Indigenous Peoples Day brought several hundred Sitkans to share a meal, dance and music, and hear a panel discussion exploring Haa Ḵusteeyí or “Way of Life.”
Panelist Gabrielle Raven Hammock, a 17 year old artist from Des Moines, Washington, said she had only visited Sitka for the first time earlier this year for the 50th Anniversary of Shee Atiká, Sitka’s urban corporation.
Hammock designed the logo for the event. Visiting Sitka gave her an overwhelming sense of Haa Ḵusteeyí.
“It felt like family immediately,” she said. “And I think that’s what it means to me, to go from not knowing much about my culture and to just being welcomed with open arms, I think that’s what it truly means to be Native.”
Kh’asheechtlaa Louise Brady is a lifelong Sitkan, an activist for cultural preservation, and is well known statewide for her leadership with the Herring Protectors. Brady explained that she spent the early part of her life feeling defined by negative stereotypes, but she has found renewed strength in culture.
“I feel like I have spent… the last 40 years understanding that being a Tlingit woman is not defined by the bad, but it’s defined by the good,” said Brady. “It’s defined by my ancestors who fought, it’s defined by my mother who started a program called the Sitka Native Education Program 50 years ago, and it’s defined by the people who started teaching the language and the songs and the dances, even though they could have gotten in big trouble from the other clans. And that’s the reason we have so many of these songs and these dances, and that’s the reason we have to remember that we have a living culture. And when we have a living culture, that’s such a blessing. I hear sometimes ‘Women didn’t drum and women didn’t speak.’ But you know what? Women also didn’t vote. So you know what I tell people? If we have a culture, if we have traditions that are hurting people, let’s make new traditions.”
Panelist Naal x ak’w Tommy Joseph described finding Haa Ḵusteeyí through art. His mother was from a Coast Guard family, and his father was Lingít from Klawock. After the death of his father when he was 5, Joseph’s paternal grandmother moved nearby and strengthened his ties to culture. But it was in carving that he flourished.
“When we’d go visit with Grandma, that’s when we became Lingít,” said Joseph, “that’s when we learned about our Lingít, who we were, and then the rest of our time we’re on the other block (in my mother’s home), where we were back to being us. I mean, we were always us, but there weren’t any of the influences of the Native culture. But I found my way through the arts, because anywhere there was somebody carving or showing painting, or there was an outdoor exhibition of something – which in those days there weren’t too many – but I always found myself hovering over those kinds of things. And so every opportunity there was that came up with the culture, the Native arts, I was there.”
Yeidikook’áa Dionne Brady-Howard, introduced the dance program earlier in the event, and gave the crowd a lesson in Lingít, especially the transition away from the former pronunciation of Tlingit with a hard “k” sound that doesn’t exist in the language.
During the panel discussion, Yeidikook’áa expanded on this idea, in discussing the Sitka School Board’s decision last spring to rename Xóots Elementary, which means “brown bear,” from the original Baranof Elementary, which honored a Russian colonizer who battled the local Lingít. She said that modern Lingít culture is less about rewriting history, and more about restoring it.
“They were trying to put back some of what had been taken,” she said, “reentering that goodwill. Because they could have just said, ‘We want to rename it. We’ll rename it Sitka Elementary School. But a lot of the comments that came out of that were things like, ‘Okay, if we’re going to name it something Lingít, it needs to be something that’s easy for everybody to say.’ Nobody cared how easy english was for our ancestors. Nobody cared. And so realizing that there’s so much Eurocentrism left and that’s what we’re dealing with, and having strong allies in those chat threads, having strong allies in those meetings. You know, people said, ‘Well, what’s going to be next? Renaming the island?’ No, you renamed the island. It had a name. It was Shee. You renamed it. We’re not the ones who are rewriting history, you are. And we need allies when those conversations happen, when those comments happen.”
Listen to the full panel discussion:
Following the panel discussion, and audience questions, Sitka’s Indigenous Peoples Day celebration moved into breakout sessions for the rest of the evening, including a crash course in Lingít, Deer Calls, and Akutaq Making – and eating! – with Mt. Edgecumbe High School students.
