In this episode of “Living with the Land,” SCS’s Tracy Gagnon takes her recording equipment into the Wilderness! When she isn’t paddling 18 miles straight or desperately trying to keep the mic dry, she speaks with visiting artist Ray Geier, and SCS Staff members Paul Killian and Edie Leghorn about their own relationship with wilderness. Listen to this weeks episode to hear more!

What’s your Wilderness?

Living with the Land is a 12 part radio series exploring stories of place in Sitka. It is produced by the Sitka Conservation Society in collaboration with Raven Radio. You can also hear the episodes every Sunday at 10:27am on KCAW, just before Living Planet.

Two weeks ago, youth volunteers from 4-H harvested apples that were grown as a result of one of the initiatives from the 2010 Sitka Health Summit. Volunteers and their parents came together once again to decorate fabric for mason jars and to cook applesauce. The aptly-named event, Applooza, was hosted by the Sitka Kitch at the First Presbyterian Church. Sitka Conservation Society, in conjunction with the Sitka Food Co-Op and the Sitka Local Foods Network, supported and promoted this event. SCS staff members Mary Wood and Sarah Komisar encouraged the engagement of youth volunteers, providing the 4H participants with an opportunity to make a valuable contribution to our community while educating them about the importance of local food production and consumption. The beautifully-decorated jars of applesauce were donated to the Swan Lake Senior Center and the Salvation Army.

To increase the future capacity for successful food projects like Applooza, SCS will be sponsoring the planting of additional apple trees in Sitka. Please join us for our ‘Apple a Day’ apple tree workshop next week. Our Yale Fellow, Michelle Huang, has been working with Jud Kirkness to plan the event. Jud will be on hand to present everything you need to know about apple trees. We will have ordering instructions on hand and encourage everyone to order a tree. We have a goal of increasing the number of apple trees in Sitka by 15 this year! SCS will also be ordering an apple tree for the Pacific High school campus.

This is something SCS, Sitka Kitch, Sitka Local Foods Network and the Sitka Food Co-op would like to see become an annual event. Special thanks to all the Sitkans who supported this event through donations of jars, time, knowledge and offered up their apple trees for harvesting, including the trees at KCAW.

Having grown up on a farm in Oregon, Lori Adams couldn’t help but get her hands in the soil when she moved to Sitka back in the 1980s. She started “Down to Earth You-Pick garden,” where Sitkans go to pick their own, locally-grown vegetables. In this episode of “Living with the Land,” Lori tells us about her garden, her ducks and her favorite customers!

Lori Adams and the You-Pick Garden

Living with the Land is a 12 part radio series exploring stories of place in Sitka. It is produced by the Sitka Conservation Society in collaboration with Raven Radio. You can also hear the episodes every Sunday at 10:27am on KCAW, just before Living Planet.

Southeast Alaska’s waterways are its highways. Boats and barges are its trains and semi-trucks. For thousands of years, people in this area have lived off the abundant plants, animals and salmon stocks which the coastal temperate rainforest rainforest, today part of the Tongass National Forest, provides. Before the Russians occupied this chain of islands off the coast of British Columbia, Tlingit and Haida native peoples traversed its waters in the belly of canoes carved from Sitka spruce and red cedar trees. They paddled canoes to fishing camps in the summer and hunted for seal and sea otter. The Haida, in particular, were revered for their canoe craftsmanship, trading the vessels to tribes throughout modern day Alaska and Canada. When Alaska natives stopped relying on the canoes for daily use at the turn of the century, many of the original carvers passed away and took with them their time-tested technique of building and maintaining the dug-outs. Today, There are only a few of the original old-style dug-out canoes. Many are maintained by the tribes, while others are on display in museums. Yet even without those original teachers, a new generation of Haida and Tlingit canoe-carvers is emerging in Southeast Alaska, pulling together the clues of a lost art left by their ancestors.

One of those carvers is Stormy Hamar. Though he apprenticed with a totem carver as a young man, his knowledge of canoe carving comes mostly from his own research. He compiled photographs of old dug-outs, and spent hours in libraries and museums like the Museum of Civilization in Ottawa studying the crafts. I visited him on a typically windy, rainy day in his home town of Kasaan (pop. 53) on Prince of Wales Island. After braving fifty miles of logging roads through the national forest that surrounds the village, we were warmly met by a carload of Stormy’s family and his two apprentices, Eric and Harley. We followed to a beautiful new carving shed sitting on the edge of the bay.  During the day, it’s open as a demonstration shed to the cruise ship passengers who stop for day trips in the town. The building was actually funded and is now owned by the Organized Village of Kasaan as part of a larger initiative amongst Southeast Alaskan tribes to provide alternatives to positions in construction and logging, and diversify the local economy.

Entering the shed, we were hit with the sweet familiar smell of red cedar. Paddles hung in the corner and woodchips covered the floor. Stormy brought us towards the back of the room to a ten foot canoe. One of the apprentices, Eric, who is Stormy’s son, had engraved the rim with a pattern influenced by both Haida formline art and cartoon animation. Stormy explained that the character in the engraving represented the movement through time; at the stern, the past, in the middle, the present and in the front, the future.

For Stormy, questions about the relevance of traditional carving methods to boat-building today are inescapable. His work tip-toes a border between the traditional and the modern, and his challenge is to balance the two. “We want to be who we are,” says Stormy, in other words, living in the modern world, while also revisiting and learning from the Haida canoe-carvers of the past. For instance, is using an electric chainsaw (instead of an adz or axe) to carve out the center a dug-out traditional? To this question, Stormy asks, what is traditional? “It’s been a long standing tradition of our people to use the latest and greatest available tools. And in that way, it is traditional. When somebody would come up with the latest and greatest, (the Haida) obviously would have used it because it would have improved their lives.” In other ways, however, integrating modern technologies contributed to the collective forgetting of time-tested methods and common knowledge (like, for instance, that adzing the wood compressed it, making it water resistant). With his apprentices in tow, Stormy aims not just to build the canoe, but to try and understand why  they were built in a specific way for centuries. “There was a good reason to build the canoes that way,” Stormy said, “And I would assume that some of these things have to do with speed, efficiency, pay-load, what the canoe can carry, the ease of manufacture…” Some of these features of the Haida canoe were held in common by canoes carved throughout the north, up to Yakutat Bay and into parts of British Columbia; clues that the design must have been worth replicating.

Stormy’s carving projects are educational, both for himself, for his two apprentices, and youth from Kasaan who are curious about carving. His initiative is as much about relearning the carving tradition as it is about creating a community space and a source of identity for the town. “If we establish a canoe-building program here then our kids will have that bond to canoe-building,” Stormy says,“Then they can kind of identify themselves in their own mind or to others as canoe-builders and canoe-users from Kasaan.” The carving shed is part of a larger initiative by the Alaska native community to reclaim the native lifestyle and knowledge-base, much of which was threatened by U.S. policy in the 19th and 20th centuries, which prohibited people from practicing their language and culture. The dug-out project addresses the concern that native knowledge and identity be passed on to the next generation, while also providing economic opportunities for the town.

 Harley Bell-Holter and Eric Hamar, Stormy’s apprentices, both envision turning carving and woodwork into careers. Eric will soon be heading off to wooden boat building school in Washington, though he plans to end up back in Kasaan. “I want to continue the woodworking tradition around here and give the youth a connection to the water.” With few employment options outside of the tribe and, of course, logging, Eric says that he would love to return to Kasaan and create a small business building wooden boats. Harley is from the village of Hydaburg, just a few hours away on prince of Wales Island. “I was raised with culture. Culture has always been my life,” he told me. He is set on returning to his hometown to become a community leader and master carver.

When the grant for the carving shed and apprenticeship run out in two years,nobody knows what will happen to the dug-out project in Kasaan.  Another challenge is finding old-growth trees large enough for a canoe, meaning more than three and a half feet in diameter. “We haven’t had much success finding good trees,” Stormy told me, “There’s been so much logging on this island that the good trees were taken out a long time ago.” But this hasn’t stopped Stormy, nor other carvers from pursuing this craft in Southeast Alaska. Eric told me that he is motivated and inspired when he hears about other canoe-building teams. “We have a unified goal,” he said. Despite the obvious economic obstacles for a craft some would consider obsolete, canoe-building throughout Southeast and the pacific northwest, along with a canoe journey movement, is on the rise. Like in Kasaan, it is the the inspiration of a carver like Stormy, not a grant, which makes these dug-out project in Kasaan a reality. It is a spirit which declares that honoring the genius of the Haida canoe-carvers of the past is a worthwhile investment.

Teaming up with SEARHC for Suicide Prevention and Mental Health

After speaking with the board of the Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium (or SEARHC), Doug Chilton was able to secure funding for the One Canoe Society to travel and give paddling workshops throughout Southeast Alaska. He suggested that the canoe society team up with SEARHC’s “One is Too Many” suicide prevention program. The journey, he said, aligns with the goals outlined in Behavioral Health programs at SEARHC: specifically, their initiatives to create spaces for building community.

“You feel like you have an extended family and those people care.”

Can the canoe journeys combat suicide? Early on, Chilton was able to see the connection between the canoe journeys and suicide prevention. “Honestly, if you think about the situation of people who commit suicide or attempt suicide,” he told me, “they’ve hit an all time low and they feel that they have nowhere to turn, nowhere to go. With (the canoe journeys), not only does it give you an activity to do or participate or coordinate, but you feel like it’s family. You feel like you have an extended family and those people care.” For people who lack those connections or a feeling of support, being a member of a canoe team may fill that void. For others still, the journey’s were about sobriety. For many, it has. Others that I spoke to in Hydaburg and throughout Southeast agreed that the sense of community they felt with their canoe team was indescribably powerful. “I think it probably changed everyone’s life that went on the trip,” said Stormy, “… I saw people that I’d known for a long time just completely in a different mindset and different behavior pattern while they were on that journey.” Reconnecting with the traditional practice, song and dance involved in the canoe journeys, also offers its own kind of healing. In the early 1900s, the loss of canoe culture coincided with aggressive policies that prohibited Alaska natives from learning about their language and traditions. “Canoe culture has been dormant,” Ken Hoyt explained to me, “It has never died. It was not forgotten.” For many, reliving this culture and connecting with the past is the most important aspect of the journey.

Fred Olsen, the chairman of the board at SEARHC, joined the Hamars in their paddle from Coffman Cove to Wrangell. When I spoke to him, he told me that he was overwhelmed by his experience. “It was incredible,” he said, “Sometimes I would just be paddling along and these kinds of things would just hit me… I wonder if this is what it was like for them.” Fred was instrumental in SEARHC’s decision to fund Chilton’s paddle workshops. For him, the journeys are first and foremost,  a way to reconnect with traditional Tlingit and Haida practices and lifestyle. He can clearly see the connection between loss of culture and suicide rates. To him, a canoe journey is suicide prevention because it bridges a gap where pride in tradition and culture has been torn away.

“There is no better suicide prevention then pride in yourself,” he told me.

Fred argued that the activity of paddling the canoe is a form of behavioral health. The reason, though, isn’t just because it is physical exercise. “When we go out to get sockeye, or seaweed or collect berries, you have to go out and do this,” he explained, “These are all verbs, they are activities. And so just going to get this stuff makes you healthier. It is behavioral health.” When people stop regularly practicing these activities, as the result of modernization, they lose the “behavioral health” that naturally comes with them. Canoe travel, which was an integral part of living with the land in this region for centuries, is no different. It is a journey that was robbed when people converted to using skiffs and motorboats as a primary form of transportation. While for many it was a practical step in the process of assimilation, to Fred, by choosing that, people lost something vital to their deeper sense of health and existence.

“When we go out to get sockeye, or seaweed or collect berries, you have to go out and do this,” he explained, “These are all verbs, they are activities. And so just going to get this stuff makes you healthier. It is behavioral health.”

Elders and Children

In many ways, the revitalization of canoe culture is motivated by the love for elders and children in Tlingit and Haida communities. Ken Hoyt. from Wrangell, told me that some of the elders in his family would have been old enough to see canoes tied up on the docks. For him, one of the most rewarding aspects of building and paddling a canoe is sharing the experience with those uncles and aunts. “(I love) seeing the look at the face of the elders, like my great aunt, my grandma, anyone who is over 65, seeing them be impressed,” he told me, “…That’s pretty cool to contribute something and in a way, give back to them, everything they’ve given to use.” Among many things, for Ken, the canoe-journey is a way prove to the elders that traditions are not lost and will continue.

On the other side, Doug Chilton from the One People Canoe Society, said that the youth were the primary motivation for his work. He sees the canoe journey as a way to connect youth with different aspects of the culture, like song, dance, carving and language. He told me about his experience hearing a young girl speak her native language during one of the first gatherings he witnessed in Washington. Listen to him tell that story here.

“Right in the middle of the stage they have this microphone and we are waiting for the next group to go on. And I am sitting there talking to my son and then this little girl, she must have been 5 or 6, this little girl went walking out onto the stage and I thought, uh-oh, somebody’s  little girl is getting away. And I thought somebody for sure was going to grab her. She started getting close to the front of the stage where the microphone was… I got worried and got up because I thought she was going to move up in that direction. Well, she walked right to the microphone, she reached up and grabbed the microphone, and she introduced her canoe family in their indigenous language and then led them out leading the song. So, I’m telling you, I was so impressed by that little girl. I don’t know who she was, I don’t know what group it was, I just remember looking at my son and thinking, this is exactly what we need back in southeast.”

Fred Olsen from Kasaan agreed that the benefit to young children and adolescents is indescribable. He was moved to tears by the idea that children in Hydaburg and Kasaan were “going to grow up thinking that we’ve always had canoes or we’ve always had totem raising.” When for so long cultural practices were lost, adults today are thrilled by the idea of raising their children in an environment rich with tradition.

Building Connections to Nature and Place

There is also something deeply healing about connecting with the sheer width and depth of Southeast Alaska. Surrounded by the Tongass national forest, the landscape can feel as vast as the wild lands and waters that surround us, or as cramped as a few miles of road that pass through small towns. While people living in small communities like Kasaan and Hydaburg, go out in motor boats all the time, Stormy Hamar told me, “It’s different in a canoe.” On one journey to celebration, Doug Chilton told me, a canoe team was passed by a whole pod of killer whales. “The feeling was indescribable,” he told me. Timothy Willis Jr., who paddled with the team from Coffman Cove, spoke about how his perspective shifted moving slowly and that closely to the water. “Just getting a feeling of the size of the water,” he said, “The straight looked like it was just over the way, but it was just actually 4 or 5 miles across. Actually getting out there and getting to experience it was kind of impressive to think of someone paddling all the way down to Washington.” Timothy had gained a respect for sheer size of landscape as well as for the traditional Haida lifestyle.

There is a difference between knowing something (for him, that the straight was four miles across) and experiencing that space.  There is a difference between knowing that you live in a wild and abundant place, and having the ability to go out an experience it. Sometimes, it is the difference between feeling whole and feeling like taking your life.. Doug Chilton told me that he could barely find the vocabulary to describe the feeling of expansiveness and connection that he often experienced while paddling. “It’s such a huge thing when you’re there,” he confessed, “It’s hard to put into words what the experience feels like. So all you can do is try and convince people to come try it and experience it for themselves.” With help from an extended network of friends and fellow-paddlers, he is helping people to experience the waters and landscape of Southeast Alaska. The canoe-journeys are one more way that people are seeing the connection between community health, cultural health, and a relationship with the natural landscape. All this work can be summed up simply. Connecting with our past and our present, ourselves and our homes in the Tongass National Forest, inspires us to live healthier, fuller lives.

When Southeast Alaskans think of local food, we usually think of foraging, fishing and hunting. In the realm of produce, however, we have become accustomed to eating fruits and vegetables shipped in from the lower 48 and around the globe.But a gardening movement is on the rise around the islands. In Sitka, a city with no agricultural property, people have been working with the city to create ways to grow and sell local produce. Like all southeast towns, Sitka has a small and strong community, which makes negotiating with local lawmakers to change the structure of land and food policy more direct and personal. With the farmer's markets gaining steam and gardens springing up all over town, the future of the local food movement in Sitka is bright. But it has taken many pioneers to get it on its feet.

Lori Adams says, "She couldn't do any of this without the ducks." Her feathered friends help her control the slug population.

One of those leaders is Lori Adams, owner and operator of Down-to-Earth You-Pick garden. She was raised on a farm in Oregon and moved to Sitka to fish with her husband in the 80s. With no dirt to play in, living on a fishing boat was a rough adjustment. Once she and her husband bought property of their own, however, Lori began scheming up plans to get back to veggie production. "I just have farming in my roots and dirt under my fingernails," she told me, "and it won't go away. And I always wanted to farm, and we moved up here and I just decided that I would farm where I went."

The view from Sawmill Creek Road of Lori's epic front yard

Lori wanted to create her own You-Pick garden where she could sell her produce to customers who came to her house to harvest it directly from her front yard. "Where I grew up a You-Pick garden was a common thing," she explained, "… So, I feel like it's really important to grow my own food and teach other people how to grow their own food. And many of the children who grow up here have never seen a carrot in the ground, have never picked a pea off the vine, and so they just don't have a connection like that with their food." With a You-Pick garden, she could satisfy her farming itch, while also giving Sitkans the opportunity to learn about gardening and create a more intimate relationship with how their food is grown.

Immediately she called the planning department to ask for a permit to start a You-Pick garden. "They looked at me with a blank look and said, ‘You want to dowhat?'" As the law stood in 2007, it was illegal to sell produce directly off of private property and to allow people to harvest their own vegetables. Luckily, the people at the planning department were willing and excited to work with Lori. They thought it was such a good idea that they wanted to help her make it legal. "So we spent 6 months changing the zoning laws and going to the assembly meetings, and once it was worked out it turned out that anyone in Sitka could have a you-pick garden if they applied for a special use permit." Now, any one in Sitka who applies for a special use permit can start a You-Pick garden right on their property.

Today, Lori has a whole community of return customers. They love coming up to her property, picking her brain about gardening, greeting the ducks, and harvesting their own kohlrabi, kale, leeks, onions, sorrel, lettuce and other cold-weather-loving vegetables.But Lori is just as excited to sell her produce as she is to teach others how to garden, or even how to create their own You-Pick. "That's my hope," she told me, "that they'll sprout up all over and it will just become a common thing."

Whether or not her story inspires others to create a You-Pick, her collaboration with the planning department is certainly a testament to the responsiveness of Sitka's local government to new ideas addressing issues of local food. Property may be expensive and limited, but there is plenty of room for innovation, and stories like Lori's certainly aren't in short supply! Go tositkawild.orgto hear more stories or to share a story about building sustainable communities in Southeast. You can also learn more about Lori on herblog. If you are interested in getting involved in the local food movement, visit the Sitka local food network'swebsite.

Protecting old-growth forest is no longer a revolutionary idea. As we continue to discover ways that old-growth habitat are critical to salmon, birds, Sitka deer and numerous other species, people are making the connection between protecting these areas and the wildlife that we depend on. Leaving old-growth habitat intact is a no-brainer forSoutheast Alaskans whodepend on the forest as the place where theyforage, hunt and fish. But we can't ignore the fact that we use woodon a daily basis. Can these needs coexist?

One way that the Sitka Conservation Society is exploring this question is by looking at ways that Southeast Alaskans have selectively and sustainably harvested old growth trees throughout time. Immediately, we turn to the ways that Tlingit Alaska Native peoples have harvested the trees. In contrast to the ways that the forests were used in the 20^thcentury when they were liquidated and exported ascommodities, Alaska Natives used craftsmanship to carve useful and meaningful objectsthat were often imbued with their values and ideals. And they did it whileunderstanding andmaintaining the character and quality of the tree.

Drawing from Frederica De Laguna's "Under Mount Saint Elias: The History and Culture of the Yakutat Tlingit" Part 1. Page 333.

by Sarah Stockdale

I am in a land of light. Alaska is alive in the summer, and in southeast, the rainforest is abundant with green foliage. As part of the Alaska Conservation Foundation Summer internship program, I have been blessed with the opportunity to spend three months here in Sitka as a media and storytelling intern with SCS. And in the three weeks since I arrived here, I've found Alaskans themselves to be not unlike the native flora and fauna that surround them in the summer. They take advantage of their daylight hours, knowing that winter will bring plenty of time for hibernation. The fisherwomen from whom I rent sleep only three hours a night, especially when they're on their boat and alert for King salmon snapping at the line. Karen Schmidt, an attorney who hosted me in Anchorage for the ACF intern orientation, was the same way. She worked tirelessly during the day, but was still happy to spend the late evening down at the beach until midnight, treasuring every last glimpse of light that bounced across the Cook Inlet mudflats.

Sunset at Cook Inlet. Photo credit: Sarah Stockdale

As part of the Alaska Conservation Foundation internship program, I attended a weeklong orientation in Anchorage before heading off to my internship placement site. There, I met with young folks interning with conservation organizations across the state. We heard from conservation leaders on a variety of topics, from organizing to Alaskan history and GIS. While in Sitka, it's easy to feel like one of only a handful of groups concerned with issues of conservation. In Anchorage, however, I was able to experience the interconnectedness of all the conservation movements across this enormous state. We certainly need one another.

In my first three weeks in Sitka, I've been able to sit back and breath in the Tongass, orienting myself to the sites, smells and culture. And when I look around me I see… green!!! For a New Mexican like me, you can't imagine my awe at the density of life that the rain brings to this unique and hidden corner of the world. As one of the Alaska native speakers commented during the orientation, it's less like subsistence out here, and more like abundance. And the Tongass is certainly abundant. Food prices may be high, but looking around, I see nourishment on ever corner from the salmonberry bushes to king salmon coming into the harbor on trollers.

I couldn't feel further away from the suburban desert where I grew up. Yet it's clear to me that maintaining and protecting the future of these natural resources is an issue that is not just important to Alaskans. With almost 80% of wild-caught salmon in North America coming from Alaskan fishermen, campaigns like the fight to protect Bristol Bay impact people all over the United States. Recently, New Mexico senator and congressman Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich spoke out against the Pebble mine. People are concerned, even down south.

And while a lot of people have a stake in the future of these lands, the people in southeast who have the time and energy to work on these issues are few. This is both overwhelming and deeply hopeful. It reminds me of the way a friend from Southern Colorado once described ranch culture. On a ranch, everyone's help is needed. Nobody is turned away and everyone's contribution is welcome. When there is a job to be done, you need all the hands you can get. Southeast Alaska feels similar to me. Every person's energy adds to the greater goal. It's nice to feel that you can really make a difference.

Co-worker Mary Wood and I got to take the Trak Kayaks out on Mendenhall lake when we were in Juneau this weekend. Later, we explored the ice caves on the side of the glacier. Unlike difficult to access arctic glaciers, Mendenhall is just outside of Juneau. Thousands of visitors every year come to see it, and are able to see how it is receding. Folks who grew up in southeast remember that it used to jut out all the way to the parking lot at the Visitor's Center not so long ago. Photo Credit: Freddie Muñoz of SEACC.

As a Media and Storytelling Intern, my job is to capture the ways that people in Sitka live in relationship with their natural environment. By sharing these stories, SCS hopes to connect people with their own sense of place in the Tongass, and their personal reasons for contributing to the fight to protect it from abusive extraction practices. There is certainly no shortage of stories here in Sitka. Every person I have spoken with has a relationship with the rhythms of the rainforest, whether through fishing, hunting, foraging, hiking, wood-work, etc. From artists, students, carvers, fishermen, elders to avid gardener, everyone has an appreciation for their home. And I'm falling in love more quickly than I'd imagined.

Laurie Adams, collecting duck eggs at Down-to-Earth You-Pick Garden. Laurie taught me that slug-eating ducks are essential to having a successful garden in the Tongass.

While my job here is to inspire others to recognize the singularity of the Tongass and the importance of protecting it, I'm not surprised to find that I'm the one being inspired. As the intern coordinator for ACF, Claire Pywell, commented: people come to Alaska for the landscape, but they stay for the people. And I'm starting to believe her.