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More than 2,000 Southeast Alaska Natives danced their way to Juneau’s Centennial Hall Wednesday evening for Celebration 2014.

The biennial festival is the largest cultural event in the state. Organized by Sealaska Heritage Institute, it brings multiple generations of Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian people together to celebrate their culture.

The Saanya Kwaan, Cape Fox dancers, were chosen to lead the processional of 50 dance groups in the Grand Entrance.

Harvey Shields is the leader of the Chief welcome dance.

“We are the Saanya Kwaan people and we originate about 50 miles south of Saxman,” he says.

Like other groups here, the Saanya Kwaan range in age from about 5 years old to elders.

“At two and three years old, they put regalia on them and then they start walking around and as they get older they find their place of where they need to be,” Shields says.

The Johnson O’Malley dance group from Wrangell is further down the street.

“I was still sewing on the ferry,” Sandra Churchill says, laughing. She made two button robes this year for Celebration.

“I know we know it’s every two years, and we still put it off ’til the last minute, but it’s worth it,” she says.

Celebration started in 1982 and Churchill has been to all 16 events. Her dance group has been practicing for months for this year’s festivities.

“It’s important for the young children,” she says, “to see the elders and how much they love it and instill that so they will carry it on for us.”

The sidewalks were clogged with people snapping pictures and taking videos. Patricia McGraw and her husband Gary looked like they were on a safari. They had traveled from Pensacola, Florida to Juneau specifically for Celebration.

McGraw grew up in Juneau. She chokes up as she recalls that time.

“When I was young the Native traditions were totally disrespected. And you know kids knew. I was told not to play with the Native kids. But kids know what’s right, what’s wrong, and I’ve always felt quite strongly that they needed their traditions and we needed to honor their traditions,” she says.

And as a non-Native, Celebration is a homecoming McGraw embraced.

At age 75, Ken Grant says his dancing days are over. But he’s danced at many Celebrations with the Mount Fairweather group from Hoonah.

Grant works for the National Park Service and lives in Bartlett Cove, where he has a spectacular view of the Fairweather range on clear days.

His formal Tlingit name even comes from Mount Fairweather.

“It means being proud, and having pride in the mountain and all that it stands for; the songs, the regalia and the stories that come from it,” he says.

Much like Celebration, he says.

“Most of all I think it builds in pride, it builds in passion, which I think is really important. For anything to function properly you need to have that pride and passion,” he says. “And I think that Celebration is a good source for pride and passion.”

Celebration continues through Saturday with dance performances, Native Art, Native language sessions, lectures, a parade and the Grand Exit.

Celebration begins this evening at 6 o’clock with the Grand Entrance procession to Centennial Hall. The four-day cultural event of Southeast Alaska Natives includes 50 dance groups. Among them is All Nations Children’s Dance Group of Juneau. The group formed in 1995 and has about 80 members. I attended a recent practice and learned that singing and dancing is a foundation for much more.

It’s a Thursday evening and some 50 kids and teenagers dance their way through the Tlingit-Haida Community Center near Salmon Creek. Group founder and leader Vicki Soboleff walks up and down the line giving instructions. Soboleff says she and the group have come a long way since the first practice in 1995.

“There were 12 children here and there was a group of their parents and maybe grandparents and aunts and uncles. All those children were looking at me and I was terrified. We didn’t start off singing Tlingit songs. We actually started off singing ‘This Old Man.’ I was just trying to get them to sing and plus I was nervous.”

At this practice they sing numerous Alaska Native songs and Soboleff says they’re instruments for learning.

“Knowledge of your Native culture and involvement in Native song and dance and language really helps you with your sense of self and belonging. To your tribe, your clan. I believe it’s really important for Native children to know who they are, where they came from, what their tribal clan is.”

One of Soboleff’s early dancers is now a teacher. Barbara Dude joined the group when she was seven and now, at 26, she’s an assistant group leader. She helps 15-year-old Allison Ford with her Tlingit introduction—just like Soboleff helped her. Among other things, Dude says she gained language skills, self-esteem, and public speaking skills. But the most important lessons were about something more. She says the group’s goal to help engender identity worked.

“When I started the group when I was seven I didn’t know that I was Tlingit. The group has helped me gain a sense of pride in who I am and now I am able to share that with my children who have known they were Tlingit since they were born.”

Dude is excited for Celebration, especially the grand entrance.

“We all dance in together and ahead of us are dancers from another group, and behind us are dancers from another group and we’re dancing across stage and each person gets their chance to go across stage and dance their hardest. They feel it because everyone around them is feeling it with them.”

Dude tears up and apologizes for becoming emotional.

“How powerful it is to watch them be immersed in the culture and the language. It’s beautiful. It’s beautiful.”

The All Nations Children’s Dance Group is true to its name and is open to children of all races and ages until high school graduation. Then Soboleff and Dude hope they’ll join an adult group or stick around to help children learn language, song, dance, and especially, cultural identity and pride.

The Grand Entrance procession begins tonight at 6 p.m. at Centennial Hall. You can watch it on 360 North or 360North.org.

The volunteer search effort for missing Juneau hiker Sharon Buis starts again Wednesday after a few days off due to weather.

Nine volunteers, including three skiers, and a Coastal Helicopter searched Granite Creek Basin and Icy Gulch on the east side of Gold Ridge last Friday, but came up with no leads.

Volunteer search coordinator Luke Holton says two teams will be sent out Wednesday.

“We’ll have one team searching in the Ebner Falls area. Due to the terrain around Ebner Falls, they’re just going to be staying below it and approaching from the basin,” he says. “Then we also have another team that’s going into the Icy Gulch area once again on foot rather than on skis. We’re going to be looking along the east side, which wasn’t thoroughly searched by our skiers.”

Help from the community is still needed.

“We’re looking for volunteers that are technically proficient with mountaineering since the areas we’ve looked for the past week are lower areas for the volunteer hikers who aren’t familiar with the terrain, but those areas have been pretty well searched,” Holton says.

He’s in daily contact with Buis’s family updating them on the search.

Holton says the organized volunteer search effort will likely end this week due to dwindling volunteer numbers, but he knows individuals, like himself, will continue to look.

“Until she’s finally found, there’s still going to be positive hope, but otherwise it’s still an effort to try to return a loved one to a family. It’s heartbreaking to call off the search officially in the first place and then it’s even more heartbreaking to call off the volunteer search even though it’s proven that Juneau has a strong community base. It’s hard on everyone,” Holton says.

Community members interested in volunteering should contact Luke Holton on Facebook.

Previous Coverage:
Search underway for missing hiker
Scent of missing hiker found on trail but no cell phone trace
Update: U.S. Coast Guard takes another look for missing hiker
Update: Troopers call off search for missing Juneau hiker
Search ends for missing hiker
Volunteers still searching for missing Juneau hiker

Juneau’s Centennial Hall Convention Center is getting a new roof this summer.

North Pacific Erectors began mobilizing for the $1.4 million project about three weeks ago.

City and Borough of Juneau Project Manager Theresa Mores says the contractor plans to work around events at the hall, including this week’s Celebration festival, hosted by Sealaska Heritage Institute.

“They are going to stop construction during Celebration and then they’ll start demoing the roof immediately following Celebration,” Mores says. “That was one event that we knew about beforehand that we tried to schedule around.”

Mores expects the project to be complete by the end of August. Not only do crews want to avoid working around snow and Taku winds, but Mores says the outside temperature needs to be warm enough for adhesives to work on the roof membrane.

She says the roof will be replaced in sections.

“They’re going to start in the section that’s farthest away from their mobilization area, and go towards the mobilization area,” she says. “So they’ll demo, and then as they’re doing that their supplies will be coming into Juneau, and then they will start construction. Hopefully the timing will be just right, so they can start constructing the new roof immediately after they demo the old one.”

The mobilization area is the courtyard on the Egan Drive side of Centennial Hall. That’s typically where Sealaska Heritage does its Celebration group photo. It’s also a popular gathering spot for people attending events at the hall. SHI spokeswoman Kathy Dye says this year’s group photo will take place in the parking lot between Centennial Hall and the Juneau Arts and Culture Center on Saturday after the parade.

Mores says this is the first roof replacement in the 31-year history of Centennial Hall.

It’s past its useful life,” Mores says. “There’s stuff growing up there, and things are kind of disintegrating a little bit. It’s just time.”

Centennial Hall serves as a venue for events, concerts and meetings, as well as an emergency shelter for downtown Juneau.

The city’s legislative delegation secured funding for a new roof in the state capital budget three times, but Governors Sarah Palin and Sean Parnell vetoed the funds. Juneau voters in 2012 approved a bond measure to fund $3.2 million in maintenance and upgrades to the facility.

Monday’s power outage in Juneau affected about 5,000 Alaska Electric Light and Power customers.

Electricity was out in parts of the Mendenhall Valley, Auke Bay and out the road, as well as some areas of Douglas and downtown.

AELP spokeswoman Debbie Driscoll says about a third of the company’s customers lost power.

She says a crew doing some work on the Lake Dorothy transmission line apparently caused a power fluctuation, and a protective relay sensed it “and it caused what we call our LD1 breaker, that basically a big circuit breaker, to open on that line. That action initiated what we call a load-shed sequence, which opened up 16 feeders down the line. That’s about half of our feeders.”

Power was restored in a little more than an hour.

She says telephone lines to AELP were jammed when the power went off. about 8:20 a.m.  Driscoll says the company immediately posts information about outages to its Facebook and Twitter sites, and you don’t have to be a social media expert to get the information.

“That is absolutely the best place for customers to find information is on our Facebook and Twitter page. And they don’t have to use Facebook or Twitter. They just have to be able to access our website and click on one of those icons and it takes you right to that page,” she says.