Community

Put on your rain gear, grab a bright yellow bag, and join your neighbors in Saturday’s annual Juneau clean up.

Sponsored by the non-profit Litter Free, Inc., with help from the city and borough, Cleanup Day is an effort to get Juneau residents to pick up the trash that litters roadways and other public areas throughout the borough.

Bags are available between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m. at eight sites:

Foodland parking lot
Douglas Fire Hall
Western Auto
Lyles and Jensen Home Furnishings
Super Bear Supermarket
Duck Creek Market
UAS Bookstore, Auke Bay
Lynn Canal Fire Station.

Once you pick up a bag, “head out to the public areas and cleanup for an hour or two, and then tie the bags up and set them on the side of the road by 2 p.m.,” says Litter Free’s John Logan. “And then after that we have about 20 volunteer contractors that pick up the bags and take them to the landfill and Waste Management accepts all that litter for free.”

All Cleanup Day volunteers are invited to a picnic at Duck Creek Market from noon to 1:30 p.m.

Laurie Sica has been president of Litter Free for the last 15 years. She has statistics from the trash pickup since 1985.

While volunteers sometimes find refrigerators and other appliances, she says most of it is just litter.

“The usual run-of-the-mill glass and plastic and aluminum beverage containers, papers that have blown. They do pick up lots of tires and auto parts that fall off cars and just your random odd things,” Sica says. “I know kids have been out doing litter patrols and they’ve reported that they’ve found wallets and they’ve found cash.”

Wallets, cash and other personal stuff should be turned into the Juneau Police Department.

Last year, Juneau picked up 44,000 pounds of litter, but it wasn’t a record. That came in 1988, when volunteers hauled 214,000 pounds of junk to the land fill.

1999 was the low year with only 12,900 pounds. Sica says the weather was extremely bad that year.

It’s likely to be raining tomorrow, but don’t let that deter you from helping clean up the capital city.

The figurative start of the summer commercial fishing season in Juneau occurred Saturday during the annual blessing of the fleet and the dedication of names on the Alaska Commercial Fishermen’s Memorial.

Some of the sounds and voices from Saturday’s wet event included Pastor Sam Dalin of the River of Glory Church, memorial organizer Bruce Weyhrauch, Samantha Kostenko, Governor Sean Parnell, and Reverend Doctor Douglas Dye of Chapel by the Lake, Dylan Davis, and the City of Juneau Pipe Band.

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Names of those who devoted their lives to commercial fishing and engraved on the Memorial include Bruce Freitag, Bob Pasquan, and John Pugh, Jr., Bill Razpotnik, and Shea Hunter Walling.

Retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Kevin Sweeney knows how to deal with extraordinary stress.

With the Air Force song blaring, Sweeney told a Juneau audience Wednesday he loved being an Air Force pilot.

He spent 23 years as a combat pilot, and has been a business executive and college athlete. But it’s his story of losing two jet engines in mid-flight that captured a Centennial Hall audience, primarily made up of high school students from Juneau and Haines.

Sweeney was the second speaker in this year’s Pillars of America series, sponsored by the Juneau Glacier Valley Rotary Club.

As a fighter pilot, Sweeney flew combat missions in Vietnam and Operation Desert Storm. He recalled sitting in the cockpit of a four-engine KC 135 Air Force jet, in Saudi Arabia, the first night of Desert Storm in January 1991.

“You’re a 300,000 pound flying gas station. You’re going to fly along at 500 miles an hour carrying 31,000 gallons of jet fuel. Now that’s enough jet fuel to refuel 2,000 cars,” he said. “You’re going to deliver that jet fuel to fighters flying along with you at 500 miles an hour.”

Then on February 6, 1991, in mid-flight, the KC 135 lost both engines on one side.

The crew of four safely brought the jet down and no lives were lost. Now Sweeney uses the harrowing experience, and others in his life, to illustrate five principles he believes it takes to excel in today’s world: “Preparation, proper preparation, passion, focus, team and confidence.”

Sweeney marched back and forth on the stage, exhorting the audience to go the extra mile, stay focused, develop self-confidence, be a team player, and never give up.

At the end of his nearly one-hour-long speech, he harked back to that 1991 flight when he and his Air Force crew discovered the jet engines were gone:

“The engines had departed the airplane. Now what does that mean?” he asked the audience. “That means you’re about to have your final exam. That means you hear there’s heavy competition calling on your best customer. You call your key executive contact. They won’t call you back. That means you’re going to have to do more with less.”

Sweeney’s latest book is Pressure Cooker Confidence, How to Lead When the Heat is On.

This is the 20th year Rotary has sponsored the Pillars of America series, bringing 65 American motivational speakers to Juneau in that time.

The final speaker, on May 9th , is Olympian Rowdy Gaines.

The first year of the Juneau School District’s “Learn to Swim” program was a “huge success,” according to the co-chair of the city’s Aquatic Facilities Advisory Board.

Tom Rutecki says 22 percent of the kids who took part in the program couldn’t swim on day one. By the end of ten lessons, 93 percent were proficient swimmers.

“Was it a success? I would say it was a smashing success,” Rutecki said Monday as he updated the Juneau Assembly on the Aquatic Board’s work over the first four months of the year.

He said more than 400 fourth graders took part in the “Learn to Swim” program at both the Dimond Park Aquatic Center and Augustus Brown Swimming Pool. Members of the Glacier Swim Club taught the lessons.

Developing a “Learn to Swim” program allowed the city and borough to secure state funding for the Dimond Park aquatic facility, which celebrates a year in operation next month. Rutecki says the board is planning a community celebration.

Juneau residents got rid of five boxes and 182 pounds of old, expired pills Saturday as part of National Prescription Drug Take-Back Day.

The twice-a-year event is sponsored by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, and carried out by local law enforcement officials.

State Trooper Chris Umbs says prescription drug abuse is becoming more of a problem in Juneau.

“Big thing now is the kids are sampling prescription drugs, not knowing what the effects are, as well as, young adults and other people are breaking into houses now and trying to see if people have prescription drugs. That’s a big thing going on as well,” says Umbs.

Besides deterring crime, the take-back days are also meant to discourage people from flushing old drugs down the toilet. According to the DEA, 80 percent of drinking water tested in the U.S. contains trace amounts of prescription medication. Umbs says there’s probably nothing to worry about, but it’s better to dispose of the pills properly.

“There’s nothing out there that’s showing that we’re getting sick because of what’s in the water, because the water treatment plants I guess are doing a good enough job of screening the water and getting it chemically treated before it’s coming back out,” Umbs says. “But to help out the water treatment plant, let’s not put so much in the water and make it easier for them.”

Umbs says the pills collected in Juneau will be shipped to Anchorage for disposal.

This is the fourth National Prescription Drug Take-Back Day since the event debuted in 2010.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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What’s in a name? If it’s a beach or a mountain or a stream, it can tell you what it looks like – or who’s been there. It can also document a change of ownership or geography — or the movement of a people.

A new book from the Sealaska Heritage Institute and the University of Washington Press presents about 3,000 Southeast Alaska Native place names. Many came close to being lost, replaced by western labels.

The title is Haa Leelk’w Has Aani Saax’u.

“It means ‘Our Grandparents’ Names on the Land’,” says Harold Martin, who handled many of the book’s research logistics.

He says the effort started about 20 years ago when anthropologist Tom Thornton came to him with an idea.

“We talked at length about what was happening, that we were losing our elders at a rapid pace. And that every time we lost an elder, we lost a lot of history and knowledge,” he says.

They found funding and started turning to those who knew the names. Thornton says they were not sure how much they would find.

“A lot of people thought these names were lost, but in fact, they weren’t. A lot of them were documented in sources, but a lot of them were still alive in people’s minds and memories,” Thornton says.

The researchers were also careful to follow protocol. A wrong move – asking the wrong person – could have closed doors.

“The first thing we had to do was to go out into the villages and get permission to proceed with the project. We couldn’t just go ahead on our own. We have to get permission from that area’s tribal government,” Martin says.

They took charts or maps to elders, pointing out places or asking for names. Martin found he remembered many from his childhood, sailing Southeast with his fisherman father, conversing in Tlingit.

The researchers found place names in historical documents, some with challenging spelling.

They tried out pronunciations on traditional speakers, to make sure they got it right. Sometimes, they didn’t.

“Tom always liked to be real precise on his pronunciation. There was one word he tried to say that came out like a private part on the human anatomy. Another one sounded like the Tlingit word for lovemaking,” Martin says.

“I always wondered why those old ladies were blushing,” Thornton says.

“They laughed. It was a lot of fun,” Martin adds.

In addition to names, the book includes scholarly discussion of Native languages and how its use differs with English.

Thornton points out that Western names often commemorate a person – a politician or a scientist or someone who funded an expedition.

“That’s a strong tradition in America. But in Tlingit, you almost never see that. Usually, it’s the opposite. The people are named after the places, rather than the places being named after the people,” Thornton says.

Tlingit, Haida and most other traditional names are descriptive. They can communicate geography – or the relationship between features.

“The example is Glacier Bay itself was supposedly named after the Tlingit name for the bay. But that name in Tlingit, ‘Sit’ Eeti Geeyi,’ literally means ‘bay taking the place of the glacier’,” Thornton says.

Finding the place names is more than an exercise in cultural history. They also document human migration and changes in the landscape, such as an ice age or changing sea levels.

Glacier Bay, across Icy Strait from Hoonah, is a good example.

“We learned that wasn’t the only name. There was an earlier name … referring to icebergs in the bay. And then the earliest name they had was …from when it was a muddy estuary of a river and people dwelled there,” Thornton says.

The names also document the use of the land. Martin says that’s helpful during subsistence and other political conflicts.

“State agencies, federal agencies and the conservationists say there’s no evidence that certain areas were ever used by Natives for subsistence purposes. All they had to do is look at our chart and see there’s no place in Southeast that wasn’t used at one time or another,” Martin says.

The researchers say the book is not complete. Thornton expects to find more place names, from documents and memories. And that’s not all.

“And hopefully, there’ll be new names on the land, because that’s a tradition that’s very important in Tlingit and Haida is to continue to name places,” Thornton says.

KTOO’s Jeff Brown contributed to this report.

Use the player below to hear a full interview with Tom Thornton and Harold Martin.

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