The Alaska Native Heritage Center is known for its exhibits and cultural programs that take place on its wooded campus on the outskirts of Anchorage, but the center also ventures out into the community with its Indigenous awareness training programs.
These workshops are in demand in November, when Alaska Native and Native American Heritage Month is observed.
Almost 700 students filled the auditorium at East Anchorage High School this month for a series of presentations about Alaska’s many different Native cultures and their values.
The training team from the Alaska Native Heritage Center had a warm reception from students.
“I love doing what we do here,” said Chris Delgado, the training and outreach manager for the Heritage Center.
Delgado says the programs are not just offered to schools but a variety of organizations.
“We have National Park Service. We’re working with the FBI. We are working with the United States Airforce,” he said. “We are able to customize the workshop to fit whatever your corporation, organization’s needs are.”
Delgado says the classes can be taught at the Heritage Center, off-campus, or even online. Delgado has praise for companies that invest in cultural awareness training.
“It says a lot about them and their companies,” Delgado said. “It’s part of what we call historical healing.”
Maureen Cronin, an academics and college prep coach at East High, is not surprised that companies want to invest in programs that raise their employees’ cultural awareness. She says cultural literacy is important everywhere, but especially at East, which has students from fifty different cultures and is one of the most diverse schools in the nation.
“It’s really important to demystify cultural generalities, and it’s important to develop cultural understanding, “Cronin said.
There’s also cultural appreciation, which Delgado says the Heritage Center tries to build by showcasing the what he calls the genius of Indigenous culture, or “indigi-nuity.”
“People aren’t familiar with our waterproof stitching,” said Delgado about the use of seal intestines and grass to make traditional raingear. He says Indigenous science is incorporated in the process.
“The Yupiit actually knew to take a blade of grass, and to sew between each layer, as they’re creating the rain gear,” Delgado said. “Once the rain hit that blade of grass, the grass would expand and be even more waterproof.”
“That’s how we survived out in the Arctic, back in the day,” says Colton Paul, a six-time gold medalist at the Arctic Winter Games.
Paul demonstrates traditional Native games at the Heritage Center workshops. He says the athletes and their feats of strength and endurance epitomize “indigi-nuity.” He remembers being inspired by Native Youth Olympics athletes as a child.
“They can jump so high They can kick way above their heads. They can jump so far,” Paul said. “I remember when I was a little kid, I would see these other kids kicking way above their heads, I would think, ‘That is right above the stars. That’s so high.’”
Delgado says it makes him feel good that his team of young staffers enjoys going out into the community and sharing their culture. He says it shows that cultural healing is taking place.
“So, part of my job is to pass down some of the history that I know to the next generation,” Delgado said. “I always tell the next generation, ‘You guys are in the driver’s seat now. I’m in the back seat. I have gray hair. I tell them though, it’s comfortable in the back seat.’”
Delgado says this transition didn’t happen overnight. He says the Heritage Center has invested a lot in its young people over the years, with staffers like Amber Shetter, who started out as an intern at the age of 14.
Shetter says the internship gave her a chance to connect to her Yup’ik culture. Today at the age of 26, she’s excited to give presentations at places like East High, where 15 percent of the students are Alaska Native.
“When I was in high school, I never had this opportunity to learn about my culture,” Shetter said, “So, I think it’s awesome.”
At East High students got an overview of about a dozen different cultural groups and were shown art and handcrafted items – like the seal oil lamp, which was used in several Alaska Native cultures.
Although Sakkaaluk Panningona is Inupiat, he shared an Unangan story from the Aleutian Islands about how it was traditional for a young man to shape a seal oil lamp out of stone, light it, and give it to the woman he hoped to marry.
“If she accepted his proposal, she would continue the light, let it keep going,” Panningona told the students. “If she turned him down, she’d just turn it off.”
For students like Jenyse Osborne, it’s a story she’ll never forget.
“When they didn’t have like cell phones to text each other, they’d give each other lights. And be like, hey. Like. I’m finding you, like, really interesting,” Osborne said. “Like you just are so pretty and everything.”
Osborne, who is Black and Native American, says cultural exchanges are a way to share beautiful ideas.
The cultural awareness trainers at the Heritage Center say they’ve noticed that when people gather to learn about another culture, they also learn to build better relationships with each other.
