Personal Narrative

Throughout our history my tribe has had suspicion of western education, and
with good reason. From the early 1900s my ancestors up until my Mother’s
generation were sent to forced education camps run by the BIA and various
religious organizations. in my home village of Klukwan along the Chilkat River my
relatives all grew up going to a presbyterian boarding school and were beaten if
they spoke their language. My Great Grandmother was the first person to speak
English in Klukwan and my Grandmother was the first one to get a college degree.
Thus was born some of the natural prejudices

Naturally during the whole ANCSA process many tribes were very reticent of
the process. The law and change it brought to Alaskan Natives is defined by the
young Natives with western education that had been estranged from their tribes
stepping forward and representing their tribes during a time where if traditional
dealings with the federal government had been followed then we would have lost
all. Men like Emil Notti and Willy Hensly and women like my Grandmother, Irene
Rowan, despised at the time for their western methods of thought saw an
opportunity and seized hold of it before it was too late due to their western
education.

Education, while no replacement for traditional thought and knowledge, can
help our people survive in the modern world, so then why do our leaders in our own
western designed corporations such as Sealaska, Klukwan Inc., or Goldbelt Native
Corporation shun those who have any actual business knowledge and promote
those who rather hold the biggest stick. Those who have good ideas founded in own
personal knowledge and research are bullied out while those who are “elders” take
down potential usurpers at any notice.

The most successful Native Corporation ever, Klukwan Inc., was run by my
grandmother when she was twenty five years old and followed up by her nephew
when he was twenty. Most Native corporations started this way and had a boom of
industry in the eighties. These young Natives in the 70s and 80s are still in charge
today, but their strategies are very different. Now they are the corporation oligarchs
and over assuming “business experts.” Weren’t these the ones who defied their
elders and brought the safety of our people at the cost of western ideologies?
Weren’t they the ones fully embracing new ideas? I ask where these leaders are now
and why are they not ushering on the next generation of new thinkers, and what
makes them so different than us, the young blood of Native Alaska?

- Posted on behalf of Aidan Hellen