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Photo: Alaska Native Heritage Center. (Skvader / Wikimedia)
This Friday, a special event is being held in Anchorage that will bring together former boarding school students, researchers, and others for a day of remembrance and reflection.
Called “Moving Beyond Boarding Schools Summit: Towards Truth and Healing”, the event will be moderated by National Native News anchor Antonia Gonzales. For her, the issue strikes home.
“My mom went to boarding school hundreds of miles away. Having her mouthed washed out with soap for speaking her Navajo language. Going there and experiencing the trauma of having to cut her hair, which you know in Native culture is a big thing, with her long beautiful hair. And she tells stories about just how traumatic that was.”
The Alaska Native Heritage Center and Koahnic Broadcast Corporation, which owns National Native News, are co-hosting the event.
While members of the press are welcome to attend, recording will not be allowed for a four-hour block in the afternoon.
“We do have people who are going to be in attendance who are traditional healers, culture bearers, elders. So there are a lot of people there to offer support, but also to allow people space so that they can feel like they can share openly.”
The boarding school era is a painful one for many Alaska Natives and Indigenous communities.
Both government-run schools and those operated by churches worked to remove Native culture and practices, and accounts of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse have surfaced in the years since they operated.
Reine Pavlik. (Courtesy Alaska Native Heritage Center / Facebook)
Skin sewing, or hide sewing, and beadwork are vital art forms in Southeast Alaska’s Lingít culture.
Reine Pavlik of Yakutat in rural Alaska is blending those art forms with contemporary style.
As Alaska Public Media’s Cadence Cedars reports, Pavlik sees it as a way to resist the pressure on Indigenous artists to modernize their work.
Reine Pavlik sits on a bed next to a large collection of her latest work.
There’s a pair of jeans with seal skin flare, a women’s suit made of deer skin and seal hide and many of the pieces include ornate beading. beading a straight line is really hard.
She holds up a pair of hand-sewn moccasins.
“This pair of moccasins is made with deer and moose skin.”
She turns them over, revealing beadwork on the back.
(Courtesy alaskasoles / Instagram)
The letters read “Land Back” in an Old English typeface, which is a message for the world we live in today.
Pavlik says she grew up in Yakutat surrounded by artists.
She says she first learned from her mother how to sew items like pillowcases, but few members of her family practiced skin sewing on animal hides like sea otter and moose.
So Pavlik learned from her aunt, Jennie Wheeler.
“Making moccasins really was a way to connect to my family and my ancestors.”
Now Pavlik’s community knows her for her beadwork and skin-sewn garments.
She says her art is inspired by her Lingít heritage.
“Using the traditional materials and using it in a modern way feels like I’m honoring my ancestors but I’m also modernizing some of the ideas that people have attached to traditional materials.”
And she says she tries to only use materials from donations or thrift stores.
“It’s something that our ancestors would do. They’d use what is near us and so I felt like that was a good way to honor them.”
And next, she says she wants to explore new ways to pass on her skills to the next generation.
The Carolyn Lewis Attneave House, home of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research. (Courtesy Stanford University)
And on this day in 2019, Stanford University’s Serra House was renamed after Carolyn Lewis Attneave, a member of the Delaware Tribe.
She was a globally-recognized scholar and psychologist who is seen as a major figure in creating the field of Native American mental health.
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