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Photo: The Alaska Native Heritage Center’s new exhibit on the impact of government and religious boarding schools is part of a series that will also look at the education of Native children before and after the boarding school era. (Rhonda McBride)
As it marked its 25th Anniversary, the Alaska Native Heritage Center underwent a major facelift at its Anchorage campus this year, which included new galleries and museum exhibits.
One of the latest projects looks at the history of Native boarding schools in Alaska. As Rhonda McBride from our flagship station KNBA tells us, it’s a work in progress.
The Native Boarding School exhibit is the first installment in a series that explores the history of Alaska Native education.
It is stark and simple, but damning.
“There is a power in naming the evil.”
This Alaska map is the work of Sonya Kelliher-Combs, an Iñupiat and Athabascan artist. Each red thread represents a child that was abused by clergy. (Photo: Rhonda McBride)
Benjamin Jacuk is the Alaska Native Heritage Center’s director of Indigenous Research.
Over the past few years, he has been looking at the role of churches in boarding school abuse.
The centerpiece of the exhibit is a map of Alaska, with tiny red threads hanging from various villages.
Each represents a child abused by Catholic clergy.
Combined, they make a curtain of red across the state.
“There’s actually a difference in just talking about these things, but actually seeing it right there in front of you.”
Next to the map is a plaque with the names of more than a hundred priests and missionaries, acknowledged by the church as having credible claims of sexual abuse against them.
The exhibit is called “Education in Alaska: Disruptions in our teachings” and will be completed sometime next year.
Future installments will look backwards, beyond the boarding school era, long before missionaries and Bureau of Indian affairs teachers took over the education of Native children.
“Really this history of us and our relationship with ourselves each other and our environment is something that is millennias old, tens of thousands of years old.”
Jacuk says project will bring the history of Native education in Alaska full circle with exhibits that showcase how Native languages and cultures are being taught in schools today.
“We also have generations of ancestors who still walk with us today, teaching us who we are.”
Jacuk says to fully understand how to heal centuries of historical trauma , you have to understand how boarding schools systematically attempted to destroy the identity of Native children.
A Tlingit man and Oregon resident has gone viral for saving a barred owl from a highway overpass.
KLCC’s Brian Bull has the story.
Pattrick Price is an artist and dad living in Eugene, Oreg.
He stands under the highway bridge where on the night of December 19, he spotted an owl on the busy roadway.
“My immediate reaction was just to pull right over and turn my hazards on. I jumped out of the car into traffic, and ran over and scooped the owl up.”
Price said the owl was likely in shock, so acted calmly as he drove it home.
At last check, a video of Price and his feathered passenger has received more than 67,000 views on Facebook.
“And I was talking calmly to it like, ‘Hey, we’re in this together. I value my face, and I know you value your life, so let’s do this calmly.’ It’s not recommended that you have too much human interaction with a bird of prey like this, a wild animal, but in this case it just crawled up onto my shoulder while I was driving.”
Price took the barred owl to the Cascades Raptor Center, where the intake staff said the bird appeared to have suffered head trauma. But the good news is that it looks like it will recover, and soon be released back into the wild.
Price says he felt compelled to do the right thing, after hundreds of other drivers zipped by the owl that blustery night.
“Ancestors are looking over us, and that might have been a call-in from one our ancestors. In a lot of cultures, they see owls as a bad omen. But I don’t see them as a bad omen, I see them as caretakers of our people. They eat the rats and the mice, and the things scurrying around. Y’know, they’re out there, living. We’re living too.”
Price said this is the second time he’s rescued a raptor.
The first time happened several years back when he lived in Alaska.
He advises people to be considerate and present when encountering injured wildlife.
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