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| Julia Cooper and Dorothy Cook, the Eklutna native village president, stand outside the tribe's rustic community center. yereth rosen |
A tiny native village in Alaska copes with urban encroachment
Members of the Dena'ina Athabascan tribe, completely surrounded by metropolitan Anchorage, struggle to preserve their language and culture.
By Yereth Rosen | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the January 28, 2008 edition
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EKLUTNA, Alaska - Outside in the crisp fruity air, traffic on the Glenn Highway emits its usual roar. Inside the log-hewn community center, surrounded by a forest of stunted spruce and golden-leafed birch, a dozen villagers attend the weekly elders' lunch and speak of times when this tiny enclave seemed a world away from Alaska's largest city.
Many decades ago, the fish were so thick in the Eklutna River that you could practically walk on them, says Julia Cooper, who grew up as one of a dozen children in a two-room cabin nearby. In the 1960s and '70s, homes were heated by wood stoves and residents hauled water from a spring across the highway, says Irene Chilligan, another local.
Unlike most native villages in Alaska, which are scattered over the roadless bush and isolated from urban areas, the Dena'ina Athabascan village of Eklutna – home to about 60 people – is located within the municipal borders of Anchorage. Just 26 miles to the west loom the imposing downtown buildings that house oil company executives, lawyers, and other blue-suited titans.
The near-urban setting has its obvious advantages – access to jobs, medical and social services, shopping, and schools.
But the remaining 250 or so tribal members, most residing outside the village, also worry about the erosion of life that dates back centuries. Now one of the nation's smallest native tribes is fighting back to preserve its culture – and making notable progress.
Their efforts are low key, as befits a tribe that shuns self-promotion. But they are pushing to revive a language that has almost disappeared and to garner more recognition from an outside world that, until recently, was barely aware of the tribe's existence.
Things have changed dramatically since he was growing up, says Aaron Leggett, the 26-year-old Dena'ina cultural historian at the Alaska Native Heritage Center. "You'd say you are Dena'ina, and people would say, 'What's that?' " Now, he says, his great aunt, the Eklutna tribe president, gets almost weekly requests to perform a Dena'ina ceremony. "I told her it's not long before you're going to be called to do Dena'ina blessings for weddings and bar mitzvahs."
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Eklutna does offer a small slice of bush Alaska in the big city. The tribal headquarters office, clinic, and support buildings are mostly a collection of trailers. In typical rural Alaska fashion, old vehicles and machines that can be cannibalized for parts lie scattered about. A few sagging couches and easy chairs perch in the woods. It's all in sharp contrast to the well-heeled suburbs just to the east.
At the heart of the village is St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church, Anchorage's oldest structure, a weathered wooden building erected here in the 1870s. It encompasses a cemetery where traditional native "spirit houses" – dollhouselike structures painted in family colors – are topped with Orthodox crosses. A wooden chapel just big enough for one person sits nearby. All reflect Eklutna's status as a stronghold for Orthodoxy during Alaska's Russian period.
The faith is not a thing of the past here. Adjacent to the historic church, which holds icons of saints considered so fragile that flash photography isn't allowed inside, stands a modern Orthodox church built a century later. It is used for special religious and family events. The Russian Orthodox Diocese of Alaska maintains the facilities, conducts regular tours, and has even established a new monastery here.
Historically, Eklutna's Dena'ina people made their home over a much bigger area. The indigenous residents moved up and down the coastline and into the surrounding Chugach Mountains, following the ebbs and flows of fish and game. At what is now the Eklutna Lake campground in Chugach State Park, they hunted sheep on the mountain slopes. From the now-prestigious downtown Anchorage address of Third Avenue and K Street, Alex Vasily – the famous Dena'ina tribal chief and shaman – ran his smokehouse.
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