Alaska Native Arts & Culture

The stands at Thunder Mountain High School’s gym were full on Saturday as the Skagway Panthers and Hoonah Braves varsity basketball teams faced off in Juneau’s first annual Elizabeth Peratrovich Women’s High School Basketball Invitational.

The teams were battling to see who would be crowned the tournament’s first champions. Ultimately, it was the Panthers who took home the title with a 29-8 win.

Thunder Mountain girl’s varsity basketball coach and event organizer Andy Lee said the tournament is meant to showcase the deep pool of talented female athletes in Alaska and to honor Alaska Native culture in Juneau. 

“I’ve always thought of Elizabeth Peratrovich, hearing the stories about her and her impact on the civil rights movement and the legislation that she’s impacted and the people she’s influenced — what a great role model,” he said. 

Peratrovich’s activism was a driving force behind the Alaska legislature’s passage of the Anti-Discrimination Act of 1945. That bill was signed nearly two decades before the federal Civil Rights Act.

Lee said it was only right to choose one of the most influential women in Alaska’s history as the tournament’s namesake. He said it was important to choose someone for the girls who can inspire them. 

Keidre Hartman, a senior on the Thunder Mountain girl’s team, said she really enjoyed the tournament and having the teams come play on her home court. 

“I really like helping build up the community, and Native culture is definitely a big part of Juneau, and so I like being able to support that,” she said. 

The Central Council of Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska was the tournament’s main sponsor. Tlingit and Haida President Chalyee Éesh Richard Peterson was in the stands to watch the championship game. 

He said the tournament is special because it lifts up young women in the sport and honors basketball’s deep roots in Alaska Native culture.

“I think it’s just exciting to see young ladies given the center stage and to do it in honor of Elizabeth Peratrovich makes all the more sense makes it a thing to be excited about,” Peterson said. 

Lee said he hopes the tournament will become a tradition for the young high school. 

“I want things to live on, beyond the people that are here and the message. And I want it to resonate with young women who play — and I hope there’s a 50th-annual,” he said. 

Lee said plans are already underway to expand next year’s tournament. 

Sealaska Heritage Institute is seeking Alaska Native artists to pitch designs for Celebration – the every-other-year gathering of Indigenous people in Southeast Alaska. The multi-day event takes place June 5 through 8.

SHI President Kaaháni Rosita Worl says this year’s theme is “Together we live in balance,” and designs should depict that using Northwest Coast style art. The winning design will appear on all Celebration materials, including t-shirts and the event program.

Worl said creating a balance between the different Southeast Alaska Native people in the region is essential to maintaining lasting relationships for future generations. 

“The whole concept of social and spiritual balance is a basic underlying theme or value in our culture,” she said. “We need to have both social and spiritual balance to maintain a healthy society.” 

Worl said balance is an important belief in Lingít culture that goes back thousands of years. An example of that can be seen with the Lingít moieties of Raven and Eagle. She said even today, it’s essential that a balance is struck between the moieties during gatherings. 

“When we have someone from a Raven clan speak, we have to have balance and so an Eagle has to respond,” Worl said. “If we don’t do that, our belief is that, you know, the spirits can go wandering, and cause harm. 

Worl said SHI is asking artists to encapsulate that balance not only between Alaska Native peoples but also in the natural world around Juneau. The sketches of proposed concepts are due Jan. 12 and artists can apply online. The winning artist will receive a cash award.

Sealaska Heritage Institute released new language learning apps in X̱aad Kíl and Shm’algyack this month. The apps are the first of their kind and are meant to open doors for learning the endangered Indigenous languages. 

Leah Urbanski with Sealaska Heritage Institute recently demonstrated a new game app. It let’s you choose which language you want to practice — Lingít, X̱aad Kíl or Shm’algyack.

Urbanski picked X̱aad Kíl, the Haida language. Her phone screen filled with animated sea creatures.

“So it’s all kind of live animals floating around the screen,” Urbanski said. “And then whenever you click on it, this guy just pops up out of nowhere.” 

A harbor seal appeared in the corner of the screen, looking at us. When Urbanski tapped on it, its X̱aad Kíl name appeared: X̱úud.

There’s also a game with a forest full of birds native to Southeast Alaska, a quiz game and more options on the Lingít side. The app is called SHI Language Games.

This app and two others released this month are SHI’s first attempt at putting X̱aad Kíl or Shm’algyack, the Tsimshian language, in app form. 

The new language apps, much like the Lingít one SHI released several years ago, are called SHI: Learning Haida and SHI: Learning Shm’algyack.

They have phrases, vocabulary and a breakdown of the alphabet, with recordings to help learners pronounce each sound right. 

The X̱aad Kíl voice users hear is Skíl Jáadei Linda Schrack, and the Shm’algyack is Shiggoap Alfie Price. Price and Schrack worked with a team of language experts to create the apps. 

The X̱aad Kíl and Shm’algyack apps are a bit thinner in content than the Lingít app right now, but Urbanski said that will change. 

“For right now, this is what we have,” she said. “But we’re going to continuously keep adding to this as we go along, just gathering all the kinds of vocab that we need.”

She said these apps are another way learners can engage with X̱aad Kíl and Shm’algyack. 

“I think getting language out there and in as many ways as possible is important, especially with our ever-evolving world,” Urbanski said. “Technology is one of the things that a lot of people use.”

Apps are especially helpful for younger learners, she said, and they’re all free to download from app stores on iPhones and Android devices.

Gregory Golodoff was sitting in a sod house when the soldiers arrived.

“We had heard machine-gun fire from this side, this side, you know. I forgot who it was told us they’re coming from this side, they’re coming from that,” Golodoff said in a 2018 interview — 75 years after the Battle of Attu.

The Japanese Imperial Army invaded the Unangax̂ village in 1942, where the three-year-old Golodoff lived with his family.

Golodoff was the last surviving person who was born and lived in Attu, the last island in the Aleutian Chain before reaching Russia.

His death on Nov. 17 marks the end of an era when there were still people alive who had lived in the now-lost village.

The Japanese army occupied the island for three months before taking all 42 Attu residents to Japan as prisoners of war.

Golodoff’s entire family was imprisoned in a dormitory in the port city of Otaru, about 500 miles north of Tokyo. The next three years were full of disease and malnourishment, straddling the brink of starvation.

“We would just get a bowl of rice a day or sometimes a salted herring,” Golodoff said.

He remembered the cooks taking pity on him and treating him like “a pet.”

“I was a cute little guy, I guess, because a Japanese cook scraped burned rice from the pot and would bring it to me,” he recalled.

People who knew Golodoff throughout his life have remarked at how little resentment he felt toward his captors. That empathy shows even in those early memories.

“Well, gosh, we were hungry, but so were the Japanese,” he said. “The Japanese were starving, too.”

Trying to forget

Only half of the Attuan POWs survived the experience. Golodoff lived through it, as did his mother, older brother, Nick, and his sister, Elizabeth. But many of their family members didn’t make it, including Golodoff’s father, who died of disease in Japan.

“We cremated all of them,” Golodoff said. “All the people that died in Japan.”

Those who did survive were released when the war ended, but couldn’t return home. Many homes had been destroyed, and the United States government judged it too difficult to relocate the freed POWs back to Attu.

Instead, the village was abandoned and the survivors moved to other communities. Golodoff and his family settled in Atka, an Unangax̂ village about 500 miles east of Attu.

Those who died in Japan were also brought to Atka to be laid to rest.

“They brought ‘em all back in three coffins,” Golodoff said. “All the ashes in three coffins and buried by the church in Atka.”

Golodoff spent most of his life in Atka. He practiced subsistence, hunted, fished and said he stayed too busy to think much about the war.

“I didn’t have time to wonder about anything, because most of the time we had to hunt for food, you know, go out and fish and stuff like that,” he said.

He joined the Army, was stationed in Germany, and then moved back to Atka. He ran the village store, and became the tribal president in the 1980s when Atka saw significant growth, including the construction of a new school and a subdivision about a mile from the old village.

In all those years after the war, Golodoff said the survivors didn’t want to talk about what happened. He didn’t even speak about it with his mother.

“She never told me anything. They don’t want to talk about anything like that. They’d rather forget it,” he said.

But a new generation of Attuan descendants are talking about it. Crystal Dushkin grew up in Atka, but her great-grandmother was from Attu.

“A lot of people refer to the Aleutian Campaign as the ‘Forgotten War,’” Dushkin said in a 2017 interview with KUCB. “But our people have never forgotten it. It’s never lapsed from our memory.”

Dushkin is one of the many people who work tirelessly to preserve Unangax̂ culture and the memory of Attu.

“That’s what I wish for the younger generation, as well,” she said. “To always hold on to what our ancestors taught us. To always remember them, and to make sure that they teach it to their children and grandchildren so that it’s never forgotten.”

Then and now

People often compare the Aleutian Campaign to the attack on Pearl Harbor, but Pearl Harbor was an attack from the sky. The Battle of Attu, and a similar one on the Aleutian Island of Kiska, mark the only times the Japanese actually invaded the United States. The Aleutian Campaign was the first time foreign forces occupied American soil since the War of 1812.

In 2012, the National Parks Service held a meeting for all the Attuan descendants and survivors. Golodoff wanted to meet other descendants, but he also wanted to connect with other surviving POWs.

“I was going to see my peers,” he said. “Then I went there, I was disappointed. Nobody survived except us.”

There were only three survivors left. Greg, his brother Nick, and his sister Elizabeth Kudrin.

“I guess we just lived the longest. That’s all,” he said.

Nick Golodoff passed away two years after the reunion, leaving just Gregory and Elizabeth.

And then, in February of this year, Elizabeth passed away.

Lost but not forgotten

Gregory Golodoff passed away in Anchorage on Nov. 17 at the age of 84.

Ten days later, dozens of people came to St. Innocent Cathedral in Anchorage to pay their respects.

Moses Dirks is an Unangax̂ scholar and a friend of Golodoff from Atka. He said as a child, he looked up to Golodoff, who was a good role model in the community.

“He was always helpful, and he was always willing to help the people there in Atka for many years,” Dirks said.

Golodoff’s niece, Joanna Thompson, said she admired how her uncle would never show anger or resentment for what happened to him.

“Uncle Greg just turned it into something else,” she said. “He could have been one of the other children that passed. So he was lucky to be alive, and he just found joy in every day.”

Dimitri Philemonof, the CEO of the Aleutian Pribilof Islands Association, described Golodoff as a quiet and humble man.

“Throughout his life, he has been a great leader,” he said. “I never saw him hate or anything of that sort. I think that says a lot for the Aleut people.”

Golodoff was the very last person on Earth who was born and lived in Attu, a village lost to war — the last American citizen whose home was occupied by a foreign force. But to Golodoff, those were just the facts of his life.

“It’s just something that happened. Things will happen. We’re all going to experience something,” he said. “We’re not really here. From dust we came, to the dust our bodies will return. So we don’t die, as far as I’m concerned. We don’t die. We might depart from our bodies, but that’s about it.”

Golodoff was buried at Anchorage Memorial Park Cemetery on Nov. 27.

A Washington man has pleaded guilty to a federal charge of misrepresentation of Indian-produced goods and products. The charge stems from his involvement in a larger conspiracy to sell over $1 million of fake Alaska Native art in Ketchikan.

According to a plea agreement filed in the District Court of Alaska, Jessie Halili Reginio was charged with violating the federal Indian Arts and Crafts Act by passing off stone carvings and wood totem poles as traditional art made by local Lingít and Haida artisans. They were actually produced in the Philippines. The products were sold out of two storefronts in Ketchikan: Alaska Stone Art and Rail Creek.

The stores were owned and operated by Cristobal Magno Rodrigo and his family members.

Reginio was an employee of the family’s stores and received commissions on the Filipino products they sold.  His plea agreement lists his involvement beginning in 2019. Reginio portrayed himself as an Alaska Native carver named “Sonny.”

In May of 2019, Reginio received commission on a stone-carved bear with a fish in its mouth which sold for almost $1,500. In July of that year, he sold a stone eagle for almost $6,500. Then, a month before his involvement with the scheme allegedly ended, he sold a Philippine-made humpback whale to an undercover law enforcement agent. The whale was signed with a false name: “Kilit.”

Federal authorities say that Reginio would lie to customers that he learned to carve by watching his brother and his uncle “Kilit,” both Lingit master carvers. In a later conversation with a customer, he misrepresented his employer Cristobal Rodrigo as his nonexistent uncle, “Kilit.”

Rodrigo was sentenced to two years in prison for his part in the crime in August of this year. It is currently the longest sentence ever given for an Indian Arts and Crafts Act violation in the United States.

In a statement at the time, Alaska District Attorney S. Lane Tucker said that Rodrigo’s monumental sentence was a testament to the feds dedication to protecting indigenous cultural heritage and that the family’s actions were “a cultural affront to Alaska Native artisans.”

Lingít scholar Jeff Leer noticed gestures an elder would make when telling stories when he was young.

“When she was talking along and talking about a person sitting, she would, you know — you’d take your right index finger and put it erect, and then you crook it about halfway,” Leer said. “So it looks like it’s bent at about a 90 degree angle.”

Using old recordings, Lingít language experts like Leer are documenting and compiling hand gestures used by birth speakers that have meaning in the context of the language. 

Leer leads the Sealaska Heritage Institute’s Tlingit Gesture System program. He’s been studying Lingít for nearly 60 years.

He took American Sign Language classes in Chicago, and when he came back to record stories with other elders, like Elizabeth Nyman, in the 1980s and 90s he began to see it as an integral part of the Lingít language. 

“I started really paying attention to the gestures that she was making, and recording them and describing them,” he said. 

Roby Littlefield has been documenting the gestures as well. An elder named Franklin James told her these gestures were often used when people were hunting and didn’t want to make much noise, or when they were across the bay from each other, in sight, but not in shouting distance.

“He showed me how he raised one arm up in the air and the other hand, he made a movement toward the fingertips of the arm that was up to say that the tide is rising,” she said.

Littlefield is an educator in Southeast Alaska, teaching Lingít to students from middle school to the college level, and she said these gestures could open more pathways for students to absorb the language. 

“There’s many learning styles that people naturally do well with when they’re learning a language. And one of them is a movement – a physical movement can lock the word into your brain,” Littlefield said. “So when you learn a new word, or a whole sentence, you do that physical motion, or movement, or expression on your face, and it locks the word into your long term memory.”

Leer said that since he started recording gestures, he has documented about 100 of them, but he doesn’t think the number stops there. 

“I’m sure there are many, many other gestures out there,” he said. “And what we would like to do is to find the people that still know and use those gestures and add to our corpus of the Lingít gesture system.”

Leer said this gesture system could allow learners to use less English to fill in blanks in the classroom setting. 

“The idea is to develop the Lingít gesture system into a true sign language so that it can be used to teach Lingít in the schools, without recourse to English,” he said.

Sealaska Heritage Institute is sponsoring the program, using reparations funding from the Presbyterian Church’s recent apology to the Lingít community. 

SHI said in a press release that they plan to investigate whether there are similar gestures and associations in the Haida and Tsimshian languages, X̱aat Kíl and Sm’álgyax.

 

Correction: This story previously stated that Roby Littlefield works in Juneau. She is based in Sitka and travels to communities in Southeast Alaska to teach Lingít.