well in math, but in general,” she says. “So we decided that we were going to go after programs where we could help our students in math.”

Such programs will be part of the Walter Soboleff Center when it is completed. It will have classrooms and event spaces as well as ethnographic collections and a research facility. Worl says about half the funds have been raised for the center, estimated at $20 million.

Alaska Native organizations, school districts and universities are eligible to compete for funds from the Alaska Native Education Program. It was created by the late U.S. Senator Ted Stevens for Alaska Native education programs, because Alaska does not have benefit of educational funding through Bureau of Indian Affairs schools, unlike other states.