Alaska Native Arts & Culture

Ketchikan students tracked the inaugural flight of an Alaska Airlines plane designed by Crystal Worl on Friday.

The former salmon-thirty-salmon is wrapped in Worl’s colorful formline salmon design.

Houghtaling Elementary School teacher Starla Agoney said her fourth graders wouldn’t mind a formline design on every plane.

“Some of the conversations were students think that all of our Alaska Airlines planes should have those designs, formline design, and to be traveling throughout the United States,” she said.

Agoney said that one of her students came to school on Friday morning with the news that the plane would be touching down later that day.

She took it as a chance to show them pictures of the plane, and track the flight through Alaska Airlines. When it got close, they all flocked outside to look. And a conversation about culture took off.

“We talked about how the salmon is the clan of the artist and how the artist always wanted to see a salmon design on one of the planes,” she said. “So it was really deep conversations about what it means to our area.”

It was especially engaging for the students since they’ve been learning formline designs through the school’s artist-in-residence program.

“And so my students were able to talk about the ovoids and the U-shapes and what they thought the design meant,” Agoney added.

Watching the plane come and go was a way for the students to connect what they’ve been learning with real life.

“We’ve been learning about each other’s cultures and the cultures of the Southeast Alaska people,” she said. “And so it was they were able to connect that with what they’ve been learning in class. And so that was really special and unique.”

Agoney said other classes at Houghtaling also watched. Revilla Junior Senior High School students did the same.

Raegan Miller is a Report for America corps member for KRBD. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep her writing stories like this one. Please consider making a tax-deductible contribution at KRBD.org/donate.

Gasps and cheers filled a room at the Juneau International Airport when X̱áat Ḵwáani landed on Friday morning.

The Alaska Airlines plane — its name means Salmon People in Lingít — features a giant, colorful design by Crystal Worl depicting salmon in Northwest Coast formline. 

Juneau dance group Yees Ku.oo performed a song called “Admiration” to celebrate the design’s inaugural flight. Nancy Barnes, who leads the group, said she’d been excitedly pacing back and forth all morning.

“I’ve known Crystal since she was a tiny little girl,” Barnes said. “I’m just so proud of her.”

Listen to Yees Ku.oo perform a song called “Admiration”here:

Worl was on the plane for its flight from Anchorage.

“I saw our Lingít language on the plane and heard everyone on the plane say ‘X̱áat Ḵwáani,’” she said. “I just feel immensely proud. There’s no English words for how I feel right now.”

In a speech to those gathered to celebrate, she spoke about the salmon’s cultural and spiritual importance. She said restoring salmon runs in the Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers would require both traditional and modern techniques, an approach she uses in her art.

“We won’t be able to harvest again until the numbers get better, and the younger generations are not able to learn these fishing and preserving skills that have survived for generations,” she said. “We must make change in our actions and thinking about the environment.”

According to Alaska Airlines, this is the first time they’ve featured a language besides English on the main door of an aircraft. University of Alaska Southeast language Professor X̱ʼunei Lance Twitchell helped Worl decide on the name.

“It’s such a wonderful thing to have people speaking Indigenous languages in Indigenous places,” he said, before teaching the group how to say X̱áat Ḵwáani.

Listen to Twitchell’s pronunciation lesson here:

Worl’s grandmother, Sealaska Heritage Institute President Rosita Kaaháni Worl, thanked the airline for highlighting Alaska Native art and language, “our language that previous generations had tried to suppress.”

X̱áat Ḵwáani is the same plane that Alaskans long knew as Salmon Thirty Salmon.

Marilyn Romano, Alaska Airlines’ regional vice president for Alaska, said the process began when it was time to repaint the Salmon Thirty Salmon II, which flew the Milk Run from Seattle through Southeast Alaska for more than a decade. 

“Knowing it had to be repainted, that’s when we had the opportunity to pause and really think about, ‘What could we do different?’” she said. 

Romano had seen a woman wearing a sweatshirt designed by Trickster Company — a design shop owned by Worl and her brother, Rico — at Fred Meyer in Anchorage. She bought a sweatshirt of her own in Juneau and then learned more about Worl’s art — including her murals in Juneau and Anchorage. 

When it was time to repaint the plane, Romano said she knew who to call.

X̱áat Ḵwáani continued on to Sitka, Ketchikan and Seattle on Friday. It’ll fly throughout Alaska Airlines’ network.

An Alaska Airlines plane now features formline art by Juneau artist Crystal Worl.

On Friday, it will make its inaugural flight from Anchorage to Juneau, landing at 9:23 a.m. before continuing on to Sitka, Ketchikan and Seattle.

Worl has imagined designing plane art for years – in 2020, she tagged Alaska Airlines in an Instagram post sharing an idea.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Crystal Worl (@crystalworl)

Now her blue, white and pink design — depicting salmon in Northwest Coast formline — completely covers a passenger jet.

“Every time I looked at an Alaska plane, I couldn’t help but visualize the salmon being in formline, or having some sort of design that represents identity,” she told the airline in a press release. “I can’t help but look at things and see how to Indigenize them.”

The plane is named X̱áat Ḵwáani, or Salmon People in Lingít. According to Alaska Airlines, it’s the first time they’ve featured a language besides English on the main door of an aircraft.

“For me, this plane is confirmation that the art, language and culture that our Ancestors practiced and hoped to pass on to future generations is not only alive and well but is thriving,” Dawn Smith, co-chair of Alaska Airlines’ Native Employee Network, said in a statement. “It is a statement for all Indigenous people that we are still here.”

Earlier this year, Worl designed a stamp for the U.S. Postal Service. She painted the Elizabeth Peratrovich mural in Juneau, and her art appears on a Juneau ambulance. Last year, she replaced an Anchorage mural depicting local history with one featuring a colorful formline nature scene. 

Alaska Airlines’ Salmon Thirty Salmon II, which flew the Milk Run from Seattle through Southeast Alaska for more than a decade, took its last flight in April.

An Indigenous Alaskan author is hoping to breakthrough into popular fiction. Matt Gilbert already has a pair of significant nonfiction books under his belt, but he wouldn’t mind crossing over into film work or novels set in a galaxy far, far away – in a genre that might be known one day as Gwich’in Sci-Fi.

Matt Gilbert has written the serious stuff. The 2005 graduate of the University of Alaska in English Literature just published The Gwich’in Climate Report (University of Colorado Press, 2023), a compilation of his interviews with Athabaskan community members, hunters, and trappers on regional adaptation to climate change. An earlier book, Sitting at Their Feet, a memoir of his coming-of-age during a time of cultural transition, was published in 2021 by the Epicenter Press.

Gilbert was featured in this 2008 report on Arctic climate change from National Public Radio.

Listening to elders is something we all should spend more time doing, but for Gilbert — even growing up in Arctic Village — there was something else.

“I was a big, big, big, huge sci-fi nerd,” said Gilbert. “Totally, a Star Wars fan all the way, a Star Trek fan all the way. Lord of the Rings fan, Willow fan, and as a kid, I would grow up and love these movies. But I always wondered: What about us?”

Star Trek is still celebrated for bringing racial and ethnic diversity to space. For Gilbert, it wasn’t necessarily about the racial makeup of the actors, but their worldviews. He was raised in a culture of storytelling that just wasn’t making its way into contemporary science fiction of any kind.

“As a kid, I was really disappointed, you know, really disappointed,” he said. “A little kid in front of the TV and a bookworm early on. Where’s our stories? You know, where’s the modern Native stories, with sci-fi or fantasy, or with anything? And I waited. And so when I was 15 years old, I was in high school and still nobody – no Native American person wrote anything like it and I got tired of waiting. I was like, ‘Okay, if no Native writers can write the stories I want to hear, I’ll write them, and that’s what I did.”

He did, but not as Matthew Gilbert. You can find his first trilogy under the name Wolf Golan. “Wolf” for his first dog, and “Golan” a tribute to his grandmother’s family name. The series is called Chandera, and Gilbert began writing it in high school. It’s set 300 years in the future, and its protagonist is Maxwell Wilkes, a Gwich’in Athabaskan.

For the novels to work, Gilbert had to project not only the future of civilization as a whole, but the future of his culture. He was pleased to learn that many of his peers believed that people will still identify as Gwich’in three centuries from now.

“When I was writing it, I spoke to Native American people, even to young people like 20-year olds,” he said. “And I asked them, “In 300 years, how do you think we’d be? And they’d be like, ‘Oh, we’d be heavily westernized, our old culture would be gone. Yes, we’d have probably still have a connection, but it would be distant,’ and so I put that in there. They’re still trying to be Gwich’in, but it’s been so long since they were connected to the real culture 300 or 400 years ago.”

Gilbert says he’s been criticized for creating a character who tips too far into western standards of heroism, but he argues that the differences are subtle: In the first book of the Chandera series, for example, Max Wilkes rides into battle quietly, in contrast to Luke Skywalker and Hans Solo and other “Western guys… yelling stuff.” In another nod both cultural and autobiographical, Gilbert says his hero sleeps late.

Since Gilbert first started creating the world of the Chandera trilogy as a high school student, he’s pleased that Native American science fiction is seeing a renaissance, through the works of authors like Rebecca Roanhorse, and scholars like Grace Dillon, a professor at Portland State University whom he considers a mentor. And there are new characters, too, who are pushing the Native American worldview into space. A favorite of Gilbert’s is Camina Drummer, a pivotal figure in the huge sci-fi hit The Expanse.

Gilbert self-published the Chandera series, but he’s hoping a publisher might take the trilogy to the next level, into the world of trade fiction. In the meantime to pay the bills, he and a colleague run a management company, and he works occasionally in construction.

He vividly remembers finishing his English Literature degree, and looking around the university at friends studying to become engineers and other professionals. Eighteen years on, he’s still content with his choice to pursue writing.

“If I could go back and do it all over again, I don’t think I would change anything,” Gilbert said. “I I like being a writer. I like telling stories, you know. But I do actually want to do different things from this time onward.”

Gilbert is hoping to expand his creative range, and possibly move into music. Whatever is ahead, it’s unlikely to be a “normal” job. “I tried to get a normal job and be normal,” he said, “it (writing) just wouldn’t leave me alone.”

Expert witnesses testified in court Wednesday that traditional tribal values are ingrained in Southeast Native culture. They were testifying in a trial to determine if it is constitutional to display traditional tribal values in Ketchikan schools. Cultural anthropologists and professors took the stand to answer questions about what the values mean to Lingít, Haida and Tsimshian people.

A trial has been ongoing in Ketchikan to determine if displaying the 14 traditional tribal values, developed by area culture leaders, violates the First Amendment. About a third of Ketchikan students are Alaska Native.

Stephen Langdon is a professor of cultural anthropology. He testified that the values all hinge around the idea of respect — central in Southeast Native culture.

“Well, what’s critically important, is that people have to learn to live together, and by understanding others it’s much more successful to be able to live together,” he said.

The idea of “reverence for our creator” is what plaintiffs Justin Breese and Rebecca King say violates the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. They say that hanging the posters in school common areas without context or a lesson is endorsing the values. They also take issue with how the values are used in a behavior reward program at Ketchikan Charter School. King is a kindergarten teacher at Ketchikan Charter School. The school’s principal, Kayla Livingston, testified during the first day of the trial that “reverence for our creator” has not been selected as a “value of the week” or “value of the month” for the reward program. But, she says there isn’t any rule preventing it.

Langdon said there isn’t a religion or a specific deity worshiped by Lingít, Haida or Tsimshian people.

He told several traditional stories from clans around the region to emphasize how the values are integral in the Native way of life. He referenced stories about the character Raven, which is both creator and trickster  — he described the stories as teaching tools.

“The ways in which they are used in teaching is to think about what Raven is doing, and it’s not necessarily in a positive light,” he explained.

But plaintiff Breese pointed out what he believed to be references to creation in Raven stories. Plaintiff Rebecca King spoke at length in court Tuesday.

On the final day, Breese highlighted a website from the Central Council of Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, which makes a reference to “the Creator” that blessed Indigenous people with the land. The site also has a passage that includes a description of the story “Raven Creates the World” and describes it as a story about “how the Raven created the world.”

But Langdon said that he didn’t think that example was typical.

“That particular use of ‘creation’ tells us how the Raven created the world,” he said. “But that an unusual use of the word creation from the vantage point of Western thought.”

He said that the term doesn’t really translate to English, and Raven stories aren’t creation stories. They’re meant to teach lessons.

“So there is already in place an existence for Raven to interact with, and there’s no deeper story so to speak, in terms of where Raven comes from, or who Raven is supposed to be a part of,” he said.

Rosita Worl is the president of the Sealaska Heritage Institute. She testified that the meaning of the word “creator” got misinterpreted in translation.

“In our culture, reverence for, you know, our creator doesn’t refer to any god or any deity that we worship,” she said. “That’s absolutely not within our culture. Within our culture, creator could refer to multiple beings.”

Worl said that the Southeast Native culture includes a belief that everything has a spirit, even a rock or a table.

She said that the values need to be taught to promote healing from historical wrongs. They are necessary to openly living a traditional way of life.

“We want people to learn about our culture and our values,” Worl said.

In closing arguments, Breese said that the district is teaching the spiritual beliefs of Indigenous people.

“They’re used as a guidepost for behaviors and beliefs required of a good student,” he said. “Recognizing and rewarding students for following the 14 traditional tribal values shows the district is teaching, promoting and endorsing those tribal values instead of teaching about them.”

John Ptacin, the attorney for the school district, argued that not every reference to a creator violates the First Amendment. He said that the values are deeply ingrained in an Indigenous way of life, which has a place in public schools.

“These values take on a meaning which are social and customary for these people,” Ptacin said. “And it has taken on that meaning for the last 12,000 years. Every feature of everyday life — subsistence, ceremonies, and every object that the experts and all the witnesses have shown you. These are the values by which they live.”

Wednesday marked the end of the civil trial in Ketchikan Superior Court. Judge Katherine Lybrand did not give an estimated timeline for her decision but told the courtroom she didn’t expect it to take long.

In red, teal and black, the Kaagwaantaan totem pole stands tall in front of the mural of Elizabeth Peratrovich in downtown Juneau. 

Carved by Lingít artist Nicholas Galanin from Sitka, it’s one of 12 totem poles that have been raised along the docks downtown. They’re part of the Kootéeyaa Deiyí, or Totem Pole Trail, that Sealaska Heritage Institute is installing along the waterfront. 

“It reaffirms our place on our ancestral lands. It acknowledges that we’ve always been here,” said Ricardo Worl, communications director for Sealaska Heritage Institute.

Worl says that soon, signs will go up near each pole explaining what they are and their significance. And people will be able to watch videos about the poles online. He says the poles need context — there have already been reports of people climbing on one for photos.

“We realize weʼre going to have to work with the community to educate everyone,” Worl said. “This is not Disney Land.”

He also plans to have shops downtown carry pamphlets about the poles, the clan histories they represent and the artists who made them.

Worl said getting the first 12 poles up has been a whirlwind. Some were raised Saturday morning, just before the Kootéeyaa Deiyí Ceremony.

Eighteen more poles are planned. But there isnʼt a set timeline. Worl said it will likely be a multi-year process.

“I think there’s just so much excitement still surrounding the polls that we want to capitalize on that and sort of keep the ball rolling,” he said. 

The first 12 poles were funded by a $2.9 million grant from the Mellon Foundation and featured renowned artists from Lingít, Haida, and Tsimshian communities. Worl said SHI is speaking with Alaskaʼs congressional delegation about possible federal funding for the additional totem poles.