Woven Peoples and Place: Húus dáng hl kíngsaang (I’ll see you again)

Earlier this summer, Clara Mooney and Addy Mallott joined the Sustainable Southeast Partnership (SSP) as storytelling and engagement interns hosted with the Sitka Conservation Society through the Sealaska Internship Program. Started in the ‘80s, the Sealaska Internship Program exists to uplift shareholders and shareholder descendants pursuing postsecondary education by providing access to meaningful career experiences, supporting their goals and vision, and fostering community among peers. Since its start nearly 400 individuals have moved through the program with many landing careers at Sustainable Southeast Partnership partners including Sealaska, Tlingit and Haida, Spruce Root, and more.

In 2024, more than seven partners of the SSP hosted internship experiences performing a wide breadth of work in everything from accounting and composting, to political research and salmon stream surveying.

Mooney is Eagle Beaver, Haida and Blackfoot from Seattle. She is currently a senior at Stanford University where she is studying environmental science and Native studies. Mallott is Kwaashk’i Kwáan from the Fort House of Yakutat and lives in Juneau. Both joined a group of fellows, interns and Sealaska staff on Prince of Wales Island earlier this summer for “Back to Lands Week” — a field trip to help participants gain a deeper understanding of the regional Native corporation’s commitment to traditional lands and the work of its partners. For Mallott, who grew up in Juneau, this opportunity was a rich beginning to an exploration of other communities in Southeast through film photography, a method that allows a slower, more intentional look at the world. For Mooney, who grew up in Seattle, but who has family ties to Hydaburg, this trip was an opportunity to deepen her relationship to land, culture and ancestors.

With an analog camera and journals in tow, the two journeyed to Kasaan, Klawock, Craig and Hydaburg.

These are reflections of the people they met and the experiences they had along the way.

Kasaan’s carving house

Everyone we discussed our visit to Kasaan with had the same thing to say: “That place is special.” Under 60-foot totems and alongside breaching pods of killer whales, it became clear that this was the very magic they spoke of — a magic that could only be fostered in a land so charged with ancestral power. Our arrival to Kasaan’s carving house was met with greetings from a totem representing our cyclical connection to our past, present and future. Nang K’adangáas Eric Hamar, a Haida carver who was one of the totem’s creators, taught us the importance of our totems and the land that shares their roots. “A totem isn’t finished until it is standing up,” highlighted by the Haida translation of “totem’gyáa’ aang” being “standing up.”

In learning that a key part of a totem’s life and birth centered around it standing, what could it mean for a totem to lay dormant? Beside the Kasaan totem pole, lay a totem that had previously been stolen and only recently returned. Finally in its rightful home, moss creeped into the seeps and cracks of this elder tree. No longer standing, with a young tree sprouting from a bear’s ear, this piece is being actively reclaimed by the land. And thus is the lifecycle of a totem: from the land we raise them and to the land they return — sprouting the next generation of totem from its core.

Around the region, and with a particular focus on Prince of Wales Island, partners within the Sustainable Southeast Partnership are working to ensure the longevity of totem pole carving through arts programming and land management strategies that inventory, understand, and seek to protect the long-term health of old-growth red and yellow cedar trees.

Salmon Restoration in Klawock

Led by Tlingit and Haida, Alaska Youth Stewards (AYS) is a partner-rich regional program that uses an experiential learning approach to provide hands-on natural resource jobs, community service and cultural stewardship experiences. The Prince of Wales AYS crew passes buckets of sediment from the forest to the bank at a salmon stream restoration project. Leading the crew this day, the coordinator of the Klawock Indigenous Stewards Forest Project and SSP Community Catalyst with Shaan Seet Inc., Quinn Aboudara teaches the AYS crew proper techniques for improving salmon habitat.

Crews have added logs to a salmon stream outside Klawock, providing shade and pools for salmon to rest and hide in. In a new-growth forest more logs are needed to achieve the same effect that old-growth tree falls have in healthy salmon stream ecosystems. As our changing climate causes weather and water to warm, shade will become even more important for salmon who are impacted by increasing water temperature.

Healthy salmon streams and healthy forests cannot exist without one another. As streams wind and bend, the bank erodes, recruiting trees and debris that fall into the water, adding more features that benefit fish. In return, the bodies of the salmon who travel up the streams to spawn fertilize the trees. Rich with nutrients accumulated at sea, salmon sustain the bears, birds, fungi and trees of a healthy forest ecosystem. Our seas, streams and lands are in a deep reciprocal relationship of nourishing one another.

When this forest was logged, old-growth trees were cut down, leaving the stream with limited shade and with few large trees to recruit for fish habitat. Fish returns and escapement plummeted. The new-growth forest that has grown back in the roughly 40 years since the area was logged, contains very little undergrowth. The Sʼáxtʼ(devils club) and other shrubs that normally provide shade to fish cannot grow or find light amongst the tight-knit canopy of densely growing second-growth forest.

Sometimes in the dark of the new-growth forests it was easy to let the gravity of colonial pressures and histories weigh upon you. It’s hard to escape the pit that forms upon seeing the ancestral remains of giant trees that used to dominate the island. Now their stumps provide the foundation for new generations of spruce and alders. Yet medicine and healing also grows in these forests in insurmountable abundance. From the repopulating devils club, to the increasing rates of salmon return, to the laughter and joy from the Alaska Youth Stewards crew, our peers, and U.S. Forest Service leaders, one can understand how to hold these emotions in tandem. Balance. Putting hope and action together. Trusting that rebirth and regrowth is not only possible, but necessary.

The Shores of Howkan

The shores of Howkan were lined with towering red trees, creating a wall of browns and greens to juxtapose the soft waves crashing against the rocky shoreline. K’uyáang Ben Young, Raven of the Yahgw’láanaas Clan and Xaad Kíl language speaker and teacher, led us into the treeline, the wall of trees opening like a portal into lush understories and embracing cedars. The air was electric with intention and history, retired totems almost completely consumed by moss and dew, by life and growth. We introduced ourselves to the land and to the spirits who had been on this land before us.

Over a century ago the villages of Howkan, Sukkwan and Klinkwan dissolved in order to form a school in the new village of Hydaburg. Today, the villages hold gentle reminders of the lives our grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents lived. Beyond seaweed forests we gathered on the barnacle-covered coastline, singing Haida songs to greet our ancestors. With music in our ears and the drumbeat in our hearts, there was no denying we were surrounded by family.

When the three Haida villages consolidated and relocated to Hydaburg, families left parts of their lives on the islands. Walking the shore of Howkan, glimpses at life here are hidden amongst rocks on the beach. Trade beads, buttons and shards of pottery are still abundant reminders of how our ancestors remain embedded in this landscape.

I’ll See You Again

On the roads that wove throughout the island we covered so much ground. Each bend of road brought the deep ties between the fish, trees, people and stories of this place into clarity. Each SSP partner, AYS youth and community member we met was so connected and dedicated to each other, to cultural strength, and to this place.

Our people have forever known this interconnectedness between us and our world as the most basic of truths. We’ve known how to care for this oneness and even when colonialities try to tear apart and disentangle, and make us forget, we are so good at noticing the reminders around us.

From the way an adze fit so well in our hands, the eagerness of the youth stewards to learn and mend the forests, the wisdom Delores Churchill radiated and the strong prideful voice Ben’s son used as he sang in Xaat Kíl to his ancestors at Howkan, it was abundantly clear that we never forgot and these ties never left.

Our days had been fast, quick like the whitewater that foamed in the boat’s wake. It wasn’t until our last morning that a quiet had washed over the group, overwhelmed with reflections that hadn’t had a moment to register. One by one the Sealaska interns in our group boarded seaplanes that would take them on their next adventure; to some the trip was a mere hop to Juneau, for others a series of several layovers on their way to Iceland or the UK. Goodbye’s were hard, so we didn’t say goodbye. Instead, to the land and the people we whispered a “Húus dáng hl kíngsaang” (“I’ll see you again”).

The Sealaska Internship Program exists to uplift shareholders and shareholder descendants pursuing post-secondary education by providing access to meaningful career experiences, supporting their goals and vision, and fostering community among peers. To learn more about the program visit sealaska.com/careers.

• “Woven Peoples and Place” is the monthly column of the Sustainable Southeast Partnership (SSP). SSP is a dynamic collective impact network uniting diverse skills and perspectives to strengthen cultural, ecological, and economic resilience across Southeast Alaska. Follow along at sustainablesoutheast.net; on Linkedin, Instagram and Facebook at @sustainablesoutheast; and on YouTube @SustainableSoutheastAK.