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I always say that Hoonah, X'una Kaawu
is the richest place in the world
because we have the most beautiful children in this world.
One day, one of you will stand in my place
because this culture, our values, what we hold dear,
what we hold deep in our hearts,
it must continue.
It must continue.
Respect, respect, respect everything.
Respect other people.
Respect what you are learning.
When you are respectful,
you are honoring your soul,
you are honoring yourself.
Keep that respect always.
Let's line up here.
Grandparents, our beautiful grandchildren
are coming this way, group.
All of our songs, every single one is a love song
and we express our love for each other.
When we dance, we don't just do anything we want.
We're holding the people in our hearts.
We're holding them because we know that they are precious.
We're grasping them, we're embracing them
because our love for each other is strong.
We also believe strongly
that there is a Creator stronger than ourselves,
which is why we're here on earth.
We're here on earth not to see what we can gain,
but we are here to take care of each other.
And so, Kah-shu-goon-yah, our Father In Heaven,
we talk about the Raven and the Eagle,
we are actually talking about our history,
where we came from, who we are, how we are a family,
and how we are connected.
I teach it to our children.
I want them to know the importance of who they are.
I want them to know that they have something to offer.
I want them to know the importance
of them being born and a part of us,
that there is going to be acceptance.
And we want them to be an enthusiastic part of things,
that children, absolutely, it overwhelms me every time
when I see a small child singing and dancing,
mimicking what he has been taught.
It's born in him, it's born into the child.
And not every Tlingit is going to grasp this.
It's our lifestyle, it's our way of life.
And when it's born in them, feel very strongly,
there he is the next leader.
In 10,000 years, this culture will still be strong
because we have something to offer.
is how our people,
all kind and gentle listeners,
I'm going to be speaking
in my grandfather's words.
My Tlingit name is
and.
means, "You'll be short of change."
means, "She's priceless."
I am a grandchild of the Kaagwaantaan, the Gaanax. adi,
the L'uknax. adi, the Kiks. adi, the Aak'w Kwaan people
and I come from the Ravens Nest house.
My father, David William Sr.,
his Tlingit name,,
when he became clan leader for the Chookaneidi.
When he was a child born,
he was given the name Kaash de yaaw dakaa.
My mother, Mamie Williams,
her Tlingit name,.
Let me tell you a little bit
about how I was born into the culture.
I was just a little girl and my friend Shuni said
that she's an Eagle and Linda said she's an Eagle.
So my friend Winona said, "Okay, I'm an Eagle."
And I decided, all right, I'm an Eagle too.
I went home for lunch, I announced to my mother,
"Mom, I'm an Eagle."
And she said, "You can't be an Eagle, you're a Raven."
I wanted to be like my friends.
So I said, "But I wanna be it."
"No, no, you don't choose, you're born into it."
You are born into a beautiful culture, Carol.
You are born into something that is sustainable,
"and don't deny who you are."
That moment was the beginning of my education.
I was raised Tlingit surrounded by Tlingit artists
and the main language spoken was Tlingit.
The word Tlingit means I am a person
and distinguishing ourselves from the animals.
We are people, we are a person.
So lovingly, kindly, patiently,
my mom taught me the joy of being Tlingit.
I don't often told the story.
My father, when he was in the third grade,
ran up to his teacher,
she's a nun and he said,
and because he spoke Tlingit,
she beat him, she beat my father.
She picked him up and ran with him
and threw him against the wall,
dropped him again and threw him.
He was bloodied and bruised, torn, hurt, traumatized.
He was never beaten before.
What did my father say to that nun?
, "It's good to see you."
Where is the threat?
I don't get bitter about it.
No, that's the wrong way.
Let me teach you a little bit about who I am
so that you can have an understanding
and I would like to learn something of your culture.
Let us come together.
"It's good to see you."
I was looking this morning
at the regalia the children were wearing
and one boy has a missing button.
So I have to look and give him a button
so that the blanket can be complete.
It makes you feel so good that the children
have learned the beauty of the Tlingit culture,
the beauty of who they are.
Before Western contact,
Alaska Native people
have had entire indigenous knowledge systems,
our way of educating our own people
for thousands and thousands of years.
And then when Western contact happened
and colonization started happening in Alaska
between the 1740s and going into the mid and early 1800s,
we started seeing boarding schools pop up all around Alaska.
What you're gonna see here are objects
that were taken from that time period,
and these objects are coming back home
to the Alaska Native community.
All of their objects that they had with them
were being taken from, you know,
whether if they were taken from the children themselves
or if the parents sent them with the child,
there is this perception that everything was burned
once children, you know, started going to schools.
Next to the model canoe is a photograph
of native children and this came,
so what you're gonna see here is, you know,
kids as young as you know,
four or five years old being sent away.
It was completely legal to take our kids away,
and in many cases, you know, take away our cultures,
take away our languages.
As the leader of the Alaska Native Heritage Center,
we have a responsibility to ensure
that the shared history is taught,
ensure that this never happens again.
So what we're gonna go to now
is we're gonna go see the only healing pole in the country
that's dedicated to boarding school survivors.
So let's take a walk outside.
So this is the beginning
of the Alaska Native Community Healing Garden.
So well, come on in.
I always get chills whenever I'm around this pole.
The idea behind this pole,
we had the granddaughter of a boarding school survivor
who reached out to the Alaska Native Heritage Center.
Her name was Norma Jean Dunn.
And she said, "We need to have a pole
that is raised, dedicated
to every single Alaska native boarding school survivor
and descendant and for those who never came home."
When you look at a pole, it's very much, you know,
a lot of people that see this pole,
it's represented or they might perceive it as art,
which it is,
but it's also the first healing pole in the nation.
And so when you look at the pole,
what you're gonna see down here on the bottom
is a bear with her two cubs,
and in the human mask form, represents what the term title
were Indian agents at the time, the taking of our children.
But then you're gonna see a mass in Raven form
embracing two kids at the top,
it signifies our children coming back to their community.
It's just so beautiful that we were able
to raise the healing pole here
at the Alaska Native Heritage Center.
And when we raised it,
we had over a thousand people who showed up.
And so for me, you know,
that really does signify we are in an era of healing.
This is a moment in time that just really signifies that,
you know, our community is hungry for this type of work.
I introduced myself in Yup'ik.
My English name is Emily Eedenshaw,
my Yup'ik name Keneggnarkayaaggaq,
and I am Yup'ik and Inupiaq.
My family comes from Emmonak, Alaska,
which is a small Yup'ik village
on the mouth of the Yukon River.
But I live and work on the Dena'ina lands
and I currently serve as the president
and CEO of the Alaska Native Heritage Center.
Last year, I was also adopted
into the Raven St'langng Laanas Clan
in Old Masset at Haida Gwaii.
So I'm Raven Thunderbird.
I have the best job in the world
because I'm surrounded by the beauty
of our cultures every single day.
We welcome thousands of tourists
that come to the Heritage Center every year.
Anyone would've said this growing up,
I wouldn't have believed them,
and the reason why is because of my own personal story.
I was not raised in my community.
My mom was adopted out at birth,
which unfortunately wasn't uncommon,
especially during the territorial days in Alaska.
And so my mother was raised outside of our community
and culture and in turn, so was I.
I spent many years in Texas,
but I moved back to Alaska when I was 18 and I'm now 40.
But I moved back to Alaska when I was 18 and I'm now 40.
And I've spent my entire adult life trying to reconnect
to who I am as an Alaska Native woman.
And for me it's been a healing journey on so many levels.
I have found that in my connection to culture and community
has been a source of strength for me,
you know, but also understanding
that I have a responsibility to pay it forward.
And so everything I do really ensures
that every single Alaska Native person,
no matter where you live,
deserves to have access to your culture.
You know, here at the Heritage Center,
we often say we're more than a museum.
This is where our cultures come alive.
This is where you get to see us living
and breathing our ways of life.
But also you get to see our knowledge passed down
from generation to generation every day.
Or even speak our native languages,
or even speak our native ranges,
you know, my grandfather, when I met him for the first time,
I asked him to speak Lingit back to me and he refused to
because of what happened in boarding schools.
And so I think there is a real hunger
and a resurgence happening all across Alaska
and even, you know, extending beyond Alaska,
almost like a cultural renaissance, if you will,
where you know, indigenous peoples,
our cultures are thriving,
our languages are being spoken in schools.
And like I shared earlier, there is a point in our history
where we weren't allowed to do that.
And so there is a real hunger within our community,
but also from our visitors.
The untold stories from Alaska's First Peoples.
The untold stories from Alaska's First Peoples,
My name's Aaron Leggett.
I have the honor of serving as the president
of the Native Village of Eklutna,
it was the only federally and now state recognized tribe.
And right now we're down at Chanshtnu,
or Westchester Lagoon.
Behind me is one of the indigenous place name markers
and many of partners, we identify important Dena'ina sites.
Right now we're at Chanshtnu, or Grass Creek.
This was a Dena'ina fishing camp.
The Dena'ina are the indigenous people
of South Central Alaska.
They've lived here for the past thousand years.
In the early 1920s when Anchorage was selected
as the headquarters for the Alaska Railroad,
the early mapmakers came down here
while the Dena'ina were fishing along the creek.
And they asked 'em, "What do you call this?"
And they said, "Chanshtnu."
They wrote it down as Chester.
We said, "Well, close enough."
The point being that there was no old man Chester
that had a whiskey still
or a homestead along the creek here.
It's a derivation of the Dena'ina name Chanshtnu,
and Chanshtnu means Grass Creek.
You can see this grass that's starting to turn,
that is the grass that's being referred to.
If you look on the interpretive panel,
you'll see that name Chanshtnu.
And then above, you'll see this piece of artwork.
This is an abstraction of Dena'ina fire bag.
This was something that Dena'ina men would carry with them
as both an important possession
and also a sign of status and wealth.
Inside the fire bag, he would have the things
that he needed to create a fire, like flints and dry tinder,
things that he didn't want getting wet.
Later they would also be used
to carry gunpowder and ammunition.
This was created
by Ahtna Athabascan artist Melissa Shaginoff,
working with the committee.
And we ultimately selected the fire bag as a Dena'ina symbol
to tell the story of perseverance that the Dena'ina had
before the land got surveyed out from under us
and million dollar homes that you see behind us.
We were essentially forced off of this location
or told we had to vacate.
But these fish camps,
including my great-great grandparents',
were right all up and down this area here.
So we wanted to remind people
of the Dena'ina name Chanshtnu,
that it's not Chester, that it means Grass Creek
and that it's an important Dena'ina fishing location
here in Anchorage.
So I've been at the Anchorage Museum
for the last 13 and a half years,
but before that I worked
at the Alaska Native Heritage Center
as the Assistant Curator of Collections and Exhibits
and the Dena'ina Cultural Historian.
So my gloves are a pair of Athabascan beaded gloves.
These floral designs,
they came in through Canada from the nuns in schools.
They taught the women floral embroidery
and then it transferred to beads.
It worked its way across Canada, into Alaska,
through the Alaska Commercial Company,
the Hudson Bay Trading Company.
And so today, a lot of floral designs
are a well-known artistic style of Athabascan beaders.
Decorated in beaver fur on the trim
and then moose hide for the actual construction.
My necklace, again,
made from red and black and white trade beads.
And then these white shells here
are called dentalium shells.
They're a small sea mollusk.
It grows down around Vancouver Island near British Columbia.
They were traded up the northwest coast
with the Tlingit and the height of the Tsimshian
to the Ahtna Athabascans,
the Ahtna traded with those people for copper.
In Tlingit culture,
copper is the ultimate sign of status and wealth.
And in our culture, these shells are.
So, they were highly valued,
they were a sign of status and wealth.
If you look at the logo
for the Alaska Native Heritage Center,
you'll see just exactly what I'm depicting here.
Well, the reason I chose this location
is that this is a highly visible location.
I think there's thousands of people that come by.
Well, but also project is really about,
is explaining to people
that this still is our traditional homeland.
We've never left it.
We haven't been, you know,
forcibly relocated thousands of miles away.
I was asked to do that pole many, many years ago
by the clan leader in that.
And I begged them not to gimme the directive to do that
'cause I didn't feel I was skilled enough to do that pole.
I see people use it the way it's supposed to
and people are happy that it's there
because it reminds 'em of a past,
they had a rich history here,
and it's in the exact position the original was
almost 300 years ago.
Of course nobody was alive that remembered the pole,
but they had been told the stories
and handed down through the years
of what the original looked like.
And now it's back, it's back in the river
where the original stood at years ago.
My name is Jeff Skaflestad.
My grandfather came here from Norway,
married my Native grandmother.
The family I grew up in was a logging family.
Went to school here in Hoonah, returned to Hoonah,
was a teacher here,
a math and science teacher till retirement.
Carver and formline artist are what I do.
They're kind of connected together.
What we understand when we go back in history,
it looks like that from the carving,
they developed the distinctive formline art
that we have now.
And it's always been debated back and forth what came first,
but it looks like right now the evidence shows
that carving came first and from the carving,
it set the rules and made this formline art so distinctive.
In Western culture, we're stuck using the word art.
And even though we think we've identified a Tlingit term
that might include the concept of art in some way,
they are not exactly comparative.
Everything you see in here that we do is really not art.
And when I say that it,
it doesn't have the Western idea of art.
You don't make something and you put it on the wall.
You have this tremendous responsibility when we do this art.
Because in this art is spirituality, history,
it tells the story of events, they were good, bad.
We don't like to use the word totem poles.
So for us, when we refer to an art piece
that looks like this, this is called a kooteeyaa,
and for us the most important part of the pole
is the object that's on the bottom.
So we start there first.
So this is a famous story from my clan,
the Chookaneidi clan.
This pole is is called the Xa'Kooch kooteeyaa.
Xa'Kooch is a famous warrior kind of equivalent,
in Tlingit, equivalent to like maybe Achilles,
stories from Greek area and that.
And so at the time the people were living here,
they lived out near the coast and that,
and they were doing activities from boats.
And there was a giant octopus that would attack the boats
and pull the people overboard and eat them and kill them.
So Xa'Kooch, which is represented by the guy here in red,
who's actually holding the octopus and the dagger,
he was one day talking to his Raven brother-in-law
and said, "It looks like I'm gonna have
to be doing the battle with octopus.
He has killed all of our warriors.
I'm gonna have to do the battle with this octopus."
And this comes from a time when people
and animals could understand each other,
and people from the shore watch the battle going on,
and the water's boiling and Xa'Kooch is in the air
and then the creatures in the air.
And all of a sudden the whole thing just kind of submerges
and it gets quiet, and that's it.
"I made a promise to the porpoise people, I'm done.
But I made the promise
that you will never hunt the porpoise again."
And then Xa'Kooch dies.
I had it on the other end of the store down here
and I had some old timers come down here and that,
and they came to the door here
and looked across the room at it.
And without me asking, they said,
"Oh, so you did the Xa'Kooch pole."
So I felt pretty good about that
because they recognized what I tried to depict here.
Here Xa'Kooch, here's the dagger tied to his hand.
And then this is the famous warrior.
If I go to another town and I go to another carver's work
and someone says, "What does this pole mean?"
If I don't know the story already,
I have no idea what it means.
So it's not like there's some code
that you learn about that.
So if you remember cliff notes,
and for those that went to school here in the United States,
cliff notes were like short summaries of what you needed
to know about a story or an event or something,
so that's what these serve as.
So what they are is we carved these
and then we put in the main parts of the story
and then we tell the story and people are there,
they're present when I tell the story.
Then they remember it and say 20, 30, 40, 50 years from now,
I'm gone, and they wanna tell their grandchildren about it,
and they'll look at it like,
"Well, let's see, how did this go now?"
And then all of a sudden, it'll come to 'em like,
oh, that's right, this is the porpoise.
And so it reminds them of how the story goes.
You learn this art, you have to learn all that too
because you're simply just a caretaker of the knowledge.
This is not yours, you don't own it, you'll never own it,
and you make that agreement
when an artist takes you on as an apprentice,
that you understand that I'm teaching you this
with the idea that you're gonna pass this on
to people who may not exist yet.
This art is rule driven.
Say someone says, "I want to be a poet,
but I don't really want to learn the alphabet
or syntax or grammar, anything like that,"
it's like, well, it's pretty hard to do that.
So you have to go through all these stages
of learning the rules
so that your poetry will mean something.
So when you do this art,
you have to go through all the basics
of how the rules apply and so forth.
And once you know the rules like that,
then you can become creative and then you can design
and make things that are original so you can be creative.
And a lot of times Western artists can't see that.
Seeing my grandfather at the kitchen table,
people coming by, different elders would come by
and they would talk history, culture.
And my grandmother always had a cup of coffee in their hand.
And that's why even to this day,
I can drink coffee as late as I want, just instilled in me.
My name is Richard Dalton III.
My Tlingit name is Teeykat
and I am T'akdeintaan from the Raven Nest House
and Chookaneidi Yeil, child of Chookaneidi.
I do a lot of form line design.
And since graduating from the Art Institute of Seattle,
I started doing it more on the computer,
using vector programs like Freehand and Adobe Illustrator.
Formline art to me and my people
is a way for us to tell our history,
the oral history of our people in past and present.
And it's important for us that we're able to do that
and distinguish different tribes,
like our Raven Moiety and our Eagle Moiety.
How did you learn how to do it?
Where are you drawing your inspiration from?
Do you know the difference of the different moieties
and different clans and different objects
and elements of the design?
And like anything, you need to learn how to do something,
how it was done before and where it came from
and the meaning so that you're just not copying
or duplicating without knowledge or understanding.
I think that goes for any indigenous tribe.
These are some of the personal
and commercial designs I've done.
This one here is a Raven design.
The primary of the colors that I use,
black is always is my primary,
in our culture, red is our secondary
and the teal blue to green is our tertiary colors.
And keep in mind that a lot of these colors
weren't traditional to us.
Like a lot of the totem poles originally years ago
never had color.
A lot of the colors were created
and brought to us from Westerns.
Here is a good example of the process.
This past year, Goldbelt had their 75th anniversary
of having the gold medal.
They gave me a design that an artist had did
and they wanted me to clean it up
and modify it so that they could use it for silk screening,
embroidery, posters, you name it.
So coming from a commercial graphic design background
and marketing, I was able to take that design, redraw it out
and by vectorizing, it allows my client to then take it
and print it at any size and it's always crisp and clean.
When I went to the Art Institute of Seattle,
I was learning vector and Photoshop and things like that,
and then I started vectorizing from that point on.
And I remember it was hard coming back home
'cause it was something new.
And I had to go through a lot of explaining how, well,
I still do my traditional hand drawing
'cause I think that's important,
and then I go through various stages
and then go to the computer
and then I've mastered that into my own form
and the process that I can get things done.
That sheet, but can we move this up a little bit more
and make it more of a curve on that side, and?
When I was questioned about it,
"Like why are you doing this?
Why are you doing the computer?"
Well, it would be like you getting a new steel blade
from some other store or state or country
that you invested into a new tool for your carving.
You invested a new sewing machine to do your blanket.
You know, things like that,
that we have all of these tools available to us
and some people pick it up and some people don't.
So that was just to help make them understand
that I'm not just selling out per se to digital world,
but there is a process that I maintain
so that I had that history of art,
had that history of drawing
and conceptualizing before jumping on the computer.
And what's nice about it is that with the new tools,
it has allowed us to turn things around and share things.
And to take it even further,
this blanket was done through eighth generation
out of Seattle, Washington.
Would be like me developing a meme
where I took my blanket from one of his photos that he had
and I threw it on there for a Yoda.
And that was just a fun thing to turn around.
It might have been Indigenous Day.
I was inspired a lot by my dad's books
that I read when I was young.
I had read that the Brooks Range
is the most uninhabited mountain range
in the United States.
And that just really spoke to me
and I wanted to go there and live there.
My home is located northwest of Fairbanks
up on Moose Mountain.
I'm away from the city lights,
so I have really good Aurora viewing up here.
I grew up in an area of Massachusetts
where the population density's pretty high.
And I always dreamed about what it would be like
to be out and live in the wilderness.
My dad died when he was 41
and my mom had five kids, and so she wasn't around much.
She was having to work to help support us.
And so we were raised very independently.
And so when I was 18,
I had already actually been on my own for a year
when I was 18 years old,
moved into an old abandoned mining cabin
that had no running water or electricity
right on the edge of the gates.
But for me it was absolutely magical,
to be living a dream like that
and learning what the wilderness had to teach.
I've always loved the night, even when I was a little girl.
I love being out in the wilderness.
I am living my dream.
I can control my own schedule.
I get to see all kinds of beautiful regions of Alaska.
For me, being out in nature under a star-filled sky,
I have kind of a profound sense
of connection and spirituality.
I feel connected to this vast universe.
There's oftentimes where I'm not photographing,
I will set my camera aside and appreciate the moment.
It's a very important for me to be able to do that
so that I don't lose the joy.
One of my favorite images is called "Wonderland."
It was captured right here in my yard.
I love how the moon is in the scene illuminating the trees
that are covered in frost in November
and that the very subtle Aurora
coming through part halfway through the scene.
Here is called "Galactic Dreams."
And it's an image that has the Milky Way running alongside
of the Aurora underneath and Andromeda Galaxy as well.
And I have very, very few images that include the Aurora
with the Milky Way and Andromeda Galaxy.
And the temperatures were about 30 below that night.
This is kind of what's called an arctic entry,
where typically, you know,
people store all their arctic gear, snowshoes.
Tonight because it's warmer,
I definitely have my wools that I would put on
and a neck ring.
I like to wear a wool neck ring that I got in Iceland.
If it's a colder night, I go with my qiviut,
which is very lightweight and warm.
This is muskox wool.
It's one the warmest wool that you can buy.
On a, you know, cold night,
I have my fox hat that I like to wear
along with my beaver mittens,
which I wear over other mittens.
Tonight I would just be wearing
some simple little gloves like these
because I have access to my fingers to photograph with.
It's the nice thing about fall
is you don't have to wear as much gear.
I would definitely wear a hat as well.
Frostbit can happen quickly up here when temperatures are,
you know, say 40 below, I think it's like 10 seconds
for exposed skin to start to freeze.
You have to be very, very careful of that.
And I have been frostbit before.
So camera gear include plenty of hand warmers,
I always have at least two headlamps with me.
You know, the importance like,
when you're out on the cold temperatures,
bringing your camera gear in, you have to think about,
you know, securing it in something
where a lot of moisture's not gonna develop.
So I myself like to wrap my cameras in down
and I will put 'em inside my pack
and then lay it on a like the cold floor
just so that they warm up slowly.
You have to be prepared for any type of condition.
There are things that happen unexpectedly,
road closures and you could be stuck out for a while.
People would say maybe it's a bit too much,
but I like to travel with firewood.
I have a saw, I have an ax, I have matches, lighters,
you know, a survival sleeping bag that goes to 50 below.
Yeah, it's a lot of gear.
It takes a while, prepping for a trip.
Yeah, so this is my Aurora nook in here is what I call it.
I have a nice sheep skin here, down sleeping bag,
first aid kit, spare tire, cooking utensils and food.
Little stove in here and also pack water under the bed.
And one of the things I forgot to tell you about here
is I like to carry an inReach with me
because I am usually not in an area that has reception,
and if there's any emergencies I can use this.
It has a little SOS button here
that kind of works off the satellites.
It depends on the temperatures,
but I do have another sleeping bag
that's a 40 to 50 below bag that I will throw in here
for when it gets a little bit colder.
My little pot for heating up water
and my tiny little cook stoves that I love
because if I am backpacking away from my van
and camping somewhere else, this is what I'll take with me.
And this provides me a way to heat up water,
melt snow, make a hot cup of coffee, whatever it may be.
Nice and light and efficient.
But this is kind of my setup for fall right now.
I have a CB radio and an antenna
and I use that when I go up on the Dalton Highway
so that I can communicate with truckers
or anybody else on the road.
It's kind of an essential tool to have up there
because it's rough driving conditions, things happen.
You need to know what's going on
and you need to be able to have and communicate.
Aurora photography is very technical.
There's so much to consider
when you are out photographing, you know,
'cause the Aurora is changing its brightness constantly,
you're having to check your exposure,
your composition and at night, that can be challenging,
as well as being prepared for the elements,
which can be quite challenging.
You know, when you're out in, you know,
sub-zero temperatures and making sure
that you know you're gonna keep yourself safe
and you're gear protected.
I work very hard at what I do that to see something payoff
and that people appreciate it.
One of the apps that I like to use is called Windy.
It's fairly accurate.
This is commonly used by bush pilots here in Alaska.
This is showing the wind direction too.
Right now we don't have really any stars.
Doesn't mean that it's gonna push out
and be clear here any minute.
Or we could drive up the road
and see what it looks like.
To go a little bit further in this direction
is what I would do
and see if we can catch any clear spots up here.
The 30% cloud cover in that area.
So we're gonna go check it out.
Clouds have kind of been our ending lately.
As soon as you make it, slowly started to disintegrate,
the best you can hope are good pictures of it.
Hi, my name's Heather Brice and I'm Steve's wife.
I have been carving ice for 27 years.
I have 11 world championship titles.
I transitioned from wood and bronze to ice when I met Steve.
My name is Steve Brice, a 30 year ice carver.
Welcome to our workshop here at Chino Hot Spring, Aurora.
Ice, oh, excuse me, Ice Museum.
- The Aurora Ice Museum. - Yeah.
This is where we make all the parts and pieces
that are gonna go inside of the Ice Museum here.
So if I'm redoing a room or redoing a sculpture,
maybe about 90% of the time it'll be done in this area.
We've carved all over the world.
Probably the best location though
is here in Fairbanks, Alaska,
where the weather is always cold and predictable,
fairly predictable anyway.
If it's too cold, if it's too warm,
it becomes a severe challenge.
Pretty much other forms of sculpture,
you know you can control your atmosphere,
but a lot of ice events,
you have very little control over the weather.
Sad fact is some of our best stuff never got great pictures.
Photographs make it a little easier
to know that it's gonna be destroyed.
It's the actual making of it which is the creative process
that gets you addicted to doing ice.
The art is in the making.
The temporary aspect is part of the allure,
I think, especially for the public,
that it's only there for a fleeting time.
Has to be enjoyed immediately.
When two people are doing a piece, if you get stuck,
the other person can come over and see it easily.
Yeah, he does a lot of the big ice removal,
a lot of the bigger shaping.
I love fine tuning and really making the surfaces
and the textures and just the really ornate detail pop in.
If either of us gets stuck,
it's because we're looking at it too much
and the other person's not looking at it so much.
They can come and see exactly what needs to happen.
And we help each other out with that all the time.
Really drawing as well
as a child, my aunt was really integral
in doing fun projects with us, my sister and I.
And I got started in like shop
and sculpture pretty early in my elementary education.
And I love to pull inspiration from movies I've seen,
from children's books especially.
I love to create animals doing human things,
just a little bit whimsical.
The magic comes from the last two to 3% of what you do.
You know, you can sit there and do a scene
and run out of time and it is good,
but to turn it into magic,
you've gotta push it past an incredible level.
To become an ice sculptor,
it's advisable to go to an ice company
and ask if you can get hired
and acquire a few rudimentary tools
and take it from there.
A lot of sculptors can get a little bit experience
through the culinary field.
They go to chef school and they learn how to do tabletops
and ice trays and shrimp trays and things like that.
In a heavy equipment accident,
I've not been a a painter or a drawer since
and I've been pretty much 95% ice ever since that
because when I put gloves on, I don't notice
that I'm missing half of my left hand or my left thumb.
Oh yeah, Bethel, I don't think they have any electricity.
And I'm like, "What?"
Actually, my senior year in college,
I was trying to figure out what to do
and I decided to join Peace Corps VISTA program,
and initially I was going in the Peace Corps to go abroad,
and then I heard too many horror stories
and so I decided to do VISTA,
which is Volunteers In Service To America.
I had a choice, I could go to Apopka, Florida
or Fairbanks, Alaska.
Now, Apopka is maybe less than 30 minutes
from my parents' house.
And I thought, oh my gosh,
I didn't join this program to be so close to home.
So I thought, well, I guess I'm going to Bethel, Alaska.
I talked to my college roommate, said, "Oh my god, Kathy,
I'm going to Bethel, Alaska."
And she said, "Oh, oh, there's someone on my floor
that's from Alaska, let me ask him about it."
And she comes back and she says, "Oh yeah, Bethel,
I don't think they have any electricity."
And I'm like, "What?"
And well, what happened was the power plant
had burned down in Bethel like, a couple years prior.
And so that's what that person was remembering.
My name is Corlis Taylor.
I've lived in Alaska for 45 years
and I've been in Fairbanks for about 33 years.
I retired in 2020, and up until then,
I was working full-time and doing artwork part-time.
Both my grandparents were seamstresses,
my grandfather was a tailor,
and so there were always sewing machines around.
My mother and my grandmother
made all of my clothes growing up.
Didn't have my first dress that was purchased at a store
until I was a sophomore in high school.
And I was out in Bethel,
I decided, okay, I need to figure out something to do.
So I thought, you know, I'm gonna teach myself how to quilt.
And so I bought a book and taught myself to quilt
and made my first quilt.
And a friend saw it and said, "Can you make me one?"
I'm like, "Okay."
So then I made my second quilt
and then just started making quilts.
I could make something really incredible and wear it.
And so somebody was coming from California
to teach this wearable art class at our local quilt store.
And so I took that class
and just kind of took off from there.
It just became my new love
because it was just being a way
to be really creative using fabric.
Yes, I call myself an artist.
I know that there's, in the art world, there's a lot of,
controversy might be a strong word,
but between craft and art.
I think this is a combination of craft and art.
Painters have this palette of all these different colors
and they mix, you know, blue and green or yellow and orange.
You know, they're mixing these colors
to come up with a new color.
Well, I'm doing the same thing with fabric.
You know, I will take a red fabric and a green fabric
and mix them together in a garment.
And this is the fabric that I chose
for the lining for this garment.
I usually start off with one piece of fabric
that I look at that I really love,
and then I take that one piece of fabric
and I look at it
and see what other colors are in that fabric
and then start collecting other pieces of fabric
that go with that one piece.
But I start off with the focal, my focal fabric.
I always start off by cutting a muslin.
And so this is my piece that I am building on.
I like to use anywhere from eight to 10,
15 different fabrics.
So I will probably pull out this kind of a turquoise,
deep turquoise greenish blue color fabric
to add to this collection.
As I said, you know,
painters have their different colors of paints,
they have the canvas that they are painting on,
they're using their different sizes
and shapes of brushes to make the strokes.
And so for me and for making wearable art,
this is my canvas.
So this white fabric here is the canvas
on which I'm building up all of my color.
Of course I'm influenced by the supply of fabric
that's here in town.
But then whenever I travel,
like I was just in Florida last week visiting my mom
where I'm from and we went to the fabric store
and I bought more fabric.
And so whenever I travel,
I'm getting fabrics and bringing back to my studio.
So my garments tend to be very wearable
as opposed to something that's more gallery art.
There are garments that are in galleries
and they're very, very elaborate kinds of things.
2015 or 2016, somewhere in there,
we had our first show in California.
When I see it on the runway, when a model is wearing it,
my first thought is,
wow, that looks really good on her.
And then my second thought is, oh my gosh,
I should have done something a little bit different.
Oh, I should have had that fabric,
instead of having it there, I should have had it there
or maybe I could have done.
You know, we always are self critiquing of what we do,
and when I sell garments and people buy them
and I see them wearing it, there's a little piece of me
that's sad because I like it so much
and I'm like, oh my gosh,
I really wanted to keep that, but I sold it,
and then part of me is just really, I don't know,
proud I guess is a word to use, that someone liked my stuff,
liked my work enough not only did they buy it
and take it home, but they're wearing it out in public.
I am really proud when I see this airplane,
to see how it's impacted people and in particular in Alaska.
People are really proud of the Xaat Kaani livery,
the first commercial aircraft
to be named in an indigenous word,
Xaat Kwaani are the Salmon people.
Nowadays there is a Tlingit word for art
and it's called, it's a new term.
It translates to the happening of a significant event.
The is connected to who we are
and to our past.
And the is showing that we still exist
and live in a modern day and we can have our language
and speak our language and bring in
and introduce new words in our language if we need to.
And it's a part of how we are adapting
to the modern day and moving forward.
Introducing myself how my grandmother taught me.
My Tlingit name is Kaakeeyaa
and my English name is Crystal Worl, a Raven Sockeye Clan.
I am Deg Hit'an Athabascan from my mother's side,
and I am Tlingit and Filipino from my father's side.
I am doing a lot of public art, murals, large scale work.
I also do painting and printmaking and graphic design,
co-owner and co-designer of Trickster Company
with my brother Rico.
We are an indigenous graphic design art gift shop online.
I think I'm really blessed to have a family
that really nurtured my creativity from a young age.
My grandmother has stories of recognizing
that I was gonna be an artist from a very young age
and she said that I would be running around like a spazz
and the thing that would stop me in my tracks
was very vibrant, bold patterns and colors.
And then my mother never scolded me
for drawing on the walls.
To this day, I'm still drawing on walls.
We've been doing art well before art was a word.
We were creating a means to pass on information
to the next generation, whether it be for our regalia
so that we could recognize each other
and know which clan someone was from
so that we know how to address them and care for them,
or libraries encoded in our totem poles
and our longhouses and our canoes or our paddles.
All of these are encoded with our cultural values,
our stories that belong to particular clans.
Designs that I do are formline, which is specific
to the Tlingit Haida and Tsimshian tribes in Alaska
and throughout BC.
Formline is probably most recognized by totem poles, canoes,
longhouse frontlets, and our Chilkat that we weave.
I think formline art comes from
and belongs to indigenous people,
and specifically the Tlingit Haida and Tsimshian.
For the most part, I think that formline
should be carried by our people.
Just like our ancestors, they adapted to the time.
What was modern and contemporary for them
may be what is traditional for us now.
And so moving forward and continuing,
being innovative and adaptable
and being able to change with times is significant,
while still simultaneously being rooted in knowing
who you are, where you're from, and what does that mean.
And so that's why I say a lot
of indigenous people live in two worlds
because we're connected to our ancestors, our land,
the animals that we harvest, that we've always harvested
from the past to the future generations
and our obligations to pass all that information
and also to the present and living and being here and now
and existing as innovative and creative indigenous people
that are thriving and speaking our language.
I was interviewed in "Alaska Business Monthly" magazine
for my art.
At the same time, Marilyn Romano,
who is the vice president of Alaska Airlines,
had proposed that the new livery get painted
by an indigenous Alaskan artist.
And the mail woman comes into her office
and puts this magazine on her desk.
And I'm on the cover with my art, and she reads the article
and she says, "I want her to do it."
Coincidentally, three years prior,
I had superimposed my artwork onto a Boeing 737.
I had been wanting to see an Alaska Airlines airplane
designed by an Alaska Native.
So Marilyn Romano calls me and says,
"Hello Crystal Worl, is this you?"
And I'm like, "Yes."
"Wanted to talk to you about designing an airplane."
I saw your article
on the 'Alaska Business Monthly' magazine,
and I wanted to ask you if you'd be interested
"in designing an airplane for Alaska Airlines."
I can't say no.
I'm really proud when I see this airplane
and to see how it's impacted people throughout the globe.
I have memories of being a baby and in a crib
and looking up at a Audubon bird poster.
I'm Linda Infante Lyons and I am a painter.
Grew up here in Anchorage, Alaska,
and a lot of my inspiration comes from the island of Kodiak
where my mother and grandmother and great-grandmother,
my Alutiiq Alaska Native family
goes back 4,000 or more years.
I was always drawing and drawing on furniture
and getting in trouble, you know, for drawing too much.
So I've always, always loved art.
Really what I'm trying to do is taking what I see
and then trying to express how I feel.
So it's important to me that the paintings or the drawings,
mostly paintings now, show or express the feeling
that I get when I see these things out in the world.
My grandmother from Kodiak, she was very inspirational.
I know that she did some drawing and painting,
but she was a very busy woman.
She raised a lot of children
and I don't think she had the chance
to develop her art career,
but I know that she's very creative.
She also was in love
with her natural surroundings in Kodiak,
and we spent a lot of time on the beaches,
beach combing and fishing and berry picking.
You know, she taught us names of the flowers,
how to tie a hook so you could fish.
My Kodiak grandmother was sort of that seed
of creativity since I was really young.
My portraits now are inspired by icons.
So in a sense they're symbols.
I'm not really picking out the individual expression,
but something that's more universal.
And these portraits are of Alaska native women.
I am trying to show them as symbols
of that expresses the authority and spirit of these women
and their attachment to the land.
This is a work in progress icon portrait.
She's looking out into the world, proclaiming the authority
that she has from millennia of living on the land.
To me, women are very important.
I came from a long line of very strong women,
very inspired by my grandmother, inspired by my mother.
I have three daughters.
I also saw through my grandmother
how much she was the glue of the family.
She was the energy and the one that had all the stories
and things that I needed to know as a child.
One of the things that really inspired me
is the Alutiiq mass
and a lot of Alaska native mass have a central figure
and then they have an array around the head.
This concept is I think very similar aligns with,
you know, Christian beliefs and Russian Orthodox Church,
very prominent in Kodiak.
My ancestors lived through the Russian colonization
and my great-grandmother, she spoke Russian and Alutiiq
and didn't speak English.
So, that history is very close.
I was participating in exhibits
called "Decolonizing Alaska,"
in which the artists were asked to think about decolonizing
and how to sort repair some of the damage to culture,
Alaska Native culture, how to move forward, you know,
as a living culture and taking those pieces
that were often repressed, elevating them,
and in my mind, elevating the Alutiiq culture
and just melding it with Russian Orthodox
or Christian or just in general Western.
In other words, showing that the Alaska Native culture
can be seen as equal as the Western.
I like the idea of instead of decolonizing, indigenizing,
you know, raising up, making aware to the world,
you know, this very rich culture and history.
Like any art work,
as you create the work you discover new things,
things that you hadn't planned on doing,
and you actually learn
from creating the actual artwork,
teaches you new things or leads you on different paths.
It's not a purposeful message,
it is a message that seems to grow over time
and then it becomes relevant
with what's happening in the world now.
And there's a lot of connections that happen as you go.
There's also more subtle, you know,
messages or the imagery
can really start a conversation or an emotion.
You know, if someone can see my work or other artist' work
and stop for a minute
and think about what they're seeing and how they feel,
they may come away with a different idea or feeling,
but it opens your mind and your heart to something new.
You are in the University of Alaska Museum of the North
in Fairbanks, Alaska.
I'm Aldona Jonaitis
and I am the retired director of the University
of Alaska Museum of the North.
The museum has artwork that is contemporary,
middle 19th century, very ancient, and some that is modern.
And this is one of our oldest pieces.
It's called the "Okvik Madonna."
It's about 2,000 years old, give or take.
And it is not the "Madonna," it's made of walrus ivory.
The Inupiat, who are the group of people in the north
who carved this, we assume,
have a story of the Mother of the Animals.
The Mother of the Animals is a being
from whom all the animals of the world emerge.
As you can see, there is a little creature on her stomach
as she's holding this little creature
that probably is a seal.
Then if you look at her face, look at that smile,
this Mona Lisa's smile, that piece is carved so exquisitely
with stone tools.
A little anecdote about this
is that when I came for a job interview here 35 years ago,
I was walking through,
'cause I'm a Native American art historian,
so I've lectured a lot about Native American art,
and I walked to the gallery and I said,
'cause I had taught this many times at the beginning
of my class I said, "You have the 'Okvik Madonna'?
I wanna be in a museum that has the 'Okvik Madonna.'"
And here I am.
This is another remarkable piece of ingenuity.
This artist who made this was the Siberian Yup'ik.
This is a gut parka.
It is made of seal gut, women gut seal gut, cut it,
opened it and sewed it together,
decorating it with feathers and teeth.
It is completely waterproof.
It is actually used.
It is used as the hunters go on the ice.
This piece, it's beautiful,
not only to us and to the Siberian Yup'ik,
it's beautiful to the animals.
So you are honoring them by making an artwork
that you're wearing when you're going to harvest them.
And of course you always ask the animal,
"I would like to take your life away,
but I thank you for allowing me to do that."
This metal piece is intended to look like whale bones,
which the northern people use for food.
I have been showing you
what one might call traditional indigenous art,
art made by Alaskan natives.
This is a work
by a contemporary Tlingit woman called My Face.
The blue is a very rich, deep blue
that is a color that is very common in Tlingit art,
in painting, and a lot of other things.
These items represented how much wealth you have.
But of course what we wanna look at
is her bursting out of this background.
She's bursting out not of her culture,
this woman is very connected to her culture,
but she's bursting out of the constraints
that some people have saying, "If you are a native person,
you have to make traditional art."
Of course it's indigenous art.
This was made by the Tlingit.
Photography has been around Alaska
since it was brought by the Russians.
The oldest photograph that's in the archives
of the state is from 1868
and it was made by Eadweard Muybridge
who photographed sequential shots of horses running
to prove that when a horse gallops it's off the ground.
Artists his still as studies of humans walking.
This is the Roseberry Gallery.
I'm a photographer, I've taught photography here
at the university for 35 years,
and we're headed over to see a man
who was a good friend of mine, he died about 12 years ago,
who was responsible for all the photography
here at the museum, for the collection.
His name is Barry McWayne and this is some of his work,
some of his landscape work in Alaska.
He was, you know, out of the film era
before digital photography, though he transitioned himself.
But he was sort of like Alaska's Ansel Adams out
with a big format camera
doing large format landscape work.
And he put together this huge collection of images
that we now are seeing some work out of here today.
I think without Barry,
there are a lot of photographers in this state
who would've never sold a picture
and never had their work in a museum
or been inspired to do a solo show
or get into the community of photography.
I understand that there are 1,400 plus photographs now,
and that it's about a third of the entire collection
that the museum draws from for this gallery
and has in its storage.
So we're talking close to 5,000 pieces of sculpture,
native arts, photography, paintings, everything, all arts.
You know, photography's kind of, it's one of those arts
that people still say, "Well, there's photography in art,"
you know, because it's got a craft side to it,
it's got an informational side,
it's done in photojournalism, it's done as home portraits.
So there's a lot of photography that's not art.
Mostly if you do a painting on the wall,
that's considered art right off the bat.
Photography has always had this chip on its shoulder
and also this identity from other artists
as is it an art or not?
Photography has often been a minor part
of museums collections 'cause it wasn't as valuable.
Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, those guys were getting hundreds
of dollars per print back in the '60s.
If you have a Weston "Pepper Number 30" now,
it's worth millions.
So photography is coming to its own as being a valuable art,
which helps 'cause when the marketplace identifies something
as an art, it's an art.
Of course photography is art, it's self expression,
it's emotional, it's craft,
it's all those things that go into any art.
These are from a reindeer herding series
that I did outta Nome, Alaska.
Reindeer were brought to Alaska
by a guy named Sheldon Jackson back in the late 1800s.
Now what he saw was that a lot of native communities
were being made to settle into villages
and they had been nomadic, they'd followed caribou around.
These people have meat, fur, leather, you know,
the resources that an animal like this gives.
So he brought reindeer from Siberia where there were herds,
reindeer and caribou
are genetically the same animal pretty much.
But these are domesticated animal
and I shot these back in 1990,
just the year I started teaching here at the university.
This work is by an amazing photographer named Jim Barker,
who's in his 80s now, and he lived in Bethel, Alaska,
which is out in western Alaska.
It's a little hub community, a mostly native community,
and he made these spectacular photographs
of the subsistence lifestyle out there.
He lived in a community for 12 years
working at the radio station, reading the news,
selling local photographs and things like that in order
to produce this incredibly important historic document.
These are people dragging in a beluga whale,
this is a young girl getting her hair fixed amongst,
two young girls getting their hair fixed amongst,
I mean, I couldn't walk in there
and not know these people and shoot this image.
It shows his acceptance by the community,
which is so important in documentary photography.
My name's Jovell.
I'm a full-time creative working artist photographer.
When I'm not doing photography full-time,
I'm here at the gallery doing anything from sweeping,
mopping, putting shows on.
Whatever needs to be done, I do it.
I came from Trinidad and Tobago
and moved to Alaska as a baby,
but my family is still West Indian, we're still Caribbean.
My dad is incredibly supportive, I love my father.
My auntie also cool, but she's still asking me
when I'm gonna go back to school.
You know, I'm 32, I've had this gallery for seven years
and every year she keeps telling me, "Well, you know,
it's not too late to go back and get a real job."
What I felt was a need in the community
for accessible art spaces.
Growing up in Anchorage, Alaska, I loved it,
but I didn't feel like there were a ton of spaces
for creatives, especially creatives
who were emerging to play or exhibit their work
or really sort of developed their skills.
I decided to build something myself with a couple of friends
and so we built Akela Space, the gallery.
The gallery was started as a place
where emerging artists could showcase their work
and sort of get a feel for if they wanted
to be full-time creatives or full-time artists.
We built a studio in the back of the gallery,
somewhere where we could do
our commercial photography and videography
and do some more of that work
to help keep the lights on in the place in early years.
I don't know that I would say I'm a mentor for some artists.
I think that the older I get,
the more I feel like I'm slipping into that mentor role.
You can't be the guy forever,
nor should you try to be the guy forever.
I think at a certain point, we have to step
into that uncle or auntie role in the community
and I think the gray hair in my beard
is telling me that I'm getting there.
I was in high school and I was playing football,
not very well, I was terrible at football,
but I would take photos of the junior varsity games
and then over time, those same athletes would come up to me
and say, "Hey man, can you take my picture off the field?"
So we would run around town, you know,
we'd go to like a cool building
or we'd go to the top of a rooftop or silly stuff
and we would just take fun pictures and make fun images.
I grew up very introverted,
so photography allowed me to kind of go back and forth
between participant and observer.
So when I wanted to be included
and wanted to be a part of the fun,
I could be a participant, I could take those photos,
but when I was nervous or maybe I felt like I needed
to go back into my shell a little bit,
I could switch modes and go back into observer mode
and still be in that same room.
It felt good to give people images
that they could see themselves in and feel proud.
So I think everybody's beautiful.
I think being photogenic is more of a mind state
than it is any physical attribute.
I often joke with people that the key to being photogenic
or the key to confidence in photos
is to pretend that you are an ugly boy.
You know, if you ever walk into a bar or nightclub,
it's always the ugliest boy who is trying to flirt
with the prettiest person in the room.
That ugly boy has the most confidence out of anybody.
A lot of the work that we tend to show in the space
tends to be from artists
who are from a marginalized community of some sort,
and that isn't always intentional,
but we want to give the opportunities
to the people who we feel don't get them as often as others.
Very rare that I feel like a photo that I make is good.
A lot of times I don't question
why my eye is drawn to something.
I just say, "Well, let me get this photo
and I'll figure out why later."
Creativity is a tool that we use
to better understand ourselves.
The creation of that, I think oftentimes
is just for that same end goal,
to better understand ourselves,
the roles that we may play in community,
how we fit in with the world around us.
I think a lot of that stuff
is just trying to take things that are in your head
and get 'em out into the world and make sense of them.
It's up to you as the creator, as the artist to decide,
is this something deeply personal
that I want to keep for myself,
or is this something that I wanna share with the world?
I believe that good art
should be a catalyst for conversation.
I feel like good art should be polarizing.
After viewing a piece or after consuming art,
you should be so motivated to speak on it,
whether that be that you love it so much
that you need to tell somebody
or you hate it so much that you need to tell somebody.
Good art should drive you to one of those sides of the fence
and spark that conversation
because if we feel moved to talk about something,
now we're talking to each other,
now we're talking with our neighbors,
now we're talking with community members
that we might not have had a conversation with otherwise.
We don't only show art that we like
or that we think is cool in this space.
We show art that we think is going to incite a conversation.
We show art that we think the community
is gonna respond to in one way or another,
and they're gonna keep the conversation going.
At that point, once you put it out into the world,
you can no longer dictate what the world does with it.
It just has to spread like wildfire.
This current generation of artists I think is so talented
and one of the things that I really appreciate about them
is that they have so many tools at their disposal.
I often say that it should take them half as long
to get twice as good,
because the things that I had in terms of photography,
I didn't have a lot of money growing up,
I had the penny pension save to get my first cameras.
My first cameras were often hand-me-downs
and things that I just borrowed.
But nowadays, we've got so many incredible tools
for creativity in our pocket.
You know, I'm hoping that we can get back to a place
where creativity comes first and expression comes first.
To provide equipment that people can use, they can learn on,
they can practice on without having to break the bank.
If art is your calling
and if it's what you wanna do for a living, yes, pursue it.
You will have to figure out how to do the business side.
But I would hope that these emerging artists
and artists who have been in the game for a while
are still taking time to create for themselves,
for that intrinsic value and can find some space
to think about things other than their finances.
I moved here about nine years ago.
I drove up from San Diego to Skagway,
came up just for like a summer job,
and I had no idea I would end up in Anchorage.
It was sort of like, like,
okay, let's see what happens from here.
I really love the small community here.
I love how like, we're all just really connected.
That makes me feel like at home.
So my name is Rejoy Armamento.
I am an illustrator and a muralist.
My dad, he is, you know, he's an artist.
He's always just like drawing things,
making things, building things.
And then also my mom,
she was like really into decorating the house,
and so I was like surrounded by just like being in spaces
where base was very like conscious,
just, I like to do a lot of freestyling.
I like where it can take me
and then I like to listen to the piece
and sometimes it will just dictate where it should go,
and then I get excited.
I think I notice like when I'm really excited
and I just see things come together
and I realize, oh yeah, that's an art piece for me.
I love being the observer,
just kind of like watching things,
visiting places and seeing patterns
like on the street or something like that.
It's like the outside world,
another big inspiration is like my internal world.
I'm a very spiritual person and I'm very introspective,
so I feel like my inspiration,
it kind of comes from sort of like,
I don't know, it could be ancestral
or just sort of like the subconscious
just sort of inspiring my work.
Because you know, it's a dialogue.
Like you sometimes you don't even know,
you don't realize what you're making
and then you know, people just tell you like,
what's going on, then you realize it.
But a lot of people say
that my art is very playful and childlike,
the kind of emotion that I like to convey,
like a sense of aliveness.
I'm mostly self-taught.
I went to school for a graphic design,
but I took like, you know,
a few drawing and painting classes.
So all the paints were like, you know,
but everything that I know is pretty much just through,
I dunno, learning from YouTube
or like just observing things and trying 'em out.
I've also learned a lot from the people in my community too.
If I don't know something, I like to ask another artist,
like for advice on how to approach things.
One of my first murals is a Hunter S. Thompson mural
for this dispensary downtown.
That was my first commissioned piece.
So it was like, "Ooh," you know, it was a pretty big deal.
It's still one of my favorites
because I feel like it definitely represents my style.
I love portraits, he's like smoking a cigarette.
I just remember having so much fun
playing around with the smoke,
like just make it look very psychedelic.
My style is very fluid and fun.
"On the sacred spirit land of Yaokwa
just off the island of Bellicher stood a man
draped head to toe in a thick black tunic
with a wooden Kushtaka mask covering his face.
The mask was painted a bright red
and showed a hand reaching out of the mouth of an otter
as a human was being devoured.
Yaokwa was the place of creation for the Klagook tribe,
the land that humans were not allowed to enter,
but no one had seen the spirits outside of the stories
"in a long time."
When I was in high school,
I walked my younger brother to school
there in the mornings and back home,
and it was kind of a long walk
and trying to like keep his attention,
especially in the winter it's cold.
And so I started just telling him a story.
So every day I would tell him a little bit more
of the story, talking about a young boy who was Tlingit,
who was around his age
and it was a fantasy one where he has these powers
and he's going on an adventure,
and my brother really enjoyed that.
He'd get excited too, we'd start to walk home,
he's like, "All right, what happened now?"
So that's really how that one started.
For me, I'm writing it as an analogy
for racism and discrimination
and it centers in a fictionalized southeast Alaska setting,
which is something, another big part of all my writing
is that I want representation.
I want to see more of who I am and who our people are
and I think that's the most important thing on writing
is write something that you would wanna read.
I also like that you can just go in
and read it at not as deep of a level
and then you still enjoy it
and you can get entertainment from like,
what's gonna happen next to this character?
So I like telling stories that work in multiple ways.
As a writer, this is things that I work through
and that I learn and that I can express through my writing.
But on the other hand,
that's also what readers are looking for.
And as a reader who loves fantasy and young adults
and high fantasy, these are always the kind of stories
that I wanted to see more of,
and so that's why I write them.
I wanna be able to put out the things that want to read
and be able to normalize
and have more representation for us
and especially normalizing,
there's a lot of Tlingit language in my novel,
and so normalizing the use of it
and putting it in is really important to me.
My name is Kaasteen, my second Tlingit name is S'xeinda. at,
my English name is Katelynn Drake, but I go by Kaasteen.
I am Tlingit and I am a member of the Chookaneidi Clan
and on my father's side,
I'm a daughter of the Inupiaq people.
But I am from Hoonah, but I grew up
splitting my time really between Anchorage,
Juneau, and Hoonah.
It was a mix of bouncing between places.
Most of my summers were spent between Juneau and Hoonah
and my family comes from Hoonah, we have a long line
and that is also what feeds into my storytelling
is there's so much history here and our family,
we have a long line of fishermen and artists
and storytellers and that all comes through
and really storytelling is so important
to us as Tlingit people.
Some of the earliest inspirations, I would say,
my Tlingit names for example, even they are rooted in story
'cause stories are so powerful.
My name, Kaasteen, the story of that one
depicts how us as Chookaneidi actually journeyed
from where we were originally from in Glacier Bay
to how we came here to Hoonah.
Stories like that are a history for us,
they record that for us
and they tell the story of where we come from
and who we are.
Here are some of my pieces that I've made
and all of them have a story to them.
This is a drum that I made for my auntie.
I wanted to depict her and her family.
Because we're Chookaneidi, our crests,
our main one is Eagle and we have different crests
or Octopus, Eagle, Porpoise.
And so in this one particularly,
I was telling the story of her and her family.
So up here we have my aunt depicted as the mother octopus
and both of her daughters
who she's carrying in her tentacles here.
She's holding up both daughters
and then down here her youngest is,
her son is a little porpoise.
And so I wanted this drum to show her how I see her family
and her caring and supporting her children
and being that mother.
Recently, actually last year,
started kind of venturing a little bit
and trying my hand at making regalia.
This was a vest that I had made.
You can see I have a eagle here, there's some seaweed,
can't see it, but I have a bear on the back,
and all of it just to show who I am.
It is facing the water
so that any visitors approaching from the waterside
would be able to tell that this Xunaa Shuka Hit
belongs to all of these people.
This house, Xunaa Shuka Hit, represents the homeland
that we all came from and is now our homeland,
which is now being taken care of
by the National Park Service.
The purpose of this house
is to have a footprint back in our home that we had left
because of the glacier that advanced upon us.
Kaach Yaas, Chookaneidi,.
Gordon Greenwald, my English name,
Kaach Yaas from Huna Kaawu or Huna Lands.
This screen represents the four clans
and their homelands and why they left.
You have the T'aakdeintaan people in Lituya Bay,
their homeland, and the glacier in the head of Lituya Bay
and the numerous tsunamis that washed through Lituya Bay
that washed the people out.
Though the T'aakdeintaan no longer live in Lituya Bay,
their canoe is still anchored and you see Mount Fairweather,
the mother mountain to the T'aakdeintaan people
and all of the Huna people.
As you go along, you see the spirit of the glacier
that was called down because of disrespect
and crushed the houses and the villages
of the other three clans of Huna people.
And you have Kaasteen, a young lady
that was in seclusion at the time,
and you'll see, look at her eyes,
you'll see the glacier reflecting in her eyes
as it's coming forward.
One of the oral history was that Kaasteen was left behind
because of her actions
and the T'aakdeintaan people covered her
and gave her many sea otter robes to stay warm.
They left Glacier Bay and went to Chah-nulth.
And you have the spirit of the cliff
that they built their fort up on.
The Kaagwaantaan people brought us copper.
So you'll see the copper shield here.
The Kaagwaantaan canoe with the wolf and the brown bear
is still anchored in Chah-nulth,
though they live in Hoonah also.
The Wooshkeetaan people, when they left Glacier Bay,
went to what we now call Excursion Inlet and built a fort.
Then you see up here in the middle,
there's a canoe with people
and all the people have their paddles raised except for one
for when we come to a new village site
or another village site, we drift offshore with our canoes.
We raise our paddles, may we come ashore?
I come as your friend, I have no weapons.
That represents all the other people, whomever they are.
They come to our homeland as our friends.
This kooteeyaa that we have is representing the Eagle clans
that are currently in Hoonah.
Hoonah originally had three Eagle clans
that came out of Glacier Bay.
These other clans are currently in Hoonah
and have become members of our community.
You have the Thunderbird of the Shangukeidee,
then you have the Brown Bear people,
you have the Shark people, then you have the Porpoise,
the Chookaneidi people,
and then you have the Kaagwaantaan people.
Then you'll see on the kooteeyaa, the orator.
That is the one that passes on
all of our historical information that must be passed to us
as we go from generation to generation.
The second kooteeyaa here is representing the Raven people
that are now in Hoonah.
So we have the black-footed kittiwake down here
representing the T'aakdeintaan people, my father's people.
You have the Dog Salmon,
the L'eeneidi that are also in Hoonah now.
The Kaach. adi, the Land Daughter people
that are in Hoonah and have been for many generations.
You have the Deisheetaan, the Beaver people
that are now in Hoonah, the Koowu,
the L'uknax. adi people that are in Hoonah,
Taakw. aaneidi, the Sea Lion people,
the Woodworm people that are in Hoonah, the Frog people,
the Kiks. adi people.
And then you see on the pole there are singers
that sing our songs and then you have the Ravens.
It's hard for me to imagine that people don't think
of indigenous cultures within Alaska
as a very living and vibrant culture
because I just see it everywhere in Alaska
and see the culture blooming in very different ways,
whether that's through the dance form, through the art form,
through the language acquisition.
Definitely feels like I have been witness to a renaissance
of Alaska Native culture within Alaska.
My name is Da-ka-xeen Mehner.
I was born and raised here in Fairbanks,
but I actually grew up in both Fairbanks and Anchorage.
I don't feel like I particularly have a medium,
but looking for work that addresses the issues of the day.
Now growing it up in Fairbanks and small cabins,
drawing was my general pastime.
So this is referred to as a moon mask,
kind of the face in the center
and the outside representing the moon.
I'll eventually get in some more detail
that shows the rays coming off of there.
It's made from yellow cedar
and it was a mask that I'd started a number of years ago.
You know, I am Tlingit and so I quite often defer back
to the black and red as primary and tertiary colors,
but sometimes I just like to play around
and see what colors will work with what.
I leave people with questions.
Hopefully they have a little more thoughts
about the world around us and have some maybe investigation
that they would like to do after seeing my work.
I feel like my work
really just represents my own perspective,
but I do, I guess enjoy examining power structures
in the world and reflecting on how those power structures
influence indigenous communities.
You know, that beginning exploration of drawing,
it was a place to find worlds outside
of the ones that I knew and I think the arts have a way
of transporting people, whether you're a maker or a viewer.
Teach at the University of Alaska Fairbanks
in the Native Arts Center.
It's a program that started in 1965 by Ronald Senungetuk,
so we're coming up on our 60th anniversary of the program.
It's a very unique program where we are able
to offer degrees in native arts in the BFA and MFA level.
The importance of the indigenous arts program
or the native arts program that we have at the university
really shows a commitment by the institution
that this form is valuable within an institutional program
to be able to share it in a way that is formalized.
I think it's very valuable
to be able to kind of pass on knowledge within this form,
but then also be able to give students a degree
that then they can move on into a professional career with.
I always tell people, "It's easy to teach technique."
"It's hard to teach creativity," right?
And so I think that's one of the keys in the program
is being able to unlock people's creativity,
and I'm not sure if I really teach creativity,
but how to unlock other people's creativity.
We've had students from around the state, of course,
we get a lot of students from Western Alaska,
Northern Alaska and the interior of Alaska.
We've had students from Southeast Alaska.
The program is fairly popular with international students,
so we get a lot of students
from Sweden and Norway and Japan.
Really interesting seeing
kind of maybe that global perspective
within the classroom experience.
A lot of our students or alumni go on
to just be practicing artists, you know,
effectively becoming a single owner business and working.
We've got artists that are showing all over Alaska right now
or alumni from the program that are showing all over Alaska
and sometimes out of state in Santa Fe,
across the United States in different exhibitions.
It's really interesting seeing how many students
that have left the program do become teachers themselves
and kind of this cyclical passing on of information
that I feel like the new generation
is so much more well equipped than I was.
There are many more opportunities now to study language,
there are many more opportunities to study dance forms,
there's so many more opportunities to study visual art forms
that I felt like when I was coming up,
unless you were working directly with an individual artist
as a master apprentice,
there weren't really many opportunities to take a course
and learn any of those things.
It's a moon mask with yellow cedar.
It was one I started a little while ago,
so it's nice to maybe revisit and come back to it.
I've got one eye cut in
and maybe I'd start working on cutting in the other eye.
Well, masks were traditionally worn in performance.
Early on in my career,
I saw very few people actually wearing them and using them.
But today I feel like most dance groups have masks
that they work with in their performance.
And so maybe the masks that I'm making are more,
they're really artwork that references a mask,
but really it's a piece of work that is not a mask,
if that makes any sense.
The native people have to be around native people.
That's when they get lost,
when they don't have contact with their own people,
'cause some people don't know how to deal
with all the hustle and bustle of town
when they come from the villages.
Originally, knitting wouldn't
have been a Alaska native traditional art.
It was something that would've been introduced
by first contact with the missionaries
and that kind of thing.
And it was picked up so well
because you could knit hats for your family,
mittens and glove.
These two ladies were at that first workshop in 1969.
They are all elders that are deceased now,
but they knit their whole lives for the cooperative
up until that point when they were not able to knit anymore.
Most of them live out in the different village areas
and they do the knitting in their own home
and they mail it back here
and then this wonderful lady helps to get it ready for sale.
And those two wonderful ladies
are the ones that helped sell it
to different people that come by and visit.
It started in 1969, Dr. John J. Teal was the founder,
saw that a lot of the people
were having to leave the village area
and they were losing their culture by doing that.
And he wanted to do something
where they could go ahead and work in their own home
and yet sell that product.
And he saw the wonderful hand work
that they were already doing.
They picked something
that was special to an area like this one
where the first workshop was held.
It was out on Nunavut Island
and it was about 1,200 years old.
They went to each area, they went ahead and did patterns
or based on something that was traditional
and special to that area.
Most of the people that live out in the villages,
there are not jobs available,
so they live subsistence lifestyle,
which means they live off the land.
They spend time catching fish in the summer, putting it up,
drying it, getting it ready for the freezer.
This is a map of Alaska
and the red and green are cooperative members are from,
the wild muskox are located.
And then the barns are where are the captive muskox.
Qiviut is a natural fiber,
a natural byproduct from the muskox.
They shed naturally each spring.
And so it wasn't an introduced animal, it was an animal
that was native to different areas of Alaska already.
And that was other thing that he wanted.
He wanted something that would be able
to utilize a local animal or an item
that the people could incorporate into their life
and yet still incorporate their life into that item.
So many of our patterns that our members
are based on traditional patterns or artifacts
of the area that they come from
that are very important to them and symbolize that area.
I first started to learn to knit,
I think in middle school, like at a club.
And then my mom taught me how to do this type of knitting.
I noticed just something to do,
meeting different people across the world,
some of my family from the villages
and catching up with them
and just working on crafts like this on the job.
I think started knitting for this co-op in the '80s,
and I started working here I think 2015.
- Yeah. - I like working here 'cause it's comfortable.
I get to meet people and I love doing my job.
I first was taught by my maternal grandmother how to knit
and crochet and I at first did more crocheting.
When I first started knitting,
I knit a baby like Barbie scarf that much
and then I put it down until I started working here
and that introduced knitting to me.
And I am like Sandra, I like knitting.
I find that it's soothing.
In fact, like I commented it's soothing enough some days
when it's hectic and I go home and knit,
I'll knit and it'll put me to sleep.
That's what's made the co-op a success
is the fact that again,
you can take knitting with you anywhere
and you can do it anywhere,
but in different village areas where we have members,
sometimes I think maybe they go
and talk to each other when they need help.
They can visit with one another if they're close.
But it's not a requirement,
it's not a group participation type activity.
It's very much can be a filling activity if you want.
I think there's newer members that are younger.
It's finding your own crafts or clothes,
things like that to have for yourself
or giving it away to friends or relatives.
We just talk about what's happened
or what we've seen that was interesting or funny
or what's just going on in our lives
while we're doing our crafts.
Yeah, I'm good.
So only certain women were able to weave.
You had to be chosen.
With many elders, you kind of learn not to ask why
and you just need to wait and see.
You just need to take in what they say
and follow what they say.
The answer will come, and she did, right?
When she saw me, she said, "She's the one."
And I remember her pointing at me like that.
"She's like, She's the one."
I take on a responsibility.
My Tlingit names are Kudeiyatoon and Kudataan Tlaa.
My English name is Darlene See.
I'm Raven Kaach. adi, Land Daughter
from the house Looking Out.
My mother is Tlingit and my father is Aleut,
and I'm a grandchild of the Chookaneidi
and the Wooshkeetaan,
the Brown Bear clan and the Shark clan.
The oldest form of weaving right over here,
Ravenstail weaving, that was lost
to our people about 200 years.
You know, and weavers would weave robes and tunics
and aprons for high cast people, used in ceremonies,
very important ceremonies.
The Ravenstail weaving is a geometric style of weaving
and a lot of the motifs that you see,
the weavings that you see are on basketry.
And so a lot of that is incorporated
into a different medium.
Instead of using spruce root, the medium,
and traditionally we use mountain goat wool.
And it got lost,
it was lost to our people or a number of reasons.
But then Chilkat weaving,
this right here is an example of Chilkat weaving,
and it was also for ceremonial purposes as well,
woven for that reason.
And Chilkat is the only weaving in the whole world
that you can weave a perfect circle in.
Not many people were doing Ravenstail for a while.
Probably because you can put more oral history on here,
you know, with various Chilkat designs.
Well, one of the things really special about Chilkat
is there's a lot of unsaid things weavers pass on
to other weavers, especially with Chilkat,
certain things that you must do
and many things that you should not do.
And it's really important with any type of weaving
or any kind of work, you really need to be in a great space
with your head and your heart,
'cause everything goes into your weaving from your hands,
with Chilkat especially.
Like when you first get up in the morning,
don't eat for a couple hours, just tea or water, coffee
and weave for at least a couple hours, two, three hours.
And then if you're hungry, you can eat.
There's many different things follow like that.
It's really important to continue making items available
for other indigenous people.
Yes, it's important to make money,
but it's also very important to lift up my uncle,
to lift up our clan together
and to treat our guests that were there
during our time of need.
I'm working on a Chilkat apron for an adult
or else a young child's robe.
I know traditionally you weren't supposed
to be weaving your own at oo,
which is gonna be at oo, clan property.
And I talked to a few elders about that, you know,
and with a full sized Chilkat robe could cost anywhere from,
I don't know, 60, $90,000 if not more.
There's a lot of work that goes into a Chilkat robe.
And a few elders had mentioned to me, yes,
traditionally you would hire the opposite clan
to be doing that for you, but it's okay it.
And weaving in sections here with Chilkat,
wherever there's a straight line here,
you're going to end up having a draw string.
What I mean by a draw string,
you'll have a string here that you can interlock.
And so whenever there's the black straight line area
is where you can have interlocks here.
Like here's a little draw string here
and I can pull it and it pulls the weaving together.
So you're weaving in sections.
So whatever you see flat straight lines,
the main formline, you can put a draw stringing in there.
And so I'm weaving on this section right here,
which has the claw right here, the black and white claw
and with the white and the black.
And here are the claw fingers here
coming over to the other motifs.
And there's interlocks along the way here and that I've got,
and so I can interlock, and so weaving in those sections.
And here's another interlock here with the border.
And see, just pull in it,
puts the weaving straight together, here, yep.
Will probably take a couple months.
Traditionally, you didn't really get black.
You kind of got a charcoal,
kind of maroonish black, I guess.
They would dye use natural colors
'cause all we had was in yellow wolf moss.
And you get that in British Columbia.
Our people traded and our people traded for wolf moss.
We don't have any in our area.
To get the deeper color, you needed to use urine.
And the darkest yellow, the best urine to get
is from like up to a nine month old baby.
There's some things that you just don't talk about,
you know, and to me a lot of those things were so enriching
and so confirming to my soul, you know,
you're connecting with, I really don't wanna say art forms,
but out of a lack of word,
you know, connecting with these art forms
that are connections to our past, our oral histories.
Some women will sing songs or you're going along
and you're talking to the tree people
and letting them know why you're there,
letting them know you're not gonna take more than you need
and you're not gonna waste anything.
With our culture, we believe everything
has a spirit, everything, animate and inanimate objects.
So here we're looking
at what we consider our healing kooteeyaa.
This one is representing both the Huna Tlingit people
and the National Park Service.
So we start with at the bottom,
Glacier Bay is our food basket.
So you see the basket with the sea otter, halibut,
fish, our seagull eggs.
And as we move up the kooteeyaa, you see the houses
that were being crushed by the advancing glaciers
that forced us out of our homeland,
and we scattered for many years
as our people left in their canoes.
As you go up the pole, you'll see there that on the one side
is Lituya Bay, the T'aakdeintaan people,
that was their homeland of Lituya Bay.
And they were washed outta Lituya Bay with tsunamis.
And so as they scattered for many years also,
we wandered looking for our new home.
Then you have the face of no spirit that has too many hands,
too many rules that has locked us out of our homeland,
the federal government.
And through the years, our ancestors
were going through some turbulent times, rough waters.
You see the tears of what they wanted.
It was the foods from home and the land of home.
And so you'll see
that we were walking back toward our homeland.
Then came a time in which the National Park Service
and Huna Tlingit people came to an understanding
and they got a paper understanding
that allowed us back into our homeland at times.
You'll see the waters are calming,
they're not calm yet, but they're calming.
And then we had an agreement
and a working relationship with the Huna Tlingit people
and the National Park Service to build Xunaa Shuka Hit,
our home now back in our homeland.
We all know what a chain and padlock is.
It was my way of trying to say that the federal government
has locked us out of our homeland,
has not allowed us the free access
that we always dream of having.
Yet it's very contemporary.
It's a way of sending the message
to whomever is looking at it.
Someday I hope to be able to unlock that padlock.
All of us know that we walk in the footprints
of our ancestors and our grandparents.
We are walking back toward our homeland.