Over six hundred people gathered for the ceremony of raising the first Alaska totem pole dedicated to all Alaska Native people who attended boarding schools, as well as their descendants and those who died during that time.
Volunteers position the Boarding School Healing Totem Pole that was raised at the Alaska Native Heritage Center on Sunday, Oct. 22, 2023. Haida carvers and brothers T.J. and Joe Young began carving the Western red cedar, harvested from Hydaburg, on site in the spring.
“The idea behind it was to pay homage and respect to the generation that endured the boarding schools,” said one of the carvers, TJ Sgwaayaans Young. “We wanted to depict more or less what those generations had to go through, and both the parents and the children.” The afternoon event started inside the Heritage Center where attendees — mostly elders — listened to prayers, remarks and traditional Dena’ina and Haida songs. A younger portion of the crowd watched a livestream of the event in a heated tent outside. In a few hours, the stream of people, many wearing Haida hats and other bright-colored traditional regalia, trickled to the carving shed outside — to the totem pole.
Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, center, participated in the blessing of the Boarding School Healing Totem Pole at the Alaska Native Heritage Center on Sunday. “Some were exposed to really, really unspeakable traumas, and then some met their childhood friends there, even their spouses there,” he said. “The whole idea of the totem pole is to have, you know, a shared experience, good and bad, to acknowledge what happened and see what’s next to try to move forward after all of this.”
Participants pulled on two lines to raise the Boarding School Healing Totem Pole at the Alaska Native Heritage Center on Sunday.
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