A Tramp Through the Damp in Sitka

“Don’t drip on the books” commands a sign in the Harbor Book Store in Sitka, Alaska (population, 8,000). I could relate to that injunction as I visited the National Historic Site in the driving September rain. Back in 1903, the local Tlingit totem carvers were motivated to create some fresh icons for world fairs in St. Louis (1904) and Portland (1905) after which they were returned here. During the Depression, Civilian Conservation Corps gangs spruced up the by-then-bedraggled sculptures for eventual conservation by the National Park Rangers. Their displays are powerful and instructive about the lives and habits of the local Indians.

And there are two excellent ten-minute slide films: one on the Battle of Sitka in 1804, during which the Russian American Company troops outgunned the local Indians, who surrendered after a lucky shot from a frigate blew up their canoe full of ammo.

How did the Tlingits get guns in the first place? Well, there were a lot of surplus guns left over after the American War of Independence, and geopolitical maneuverings being what they were, both the Brits and the Ams sold the Indian guns to destabilize the Russians’ hold on this valuable source of the furs the Chinese were so hungry for. The other fine film shows how the Indians got there (paddling up from British Columbia) in the first place.

But the real treat, in a high-roofed shed garnished with local totems, I found in a suite of craft rooms where a matron was fashioning the kind of dazzling regalia the Indians made from red felt and buttons they picked up from the Anglos in trading.

A younger woman was hard at work at an even more inspiring bit of cultural retrieval: Basing her creation on the historical research of a Canadian scholar, she was methodically twisting from Merino wool the first cape in 200 years. When I asked her where she got the curiously abstract piece of bone she was using in the weaving, she said: At the bottom of a bowl of venison soup!

In the small but vigorous craft renaissance under way in Southeastern Alaska (the panhandle), her soulmates in Juneau and Ketchikan, heartened by her success, were weaving similar capes. When she heard I was from Philadelphia, she was thrilled: The clan house of her great-grandfather from Porcupine Point had been carted off to Penn’s University Museum early in the 20th Century, and it is her dearest wish to visit this Mecca, where such an ancestral artifact is conserved. (I told her to hurry!) It didn’t surprise me to learn that each year about 100,000 visitors come to Sitka, a major stop on the itinerary of the cruise ships making the Inside Passage each summer.

The next “must” stop on the meander back to the center of Sitka is Sheldon Jackson College, where 250 students pursue liberal arts degrees in teacher ed, business, natural resources and forest management. Readers of James Michener’s Alaska will recall the indefatigable Reverend Jackson, who spent his summers Presbyterianizing the bush and the rest of the year raising money for his schemes of Christian civilization. In 1988, Sitka held a major centennial symposium here on the collecting of Indian artifacts, soon to be housed in the first concrete structure in the territory.

I bored museum director Peter Corey with the umpteenth telling of my only story about Bill Reid, the Haida visual genius who sculpted the first traditional Haida canoe in this century for the Vancouver Expo. In January 1988, when I was making my frigid railway circumnavigation of Canada, I took the ferry from Prince Rupert to pass the day on the Queen Charlotte Islands. Turns out the Haida were gathering that very day in their annual powwow, and Reid had pushed the noble craft out in the sound with a tentative paddle. It beat those old, grainy set-up movies of Edward Curtis.

Last fall I walked into the foyer of the Museum of Man in Paris and, damn, there was that blasted canoe again, at an exhibition of Claude Levi-Strauss’s favorite Amerindian pieces. A few days later I was in Giverny, paying the usual tribute to Monet, when I was surprised by a mimeographed notice announcing the arrival of a group of Haida Indians at Le Havre to make a royal paddle up the Seine to the Museum of Man. What a canoe. What a life. What an artist.

The Centennial Hall (think 1867, when we got Alaska form the Russkies for two cents an acre, all six million of them) has a small local history museum named after the Isabel Miller who started it. I took in some sessions of an international symposium on saving seamen shipwrecked in the cold waters.

The best seafood dinner I had in Alaska was at Staton’s on the main drag: halibut, beer-batter fried, with Alaskan amber ale to ease it down. And when your dogs are tired from taking in the Sitka sites, drop by the library, a new building with a stunning sitting room overlooking the Sound.

By this point I was tired of youth hostels and decided to splurge on a $100-plus-a-night room at the Shee Atika Inn, but the annual convention of the state’s leading professional sorority left no room for me in that inn. So I consulted my Frommer’s Dollarwise Guide. Karras Bed and Breakfast was described at “the most convenient B & B to downtown. Operated by a Greek man and his Tlingit wife well-versed in native legends.”

Pete Karras picked me up and took me back to the airport—in his pickup. And the breakfast, if not hearty, was substantial enough. Alas, the Indian wife was outside cosseting the grandchildren. I learned a great deal about hunting and fishing mores and economics from Pete, an amiable sexagenarian, between mouthfuls of French toast.

I had been “researching” a jeu d’esprit on Alaskan Dreams by asking as wide a variety of residents how they plan to spend their Permanent Fund oil bonus. When I asked a fisherman who stopped by to palaver during breakfast, he surprised me by saying he’d never applied for the freebie since it was begun in 1982. Why? “I can’t read or write.” The matter-of-factness of his response, entirely without any sense of shame about this limitation, amazed me as much as his answer.

You also run into an ornery streak when you bring up the fund, which sent over 530,000 residents a check for over $900 each last year. A fisherman at the SJC Library thought it was just another example of welfare mentality spreading across Alaska entirely too quickly. His companion expressed no such reservations: She was plunking it onto the mortgage balance of her fishing charter boat.

What was a fishing charter captain doing in a library, researching a tour based on the Russian influence on the region? Now, that’s my kind of non-Disneyland touring. If you get off the cruise ship next year, ring up Captain Barbara Bingham. To judge from the intelligence of her conversation, she’ll have cooked up something high-IQ by then.

Reprinted from Welcomat: After Dark, Hazard-at-Large, October 2, 1991