Alaska Native artifacts returned to Kake as Quakers continue reparations

At the Kake Dog Salmon Festival on Saturday, Aug. 3, 2024, residents and visiting Quakers examined artifacts returned to the village by the ancestor of a Quaker missionary. (Photo courtesy of Jan Bronson)

Formline carved paddles, beaded slippers, and a small totem were among the items returned to Kake last weekend by a Quaker woman whose ancestor taught in the mission school there in the early 1900s.

Joel Jackson, the Tribal council president for the Organized Village of Kake, said it is nice to have the objects home.

“That wasn’t meant for somebody else to display in their home as an artform or whatever. That’s sacred to us,” he said.

He said the village is working on repatriating other objects that are held privately or in museums across the country.

The return of the objects is part of Quakers’ ongoing reparations effort in the Southeast city of roughly 500 people. In January, Quakers with the Alaska Friends Conference and from Oregon and Washington donated more than $90,000 to the establishment of a cultural healing center in Kake, which followed a formal apology in 2022 for the Quaker role in the boarding school era.

Quakers established a mission school in the Tlingit village of Kake in the early 1900s. Presbyterians later took over the school, which was among the boarding schools that forcibly assimilated Alaska Native people.

Juulie Downs, the great-granddaughter of one of the Quaker teachers there, was moved to return the objects that had been in her family since then after learning that, in some worldviews, objects can be sacred or even considered to be ancestors. She wondered if the items she now owned might have more meaning than she had previously considered with her Christian worldview.

“We don’t humanize objects and say, ‘This is an ancestor, and this ancestor has a home and needs to be taken home,’” she said. “And so for me, it was just a really cool thing that I’d inherited that was gorgeous and it was meaningful to me, but not as an ancestor.”

Downs reached out to the Haa Tóoch Lichéesh Coalition in Juneau and formed a plan to visit Kake to return the objects.

At the Kake Dog Salmon Festival Downs met community members, including a woman whose great-grandmother was a student of her great-grandmother. Their ancestors had exchanged letters after Downs’ great-grandmother left Kake in 1906.

Down said she was deeply moved by the experience, and the effect the objects had on the community.

“I’m the first descendant of any of those missionaries to come back, to return and to bring back artifacts. So theoretically, there’s other artifacts out there,” she said.

Joel Jackson saw it as part of a healing process from the intergenerational trauma sparked by those schools. He said some of the symptoms of that trauma, like alcoholism, could be healed by the cultural healing center he is working towards in the community.

“That’s why the healing center is so important to me: It’s to give people that may want to quit drinking or doing drugs an option of going to a cultural healing center, instead of the Western style of rehab,” he said.

The National Forest Service has agreed to let the village use an empty building for the center, but Jackson said a final hangup is getting the building insured. Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Alaska Regional Forester Chad VanOrmer attended the festival and participated in a round table with community leaders. Jackson said he hopes it leads to a breakthrough for the center.

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