Portable Southeast is an island-hopping art show designed to break down the physical and social barriers that divide the Alaska Panhandle. It’s organized by the Juneau Arts & Humanities Council, and showcases work from Alaskan artists across six different towns and cities. Each month, the exhibit’s 22 paintings are flown to a new venue. Right now, they are hanging on the walls of Petersburg’s Clausen Memorial Museum.
Cindi Lagoudakis, who directs Petersburg’s museum, unpacked the exhibit at the beginning of February. She says the pieces came off the jet in individual plastic totes.
“The Juneau Arts and Humanities Council has done a really incredible job of organizing this,” says Lagoudakis. “The totes are set up with foam to protect each image. Everything is labeled so everything will go back in the exact same spot that they were shipped. To me, it makes it very easy to pack it up and very easy to unpack it — except for when I almost missed one little piece.”
Haines commemorates 125th anniversary of the Clara Nevada.
Missing gold, missing passengers, dynamite, a sinking ship and the beginning of lighthouses in Alaska are all at the center of one of Southeast’s best-known mysteries: the sinking of the Clara Nevada.
Feb. 5 marked the 125th anniversary of the SS Clara Nevada shipwreck and to help commemorate the event, the Haines Sheldon Museum opened its first ever exhibit dedicated to the maritime tragedy, “A Mystery Lies Beneath the Waves: Legend of the Clara Nevada.” The exhibit, sponsored by the Eldred Rock Lighthouse Preservation, features information and artifacts related to the wreckage, which took place on the north tip of Eldred Rock Island, 55 miles north of the major port of Juneau and approximately 35 miles south of Skagway.
Alaska’s only reservation is fighting to reclaim how its story is told. Metlakatla residents hope that by filling the new Annette Island Reserve Historical Archive with pictures, videos and sounds, future generations will know where they came from — and the current generation will remember the past.
Right now, when someone writes about Metlakatla, they don’t always get to hear the story from the people who live there. Tribal Councilmember Keolani Booth said that’s because there’s not a central archive to store the tribe’s stories and memories.
“You know, when anyone writes about Metlakatla, or does anything … we’ve got one narrative — that’s from our narrative, and, and I think the fact that we don’t have that right now, it’s left up to interpretation by anyone who would want to write about Metlakatla,” Booth said.
The Palmer Public Library, a community hub built in 1985 that provides not only books and historical archives but computers for anyone’s use, is closed indefinitely after a partial roof collapse left the building unsafe for occupation.
A family of four was in the children’s section when the ceiling came crashing down in that area just before closing time Wednesday but escaped without serious injury, officials say...
The full extent of the damage — and any estimate for repairs — wasn’t clear as of Thursday, local officials say. A wall buckled in and out, and the ceiling collapsed and is resting on bookcases. Cracks are visible in the building, so staff aren’t allowed to enter.
In honor of Valentine’s Day, the Alutiiq Museum likes to show a little love for its volunteers. We are fortunate to have many friends who contribute their time and talents to our work. To highlight the importance of our volunteers, we honor one outstanding contribution with our Volunteer of the Year award. For 2022, we picked Chris Wooley for his help with researching the lives of two Alutiiq teenagers who died while attending the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania.
Chris is a retired anthropologist and the former owner of Chumis Cultural Resource Services. He worked around Alaska completing cultural and historic studies for over 40 years. In the 1990s, he assisted Leisnoi, Inc. in documenting the Alutiiq history of Woody Island, research that helped the corporation protect its certification as a Native Village under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. He was an early advocate for the Alutiiq Museum and assisted tribal leaders with retreats on Woody Island.
Now, Chris’ knowledge of Woody Island and his research skills are helping the Alutiiq community again. When the Alutiiq Museum learned that the remains of Anastasia Ashouwak and Pariscovia Achacee Friendoff could be repatriated from the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, we formed a Carlisle School Repatriation Working Group for the Kodiak region and invited Chris to join. Requesting the return of the girls’ remains required identifying their closest living relatives. Anastasia’s family was quickly identified, but Pariscovia’s family has been harder to find. Chris has been a regular participant in working group meetings and has given many hours of his time to explore historic records as the search for Pariscovia’s relatives continues. His research has been invaluable.
The Kodiak History Museum received a $48,000 federal grant last fall to digitize its entire collection in an effort to improve access to some of the museum’s items that aren’t currently on display.
The project began in November of last year, when the museum received a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a government agency, to create a digital archive. Margaret Greutert is the collection manager and grants coordinator for the Kodiak History Museum...
She said part of the project is to improve the museum’s transparency.
“We’ve had only about 10% of our collections on display right now and so we need to figure out ways to make those more accessible for people so people know what we have, we do hold all of these things in public trust,” she said.
Brian Venua, February 8, 2023. Alaska Public Media.
Centuries ago, a few dozen Alaska Natives left their home on an epic migration.
They were of Ahtna descent, and their trip began in Alaska’s Interior, in the Copper River watershed. They passed through some of the most rugged terrain in the world, and for a period of years, the group lived in the vicinity of the massive Bagley Icefield, using snowshoes to stay on the surface. One boy still died along the way, according to oral tradition, when he fell into a crevasse and couldn’t be rescued.
The 200-mile journey ended near the present-day community of Yakutat, along Alaska’s thinly settled Lost Coast between Anchorage and Juneau. There, they exchanged copper with another Indigenous group for the rights to a salmon stream — Kwáashk’ Héeni, or Humpback Creek — along with an island to settle on, and a large swath of the surrounding Yakutat Bay.
The clan ultimately renamed themselves for the creek, and the Kwáashk’ikwáan settled in the Yakutat area.
A program at Juneau’s Harborview Elementary has been integrating Lingít language and culture into classroom teaching for decades. Now it’s expanding to middle school, with plans to teach other subjects in Lingít as well.
Molly Box is the interim principal for the Tlingit Culture Language and Literacy program. She said parents were excited to hear their children could stay in the program longer.
“Families who have fourth graders or fifth graders were like ‘Oh my gosh, this kid can’t think of better news,’” she said.
KTOO.
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