The slow rising sun cast hues of gold on the landscape. Western hemlock and sitka spruce
dusted with dew droplets glistened in the morning light. In the shade of these towering trees, a mother bear and her two cubs rumbled down Thunder mountain into the valley of Lemon Creek. The two cubs pranced in front of their mother, embracing the sunrise; their raven hair turning into a cascade of brown. The little bear’s honey eyes held stars that captivated one's attention. This time of day was reserved for non-humans it seemed, in the way the deers and bears stood fearlessly in the open and in how the birds sang in tongues I only hoped to perceive. I accepted this gift from the land in childlike wonder, holding my breath so as not to disrupt the fabric of the moment. The hesitant sun seemed to be rising quicker because the next thing I knew the sun was in full bloom, and the rest of the human world had come to greet the day. As swiftly as they came, the birds quieted to a chirp, the deers dashed for the trees, and the two black bear cubs and their awáa followed the creek upstream. In their stride, a cacophony of bellowing engines and loud horns sounded, signaling the arrival of the first cruise ships in Juneau. Car exhaust filled my lungs, and once again I was in the un-natural world.
The first black bear I saw was nailed to the walls of my Náan’s dining room in Seattle. It was larger than life, long black claws, dulled with age reaching out toward you. Its fur was dense and as black as midnight. I remember feeling it for the first time, I couldn’t have been much older than three, my small hands disappearing into the unfamiliar creature's coarse mane; gentle fingers hyper fixated on the coin size bullet hole in the black bear’s skin. Its face was violent, teeth bared to eye, nose snarled in perpetual anger, and eyes glistening like obsidian. My stomach turned with confliction. I didn’t know what pride was, so instead I felt shame. I asked my Náan about the bear, to which she responded “It is a gift from your uncle Jim.” I knew better than to pry, so I thought about the bear and the bear as a gift, and decided that that was alright. She taught me the importance of gift giving and our responsibility to one another and the land. She was Niitsitapi from Montana, so far from the grasslands of her home, she would tell me of the ever expanding sky and of the woman who married the Morning Star. I never met my Chanáa, but my Náan told me he gifted me a family in Southeast Alaska. So before I understood what being Native meant, I knew that I was Niitsitapi and Xaadas, which I came to understand as a gift.
In summertime the sun reigned, the moon only grazing the sky for a few hours. It felt unnerving at first to bask in light, not moonlight, at 10pm. I had come to Juneau as an environmental intern for my tribe. At 20, it was my first time in the traditional homelands of my Xaadas ancestors, and the sky was electric with a buzz that I think could only come from air so thick with memory. After my second week in Southeast Alaska, my unease for the latent moon turned into a race to chase the sun. With my new fireweed Xtratufs, I set out each day for new trees, trails, and streams. On Eagle beach in the far North side of Juneau, I walked along the purple lupines that lined the rocky shore until it became forest. In the mix of spruce trees and devils club, a tree with bright needles that drooped off its arms stood tall. Its leaves looked like veins, interconnecting and sprouting off in different directions. Its base was thin and the bark had a grayness to it. I rubbed the needles between my fingers, greeted by the familiar smell of cedar. It struck me that this was my first time meeting a yellow cedar. I had only ever felt the tree’s bark separated into the thinnest strands, woven in and out and in and out, up and down. But here were the trees, the birth of our canoes and totems and baskets and everything. I felt a strange sense of nostalgia and familiarity in the forest with a tree I had only ever dreamed of. I wonder if this is always what it feels like, returning to a homeland you know so intimately. A land that resonates in your bones. Everything reminded me of family. Everything felt heavy.
Before I knew of woven cedar bark, I knew of how my Náan would weave the strands of my dark hair into braids. Her own hair had thinned with old age, raven wings with feathers missing. Whenever my sister and I would visit, she would sit me down in front of her and run her wrinkled and sun spotted hands through my hair. Her touch was cool on my scalp as she partitioned my hair into three strands, new hair being added with masterful ease. In these quiet moments my Náan would tell me about things much larger than myself, her voice soft and cracked. Often, her stories were about my father. “One day, when the stars were shining exceptionally bright and the salmon were returning to spawn, the moon planted a kiss on the earth, and there he was. A boy with honey eyes and hair like raven’s wings. When he was born he roared like a táan, so his mother named him Kwians Kyiau Mooney, and so he became Precious Little Bear.” My auntie taught me to be mindful of my energy while I am weaving. She says that the energy stays in the interwoven strands of cedar, so we should always weave with good intentions. I wonder if my Náan knew the same to be true, and wove memories into my hair like berries in the sky.
At the turn of July, the salmonberry began to show their vibrant oranges and reds, and the sockeye ventured upstream to their spawn. The land reeked with life and death and everything in between. The fireweeds were now in full bloom, majestic pink blossoms scattered the grasslands, juxtaposing the solemn gray of the sky. Work in the office off Glacier highway had become a lull of translating the names of fruits and vegetables into their traditional names for hours on end. Half my days were spent in the tribe’s greenhouse, buzzing between cherry tomatoes and bright yellow squash, and the other half finding the Łingit and Xaadas translations to the plants we were cultivating. Life had become a blur of sonorants and phonemic tones. Sounds that were foreign to my ears and throat, but resonated somewhere deeper that I was unsure of how to decipher. I tried to reach for that place, trying to pronounce Íitl’ Kuníisii with the same care the word had been given by Xaadas before me. I released a croak akin to the gurgling lure of a raven. I was shocked by the violence of the resonance I produced, the violence of my Western accent and the violent absence of the notes necessary to speak my traditional tongue.
I couldn’t speak until I was too old. It seemed that sound reached my ears more gently than other children, and so I observed with my eyes the movements of faces and the trace of hands. In the quiet of those early days, I was acutely aware of my absences. The absence of sound, of a mother’s presence, of a father’s life. I was too young to understand that the silences resided in the same place within me. As the last living member of her family, my Náan was familiar with how absence became weight and how emptiness overflowed. In my absence of words and hearing, she communicated with photos and little blessings; the faint smell of burning sweetgrass and the rich taste of k'áad stew. Her house was a living relic, the walls lined with portraits of ancestors, and adorned by my Náan with vibrant beads and eagle feathers. In the furthest corner of the living room stood a veneration of a man who my Náan tells me is my father. With my ear still slow to the world, I fixated on the image of the man I should have known. The dark fur of his beard, the freckles on his nose. Memorizing his face, I traced the thick eyebrows in the photo, mirroring my own action on the small but mighty brows of my three year old face.
When I was a teenager I would wander around my Náan’s house searching for memories that she kept tucked away. I found it in a school ID photo of my dad. It struck me that I had never perceived youth in my father. His early 20s were well documented, and then nothing. It seemed jarring on him, unnatural almost that his eyes still held hope and that his smile would live to see another day. In the more recent photos of him, where he was holding me as a baby, I couldn’t help my stomach from dropping, unsure of which moment was closest to the last one. My Náan told me he was a sweet boy but that he was troubled. I like to think of him this way, before silver necklace chains became metal bars, and when violence was only known in the loud march of his steps. In this school ID photo, I could pretend to not know the rest of the story. I could live contently knowing him as a boy given far too much weight for a child. I could remain transfixed in his brown honey eyes that still held hope that everything would turn out alright.
With August came rain. Dense, billowing clouds that hung heavy and dark. The rain here was different then back home, I’d come to know that rain blessed the land differently in all places. In Seattle, the gray skies are consistent and bright. The rain comes and goes as she pleases and our trees remain green in her wake. The rain in Juneau was ferocious, wind and water combining to drench the land. The salmon swam up the rivers and into the skies here, leaping as if to the clouds themselves. Juneau rain you felt in your core, something ancestral in its power. On the first Thursday in August, I began work at the Mendenhall Glacier in a flurry of strong winds and glistening tears. My tribe, who I had been working for, was entering into a co-stewardship agreement with the Forest Service. I was to be the first of many Alaska Natives working to preserve our land and culture at the glacier. Entering into the mid-century structure of the visitor center I became quickly consumed by the loss of it all. The sign tells us that the glacier went as far as the visitor center in the 1920s, having receded almost 2 miles in the past century.
At the end of the visitor center, Tlingit and Haida staff sat to watch the visitor center’s 15 minute video on the history of the glacier. We learned about how the glacier was formed, with years and years of snow pack pressed down with years and years more of snow on top. Of how the delicate snowflakes became ice which danced in the glacier before making its way to the terminus, the end, the final destination, to dissolve into the lake below. An old woman appears on screen, somebody’s Náan I was sure by the familiar warmth in her tone and the soft brown of her wrinkles. She’s weaving, a Tlingit style of weaving called raven’s tail. As her nimble fingers become intertwined with the strands of yarn she is weaving, she tells us of the interconnected history of the glacier and Tlingit people. The glacier’s name was Sitaantaagu, the Łingit word meaning “the Glacier Behind the Town” and Aak’wtaaksit “the Glacier Behind the Little Lake”. I left the theater acutely aware of how the loss of glacier ice seemed to correlate with the loss of Tlingit people and language. I whispered “Sitaantaagu” to the glacier, who I now knew the name of, it’s ice glistening as if reveling in the uttering of it’s traditional name. I thought of my own name Clara, a name given to my ancestor in boarding schools. I wonder what her Niitsitapi name was? Would it have suited me better?
In the too hot sun of my senior year of high school, I was keenly aware of how Seattle was changing. In my Náan’s backyard the grass turned into a pale brown, choked by a heat unnatural to its landscape. I sat outside with my Náan who’s dark skin seemed to be melting into the ground beneath her. My Náan welcomed the beating sun as a reminder of the strangling heat of Montana. She was built for freezing winters and blazing summers, before being moved to the milder Seattle climate. She had lived in Seattle for longer than she had lived in her traditional homelands, but you could tell that her bones ached for the land which sang her name in the night air. As we sat, she turned to me and told me I reminded her of her sister Clara, my biological grandmother who passed in her early 30’s. “You have her face and you have her strength.” We sat in a silence that reminded me of childhood, one with sweetness and understanding in the air.
My name which came from so much hate and violence usually weighed on me, but the fact that my Náan saw strength in me and my name, made the weight more tolerable. There was a lot I still did not understand at that time about what it meant to hold my name, but in the heat with my Náan I came to understand the power of names.
Every morning in the office off Glacier highway our workday would start with a check-in, and every morning Harold would do a word of the day. Harold was the cultural resources specialist for the tribe and was proficient in Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian, which was something very rare to come by. The Haida language is considered endangered, with only two fluent speakers and a dictionary that held as many words as we could remember. On this day his word was “‘Ghuwakaan’, meaning deer. Same name for peacemaker, peace dance, peace; because it’s a peaceful animal and doesn’t bite.” How beautiful that the basis for the deer’s name came from a relationship our people had with our animal relative, and how beautiful that the deer inspired peace. I thought of my own father’s name, Kwians Kyiau, Precious Little Bear. With the tab of the Haida dictionary open on my computer, I decided to search up his name. Nothing. When I saw that his name wasn’t in the dictionary, I thought maybe I had made him up. That he was a figment of my imagination, a body composed of scattered thoughts and memories rather than of blood and bones. I retyped it, praying that poor spelling was at fault and not something heavier. Nothing. Ok... How about his middle name? Nothing. How could his name, a name that I had practically worshiped, be wrong?
Such a powerful thing, a name. I couldn’t wrap my head around it, how a name could be wrong, how a name could be missing? Yet, stolen things do have a tendency to weigh on you, even if you don’t know what it is you lost. I wonder at what moment exactly it was lost. Did someone mutter it in a whisper? Scream it at the top of their lungs? Sing it like a lullaby? Was it a grandmother telling her child they were Kwians? Or a Kyiau carved into a totem? Did it make a thud like a fallen cedar tree? Or wash away with the rain? Or maybe he took the word with him when he left. I imagine him packing up his things, folding the letters to his name neatly in a bag. I imagine he exited the same way he came: still precious like a little bear, with honey eyes, raven hair, with stars shooting from the sky and salmon spawning. I thought back to when my Náan’s hands could still weave, of all the memories she tucked into the strands of my hair. My people may not remember how little bears could be precious, but as long as I hold the memories of Kwians Kyiau, I can look to the little cubs prancing in the field of Lemon Creek and know that they are precious. I can hold the stories, the violent and metallic interwoven with the softness of your hair, and know that you were precious.
The slow rising sun seemed to be a transformed thing, as if the coming of fall gave it energy. It moved quicker from the sky, chased by its celestial sibling. The end of summer beckoned, the salmon season had come to a close, fish bones littered like trash through the waters edge. The fireweed had lost most their fuchsia petals, fighting the encroaching fall air. When I rose to go to work, I was rising with the sun instead of lacking in its wake. In the still haze of morning light, my mom called me with a fragile voice. “What’s wrong?” I ask. “Oh, nothing honey. I’ll tell you after work.” My heart dropped “It’s Darlene isn’t it.” “Yes, I’m so sorry.” My Náan’s passing came quickly, I am told. She wasn’t feeling well, she went to the hospital, and then she was gone. There was no pinpointing the exact cause of her death. She had been consumed with illness for as long as I had known her. Her lungs filled with holes where there should be air and a heart which had long lost the beat of her drum. I had never felt so guilty. To spend the entire school year and summer away from her, choosing to be in a land where the midnight wind sang my name, not hers. The loss of it all felt too much. I was all too aware that the loss of my Náan meant the loss of my last known Niitsitapi relative. I wouldn’t come to understand it here in Juneau, surrounded by spruce and cedar trees that climb high into the sky. I wouldn’t find solace in the rain who’s tears mimicked my own. Instead, I went home, better late than never, to my Náan’s home outside of Seattle.
The air was thick with her memory, the familiar smell of burning sweetgrass and my papa’s best attempt at her k'áad stew. The walls were still adorned with all the ancestors my Náan hung up with care. My papa, who was watching me stare at the wall of memories, said, “She took good care of the spirits, you could tell by the way the sun catches in the morning and how the birds sing a song of good praise. It was hard work, y’know, remembering all the people she lost.” “How did she do it? It all feels too painful.” “I’m sure it was never easy, your Náan would sometimes get too consumed by the loss of it all.” For a moment we stood in silence and I could feel my Náan there in the quiet of the air. “But she would never have traded that weight for anything, it was all she had of the land and relatives before.” It sang her sweet melodies of healing as if holding memories were its own sacred medicine.
My Náan taught me how to weave and so I went to the backyard, overgrowing with sweetgrass without my Náan to care for it. My long fingers brush the green strand’s flowering shoots. I asked the grass relatives for permission to her healing, and once granted, untethered her body from the land. Sitting in the choking Seattle heat, skin melting to the ground beneath me, I began to weave a basket. I sang to the wind kind praises of all I had loved, bringing my ancestors into the very structure of the interwoven grass. I let the weight of their memory pass through me and into the basket, my ancestors and me.
My Náan taught me how to weave, and if you have a moment, I would like to tell you about her. Sit in front of me and I will braid your hair and tell you about all that came before.
When the moon planted a kiss on the ground, and there he was a precious little bear and a woman who could weave a basket strong enough to hold the world.
Háw’aa
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