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Sitka, Alaska / July 4, 1995 Photo Below: The Volcano L'ux; the Pacific Ocean lies Beyond
The Tlingit name for Baranof Island was Shee. Sitka is an anglicized version of "Shee atika," meaning "on the ocean side of Shee." Elder Mark Jacobs, Jr., spoke at the welcoming ceremony of the shared seafaring heritage of the Tlingit and the Hawaiians. According to one tradition, a voyager named Kachachgook was blown off course during a storm and landed in Hawai'i. After resupplying his canoe there, he returned to SE Alaska with his paddlers, navigating by the stars and bringing with him a never-before-seen hollow plant--possibly bamboo. His first sign of landfall was smoke from the volcano L'ux (Mt. Edgecumbe), which is no longer active. According to Jacobs, coconut husk fiber has been found in some Tlingit artifacts. While western scholars claim the coconut was brought over by Captain Cook, Jacobs believes the fibers came from ancient contacts between the Tlingit and the Hawaiians. Nels Lawson of the Eagle-Wolf clan says that the Tlingit once traveled and traded from Juneau to Baja California in their cedar canoes. After Western contact, the arts of canoe building, along with the people and culture of the Tlingits, began dying out. Although Lawson's uncle has carved a 50-foot canoe from a huge cedar tree towed up to Sitka from British Columbia, the canoe was done for display only at the city's cultural center. The canoe was not "spread" using a traditional technique in which the ced ar hull was filled with water and heated to a boil with hot stones in order to soften the wood and allow the carver to widen the beam to make the canoe more stable. Lawson has been trying to get the Tlingit community to buy a fiberglass replica of a traditional canoe, which he plans to use to teach students both about their seafaring heritage and about teamwork. Hopefully, the visit of the "Hawai'iloa" will help stir local interest in such projects. Lawson has been pushing for Native Studies and Language courses in the local schools as well. He says that currently the primary means of educating young people in the culture is an after-school program run by the Alaskan Native Brotherhood. Lawson is dis appointed by the fact that young Tlingits of today are dependent on MacDonald's and Subway sandwiches and no longer know much about how to use the resources of the land and sea around them for survival, even though many of the resources are still availabl e. He says it would take a year of hunting, fishing, and gathering to show students the annual cycle of food production in traditional times. Lawson is one of the Tlingits hosting "Hawai'iloa" crew members during their stay in Sitka. Today crew members participated in the July Fourth Parade through downtown Sitka, performing a haka, or dance, shirtless in the 56 degree weather, to the delight o f the crowd. Tomorrow afternoon at 5 p.m., the canoe will depart for Hoonah, a native community about 150 miles from Sitka through Peril Strait and other inland passages. The canoe will stop in Poison Bay overnight and arrive in Hoonah on July 6 for a three day stay, before continuing on to Haines and Juneau. |
After a week in the inland waters of SE Alaska, "Hawai'iloa" was greeted by ocean swells as it arrived in the city of Sitka on the Pacific Coast of Baranof Island on the afternoon of July 3.