The Alaska Native Heritage Center Is a Home of Ancestral Knowledge

America’s Cultural Treasures: This article is part of a series sponsored by the Ford Foundation highlighting the work of museums and organizations that have made a significant impact on the cultural landscape of the United States.

In 2000, the Alaska Native Heritage Center in Anchorage invited culture bearers to the space to build eight traditional Alaska Native boats as part of the project “Qayaqs & Canoes: Paddling into the Millennium.” The master boat builders had apprentices accompany them in the process of constructing these boats, learning by watching or helping them locate wood, carve logs, gather tree bark, sew animal skins, and color boat frames. As Jen Steinbright writes in the introduction to the book Qayaks and Canoes: Native Ways of Knowing (2001), the project “attests to the importance of utilizing traditional ways of knowing to impart significant cultural values, passing them on to future generations.” Paul Asicksik, cultural programs manager at the Alaska Native Heritage Center, where he has worked for more than 23 years, asserts that experiential teaching is the kind of education participants in the center’s programs thrive on.

“Being able to construct a qayaq from memory, measuring out three and a half arm lengths, and then, based on the height and the weight of the hunter, making a qayaq fit for your size, having something so accurate [about] the body measurements of a human being, gives you an appreciation for the living culture that, luckily, we still have, but it’s becoming rare,” Asicksik says. “You still have people who know how to do these things. It’s a living, breathing culture of knowledge.”

This is proof of life: Alaska Natives passing on understandings of particular ways of living so that subsequent generations carry forward the values and perspectives of the previous ones. The Alaska Native Heritage Center exists to be a purposeful, active place where culture is embodied, enacted, and shared. Knowledge transfer is key to the center’s mission to reproduce its culture, and this process begins with the elders, whose “knowledge is invaluable,” Asicksik affirms.

“We’ll often say when an elder passes away, it’s like a book goes poof. It’s off the shelf now, but if you could immerse yourself with that elder, you can draw upon their chapters, and you can absorb that knowledge,” he continues. “You’re not going to know everything that they know, but you’ll learn enough to pass on. A part of them will always be with you to pass that on.”

First opening its doors in 1999, the Alaska Native Heritage Center is the only organization that brings together all 11 Native cultures and more than 20 distinct Indigenous languages in the region, according to Vice President of Strategic Advancement and Communications Kelsey Ciugun Wallace (Yup’ik).

“The Heritage Center is the only living cultural center that is representative of all Alaska Native cultures,” she explains. “Traditionally, in the village, we don’t have cultural centers; we have schools, which serve as this place where you have dance festivals and practices and workshops and funerals, and the schools are our community space. So, if the Heritage Center wasn’t here tomorrow, there would be an incredible gap to fill.”

Jonathon Ross (Salamatof Tribe–Yaghanen Ht’ana), who served as the president and chief executive officer of the Alaska Native Heritage Center from 2003 to 2011, describes the impact of his upbringing on Kodiak Island without access to a space like the center. 

“Growing up, there was no singing. There was no dancing. There was no visible sign of any culture, traditions, or language. Where I’m from, you didn’t see signage. You didn’t see buildings. We were basically invisible in our own communities,” he explains. “The culture and the language have been repressed systematically by the government since the late 1800s. The churches were part of it. In the schools, you couldn’t speak your language. And people going out for boarding school [became] disconnected. So, there was a lot of shame around culture.”

The Rasmuson Foundation is a family philanthropy created in 1955 to empower Alaska residents to help each other have healthier, more enriching lives. Diane Kaplan, hired as its first president in 1995, recounts that prior to the construction of the Alaska Native Heritage Center, which sits about 400 miles north of Kodiak Island, the situation in Anchorage was similar. 

“You could take the city bus and do an entire tour of Anchorage. You’d never hear the word Native mentioned. You could go on the Alaska railroad for two hours with a guided tour all the way down, you’d never hear the word Native mentioned,” she says. “Unlike if you go to Albuquerque and you step off the plane, you know you’re in Indian Country: The carpet is Native; there’s street names. There was nothing here.”

Emily Edenshaw (Yup’ik/Iñupiaq), president and CEO of the Alaska Native Heritage Center, leads the organization to address the specific needs of the Native population. She has expanded the view of the heritage center to encompass more people who were previously not being directly served. 

“When we say this is your heritage center, that is just not meaning people who are well and in schools and youth and elders,” she explains. “It also applies to people who are in jails, who are on the street, who are homeless, who are in the foster care system. That’s where I’m trying to take the Heritage Center.”

“Alaska Natives make up almost 80% of the homeless population. Alaska Natives make up over 60% of the foster care system,” Edenshaw continues. “I got a call recently from a woman who works at the women’s prison here in Eagle River. She says 99% of the women in the pregnancy ward are Alaska Native. The power of arts and culture and how we could use that as a pathway to healing, this is why I’m doing the work that I’m doing. I believe that those people, whether they have soul wounds, whether they have been incarcerated, whether they’ve been whatever, they deserve to have access to culture as well. It’s a real problem within our community, access to knowledge, access to culture.”

Alaska Natives have been forced to contend with erasure and dispossession since the mid-18th century, when Russian colonization of Indigenous people in southern parts of present-day Alaska began. Russia introduced mandatory conscription of men as a source of forced labor, used the Russian Orthodox Church to Christianize Native peoples, and brought diseases that reduced the Unangax̂ population by an estimated 80% by 1800. In 1867, the United States purchased Alaska from Russia and refused to view Alaska Natives as citizens, taking no interest in their humanity or their needs. The government’s administration made land that belonged to Alaska Natives available to be claimed by White settlers, and the only formal schooling made available to Indigenous people was through assimilative boarding schools established by Christian missionaries with the express goal of expunging or suppressing Native identity. Through them, Native youth were forced to abandon traditional practices and belief systems and faced abuse at the hands of missionaries. 

Since this time, Alaska Natives have had to contend with a generalized perception that they no longer exist, or if they do, they do so as embalmed artifacts of the past, encountered through clear glass in a dusty museum — a kind of social and cultural death. Patuk Glenn, a board member of the Alaska Native Heritage Center, explains that “people think of us as, for example, an Eskimo living in an igloo. People get comfortable with the idea that’s who Native people are. It is damaging to think that way, because if there was an issue in the Native community and we needed help from the outside world and they want to help us, we’re in a box.”

During the Klondike Gold Rush of 1896 to 1898, the United States essentially formalized into law their attitude toward Natives by creating an apartheid state, imposing racial segregation and inequitable laws. Policies were put in place that segregated schools, and Natives would only be allowed to attend a school with American children if the family abandoned their culture — which entailed no longer speaking their home language, eating Native foods, wearing traditional clothing, or practicing any Indigenous religion. As with Native tribes and nations of the lower 48 states, if assimilation into the larger society was offered at all, it was contingent upon their effacement. In 1915, the Alaska Territorial Legislature passed a law allowing Alaska Natives the right to vote, but only on the condition that they give up their customs and traditions. That is how the general absence of the signs and symbols of Native culture in public life described by Kaplan and Ross had come to be. The Heritage Center positions itself to be the remedy for this dearth by giving Natives access to the traditions and ceremonies that fell out of regular use because of their criminalization.

To provide this access, the center runs several programs. It offers a range of school visits: standard, customized, and Shavila (“rainbow” in Dena’ina Athabascan) packages. In each case, the center might furnish a film screening, a Village Site tour, and a choice of Native storytelling, arts and crafts making, game playing, or song and dance.

Named for the Yup’ik word meaning “to be in motion,” the Eglertuq Program is specifically developed for women in the Alaska Native community. It connects culture bearers who have a particular skill or art to those who want to learn, especially for women who have survived domestic abuse. Eglertuq is mostly geared toward healing through cultural participation. The Heritage Center’s Ilakucaraq Project, which ran from 2021 to 2024, provided educational and cultural programs for Alaska Native students ages 13 to 17. The Project had three tiers: a one-year cultural immersion program, a two-day set of workshops at a high school in Sitka, and virtual and in-person cultural workshops for high school students in rural and urban Alaska, with a particular focus on providing access for those in remote villages that can only be reached by airplane.

Edenshaw attests that the center also does work in substance abuse prevention, education, workforce development, and suicide prevention — particularly prevalent issues in many Alaska Native communities. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, from 2015 to 2020, the suicide rate for American Indian and Alaska Native people increased to 23.9 people per 100,000, in contrast to that of the overall US population, which increased less than one percent from 13.3 to 13.5 per 100,00 people. The work of the Alaska Native Heritage Center aims to be not only life-giving, but lifesaving. 

Wallace, who has seen how the center has changed in the past several years, has noted the shift in priorities. “If you would have asked anybody in our community seven, eight years ago, ‘Who does your community serve?’ a lot of people had an optic that the Heritage Center was only built for tourists, for visitors. I have to acknowledge our staff, our leadership team and our board for redirecting that and giving the Center back to our community,” she says. 

The need to nurture Native communities by passing on cultural knowledge was not always evident. It became acutely apparent in the wake of the crisis that occurred in 1959, when Alaska was granted statehood and Alaska Native peoples collectively asserted their claims to the lands that they had been using and living on. The Alaska Statehood Act provided that any Alaska Native land claims would be unaffected by statehood, but a legal loophole allowed the state government to claim lands it deemed vacant, which it sought to do even in cases where Native people were occupying and using such land. After Alaska Natives’ petitions to their lands were largely ignored by the government, a group of local leaders formed the Alaska Federation of Natives (AFN) in 1967 in order to devise a just and fair land settlement for the whole Indigenous population.

Then, in 1968, oil was discovered at Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic coast. Petroleum corporations rapidly began to draw up plans to build a pipeline to carry the oil across Alaska to the port of Valdez, from where it could be shipped to the lower 48 states. Pressure was put on the federal government to achieve a settlement agreement with Alaska Natives by the oil companies, who foresaw the profits of constructing their fuel pipelines. Ultimately, the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act was signed into law by then-President Richard Nixon in 1971, ending any Native claim to land except those covered by the law. In return, it placed 44 million acres into Native hands and paid them $963 million, which was divided among approximately 200 local Alaska Native “village corporations” and 12 “regional corporations.” 

Roy Huhndorf (​​Yup’ik), who would go on to co-found the Alaska Native Heritage Center, was elected to serve on the initial board of incorporators of Cook Inlet Region, Inc. (CIRI), one of the 12 regional for-profit corporations created via the settlement act. He explains that in place of recognizing tribes, Congress “made the tribal members corporate shareholders and it said the corporations will manage the money in a for-profit way, and the land shall be managed in a for-profit way as well.” Though Native people were again being shoehorned into a mercenary way of managing their resources and caring for their people, the corporations found ways to thrive. As of this writing, the top three Alaska Native corporations have gross revenues in the billions and all 12, plus some village firms, have developed into the wealthiest Alaska-owned entities in the past several decades. These companies mostly outpace the revenue of the wealthiest mainland tribes.

But that financial success does not guarantee future life. Huhndorf accounts for the questions that led Alaska Natives to turn toward their culture: “Yeah, you’re going to make money, we’re going to get dividends, but what about our social services? What about our culture? What about the education and healthcare? So, we had to answer all those questions.”

One key person who led these inquiries was Paul Tiulana (Iñupiat Native), born on King Island in the Bering Strait. He was fully immersed in his culture, working as a mask maker, carver, singer, and drummer. After his community was forced to leave their island in the 1950s, it resettled in Nome, Anchorage, and other locations. In Anchorage, Tiulana taught carving classes and workshops, and he was a member of the King Island dancers for more than 40 years, touring extensively with the group throughout Alaska. 

“Paul Tiulana was the person saying to Roy, ‘Hey, we have a problem here. We have young people who don’t know their culture and we have elders [who] do, and we have a gap and somehow, we need to address that gap,’” says Ross. “And to address the gap, Paul Tiulana just continuously would go to Roy Huhndorf and say, “We need a heritage center in Anchorage where our people can gather, where we can teach our youth, where we can fill that gap.’ So, the lake out here is called Lake Tiulana in honor of Paul.”

Tiulana made an intentional pivot from the then-prevailing practice with regard to cultural learning and sharing of Native patrimony: He turned outward, toward non-Native people. Some surmise he did this as both to encourage outsiders to understand Alaska Native culture, and to widen financial support for Indigenous causes and concerns.

The center’s director of grants, Gregory Stewart, recalls that Tiulana “used to do performances for the Anchorage Chamber of Commerce where he would perform with the King Island Dancers, and he would explain what all the dance moves mean, because they all have significance, and they all convey something. He saw the value when someone was able to watch a dance and understand what was happening, someone who’s essentially foreign to it. There’s an increase in respect immediately. […] That education is far more than the revenue generated, in my opinion, because it elevates respect.”

However, in the 1990s, when the Alaska Native Heritage Center looked as if it would finally be realized, the founders discovered that this respect was not felt in all quarters of Anchorage.

Roy Huhndorf tells the story of the center’s initial rejection. He says that Tiulana came to him over and over, making his case. And then he found a place where the heritage center might come to be: “One of the areas that I thought Paul might be pleased with is the old Campbell tract, just a little southeast of here. This has got a beautiful creek running through it. Water is really the essence of Native being. You’ve got to be near water, and close to Anchorage.”

This discovery set them on the path to drawing up plans. But these plans were resisted. “Racism [was] still alive and living well in Anchorage. A prominent family began putting pieces in the newspaper about how this [plot] is slated to be a municipal park.” Huhndorf explains that in 1992, “they got a ballot initiative to stop it. We fought it. We did our lobbying. We thought we had the votes to let it pass, but it failed.”

Despite this defeat, the founders reorganized and identified an area on the northeast edge of the city with 26 acres of land on the traditional territory of the Native Village of Eklutna, a Dena’ina Athabascan Tribe. The center was built there for $15 million after a long fundraising campaign. It opened in 1999 and includes a central Gathering Place, a theatre, a Hall of Cultures, and the Village Sites, which consist of several homes and ceremonial gathering places that were constructed to resemble the structures associated with particular tribes. For example, a qasgiq community house is featured on the Yupiit/Cupiit Site, and on the Unangax̂ and Sugpiat site, one Unalaskan-style ûlax and one Kodiak-style ciqlluaq (Sugpiaq houses, traditionally covered by sod) sit side by side. The Iñupiat & Sivuqam Yupigi site contains a 20-by-20-foot qargi (community house) based on a similar structure from the Kotzebue Sound area. 

Upon the center’s opening in 1999, many in the community thought that it would primarily serve Alaska Native people, but the center’s leadership for several years sought tourist dollars. “The community had high expectations and hopes,” Ross explains. “They thought it was going to be a gathering place for Alaska Native people, and it ended up being more focused on tourism.” 

Though the tourism industry’s impact on Alaska has risen and sunk in accord with broader economic trends, what impelled a concern with the tourism industry was its massive financial power that might have been turned toward support for the center. In 2012, one year after Ross had left his position as president and CEO of the Heritage Center, according to the Cruise Lines International Association, “Alaska received approximately 65% of all port-of-call cruise passenger visits in the U.S. Passenger and crew onshore spending was an estimated $520 million.” The economic incentive to seek patronage from tourists was irrefutable. According to Aaron Leggett, a former assistant curator at the center and its Dena’ina cultural historian, previous leadership tried to follow the money.

“The person who was sort of the number two after Jon left and that took over, [Annette Evans Smith], she put all her eggs into that basket and she was always chasing the cruise ships and trying to figure out ways to appease them,” Leggett says. 

However, Smith’s efforts did not yield a sustainable funding stream, and when these tourist dollars did not materialize, the center was put on precarious financial footing. Wallace relates her memory of a severe downturn in 2016 when the center lost a large grant and had to cut staff and programming.

“We went from a team of 30 down to a team of 12 working four-day work weeks for six hours a day,” she recalls. “We were on furlough, and not only was it hard on our staff who were here at the time, it was incredibly hard on our community not having the space where our youth could come and have a retreat, whether they needed a retreat from their home life or from school life.”

These days, the Heritage Center is widely known to be a gathering place for all Alaska Native cultural groups. Part of how it reoriented itself to care primarily for its community is through the hiring of Emily Edenshaw in 2019. Edenshaw comes from a background of growing small businesses for the largest consortium of Alaskan tribes, the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska. She affirms that she “oversaw all the business and economic development” for them, and that she was “responsible for growing out social enterprises, small businesses,” including “coffee shops, auto detailing, a child daycare center, an event hall.” With this experience, she arrived with the practical knowledge to put the center on more diversified, and therefore more stable, economic footing. 

“We had seven grants and then admissions. When one of these grants would go away then the programs would go away,” she says, admitting that the financial situation she inherited was unsustainable. “So, in the last five years, we’ve really built out our small businesses. We operate three coffee shops: one here, one at the Native hospital, one at the tribe here. So, it generates maybe half a million a year. Then we operate our gallery. We’re the only Native-owned gallery in Anchorage.”

Stewart, who manages much of the money coming into the center from restricted sources such as grants, donor-advised funds, and contracts, says: “Emily, I think, deserves a massive amount of credit in bringing the organization into a financial position that is more sustainable, more effective, more robust, and just capable of navigating all of the obligations upon the organization.”

A consequential responsibility the center has taken on is to make life for all Alaska Native people sustainable. Edenshaw understands that in order to do this, the center needs to simultaneously be oriented both to the Indigenous community and toward the non-Natives that outnumber them (Native people are estimated to make up about 18% of the Alaskan population). One of the principal tools for accomplishing this is cultural tourism, considered an unsavory practice in certain circles of the arts and culture scene. It evokes images of smug, bourgeois crowds gawking at marginalized groups performing their traditional ceremonies, mocking what they don’t understand and fetishizing what they think they do. In practice, cultural tourism has often looked like White people exploiting the culture, artifacts, and labor of people of color. 

But the Alaska Native Heritage Center has sought to keep this practice as an indispensable tool to carry out its mission. When the question is posed to Edenshaw concerning whether the relationship between the center and cultural tourism is an important one, her answer is unequivocal.

“Cultural tourism is crucial because it not only educates and informs visitors but also supports our mission of preserving and strengthening Alaska Native culture, traditions, and languages. By engaging with visitors, we create opportunities for our community members to share their stories, skills, and traditions, thereby keeping these cultures alive and vibrant,” she says. “Additionally, the revenue generated from cultural tourism helps sustain our programs and operations, enabling us to continue our work and expand our reach.”

Stewart echoes her, attesting that “we would not exist as we do today without having invested in cultural tourism.” At the same time, he adds some historical context.

“There’s a unique and sometimes positive and sometimes problematic history when you look at how cultural tourism has unfolded in Alaska. We’ve also been subject to the influence of the cruise industry and the Alaskan tourism industry. We have a relationship to it in which we benefit from them, and they benefit from us, and we have to work together,” he says. “But there are oftentimes people at odds within those dynamics. I think cultural tourism is good for the Alaska Native community and is good for the state and is a valuable approach to the work that we do.”

Edenshaw acknowledges that the philanthropic structure tends to value a narrative of Native degradation and struggle, which she resists giving into. “The system, how it’s designed, really pits us against each other, especially with all of us going after the same kind of funding with the federal government,” she explains. “I’ve seen it here in Alaska. It’s almost like this oppression Olympics.”

Instead, Edenshaw has sought economic empowerment by diversifying funding streams. Now, instead of being dependent on one or two grants, they write between 40 and 50 grants to support the center’s work, plus ply the businesses that attract visitors to the center. And Edenshaw seeks to enfold everyone into an interwoven, connected community.

“There’s a Native value: All things are connected. We’re connected to our non-Native community. The system wants to pit us against each other, Native and non-Native,” Edenshaw says. “At the Heritage Center, we would not be where we are today if it wasn’t for our non-Native community.”

Ben Baldwin manages the Heritage Center’s Tin Hoozoonh apprenticeship program, whose name translates to “the trail is good” in Koyukon, that works primarily with young adults who have just graduated high school. It aims to give them professional skills related to cultural tourism by first discovering what the participant wants and then pairing them with a staff member who will mentor them through a collaboratively devised curriculum. Baldwin deeply values this program but reminds the center’s visitors and supporters that the center is not only devoted to developing skills. It also means to pass on ways of thinking and being. 

“It’s even more than traditional folkways. It’s traditional ways of thought. So, it’s deeper than knowing how to make a cedar hat. It’s different than knowing how to make a birch bark basket. It’s deeper. It’s what [our] connection [is] to place, to object, to descendants,” he reflects. “How do we connect all of those? That’s Indigenous lifeways more than folkways. When I hear folkways, it’s usually [with] the tinge of ‘how do you make stuff?’ So, I think Indigenous ways of being or Indigenous ways of knowing encapsulate that concept better.”

Baldwin talks about living “with the land,” instead of “off the land,” for instance, which suggests not only a different relationship to place, but an entirely different worldview. The key question he poses is whether we can live in ways that avoid exploitation. 

There is a kind of astonishing alchemy at work here: A people who have been continuously persecuted and beleaguered have found ways to give themselves and those who witness their transformative work a different way of seeing their place in the world. It is a generous view, one that imagines space for all of us to live and thrive.

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.