Dozens of stalls lined the Atnané Hít Arts Plaza in Juneau, the tables piled with colorful beads, fur, bone and shell jewelry, usually in sets of two.
Brittany Woods-Orrison wandered the market with a couple of friends, looking over the items laid out on each table. She said buying from Indigenous makers generates wealth that stays in Alaska.
“You’re keeping the abundance in the community,” she said. “And then you start building a connection with the people you have art from.”
Earrings, especially with traditional materials or complex beadwork, are emblems of contemporary Indigenous fashion, connectedness and identity.
And last week, more than 60 artists showed up in Juneau to sell their jewelry at Celebration, a days-long event that uplifts the survival and persistence of Lingít, Haida and Ts’msyen cultures. Some attendees saved up for years to buy earrings for themselves and loved ones.
Woods-Orrison is from Rampart, or Dleł Taneets, a village on the Yukon River. After traveling from Fairbanks, where she lives now, she was being thoughtful about adding to her earring collection. She said there was a time in her life when she would spend more than $400 on a piece.
Now, her monthly expenses are higher, so she was buying less and choosing carefully. She wanted to find pieces for young people in her family that they could pass down.
“Gifting is more important now, too,” Woods-Orrison said. “I’m like getting to my auntie age, it’s time to start buying the nieces and nephews their inheritance pieces.”
And, of course, the earrings look good. She said they can be an icebreaker for meeting other Native people outside Alaska, too.
“I always joke it’s a Bat Signal for all the Natives when we’re traveling in big cities. ‘Oh, where are you from? Where’d you buy those?’” Woods-Orrison said.
Across the plaza, Cayla McCutcheon stood behind a booth covered in earrings made from hand-smithed metal hoops with tiny macrame designs in bright-colored thread. Earrings on display ranged from $50 to more than $100.
She came from Sitka, and it was her first time selling at Celebration. Making jewelry is McCutcheon’s full time job.
“This is like my first Celebration market,” she said. “So I don’t know how this will impact my year-round sales, but I would say that markets in general make up like 40% of my sales, so it’s a pretty, pretty big amount.”
McCutcheon said she started weaving micro-macrame for fun, but the business is in her blood.
“My mom was a jeweler growing up, and she always contributed to our household income by making art,” she said. “And she was like, ‘If you could turn this into earrings, you’ll make a lot of money.’”
McCutcheon has been selling jewelry full-time for seven years. She said she hired a babysitter to watch her 2-year-old daughter for 10 hours a week so she could make as many earrings as possible in the months before Celebration. Outside of those hours, she stays up after her daughter’s bedtime and weaves.
She said the earring industry is huge in Southeast Alaska.
“I don’t think my business would be as successful as it is if I lived anywhere else in the world,” she said.
Earrings are part of everyday life here, McCutcheon said.
“You’ll see somebody out on the boat in a sweatshirt and sweatpants and Xtratufs wearing, like, caribou-tufted, beaded dentalium earrings,” she said. “Or like big bougie dangly Ravenstail.”
And all over the market shoppers were carefully picking through the stalls, noting which they planned to come back to.
Alaska Skaflestad held a bold pair of earrings to her ears: long, white ermine pelts, with chains and shells sewn in.
She spoke with the artist and seller Diamond Williams, who explained the cultural significance of ermine, the small mammal with a camouflage coat.
“Back in the day, our warriors used to wear it on our armor, and they had like a significance of like disappearing,” Williams said.
“I might just disappear into the night,” Skaflestad said.
“Kind of wear them as a statement piece, to be seen,” Williams said.
“Yeah, very much so. They’re beautiful,” Skaflestad said.
Williams is from Juneau but lives in Anchorage. She travels across the Western United States selling earrings at Native markets. She said she needs to earn at least a couple thousand dollars to make the trip to Celebration pay off financially.
Her customer Skaflestad came to Celebration from Hoonah. She said she couldn’t make it last time, so she had more time to save money to spend at the market.
“So happy I can finally make it. Brought all my money,” she said.
She bought the ermine earrings for herself, which cost $250, but she wasn’t done shopping. She wanted to buy gifts for family members, too.
“It’s very sentimental when you buy something that’s handmade, and then from a local artist that it’s their living, and then you get to share it with your friend,” Skaflestad said.
Williams said she earned enough on the first day of Celebration alone to make the trip to Juneau from Anchorage worth it.