In honor of Black History Month, KCAW’s Tash Kimmell is exploring what it means to be Black in a small Alaska town. In part two of our series, “Black in Sitka,” Kimmell meets with city worker and local musician Christian Jensen.
“My name is Christian. I’m 28. I work for the city here at Harrigan. I’ve lived in Sitka, most of my life. I grew up here, went to grad school here and then moved away for about nine years and have been back just a little over a year. Just the the people and arts community here is fabulous. The arts community basically helped raise me in this town, and started me off on an awesome path. And so like, I wanted to move back to contribute. And then also my family is still here. And so that’s a major reason I’m back as well.”
Obviously, you grew up here. But how do you think being black in Alaska, or being black in Sitka might be different than other places in the US?
“When you grow up in Sitka, yeah, we call it the bubble growing up, because even though there’s not a ton of Black people here, there is a lot of different ethnicity, and there’s a lot of Native culture, a lot of Filipino culture. And so comparing that to where I used to live, where I would stand out far more than here, I think that’s a huge, huge factor. I think my experience would probably be a little bit different because I was adopted. I didn’t grow up in a Black household, so I didn’t have the whole cultural aspect. So a lot of times for me, I felt like really out of place because a lot of people have their culture, like if you’re Indigenous, or if you’re Tlingit, you have your whole family group here, you have your culture here. And so for me, I always felt like a little bit displaced not knowing who I was, what I should feel like, how I should react to certain things — not having a kind of like a baseline, if that makes sense. You know, there are issues in this town, but at the same time, there’s a lot of good people. And most the time, at the end of the day, everybody’s gonna help everybody, you know. It’s how a small community works.”
I was raised by a single white parent. And when I went to college, I think I wanted to explore my blackness more and, like, try to understand that part of me more. Did you ever come to that?
“Yes. It’s an ongoing process for me. I think it is for a lot of people who don’t grow up in their cultural native background or whatever. When I first moved away, it took a little while for me to lkind of figure out like who I was my first full year of school. I went to seminary, and so I didn’t have a lot of interaction with people of my ethnicity. That was a little bit difficult. But then I ended up switching to art school. And that’s when I had a big shift for me, especially because music is such a big part of my life, just learning about cultural aspects, especially like roots music, and gospel music. The deeper you go, the more you can connect with your past self, if that makes sense, or your ancestors, or people who came before, you know? We are out here and we have love for our community. And we want to see Sitka grow in many ways, including diversity-wise. This is a small community and the more we can realize that we can work together to get stuff done, the better it’s gonna be. We’re all just living on a rock. We’re all out here in the storm.”
KCAW’s “Black in Sitka” series is inspired by the Rasmuson Foundation’s “Black in Alaska” storytelling project. For more information visit the “Black in Alaska” website.
Tash Kimmell is a Report For America Corps Member.
