Tongass Voices

This is Tongass Voices, a series from KTOO sharing weekly perspectives from the homelands of the Áak’w Kwáan and beyond.

Roblin Gray Davis is a professional actor, and he’s bringing one of his favorite ways to hone his skills to Juneau in a five week-long clowning course. 

He says clowning can break down the walls we put up, to see what’s behind. 

Listen:

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Roblin Gray Davis: I am Roblin Gray Davis, and I am a theater maker, a lifelong Alaskan artist. Been in Juneau for over 25 years now, I do believe.

Part of my interest in theater has been pursuing this idea of Mask Theater that comes out of the tradition of Jacques Lecoq, which was a school in Paris, that kind of was fundamental in maybe reopening the theater world, the contemporary theater world, to ask, you know, “how can we make this more lively and more topical and more interesting in general?”, and also, “how can we train actors and performers, designers, directors to maybe create original work?”

Though, I feel like I am still on my own personal journey in relationship to creating a red nose character. Sometimes the word clown is misinterpreted, perhaps because of all of the scary movies and all of the different forms that clown theater has taken in the United States, from birthday clowns to circus clowns to the scary movie clowns.

But this particular type of red nose clown theater work is coming out of actor training, so it’s really part of this world of mask theater, where we’re looking at putting on just “what’s the smallest mask we can put on our face?” And that is just a little nose. There’s something about how it changes the performer’s face in just enough of a way that the audience can see a character and not necessarily the actor. 

Play and laughter and kind of a liberating creativity is the heart of this work, finding how we are unique as individuals, and how our differences, our idiosyncrasies, are our strengths in a way, as artists, that’s what makes us interesting. 

If you can find that space as a creative artist, where you are hitting a nerve in your audience that elicits genuine laughter, then you are doing something miraculous, I would say. 

I mean acting is, I think, one of the most difficult art forms. I’m not a classical musician, so I’m sure it’s probably a little more difficult. But as far as you as an artist, needing to be the art form — right — we are as actors, we are the art. So in order to tell those stories and to perform lively and with authenticity and being compelling as a performer on stage, is difficult. It’s a difficult task. 

And so, I think as actors, we need to continually work on ourselves, to become more grounded, more present, more available to play, more in tune with our own creativity and those internal impulses we have.

All that stuff that I think makes a good performer or a strong performer. Someone who an audience goes, “it didn’t feel like they were acting at all. I felt that they were that character.” In order to do that art form, you have to be limber, you have to be strong, you have to be resilient, you have to be present. You have to be all of these things. 

And this particular work of the clown — clowning around — gets at all of those really important principles of performing.

This is Tongass Voices, a series from KTOO sharing weekly perspectives from the homelands of the Áak’w Kwáan and beyond.

Each year, Juneau Animal Rescue gives pet owners a chance to put their favorite photos somewhere other than social media while promoting animal adoption.

JAR’s annual calendar is made up of pets who win a photo contest, voted on by the community. And the whole thing — from the contest to the calendars themselves — is a fundraiser to support the daily needs of all the pets waiting to be adopted at the shelter.

Juneau Animal Rescue’s Executive Director Rick Driscoll and Board Member Aurora Hawke say the process takes about 6 months and features all types of animals. 

Listen:

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Aurora Hawke: I’m Aurora Hawke. I am on the board of JAR, and I am the fundraising committee chair.

The photo contest and calendar together raised between $10 and $12,000 per year for the shelter. 

For about six weeks, starting in July, but we’re going to move it forward to June. So look at our socials. Then we have the photo contest in which people can enter their photos and vote on them, and also get their family and friends to vote for their photos so that they can get into the calendar. This year, we introduced a feature called Reserve a Spot where you can put a picture of your pet on a particular day. 

For instance, my rescue Pomeranian, Bear, is on his Gotcha Day, April 24.

And when that closes, the top 10 vote-getters are featured in the calendar in the months. 

We also jury with the Juneau Photo Group – it’s a Facebook group here in town – the best cat and the best dog picture. And then the board chooses the cover. 

This cat’s name is Wink, and she is a JAR alumni as well, so really lovely to see that. 

Rick Driscoll: My name is Rick Driscoll. I’m the Executive Director of Juneau Animal Rescue.

When people enter their photo of their pet to the contest, they get to write a little narrative about their pet. And so Wink — this is from the narrative that we received — Wink came to JAR in December 2023 as a tiny kitten, her right eye was pretty badly injured, but after trying to save it, they decided that she would be more comfortable and would recover faster without it. So her right eye was removed. 

As she healed up, she was able to meet her new dog sisters, and has since joined them on hikes and beach trips. She’s very adventurous and loves to explore new things. 

Aurora Hawke: I would say a good camera that takes a really high quality, high resolution picture, so that it looks really nice and sharp in the calendar. And then just look at, look at everything we have outside. Just go outside with your pet and take a picture. One of my favorite pictures from this year is a cat looking longingly out the window. 

Rick Driscoll: Tupac. 

Aurora Hawke: Tupac, yes!

Rick Driscoll: We want to inspire people to adopt pets. That’s probably the primary reason why we do it. It’s open to anybody with a pet. And I get the most excited when we get entries that aren’t necessarily cats or dogs. We get goats or turtles or, you know, various reptiles … 

Aurora Hawke: Hamsters. 

Rick Driscoll: … hamsters, chinchillas, that sort of thing.

This is Tongass Voices, a series from KTOO sharing weekly perspectives from the homelands of the Áak’w Kwáan and beyond.

When Gigi Monroe started Juneau Drag in 2014, the city quickly embraced the art form — a performance of exaggerated gender, with flashy costumes and, often, choreography. Its roots are in spaces that the LGBTQ+ community carved out for self-expression throughout history. 

Monroe’s annual New Yearʼs Eve drag show will be the group’s 10th anniversary celebration — a time to reflect, not only on the past year, but the decade of performances before it.

It’s also a reflection of Monroe’s decade as Juneau’s drag mother. That’s an experienced drag performer who mentors new talent. She says watching performers evolve their drag and their performances has been one of the highlights of leading this community.

Listen:

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Gigi Monroe: Hi. This is Gigi Monroe, and I am the Drag Mother of the Juneau Drag group. I moved here in 2013 and I had been a full-time drag performer for about 10 years before that. I knew that this was a really artistic community and a really progressive community, and it was probably a pretty open-minded scene for drag to start happening on a regular basis. 

So we really were born out of the Femme Fatale drag show that was a tradition here for every year to raise money for the Alaskan AIDS Assistance Association, and there were always local performers who participated in that fundraising event. 

And so in 2014, that was a really big event, and a lot of people came out, and a lot of people were interested, and so I offered to start mentoring folks and having workshops, teaching makeup classes, starting to make costumes for people. And so we started then, and it was just kind of one-by-one, as people were interested.

In our 10 years, we’ve had over 40 performers, all local Juneau performers, who have come and gone. People move away, or they have kids or other life situations, and it’s been a really wonderful and welcoming revolving door. 

My favorite part, above everything else, is working with the individual performers and watching them, those who have stuck with it for many years, and we even have a few performers that are still performing and started with us 10 years ago. 

And just to look back at those old pictures and videos and look at them today, and just see how much they’ve grown and really have become very talented drag performers in their own right. 

That’s been so rewarding and so fulfilling, and it really makes me feel like the drag mother that I claim to be when you see your kids just grow up and figure out their own characters and what they want to do with this art form and establish a community with it. 

There have been a few milestones that we’ve hit along the way. One of them was when we had our very first Pride drag show, Glitz, in 2015.

I’d been here about a year and a half, and I kept hearing from the community that people wanted a really big pride party and a show and something to do. And when, like 300 people packed into the Rockwell Ballroom in June of 2015 and were just literally jumping out of their skin. They were so excited just to be there.

And it was like 95 degrees in there with no circulation, of course, and all the performers were just like full of energy and burst out onto stage. It was awesome. We brought in a performer from RuPaul’s Drag Race that everybody went nuts over. And it was like, “Okay, we are really doing the right thing here.” And I think that pushed us into having monthly shows.

This is Tongass Voices, a series from KTOO sharing weekly perspectives from the homelands of the Áak’w Kwáan and beyond.

Oncologist Dr. Paul Weiden has been treating patients with cancer in Southeast Alaska for 23 years. Now, he’s retiring at 83.

For the past two decades, he would travel to Juneau monthly to see patients who might have otherwise flown to Seattle to see a specialist. He also provided remote care for patients in other Southeast communities.

Although he’s seen treatment access improve over the years, he says there are still gaps.

Listen:

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Paul Weiden: I’m Paul Weiden. I’m a physician, a medical oncologist, hematologist, and I have come to Juneau monthly to see folks up here since November of 2001.

In the 20 years prior to that, I was at Virginia Mason, and we saw a lot of patients who came from Southeast Alaska – particularly Juneau – to Seattle, particularly to Virginia Mason for care for cancer. So the folks that bothered me most were the patients at the end of life who had been treated up here and would come down to see if there was anything more that could be done.

And they’d come with the patient and the family, often spending their last resources — monetary resources, energy resources, psychological resources — to come down, and almost always for me to say, you know, “You’ve had pretty good treatment up there in Juneau or Wrangell or wherever you were, and there’s really nothing more that could or should be done.”

So when I left Virginia Mason, I said, you know, “I don’t need to have those folks come down here, I can go up there.”

If I have a patient in Sitka or Wrangell or Skagway, or whatever, we do telemedicine, unless they need to come to Juneau for the radiology facilities that are here.

There are more towns in Southeast Alaska now that are able to do that, but it stretches their resources, because not so much the administration of the chemotherapy. That’s not so hard, but it’s the complications of the chemotherapy that occur unexpectedly between the times a patient gets chemotherapy, and that’s a lot of responsibility for somebody, and let’s say in Skagway or Wrangell or Petersburg, where there are limited resources, so that that is still a tension.

But on the other hand, I think that problem is better solved by us here in Juneau being the center hub than trying to do it when I was practicing in Seattle, I didn’t really understand where the hell Skagway was in relation to Juneau.

So now I have a pretty good understanding of where everything is, and can work with the patient and the family and whatever local medical facility is in that town to see what’s reasonable to do. You know, you also understand that a patient from Skagway can get to Juneau pretty reliably in the summer, but come winter, and, you know, it’s a little dicey.

As I say, it’s rare that a patient really needs to, let’s say, get the hell out of town to get good care. And there are two or three patients over these 20 years that I really struggled to get out of town today, and not only get out of town, but to go somewhere where they would be taken care of that night.

And there are at least two that come to mind who, if you know, I hadn’t seen them on the day that I saw them and made the diagnosis and understood the situation, if they’d called the University of Washington or Virginia Mason and said, “I’m sick,” they’d get appointment for two weeks later, or even a week later, they’d be dead. That’s rare. I mean, it’s good television drama, but it’s actually very rare, and I can think of two in 20 years for that.

Now, I’ve probably forgotten two, but it’s not 10s or 20s, it’s single digits of patients where that kind of encounter is a difference between life and death. And if I go back to like the 30, 40 years before 2000, there are also two or three patients in my career where I can think, on this day, I made the difference between life and death. It’s rare, but it is, you know, extraordinarily exciting and rewarding.

Friends and colleagues will celebrate Dr. Weiden’s retirement Thursday at 5 p.m. at Amalga Distillery.

This is Tongass Voices, a series from KTOO sharing weekly perspectives from the homelands of the Áak’w Kwáan and beyond. 

Dak júus Rob Yates teaches the language of the Haida people, X̱aad Kíl. 

According to the most recent statewide report, there is only one person alive who has spoken X̱aad Kíl since birth. There are two other highly proficient speakers. Yates says he isn’t one of them yet, but he’s still working to breathe life into the language.

Yates has moved several times to do this work. Now, he lives in Craig and has been concurrently learning and teaching the language for nearly a decade.  

Listen:

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Dak júus Rob Yates: I think it’s a really rewarding journey. I think it’s a healing journey. For me. It never gets boring, because there’s so much to learn. So I get excited each time I find out something new. It’s kind of like Christmas, getting something new. 

Rob Yates hín uu díi kya’áang. My name is Rob Yates. Dak júus hín uu X̱aad Kíl díi kya’áang. My Haida name is Dak júus. It literally means small shrimp.

I think in 2014 when I got the dictionary of Alaskan Haida and then the Alaskan Haida phrase book came out. And then some of us started teaching ourselves. Then in 2016 I started UAS college courses. 

I became homeless for a short time. Along came this Our Language Pathways Program by [Sealaska Heritage Institute] where they wanted Lingit Haidas and Tsimshian to learn their languages and become teachers. One of my distant relatives in Juneau, I reached out to her, and she’s like, “This program is, it’s like it’s tailor made for you.” So I took it serious, and that summer, I started building up curriculum. The requirement was that you had to live in Juneau on the [University of Alaska Southeast] campus.

I remember it was a Friday, and I was supposed to have gone to a meeting in the evening to discuss who was gonna teach X̱aad Kíl at UAS as a fill in, and I forgot, and I lay down and took a nap, and then I woke up to all these texts messages that I was the new teacher.

And the class was three hours long, so it was quite the challenge, and I was a full time student as well. I am back at UAS teaching Beginning Haida, Intermediate Haida and Advanced Haida curriculum development. 

Here again, I find myself transitioning from teacher to student. No, I don’t get the college credit of the Intermediate Haida class that I was taking because I’m now the teacher, and so I don’t get those credits at all. But one of my colleagues said, “You’re going to be so busy teaching that you may not ever get a bachelor’s degree.” It rings more true now, two and a half years later.

The phrase is X̱íinaag ‘láa uu íijang, “life is good,” but it also goes deeper than that, like “life is precious.” “Live your life to the fullest,” type of thing. Whenever I say that phrase, it’s like I could feel the positivity and that they are not empty words, that the words ring true. 

You can sign up for Yates’ ongoing December X̱aad Kíl class here. 

This is Tongass Voices, a series from KTOO sharing weekly perspectives from the homelands of the Áak’w Kwáan and beyond.

Earlier this month, we heard from Master Carver Wayne Price and his apprentice Skaydu.û Jules, who are working on a dugout canoe, or yaakw, in Juneau for Goldbelt Heritage Foundation. 

Today, we hear from another apprentice: Moria Johnson-Sidney shares how carving has added stability to her life during a tumultuous time. 

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Moria Johnson-Sidney: My name is Moria Johnson-Sidney. I’m a volunteer apprentice carver. This is my first time working on a dugout. My father’s clan is Kaagwaantaan. My family’s from Yakutat and like Klukwan area, my Lingít nickname is G̱ooch Yádi.

This project, and in general, it came into my life at a very delicate time, I guess. So it’s been kind of a stabilizer for me. I’ve lost a lot of family this year. You know, lost a lot to alcoholism, different types of addictions. I’ve had a lot of issues on my own. 

And so this carving project, it’s really put things into perspective, I guess. And it’s definitely, like, kind of helped me put myself back together, I guess. But, it’s been really, really special to me. 

You know, there’s like — not to get cheesy, I guess. But, you know, some people they start going to church, or like they find God, or they make art, or they make stories. Some people make boats. I guess, just different things to kind of patch up their, you know, smaller parts of their damaged selves. 

But I’m from Yakutat. My family is from Yakutat. And they have, they have cultural things here and there. They’re in a celebration. They have the Lingít language in the schools, but they don’t have boats. 

So I want to bring dugouts back home. And I definitely have a lot of family that could benefit from it: cousins who are younger than I am, who struggle with alcohol. It starts when you’re like 11, 12, 13. But, yeah, carving kind of found me. I mean, well, Goldbelt kind of kept me in the carving realm ever since I was 15. 

Basically, you know, I kind of veer off and get distracted by different things that aren’t really as important, and they always kind of finally bring me back.