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 is a series of exhibits that explores the history of Alaska Native education. The first one to open looks at Native boarding schools — stark and simple but damning.
“There is a power in naming the evil,” said Benjamin Jacuk, director of Indigenous research at the Alaska Native Heritage Center.
For the past few years, Jacuk has been investigating the role of churches in boarding school abuse.
The centerpiece of the exhibit is a map of Alaska, created by Sonya Kelliher-Combs, an Iñupiaq and Athabascan artist. Her map has tiny red threads hanging from various villages. Each represents a child sexually 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,” Jacuk said. “It's something that can't really be denied anymore, because it's staring you right in the eyes.”
There’s a plaque next to the map with the names of more than 100 priests and missionaries, acknowledged by the church to have had credible claims of sexual abuse made against them.
The exhibit is called “Education in Alaska: Disruption of Our Traditional Teachings,” to be completed sometime next year. Future installments will look at the education of Native children before the boarding school era, long before missionaries and federal Bureau of Indian Affairs teachers took over their schooling.
“Really this history of us and our relationship with ourselves, each other and our environment,” Jacuk said, “is something that is millennia’s old.”
He said the 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,” Jacuk said, “teaching us who we are.”
But for now, Jacuk said, the first installment of the exhibit is a good beginning. He said to fully understand how to heal centuries of historical trauma, you must understand how boarding schools systematically attempted to destroy the identity of Native children.
Government-run schools for Alaska Native children go back to the 1800’s and for churches, even earlier. The Russian Orthodox Church opened schools on Kodiak Island in 1784.
In a U.S. Interior Department report released this summer, the department counted 22 federal Indian boarding schools in Alaska among more than 400 nationwide.
Some of the items on display at the Heritage Center’s exhibit include items that boarding schools had children make — such as ashtrays and miniature totem poles — to show how some institutions exploited children for financial gain.
Jacuk said it’s also important that the project help to restore cultural identity. He said there are an endless number of potential spin-offs, and some could utilize artifacts and other cultural items that are currently being repatriated by the museum. One of the first could help bring back traditional headdresses, once worn in Holy Cross on the Yukon River.
Jacuk said the Heritage Center is working with the tribe in Holy Cross to learn how these were made.
“Every family had one, at least one, that got passed down from generation to generation,” Jacuk said. “When you look at the headdress itself, you can see the actual stitching, every stitch. Just having this, and being able to share it, is still an ancestor from a long time ago, still showing us the way with every weave.”