The voyaging canoe "Hawai'iloa" arrived in Haines, Alaska, at 10 a.m. this morning after sailing east down Icy Strait from Hoonah, then taking a tow up Lynn Canal, a narrow waterway bordered by steep, jagged, snowcapped mountains. Haines (pop. 2,200) is the northernmost destination of the voyaging canoe. The crew was welcomed by Tlingits from four communities--Haines, Kluckwan, Whitehorse, and Skagway.

Haines is the hometown of Judson Brown, who was approached by his friend Herb Kawainui Kane, one of the founders of the Polynesian Voyaging Society, in 1990, about the possibility of purchasing two Alaskan logs to build "Hawai'iloa".

Brown introduced Kane to Byron Mallot, then CEO of Sealaska. Mallot, who had seen documentaries about Hokule'a, said he visualized spruce logs rising over Pacific Ocean swells as the hulls of a Hawaiian voyaging canoe and made the decision to donate the logs. "The "Hawai'iloa" project is in keeping with the mission of Sealaska to strengthen native cultures by looking to the past in order to find a direction for the future," Mallot explained at the welcoming ceremony.

Before leaving Hoonah on July 9, the crew of "Hawai'iloa" was given a tour of Glacier Bay National Park, west of Juneau, by four Tlingit elders. The trip was bittersweetfor the elders. One of them said it was a chance to revisit the sites of their childhood, when the Tlingits of Hoonah used to fish, hunt, and gather food in the area--their ancestral homeland before advancing glaciers drove them out. But the trip was a sad one, too, because the National Park Service prohibits hunting and gathering today, except by special permit.

Frank Williams, a full-blooded Tlingit who was born in Glacier Bay during a seagull egg gathering trip his parents made one summer, says that certain environmentalists oppose any human acitivity that will affect the wildlife and plantlife in the park. "But we lived here for 10,000 years or more, and the land was healthy. It's our tradition to protect all living things. We pray to the forest people before we take anything from their domain. It's only since the white man came that the environment has become endangered."

Williams says there is a bill before Congress to allow Tlingits to hunt, fish, and gather for subsistence in the area. To those who say that Tlingits should be allowed to hunt and fish only with traditional tools such as the bow and arrow, Williams says "That's like telling the tour operators who bring visitors to the National Park that they can only bring tourists in by canoe."

It took Williams over two years to get a permit to hunt two goats so his aunt could weave him a traditional tunic out of goat hair. It took him three days to find and shoot the two large goats needed for the tunic. Did he eat the meat? "Yes. But they were old goats and kind of tough." His aunt dyed the tunic in the traditional way, with dark brown made from hemlock bark, yellow from a moss, and blue-green made from boiling the wool with copper in urine.

Williams told me about a case pitting a Tlingit traditionalist and Park Service environmentalists. In October, 1992, Gregory O. Brown, Sr. (Tlingit name: Shaa-yakw-nook), shot a seal with a rifle upon the request of one of his uncles, who wanted the seal for a potlatch in honor of one of BrownÕs aunts. Seals are a traditional food for the Tlingit, and potlatches are considered religious ceremonies. The Park Service arrested Brown, confiscated the rifle and the seal, and charged him with taking a seal without a permit within the boundaries of Glacier Bay National Park. Brown at first asserted his native hunting and gathering rights, then religious freedom as grounds for dismissing the charges. After his lawyers questioned the right of the Park Service to enforce regulations on land it did not own below the mean high tide line in Glacier Bay, the U.S. Government dropped its prosecution of Brown at the end of 1993, not wishing to litigate the issue of ownership of submerged land in Glacier Bay at that time, although it continued to maintain it had the right to regulate all hunting and gathering within the boundaries of the national park.

Brown wanted the issues resolved, but could not find a lawyer to pursue his case. He wrote in a letter addressed to his "Hawaiian brothers and sisters": "I was given no help from all governmental entities such as the Tlingits and Haidas, Sealaska, BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs), Huna Totem, these people only offered to pay the fine for me. I think (and its only my opinion) that these entities have a compact with the government to assimilate us Tlingits. Assimilate is just another word for GENOCIDE." He signed the letter Shaa-yakw-nook, "Tlingit Warrior."