About a dozen Chilkat weavers in Juneau met last week at a makeshift workshop set up at Generations Southeast Community Learning Center. They were weaving five or more hours a day, trying to finish up intricate, child-sized robes to be worn by local children while they dance a ceremonial dance.
The weavers are apprentices of Lily Hope. During the pandemic, she offered classes virtually, so students outside of Southeast Alaska could learn from her.
Now, they’re getting together in person to level up and finish their projects. The children’s robes are detailed and time-consuming, but less so than the two or more years it takes to make an adult-sized robe.
Growing the number of Chilkat weavers is important to Hope.
“Over the last 120 years, fewer than a dozen Chilkat blanket makers or robe weavers existed at any given point. We are changing that story this week,” she recently said on Juneau Afternoon.
Sakoon Donedin Jackson is here from Alberta, Canada. Through Hope’s virtual teaching, she spun her yarn for the robe, hung it on the loom and began weaving. But on a road trip last summer, she got in an accident and the blanket — as well as everything in her camper van — burned in the wreck.
“The only reason I was able to participate at all is because [a community member] gifted me her auntie’s yarns, who had passed,” Jackson said. “So all of the yarns in this blanket, except for the mask color and the yellow, are ancestral aunties’ that had been donated to me from this group to make this happen. So it is absolutely a project of love and support of this entire community.”
Jackson walked away from the wreck with a severe concussion but was able to restart the robe, and thinks she’ll finish in time for Wednesday’s dance.
“It’s not like joining a crochet group, right? It’s a lot more,” Jackson said. “There’s culture and there’s the spiritual aspect of it. I think it’s what changes it from art to a living being.”
The design is from Hope’s late mother Clarissa Rizal. It was the last child-sized robe she designed. It doesn’t have clan affiliations, Jackson said. She said they wanted to use a design that was “open source,” so that children with any clan affiliation could dance in them.
Gunaa Shaa Karen Taug started weaving in 1984, but she put it on hold after having five children. She started learning again from Rizal over a decade ago. The child robe she’s working on in Juneau is her first big weaving piece, she said.
“When you get stuck, like on a circle, there’s so many people to ask,” Taug said. “Plus Lily does the videos, but still, it’s nice to interact with all the ladies. Because you learn little tricks of the trade like this thing here, that’s a magnet,” she said, pointing to a magnet holding her needle to the loom.
She plans to have her grandson dance in the robe, which shows the face of a fisherman and his two grandchildren in profile, turned towards him in the center, Taug said.
“My goal really is to let the world know that we’re still making sure Chilkat robes are still weaving our history. We’re still telling our stories. We’re still here, alive, and well,” Hope said.
The First Dance, where a dance group made of children wore these robes for the first time, was on Feb. 1. It was live-streamed on Sealaska Heritage Institute’s YouTube page, with the robes later displayed at the Juneau-Douglas City Museum.
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