The Greater Palmer Chamber of Commerce executive director Ailis Vann has attended and volunteered at Colony Days since she moved to the area 14 years ago. The business group she leads hosts the three-day festival each summer. It draws thousands of people.
She’s proud of the event. That’s why, she said, she was so taken aback last year when a group of chamber members and tribal advocates told her they had a big problem with the festival. It had to do with its name: Colony Days.
“I’m going through my head of like, ‘Why?’” she said. “Then hearing stories of people and why it is and how it relates to their family history. That was what was really hard and shocking.”
The chamber’s board voted last Thursday to change the festival’s name to the Braided River Festival. Backlash followed. Board members resigned. And within two days, the change was reversed.
The controversy all centered on the word “colony.”
For Enei Begaye of the Fairbanks-based Native Movement, the problem with the word is it’s based on the idea of colonialism.
“Colonialism is this practice of countries — particularly European countries — going throughout the world, taking other people’s lands, occupying it with settlers, and then exploiting it economically,” she said.
Vann said she, along with the chamber’s 11-member board of directors, decided to educate themselves and do what they could to help. They worked with the local Chickaloon Tribe to add Native craft booths and a land acknowledgment to the festival last summer. Nobody complained, said Vann.
Over the next year at chamber meetings, she said, they also started talking about changing the name of the festival so that Indigenous people felt more welcome.
Late last week, the chamber unveiled the new name in a news release shared on Facebook: the Braided River Festival. Vann said it reflected not just the geography of the Matanuska and Knik Rivers, but also the idea of different group histories tying together.
“The symbolism behind the name I thought was really nice,” she said.
Not everyone thought so.
Hundreds of comments blasting the new name flooded into the chamber and spread on social media. Most were civil, Vann said. But she said there were also threatening calls. Several chamber board members resigned during the uproar.
To people like Barb Thomas, the director of the Colony House Museum, the name change hit close to home.
“My family were original colonists, my mom and dad were,” she said. “There are hundreds of Colony descendants, you know, we’re up to fourth and fifth generation I guess now, and it was a very important part of the history.”
She said the decision was made by the chamber board without input from the historical society, where she sits on the board, or the public. And she argued that the name change felt like an attempt to erase the history of the 200 families who were settled in the windy valley in the 1930s as part of a Depression-era program.
By the end of the first year, 124 of those families had left because of poor organization from the government, disease and ill-prepared colonists, according to the National Park Service. Most families were replaced within a year, it said.
Thomas said those families weren’t part of the colonialism that most people think of.
“They are equating it to the same thing that England, you know, and Britain did in colonizing Africa and South America, and they’re not related at all,” she said.
She said that’s because lands taken for the Matanuska Colony project weren’t on lands where the Ahtna and Dena’ina people lived at the time.
Aaron Leggett, the chief of the neighboring village of Eklutna, agreed, but he said that’s not the full story.
“There wasn’t a village, but that certainly would have been hunting grounds that would have been berry picking places,” he said.
Leggett, who’s also a curator at the Anchorage Museum, said his great great grandfather was born near Butte, which was surrounded by some of the Matanuska Colony farms. He said that while he sees a distinction between the Matanuska Colony and colonialism, Alaska Natives in the area experienced devastating effects from the influx of white settlers.
Aside from hunting and gathering grounds being taken, there was also devastation from diseases, he said. In previous centuries, there had been villages on the lands taken for the Matanuska Colony, but they were abandoned after the 1918 flu epidemic, which Leggett said wiped out about half of the area’s population.
Also, he underscored, land grabs had already started before the Matanuska Colony, both by the federal government and by the Alaska Railroad.
Still, the nuances of the Matanuska Valley’s history weren’t the main focus of the backlash to the festival’s name change. Many people in opposition brandished phrases like “cancel culture” and “woke agenda” to slam the decision.
The Palmer chamber convened an emergency meeting last weekend to reverse the name change, saying that it underestimated the importance of the word “colony” to the Palmer community.
Many business owners and area residents celebrated, while the local Chickaloon Tribe called the decision “disheartening.”
“The change in name proposed by the Palmer Chamber of Commerce was an opportunity to be more reflective of the joining together of the history and culture of the three groups just like the Matanuska and Knik join together in a braided river; also Nuutah (the original name for the area),” said a written statement from the tribe. “We don’t believe it was meant to be dismissive of history, but rather telling of a more complete history inclusive of local Indigenous peoples, and a welcoming space for all peoples.”
Begaye, of the Native Movement, said as someone who wasn’t involved with the name change but watched the episode unfold, hearing the cries of cancel culture felt ironic, considering the Indigenous history of the area has gone underappreciated for decades.
She said she hopes that efforts to recognize Indigenous history of the area won’t be discouraged.
“Recognizing the fullness of history, recognizing Indigenous place names, recognizing Indigenous relationship to land, previous to colonization — it’s not an erasure of anyone’s history. It’s a telling of a fuller history,” she said.
Vann, the chamber director, also said she hopes it won’t be the end of the conversation. She said lost in the uproar were the reactions of many people who didn’t realize the word “colony” was offensive in the first place — just like she didn’t a year and a half ago.
“I think most people want to do what’s right, and want to be inclusive of everybody. But we just have to figure out how to do it civilly and respectfully” she said.
For now, she said, Colony Days won’t be changing its name.
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Correction: This story previously misstated the relation of Aaron Leggett’s ancestor who was born near Butte. It was his great great grandfather, not his grandfather.
Lex Treinen is covering the state Legislature for Alaska Public Media. Reach him at ltreinen@gmail.com.
