Angoon, Alaska / July 2, 1995

Photo Below: Lilikala Kame'eleihiwa Accepts a Talking Stick from a Tlingit Elder

"Hawai'iloa" arrived in Angoon, Alaska, a native Tlingit community of about 750 people at 1 p.m. today. Angoon is southwest of Juneau. The crew was greeted by elders and dancers at dockside.

The first stop for some of the crew was the garbage dump for sightseeing. Bears hang out among the wrecked cars, soda cans, and smoldering garbage. There were nine bears there--five adults and four cubs--sitting on their haunches or lumbering around on al l fours. One adult had his snout in a spam can. According to Fred, Jr., son of the village spokeperson of the Raven/ Beaver clan, bears began coming around the dump a few years ago when there was a shortage of berries, and have stayed around town ever since.

Two bears were roaming through town yesterday. Seventeen hundred-square-mile Admiralty Island, on which Angoon is the only permanent community, has one of the largest concentrations of brown bears in the world. The bears look friendly, almost silly, but t hey have been known to attack people. Fred says that he cannot recall a bear mauling on the island, but he is apprehensive since the "garbage dump" bears, as he calls them, are no longer afraid of people.

The wildlife is closer to everyday life in this sparsely populated region. Bald eagles and ravens are everywhere. On the way to Angoon, "Hawai'iloa" was towed past a large pod of spouting, breaching humpback whales in Frederick Sound. These whales, which spend their winters in warmer waters, such as those around the Hawaiian islands, congregate in the inland passages of Alaska during the summer.

The various animals of the region are represented in the highly stylized art of the native Alaskans, and are an integral part of identity, with each person belonging either to the Raven or the Eagle subdivision of the tribe, and then to a clan identified by its totem, such as the Beaver or the Frog, the gentler animals of the Raven moiety, or the Killer Whale or the Bear, the more ferocious animals of the Eagle moiety.

Angoon is one of the more conservative villages in Southeast Alaska. Twenty-five years ago, the elders of the village were opposing development of the island, including a dock for the Alaska State Ferry which runs between Juneau and Ketchikan. The village was destroyed in 1882, after Tlingits demanded reparations for a shaman who was killed by an exploding harpoon gun on a Northwest Trading Company vessel. More recently the younger natives have been more open to some development, and a ferry dock has been built.

The Hawaiian crew was warmly received and greeted as cousins by the Tlingit community, as has been the case at each of the five stops so far in Southeast Alaska. Crew members were escorted to the community center to be introduced to their host families. A potlatch celebrating the arrival of the canoe will be held tonight.

Crew member Brad Cooper, a teacher of Hawaiian studies at Kamehameha Schools, was hosted by Sherene Hull, a Kamehameha School alumni and an elementary school teacher in Angoon. The meeting was a reunion of sorts. During a distance learning TV program broa dcast live from Hawai'i during the 1995 voayge of "Hawai'iloa" to the Marquesas, Cooper spoke about Polynesian voyaging with Hull's students and answered their questions about life on the canoe.

Two days ago in Kake, when "Hawai'iloa" arrived at 10 p.m., seventeen vessels, including a single-hull fiberglass canoe built from a traditional Tlingit design, and a 55 foot seine boat carrying the Kake community dancers came out to meet it in choppy sea under a grey twilit sky. A cedar bonfire was blazing on the beach, a traditional sign that the visitors were welcome and that there was food and housing available on shore. The welcome ceremony lasted until 1 a.m.

Tomorrow, "Hawai'iloa" will leave for Sitka, Alaska, at 5 a.m. and will spend the fourth of July there. The canoe is on its way to Juneau for a July 14 celebration of the accomplishments of "Hawai'iloa", which was built from spurce logs donated by Sealask a, a corporation owned by the tribes Southeast Alaska. Sealaska is headquarted in Juneau.