Alaska Native Arts & Culture

Confused about all the upcoming elections this fall? Want to know more about the voting process?

Go to the Voter Registration Rally Thursday in Juneau.

It’s part of the nationwide Native Vote Action Week, with a number of events being held in Alaska to increase voter turnout.

Juneau’s is sponsored by Tlingit and Haida Central Council and Sealaska. It will be held at Elizabeth Peratrovich Hall.

Organizer Nicole Hallingstad says it’s open to all Juneau residents, but the primary goal is to increase the number of Alaska Natives who vote.

While 70 percent of Sealaska shareholders over age 18 living in the state are registered, that doesn’t mean they actually vote.

“We hope to increase the understanding in the Alaska Native population that your vote literally is the source of our collective strength,” Hallingstad says.

People who need to register to vote, update their current registration, or want to learn more about the election process should attend, she says. Many people never register, and many others register but never go to the polls, because voting is an unfamiliar process.

“So we’ll actually have standing ballot booths that are exactly like those you’d see at any balloting station,” Hallingstad days. “People can get a mock ballot. They can get familiar with the process of showing their ID, casting their ballot and going through the act of electing to try to increase familiarity, reduce some of the fear or uncertainty around that process, and get people more comfortable with voting.”

The Voter Registration Rally is from 4 to 8 p.m. Thursday at Elizabeth Peratrovich Hall on Willoughby Avenue.

The University of Alaska Southeast has received a $50,000 memorial gift from the estate of Emma G. Widmark, given in the name of her father Dr. Alfred E. Widmark.

UAS Director of Development and Alumni Relations Lynne Johnson says the gift will be used to permanently endow the university’s Alaska Native and Rural Student Center.

“The center provides help registering for classes, they give them career counseling, they make sure academically that they’re taking the right classes. I think it’s one of our strengths here,” Johnson says.

The donation is believed to be just the second memorial gift given to UAS since the school was established.

Alfred Widmark was a Tlingit, born in Haines in 1904. He served in the Alaska State Legislature from 1961 to 1962. He also served as Mayor of Klawock, President of the Alaska Native Brotherhood Grand Camp, and as an executive committee member of both the Grand Camp and the Tlingit & Haida Central Council. He was an ANB representative to and vice president of the National Congress of American Indians and a member of the Sealaska Corporation board of directors.

Widmark received an Honorary Doctorate of Humanities from the University of Alaska Southeast in 1979.

Emma Widmark passed away in 2008.

Officials from 10 federal agencies will meet Thursday, Aug. 9, with tribal leaders from northern Southeast Alaska.

They will discuss federal housing, nutrition, economic development, utility and other programs available to tribal governments and non-profit groups.

Department of Agriculture Rural Development spokesman Larry Yerich says it’s one in a series of regional tribal collaboration gatherings.

“We want to just say ‘Here’s the main stuff that we have available, but we’re certainly open to hearing what your questions are.’ And that’s the difference between this kind of meeting and rule-making, which is much more rigid,” Yerich says.

Thursday’s meeting runs from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Juneau’s Tlingit and Haida Vocational Training and Resource Center. It’s part of an Obama administration directive for agencies to work with Native organizations.

The meeting is in person and will not include participants via teleconference.

Yerich says much of the discussion will be about funding.

“Any of the federal partners who are participating in the project, we all have a variety of loan and grant programs. And we all have services that could be of interest to the people who are attending,” Yerich says.

Thursday’s meeting is for Southeast tribal officials from Sitka or to the north. Southern Southeast had its own meeting in early May in Ketchikan. Bethel, Nome and Tazlina, near Glennallen, have had similar events. Yerich says more are planned.

Federal agencies to be represented at the meeting are Rural Development, Farm Service Agency, Natural Resource Conservation Service, Forest Service, Food and Nutrition Service, Department of Housing and Urban Development, Small Business Administration, Economic Development Administration, Department of Energy and the Denali Commission.

Programs of greatest interest:

• Food production, availability and nutrition

• Rural housing

• Land management programs of Natural Resources Conservation Service and Forest Service

• Rural utilities (electric, telecom, solid waste, sewer and water)

• Rural economic and community development

The Douglas Indian Association yesterday (Tuesday) held a blessing ceremony at Gastineau Community School for human remains found during a renovation project.

Last month, the City and Borough of Juneau halted construction after workers digging in front of the building unearthed remains and a headstone for Sam Goldstein, a Chilkat man from Klukwan who died in 1927.

It turns out the remains did not belong to Goldstein, whose body is still missing. At the request of Douglas Indian Association officials, the city brought in archeologists from Northern Land Use Research in Fairbanks. They correctly identified the remains found near Goldstein’s headstone as those of a young woman in her early to mid-20s.

Deputy City Manager Rob Steedle says they also used ground-penetrating radar to scan the construction area.

“They were able to identify six probable sites for graves, and four possible sites, as well as a number of other sites where they just couldn’t tell what was going on, but they thought they were unlikely to be graves,” Steedle says.

He confirms additional human remains were found, but declined to give an exact number. He says Anthropologist Joel Irish with University of Alaska Fairbanks was brought in last Wednesday.

“He helped complete the uninterment of these individuals, identify them to the best of his ability as to sex and age, and then on Friday we re-interred these individuals at the school site in an area that won’t be disturbed,” says Steedle.

He says construction will resume at the school this week, and the city is reasonably confident no other burial sites will be disturbed. He also says the city will work with Douglas Indian Association to investigate how the sites went unnoticed for several decades. Gastineau Community School was built in 1957.

“The records are scant, but we will be doing research to understand just what was visible on that site in the late 1950s when Gastineau School was built,” Steedle says.

Members of the Juneau Assembly and School Board attended Tuesday’s blessing ceremony as guests of Douglas Indian Association. But Steedle says DIA officials requested that it not be noticed to the public in order to keep the gathering small and private.

Douglas Indian Association officials could not be reached for comment before news time.

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Amos Wallace was a keeper. So his longtime home on Juneau’s Douglas Island held numerous documents from his nearly 70-year career.

Since he and his wife Dorothy passed away, their son, photographer Brian Wallace, has been going through the collection.

“I was in the basement in the earlier part of this year and I opened up some boxes of stuff and I saw some photos that I’ve never seen before, and unfortunately I found this,” Brian Wallace says.

“This” was a pair of black-and-white, historic photographs showing the elder Wallace with a totem pole he carved in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Both were badly damaged by water.

“I did not want this disaster to happen to the rest of the collection. So I immediately started putting everything together and organizing the archive and then I took it down to Sealaska Heritage [Institute]. And now it’s in a very safe place where it will be preserved for generations,” he says.

The Juneau-based heritage institute preserves and advances Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian culture. It’s planning a new building, the Walter Soboleff Center, to house a growing physical collection, a digital library, classrooms and display space.

That will include the Wallace collection.

“In terms of going out and meeting the rest of the world, Amos was that ambassador for Tlingit people and for Tlingit art,” says Rosita Worl, the institute’s president.

She says Amos Wallace was an important artist and craftsman.

“He definitely brought attention to our art, nationally and internationally,” Worl says.

“And it certainly takes a person with character to do that,” says Zachary Jones, archivist and collections manager for the institute.

He says Wallace was enthusiastic about his culture and generous with his knowledge.

“He was there showcasing Alaska statehood, as sort of this Alaska Native representative to different people across the nation. [He was] on the Tonight Show, at museums, really sort of an individual teaching the Lower 48 about Alaska Native art,” Jones says.

Jones and Worl say the collection is comprehensive – something that’s not often seen. It includes notes, drawings, photographs and newspaper clippings in Tlingit art.

“You get to see the breadth of the artist’s life. You can see the evolution of his work from an early age to his later years. You can really see the beauty, the depth and aspects of his life that I think we really like to celebrate,” Jones says.

Amos Wallace began carving under the tutelage of his older brother, Lincoln, when he was seven years old. He went to boarding school at the old Wrangell Institute, and studied with respected carver Horace Marks.

He served in the Army in World War II, then spent more than a decade carving small totems with his brother for a Pacific Northwest wholesaler.

As the collection shows, he moved onto a larger stage.

“This is the totem pole that is now in the Brooklyn Children’s Museum,” says Brian Wallace, Amos’ son, as he pulls up a digitized photo from his father’s collection.

“He carved this totem pole in New York City in 1958 for a big department store in Brooklyn called Abraham and Strauss. Several local people in town grew up [there] and said, ‘Hey, yeh, I know that.’ They probably even went and saw my dad carving at one time when they were little kids,” Brian Wallace says.

The elder Wallace did more than carve when he was in New York. He talked to schoolchildren and others about his art, culture and traditions. That led to his “Tonight Show” appearance, back when it was hosted by Jack Paar.

The department store totem later moved to a new location, the Brooklyn Children’s Museum. Brian Wallace pulls up another photo, showing his dad wearing a traditional Chilkat blanket and a woven spruce-root hat.

“This photo was taken the day the totem pole was dedicated. He’s standing there with a little girl and [on cards] he has the Tlingit words for ‘new totem pole’ and words for ‘my country – Alaska’ in Tlingit here,” he says.

The Amos Wallace collection also documents totem carvings at Disneyland, the University of Alaska Fairbanks and museums in Cincinnati, Toronto and Boston.

In addition, the archive includes numerous drawings, such as clan crests, on graph paper. They’re images that became totems, or smaller wooden carvings, or metal jewelry.

“This killer whale here is a common motif he worked on throughout the years. You can see the finished carving of this in the Smithsonian Institution. I’ve seen it in pendants and I’ve seen it in bracelets that he’s made, so this is one of his favorite killer whale designs,” he says. (See more Wallace pieces in the Smithsonian collection.)

Parts of the archive are already digitized. Others wait to be scanned or otherwise preserved for future use.

Worl of the heritage institute says the drawings will be teaching tools. And the whole collection will attract artists and art historians.

“When I look at some of the pieces, I recognize them, as older pieces you don’t see any more. Nowadays the art has gotten more simple, it’s broader. But when you go back and look at the early pieces … I see it in his work,” Worl says.

Parts of the collection are more personal, showing Alaska Native Brotherhood events, or Orthodox Church services. There also are family events, including Amos taking his young son Brian to his first day of kindergarten.

Watch a video of Brian Wallace talking about his father, Amos Wallace, with more photos from his life. Watch below or at this link. It’s from Kathy Dye of the Sealaska Heritage Institute.

Tlingit carver Amos Wallace from Kathy Dye on Vimeo.

This is the closing weekend of the juried art show from Celebration 2012. Thirty-two pieces from twenty-one artists include the high-water mark of craftsmanship in Northwest Coast art. There are also pieces that go outside the boundaries of what is considered traditional art with new forms or techniques.

The art competition was held in conjunction with Celebration, the biennial Native dance event and the largest Native culture gathering in Southeast Alaska. It was held in Juneau in early June. The art show, organized and sponsored by the Sealaska Heritage Institute, is intended to encourage art creation and development.

In previous years, submissions were divided into two categories, traditional and contemporary. Masks and woven baskets would fit into the former category, while glass work would be in the latter, for example. But what is new or contemporary, or non-traditional art, may itself become traditional as more artists pick up on a change in medium, form, or a new technique.

This year, judges for the competition were told to dispense with the old categories. Instead, artwork was judged in the areas of customary or customary-inspired Northwest Coast art.

Renowned Ketchikan carver Nathan Jackson judged the customary category. He says he looks for a well-thought out concept or idea, and complete symmetry. He also looks for paint application, clean cuts, and type of wood selected.

Peter Corey, Northwest art scholar and a former curator at Sheldon Jackson museum, judged customary-inspired art. He describes Northwest Coast art as strong with the formline design that appears to be pushing its bounds, the predominate and contrasting red and black, and blue and green in recessed areas. But that’s changed a little recently.

In the Customary category, Archie Cavanaugh won first place with his Eagle Man Mask, Sonya Koenig-Johnson’s Spruce Root Hat came in second, and third place went to Ruby Hughes for her vest titled Woodworm Woman.

Sealaska Heritage officials say Koenig-Johnson only took up weaving during an instructional program in Hoonah six years ago.

Cavanaugh called his winning mask meant to symbolize a transformation from eagle to man a hard and complicated project. He started by visualizing the project, and making sure the form lines and symmetry are just right.

In the Customary-Inspired Art category, Harmony Hoss won first place for her Beaver Purse, Clarissa Rizal was second for her Argillite Totem, and Shgen DooTan George took third with her Woven Octopus Bag.

Rizal says her art was inspired by a dream. She used charcoal on canvas that is then wrapped around a custom built totem. The light spaces simulate the reflected light shining off argillite and the dark charcoal the carved areas.

George entered a Chilkat apron with cedar bark backing and button blanket that drew on traditions from the indigenous Ainu people of Hokkaido. But it was her experiment of woven Raven’s tail and cut out copper pieces for the octopus bag that caught the judges eye.

Cash prizes of a $1,000, $750, and $500 were awarded to the top three in each category.

Best of show award of $1,500 went to Arthur Nelson for his Raven Bowl.

All of the artwork selected for the Celebration 2012 juried art show are on display at the Juneau Arts and Culture Center through June.