Day 34 - Anchorage, Alaska

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Jenks & Nancy Jenkins Rig #16                                                                     Tuesday, July 12, 2010

Anchorage, Alaska

Our day started out with sunshine and it was a nice day. My travels started out with spending the majority of the day at the Alaska Native Heritage Center in Anchorage. I rode to the center with Sherly Price, Bob wasn’t feeling well today and she was nice enough to ride share.

At the Gathering Place in the Heritage Center we started out with an introduction of the Alaska Native Games: Power, Balance and Focus demonstration. The games help the men with their hunting skills, they all seemed very difficult. The one we saw demonstrated was jumping over a small round stick and your feet were to push the stick backwards as you were going forward, not easy to do.

Next we went into the Theater and watch a 30 minute video on stories of the Athabascan, Yup’ik, Inupiaq, Alutiiq and Tlingit. Stories are a very important part of the Native Alaskans life, this is there way of passing there traditions down.

Back to the Gathering Place and watched several dance performances. They had two men beating on traditional drums and three young girls dancing using hand motions to describe the words to the song. The songs are another way to tell stories of things that have happened to tribe or and individual.

Next we took the tour of the village sites for Athabascan, Yup’ik/Cup’ik, Inupiaq St. Lawrence Island Upik, Unangax Alutiiq and Eyak,Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshia. The types of dwellings that they all lived in were very unique. All of the tribes lived in dirt covered mounds except for the Athabascans and they lived in log cabins. The traditional entrance was a hole you had to crawl through, but for Heritage Center visitors to view there was a traditional entrance made. The hole entrance was small for people but to small for polar bears. There were large huts for men to gather in and then small huts for women and children.

We went to a carving shed and got to see new totem poles being made. They start with pencil drawings and a 6 ft piece of wood and begin to carve with all there unique tools. Totem Poles are a way for the Native Alaskans to tell a story. You read them from top to bottom. The one we viewed is about the Box of Wisdom, the chief is preparing the nephew to use the box of wisdom. At the top is the Chief with a talking stick, below him is the talking box, below is the chiefs nephew, then there is the Eagle and Raven, then there is the children of the eagle and raven. Each totem pole is unique and tells a different story.