At the Gold Medal Basketball tournament on Tuesday, as the squeaks of players’ shoes on the gym floor faded, the Eagle Raven Dance Group filed out onto the court.
Through the mostly red, black and blue regalia, flashes of rainbow peaked through.
Group leader Jackie Pata announced the Weaving Our Pride robes for their debut as a pair.
“Tonight, I’m going to feature two robes that are dancing for the first time together,” she said to applause over the loudspeaker at Juneau Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé.
The Chilkat robe was finished in 2024 under the guidance of Master Weaver Lily Hope and other weaving mentors, but this was the first time the Ravenstail robe was danced.
Its journey to Gold Medal, which brings together teams and fans from Alaska Native communities across Southeast Alaska, started at Juneau’s Zach Gordon Youth Center. Over the course of two years, weaving mentors and curious youth wove the robe stitch by stitch, row by row. It transformed from wool into handspun yarn into a full-sized robe.
Like its older Chilkat sibling, the Ravenstail robe was made from rainbow, handspun yarn.
The colors mix with black thread, and white squares sit on top of the design. Black and white zigzag patterns border the robe.
Melina Meyer was one of several weavers who mentored the project, which often looked like working on the project alone until someone at the center wanted to participate. She said youth would be interested in what they were doing but too shy to take the yarn into their own hands.
“There’s been a couple youth that like to hang out in the back room with us while we were weaving. But we couldn’t really get them to come in and weave, to sit down and stuff,” she said. “Until one day, just needing to wind up some balls of yarn or something, and sitting down and saying, ‘Hey, if you’re going to be in here, you need to do this.’ And then they start weaving on it later.”
Neech Yanagut Yéil Laine Rinehart is a weaver who also mentored through both projects. He said dozens of young people participated, contributing anywhere from just a couple of stitches to whole rows of weaving.
“I think that that’s what’s beautiful about the Ravenstail robe — the Yéil Koowú robe — is that you can see the used hands in it in a way that is very, very present,” he said. “And I think that that’s kind of what makes it beautiful, is that you can really see that in the way that the stitches lie.”
All that teamwork doesn’t just make the robe more beautiful, he said. It’s also making future weavers.
“Just even that early exposure to the art form — even if it’s 10 years down the line, or five years, whatever it may be, or tomorrow — they’ll have that in their hands, already.”
And for Rinehart, the “pride” element of the project is personal.
“It’s just sort of that reaffirmation that we’ve always been here. There’s historical documentation of LGBTQ weavers in our community,” he said. “We’ve always been doing this work, and it’s good to see it come out in such a public way.”
Chris Coulson is now 20 years old, but they spent countless hours weaving on both robes since they were 17. They got the chance to dance in the Chilkat robe that was finished in 2024.
“I actually danced it like right after it was cut off the loom,” they said.
Coulson said they got pretty comfortable with the Ravenstail style. They have their own loom at home, and now they want to start taking on their own projects.
They said the robes turned out beautifully. Coulson had the honor of wearing the Ravenstail robe out of the youth center for the first time and delivering it to the court at the Gold Medal tournament.
“I just hope that people — the youth — really enjoy dancing them and they last a long time,” Coulson said.
Now, the robe is a part of the community.
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