Alaska

U.S. Navy plans apologies to Southeast Alaska villages for century-old attacks • Alaska Beacon

Published

3 months ago

September 16, 2024

U.S. Navy plans apologies to Southeast Alaska villages for century-old attacks • Alaska Beacon

Two Tlingít villages in Southeast Alaska will receive apologies for wrongful military action from the U.S. Navy this fall.

The first of those apologies will take place in Kake this weekend, where U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Mark B. Sucato will acknowledge the harms of a bombardment in 1869. An apology in Angoon is scheduled for Oct. 26, the 142nd anniversary of the 1882 bombardment.

Navy Environmental Public Affairs Specialist Julianne Leinenveber said it was determined that the military actions were wrongful because they resulted in loss of life, loss of resources, and inflicted multigenerational trauma on the affected communities.

“The pain and suffering inflicted upon the Tlingit people warrants this long overdue apology,” she wrote in an email.

Tlingit people have asked the U.S. government to apologize for decades. Leinenveber said the U.S. responded in the last few years with planning discussions at the highest levels of military leadership and the federal government about how to issue a substantive, meaningful apologies in a culturally appropriate manner. Lately, she wrote, military relationships with Alaska Native clans brought the matter to the attention of Navy leadership, who coordinated with the Office of the Secretary of Defense to formally apologize for the bombardments.

“The Navy will be issuing this apology because it is the right thing to do, regardless of how much time has passed since these tragic events transpired,” she wrote.

Joel Jackson, the president of the Organized Village of Kake, said the apologies are meaningful to the community even after a century.

“It’s a long time coming,” he said. “Hopefully, through this apology, we can start healing from the wrongs that were committed against us.”

Jackson said he is particularly concerned with the effects of intergenerational trauma, which he said he sees in his community today. The Navy apology will specifically acknowledge the U.S. government’s responsibility for that trauma.

Jackson said the military history of the event is not an accurate accounting of what happened. Many accounts refer to the bombardments as the Kake Wars.

“We never did go to war with them,” he said. “They attacked our communities.”

Military action in Kake

There are different accounts of the military events in Kake in 1862. Some refer to the events as a bombardment, while others refer to them as the Kake Wars.

What goes without much dispute is that a U.S. Navy vessel, the USS Saginaw, totally destroyed three village sites and two forts in the area of Kake in the winter. Soldiers then burned the villages and destroyed food and canoes. By all accounts, the destruction led to “many deaths.”

Descriptions of the events that precipitated the bombardment differ. An account from William S Dodge, one of two mayors of Sitka under the provisional government, printed in the Annual Report of the Department of the Interior, recounts that two Alaska Native men were killed by a sentry in Sitka when they were unaware there was an order not to leave the village there. Afterward, men from Kake killed two colonizers in retaliation, which caused the war, Dodge wrote.

A forthcoming book from Zachary R. Jones, Ph.D., is similar to this account, with the detail that a Kake clan leader asked for trade blankets and goods as compensation for the deaths in accordance with Tlingit law, but the general refused, which is why a “party of Kake Tlingits” killed two trappers on Admiralty Island in retribution. The information was released in advance of the book’s publication in a news release from the Sealaska Heritage Institute.

New relationships

Angoon School Principal Emma Demmert was invited by the U.S. Navy to take part in planning meetings early this summer for its October apology. She said she is hopeful for the future after working with Navy officials and seeing their openness and willingness to embrace Angoon’s cultural traditions.

“This is a really good step to healing for our community, and it’s really been enlightening to be a part of the team and meeting with the Navy on this whole topic,” she said.

Demmert said the apology is a shift in relations with the U.S. government and she credits the Biden administration, in part, for that change. She also pointed to the work Angoon students did to build a dugout canoe and shine light on the history of the bombardment as a reason for renewed attention to the issue.

In Kake, Joel Jackson said he was also looking to the future and to right relations with the U.S. military.

“Giving an apology is by no means the end of it. Definitely we’ll be looking for them helping us even more,” he said. Jackson pointed to Kake’s high unemployment rate.

“Helping to set up infrastructure, you know, to get in some totem poles, stuff like that. Hopefully a museum to commemorate what happened.”

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Alaska

Alaska Jewish community prepares to celebrate start of Hanukkah

Published

6 hours ago

December 25, 2024

Press Room

Alaska Jewish community prepares to celebrate start of Hanukkah

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) – Rabbi Josef Greenberg and Esty Greenberg of Alaska Jewish Campus, joined Alaska’s News Source to explain more about Hanukkah and how Anchorage can celebrate.

They will be hosting Chanukah, The Festival of Lights for “Cirque De Hanukkah,” on Sunday, Dec. 29, at 5 p.m., at the Egan Center.

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Alaska

A Christmas & Hannukah mix of winter weather

Published

14 hours ago

December 25, 2024

Press Room

A Christmas & Hannukah mix of winter weather

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) – A variety of winter weather will move through Alaska as we go through Christmas Day and the first night of Hannukah.

A high wind warning started Christmas Eve for Ketchikan, Sitka, and surrounding locations for southeast winds 30-40, gusting to 60 miles per hour. Warnings for the combination of strong winds and snow go to the west coast, western Brooks Range, and Bering Strait.

Anchorage is seeing a low-snow Christmas. December usually sees 18 inches of snow throughout the month. December 2024 has only garnered a paltry 1.5 inches. Snow depth in the city is 7 inches, even though we have seen over 28 inches for the season. A rain-snow mix is likely to hit Prince William Sound, mostly in the form of rain.

A cool-down will start in the interior tomorrow, and that colder air will slip southward. By Friday, the southcentral region will see the chances of snow increase as the temperatures decrease.

The hot spot for Alaska on Christmas Eve was Sitka with 48 degrees. The coldest spot was Atqasuk with 23 degrees below zero.

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Alaska

Santa catches a ride with troops to bring Christmas to Alaska village

Published

24 hours ago

December 24, 2024

Press Room

Santa catches a ride with troops to bring Christmas to Alaska village

YAKUTAT, Alaska — Forget the open-air sleigh overloaded with gifts and powered by flying reindeer.

Santa and Mrs. Claus this week took supersized rides to southeast Alaska in a C-17 military cargo plane and a camouflaged Humvee, as they delivered toys to the Tlingit village of Yakutat, northwest of Juneau.

The visit was part of this year’s Operation Santa Claus, an outreach program of the Alaska National Guard to largely Indigenous communities in the nation’s largest state. Each year, the Guard picks a village that has suffered recent hardship — in Yakutat’s case, a massive snowfall that threatened to buckle buildings in 2022.

Santa and Mrs. Claus talk to a child in Yakutat as part of the Alaska National Guard’s Operation Santa program Wednesday. (AP Photo/Mark Thiessen)

“This is one of the funnest things we get to do, and this is a proud moment for the National Guard,” Maj. Gen. Torrence Saxe, adjutant general of the Alaska National Guard, said Wednesday.

Saxe wore a Guard uniform and a Santa hat that stretched his unit’s dress regulations.

The Humvee caused a stir when it entered the school parking lot, and a buzz of “It’s Santa! It’s Santa!” pierced the cold air as dozens of elementary school children gathered outside.

In the school, Mrs. Claus read a Christmas story about the reindeer Dasher. The couple in red then sat for photos with nearly all of the 75 or so students and handed out new backpacks filled with gifts, books, snacks and school supplies donated by the Salvation Army. The school provided lunch, and a local restaurant provided the ice cream and toppings for a sundae bar.

Student Thomas Henry, 10, said while the contents of the backpack were “pretty good,” his favorite item was a plastic dinosaur.

Another, 9-year-old Mackenzie Ross, held her new plush seal toy as she walked around the school gym.

“I think it’s special that I have this opportunity to be here today because I’ve never experienced this before,” she said.

Yakutat, a Tlingit village of about 600 residents, is in the lowlands of the Gulf of Alaska, at the top of Alaska’s panhandle. Nearby is the Hubbard Glacier, a frequent stop for cruise ships.

Some of the National Guard members who visited Yakutat on Wednesday were also there in January 2022, when storms dumped about 6 feet of snow in a matter of days, damaging buildings.

Alaska National Guard soldiers and airmen shovel the roof of a building in Yakutat. (Dana Rosso/U.S. Army National Guard via AP)

Operation Santa started in 1956 when flooding severely curtailed subsistence hunting for residents of St. Mary’s, in western Alaska. Having to spend their money on food, they had little left for Christmas presents, so the military stepped in.

This year, visits were planned to two other communities hit by flooding. Santa’s visit to Circle, in northeastern Alaska, went off without a hitch. Severe weather prevented a visit to Crooked Creek, in the southwestern part of the state, but Christmas was saved when the gifts were delivered there Nov. 16.

“We tend to visit rural communities where it is very isolated,” said Jenni Ragland, service extension director with the Salvation Army Alaska Division. “A lot of kids haven’t traveled to big cities where we typically have Santa and big stores with Christmas gifts and Christmas trees, so we kind of bring the Christmas program on the road.”

After the C-17 Globemaster III landed in Yakutat, it quickly returned to Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, an hour away, because there was nowhere to park it at the village’s tiny airport. Later, it returned to pick up the Christmas crew.

Santa and Mrs. Claus, along with their tuckered elves, were seen nodding off on the flight back.

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