The trees know.
They know how easy it is to disappear 1
Sitka, Alaska is for most visitors the gateway to the Tongass National forest, which at 17 million acres is part of the largest intact temperate rainforest in the world. This part of the Tongass is home turf to the Tlingit people and infused with their placenames and stories. This is also a landscape threatened by development and voracious lumber policies, along with a legacy of willful erasure of the Tlingit presence. Sitka and its environs are a place of abundant potential and a precarious future. To build here demands consideration of its fragility and a meaningful engagement with its treasures.
Our project this semester is to envision a place for making and storytelling in support of Outer Coast, a post secondary school located in Sitka. The school offers a non-traditional, immersive two year liberal arts education that is based on the principles of self-governed education. A critical mission of the school is to teach through the “indigenous ways of knowing” and to make service to the community a central pillar of education. This brings the school into a kinship with the Tlingit people.
The school is currently a tenant on the historic Sheldon Jackson College campus. As Alaska’s oldest institution of higher learning, Sheldon Jackson’s history is complex. Built by Presbyterian missionaries in 1878, the boarding school was instrumental in the erasure of native identity and the indoctrination of Tlingit and Haida children in Christian dogma. The erasure of language and rituals of native tribes was systematic throughout Alaska. Young children were compelled to leave their villages and spend years in boarding schools like Sheldon Jackson. The use of native languages was strictly prohibited and many of these languages have come close to extinction. At the same time, the shared boarding school experience and the enforced use of the English language allowed native Alaskans from disparate tribes to create bonds that would allow them to unite and speak as one voice as they fought for the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act in 1971.
The campus is on the National Historic register and includes six buildings that were built in the craftsman style in 1910. Currently owned and operated by the Sitka Fine Arts camp, the buildings are rented by the Outer Coast during the academic year and used by the Fine Arts Camp during the summer months. Our project is for a new 30,000 square foot building on this campus that will be exclusively managed and occupied by Outer Coast and will also serve as a gathering space and be instrumental for community outreach.
1 from “Soulcatcher”, Raven’s Echo by Robert Davis Hoffman