KNBA News for March 11th, 2016
Native Leaders Urge Alaska Delegation on Supreme Court
By Daysha Eaton, KBBI
Thursday, Alaska Native leaders held a press call urging Alaska’s senators, Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, to give a fair hearing and a timely vote to President Barack Obama’s forthcoming Supreme Court nomination.
Jacqueline Pata, Executive Director of the National Congress of American Indians, said leaving the seat empty could harm Native people.
“Tribes are affected by the federal courts to a greater degree than almost any other group in the country. So it would not be good for Native people and our tribal governments if the Supreme Court is caught in a 4-4 tie for the next two years,” said Pata.
Payta pointed out that the court regularly hears cases involving subsistence on federal public lands, protection of children under the Indian Child Welfare act and tribal programs under the Indian Self-Determination Act. She said that important legal questions could be held in limbo if the seat is left unfilled.
Traditional Canoe in Progress at Sitka Park
By Brielle Schaeffer, KCAW
As part of the National park Service’s centennial, the Sealaska Heritage Institute has commissioned a traditional canoe. For the next few months carvers will be working at Sitka National Historical Park.
Carving a canoe takes lots of trial and error. It’s kind of like a metaphor for life.
Just ask master carver Steve Brown. He says he learned how to do it through lots of mistakes.
“A person could think up other ways to do it but we found over the years generally speaking the old timers had it figured out and they did it their way for a number of reasons and you don’t necessarily know what all those reasons are until you do it that way. So we can think up other techniques to make that work but they might not be as efficient in the big picture as in the old, traditional way,” said Brown.
He’s teaching his apprentices Tommy Joseph, Jerrod and Nick Galanin, of Sitka, and T.J. Young of Hydaburg, how to add by taking away. This 5,000-pound, 28-foot red-cedar log is being transformed into a boat, one wood chip at a time.
But there’s more to it than carving. The artists also use a technique called steaming, once the bottom of the boat is carved and the inside is hollowed out. Here’s Jerrod Galanin:
“We’re going to fill the boat up with water and we’re going to have a huge fire and we’re going to put in rocks and get them red hot. Once they’re red hot you put them in the water inside the boat and we’ll keep it covered. It’s basically steaming. It allows the wood to bend. We’re going to widen up the sides of the boat,” said Galanin.
That method will be able to stretch the wood more than a foot. Galanin says he wanted to learn how to make this type of canoe because it is so special to the region.
“Tlingit people, Haida people are tied to the land and this was our technique, this is our methods. We utilize what’s around us and this is our style of boat and you can’t go anywhere else in Alaska and build this kind of boat,” said Galanin.
Apprentice Young says he wants to learn the craft because it’s so important to his culture.
“Sometimes you have to stop and look back in order to move forward,” said Young.
Brown has been carving canoes for decades, something he started learning on the Makah Indian Reservation in Washington State. He says he often gets asked how a non-Native learned the art of canoe carving. To answer that question, he likes to tell a story about working with a young Native American man.
“He said some of the people in his community had asked him how come you decided to work with a white man. He said it’s true historically white people were largely responsible for the unraveling of our culture. And there for it’s right for some of them to put it back together. I’m attempting to help put it back together,” said Brown.
He’s learning from the process, too.
Sealaska Heritage Institute donated the red-cedar log from Prince of Wales Island. It was the best tree for the job, Brown says, but it got a big crack when it fell to the ground. The carvers have to cut out the split part in the center and add new wood.
“A person can get spoiled working on really nice trees so it’s good to know how to deal with one that isn’t so perfect,” Brown.
The crack will add time to the process but the carvers hope to be done in May.