Story teller unifies tribes past with present

A cultural revitalization program at Chickaloon Tribe's Ya Ne Dah Ah School has captured the interest of Harvard and the hearts of 250 tribal members.

This month a Harvard committee traveled to the school, located near the banks of Moose Creek on the Glenn Highway, to consider it for a $10,000 economic development grant.

The school has become a living repository for ancient Ahtna Athabascan stories that previously were stored only in the faithfulness of elder Katherine Wade's memory. Wade, nearing 80 years old, is the tribe's matriarchal leader.

"It's really something to hear Aunt Katie tell the stories," said school coordinator Sondra Stuart, Wade's niece. "She remembered the stories very carefully, not changing a single word. Because that's the only way they had in the old days, before tape recorders, of passing along a story: you had to tell it exactly right over and over."

Ya Ne Dah Ah means "ancient stories." The collection of brightly painted buildings that have formed the school since 1993 is therefore the ancient stories school that also teaches a full curriculum.

The old stories are full of characters whose vices and virtues contain lessons for young people. Raven is tricky and not completely honest. Owl -- Be Seem -- watches out for children who cry for no reason. And Ne Ha Sen is a greedy guy who couldn't accumulate enough material wealth to keep him happy.

Wade tells these stories "as soon as students get their other work done," Stuart says. In the past several years, the stories became tools for other classroom concepts. Now the characters and themes are formed into plays the students perform for the public, Stuart said.

Wade also teaches the students words from the Ahtna language. Colors, written in Ahtna, are suspended as a mobile in a doorway of the school. The word for clouds and other concepts are spelled out in wall displays.

These are some of the first attempts in several decades to reestablish the language in everyday Ahtna life.

Stuart said she had no such education in her own youth. Her father, a member of the Chickaloon tribe, and her mother, a Paiute Indian from Nevada, raised her on the Kenai Peninsula.

"When I came back here to my father's culture, I was overwhelmed with the many ways I was related to people," Stuart said. She was visiting Copper Center once, and a person there recognized her as her father's daughter because they have relatives at Copper Center.

"I was amazed," she said. At Chickaloon, she is surrounded by cousins, siblings, nieces and nephews, aunts and uncles.

Yet, getting to this more populated point was a long, winding road for a tribe once numbering in the thousands that was nearly pushed out of its spot on the Matanuska River earlier in the past century.

Coal miners moving into the area during World War I brought diseases to a once-strong group that had subsisted on salmon and developed elaborate trade routes to the Kenai Peninsula in the south and Copper Center in the north.

Numbers of the Chickaloon tribe diminished when many moved out of the area when their salmon run in the Chickaloon River died out from coal pollution, said Patricia Wade, Katherine Wade's daughter. Many tribe members also died from diseases.

Today's Chickaloon members are related through three sisters, daughters of Judge James Wickersham who was active in Alaska territorial courts and the legislature in the early part of the century. He married an Ahtna Athabascan woman. Their three daughters settled in Chickaloon.

Everyone today is descended from Mary Shaganoff -- Stuart's great-grandmother -- who had five children; Olga Nicolai Corey, who had eight children; or Annie Nicolai -- Katherine Wade's mom -- who had eleven children.

These descendants are related to Knik tribal members and Copper Center Athabascans through the marriages of those three women.

"We tell the children at the school how this makes them related to people up and down the road," Stuart said.

Tribal identity is strong as a result, she said. New programs operated through the tribal council also help people take control of social, health and education issues.

Delia Commander, social services director at the Chickaloon Village Traditional Council, has helped devise programs to help centralize how services are issued since the tribe received federal recognition in 1993.

From then until last year, the council operated out of a small building that held no office space for Commander. "I operated out of my car and, of course, I was making home visits."

Because federal confidentiality laws have to be observed to conduct social services business, Commander paid house visits until she had a base of operations.

Commander has helped achieve funding for a health aid who will soon be able to treat tribal people when a medical room is completed in the government building. The tribe also operates a job center out of the council offices, which helps all of the residents of that area find employment and job counseling. A traditional healer operates out of the building as well.

Upstairs, tribal members meet to decide issues, led by Chief Gary Harrison and matriarchal clan leader Katherine Wade.

These services operate out of one building, about seven miles north of the school on the Glenn Highway. This is the site where the first Russian Orthodox Church was established in the 1800s. At some point a railroad building home from the 1930s gave way to a church after World War II, and later that church was changed into a house by a homesteader who showed up and claimed the land, tribal member Patricia Wade said.

Prior to the homesteader, the Stickman family, tribal members, had lived in it as a railroad building in the 1930s. Stickman family members who died were laid to rest out front in Russian Orthodox ceremonial sacred burial houses, which was the traditional family plot in those days.

Today, passersby might be confused by the gathering of burial houses inside a picket fence, watched over by a white Russian Orthodox cross. It remained there through time while other buildings -- and the Glenn Highway -- crowded around it, said Patricia Wade.

"We didn't have designated cemeteries in faraway places. People were buried near the ones that loved them. They could care for the Spirit Houses and be close by. They could care for the Spirit Houses and be close by," Wade said.

The tribe has no desire to move it, and has adjusted to time's changes, Stuart said.