Knik cultural mapping project gets park service grant

Historic Dena’ina cultural areas near Fish Creek in the Upper Cook Inlet will soon be mapped as part of a project funded this month through a National Park Service grant.

The almost $38,000 Tribal Heritage program grant was awarded July 15 to the Knik Tribe through an application process. Tribal leaders plan to work with an archeologist, field assistants and possibly several students from the Tribe’s new Knik Cultural Charter School to survey the area for any cultural signs of the Native people who lived and subsisted in the area for thousands of years, according to the grant application.

The 32-acres of state owned land are a known home to Native cultural features. But because the region today is a popular area for both recreation and subsistence, including dipnetting and ATV trails, those sites are at risk of being destroyed, said Richard Martin, Knik’s historic preservation officer and mapper, who applied for the grant on behalf of the Tribe.

By mapping the area they can work to better preserve the history there, he said.

“What we plan to do is just document every feature,” he said. “Ultimately what we want to have is a good concise map of everything we have there, and that will help the state do better planning.”

In the past, that mapping and preservation project was a part of the Knik Arm Bridge proposal, but never moved forward when the effort was put on ice more than a decade ago. Now Martin says he wants to at least document the long heritage of the area to both protect the sites that still exist and the knowledge of what was there.

“You’ve got to go back to your roots, and the roots are how they lived on the land and what they did,” he said “We can’t save everything out there but we can at least preserve the knowledge of what was there.”

And since there is also evidence that the area was used by Native peoples who lived there before the Dena’ina, the project could be documenting more than 10,000 years of indigienous use.

“There’s a really rich heritage that is more than Dena’ina — it’s really a heritage of all the people who live here on the land.”

But perhaps more importantly, he said, mapping projects like this help today’s Tribe members remember their culture.

“It’s important because it goes back to this depopulation of the Native people and the loss of the cultural values,” he said. “Part of the rejuvenation is taking the people back to the land and teaching them that they have a rich heritage. You can’t create something from scratch — you have to have something there to help build it.”

The project is slated to start in the spring of 2023.