Lani Weaves a Blanket and Other Thoughts at Klukwan

8 July 2006
We drive our behemoth SUV to Raven House first, a clan house thrice relocated due to acts of God and the highway department, hoping that Mark will actually stop today if he sees a brown bear in the distant reeds. I don’t know what I was expecting at Raven House, but I wasn’t expecting a house that was lived in, a house with wood paneling and fading couches and a living room piled with children’s DVDs and aging photographs. Nora points to the photographs and gives names to faces, but I’m not sure where we are despite having done even the supplemental reading. There’s something about this trip that approaches Tlingit history sideways, from all sides, at once. I listen patiently, trying to mentally assemble a family tree of clans and moieties, connect the sound of Tlingit spoken by Nora, her mouth full of hard Ks and sudden stops, to the long strings of consonants and doubled vowels I had seen in print.
We move on to Klukwan, where Muir “had found a lot of human bones scattered on the surface of the ground or partly covered” and people “in apparent good faith” to receive missionaries. At that time, we were told, the population of the village numbered 1800 people. Now, it is 140. I rode with Nora on the drive up, hoping to ask her a little about the Tlingit language and the process by which she translated and transliterated it. She looked out the windows and chatted with our travel companion: Someone hit a moose on this road. It went right through her windshield. She’s paralyzed from the ribs down. Did you know Mr. Stevens? He died two weeks ago. Wild irises grow up this way. I’d like to plant some of those wild roses in my yard. Boy, the river’s swollen. When I asked my question, Nora told me it would take two semesters of linguistics to answer it. I expected as much, but I wanted to know how to hear an exclamation point or a period in the middle of a word, or a line drawn under a K. She said it took her a month to translate her first speech, a process through which she lost sleep, and got drunk, and cried.
Klukwan was just around the next bend, and the car was silent, save for a Dolly Parton tape quietly playing in the background. Nora said, Boy, this is pretty. Oh man, is it pretty up here. Her awe surprised me. I had been gazing in silence at the jagged mountains, tremendous pinnacles of rock, topped with snow and white cloud. In the valleys, I could see the tell-tale U shape of glacial action, but rocky prominences reached above, hostile and breathtaking and inaccessible. I thought about yesterday’s hike and about John Muir racing up his glaciers and how I would only see those mountains this one time, know them from the back seat of a spacious and comfortable car that smelled like children and vanilla lotion. Even my pictures (of course, the pictures, first the pictures) blend one peak into another, into a homogenous chain of rock and river and snow. But Nora knew this place and its beauty surprised her, even when it wore overcast skies, even as we drove through it talking about death and wildflowers.
Klukwan is a gravel road lined with houses in various states of decline. Lani’s is neat and pretty, wooden-shingled and framed with flowers. There are also trailers adjacent to decaying Victorians, weathered to a uniform grey, with intricately carved cornices in dire need of nourishment and paint and cracked bay windows whose glass had turned the color of overgrown toenails. Nora says these houses are beautiful, and they were, once, in the way of houses, but now in the way of fallen trees in a bog.
Near the long house, carpenters carve decorative columns with handmade adzes, smoothly polished handles to which the heavy head is tethered. Once, the blades were made of stone or metal washed ashore or meteorite. So it was a tool from beyond the clouds. The long house was hand hewn, the planks planed by hand. Kimberly says it is “a house like a mirror,” a reflection of history coming back alive, and she tells us about bentwood boxes bound with sinew (dried and stretched out intestines) and filled with dried soapberries, or the spirit of the long house stretching its arms out to protect the house and its winter stores. Sally sings us her haunting version of “Amazing Grace” in Tlingit, in a voice that sounds like it came from another world, high but not tinny, rich but not overpowering, in every way impossible to describe or apprehend. Her Tlingit names are “The Best Part of the Land” and “Little Sea Otter,” one of which her husband caught in his fishing nets and which she was happy to have for the fur.
We move outside to where Valentino—Sally’s wiry husband, a white-bearded Tlingit adopted from Italy whose name means “The Calm Water Behind the Dorsal Fin of an Orca”—hacks a 30 lb. king salmon into thick steaks, first slicing off each fin and tossing it back into the river, then carving a clean slice down the belly, ripping out a bloated swim bladder and drippy, clotted guts, which splash heavily as he tosses them in too. He cuts off the head with a thick crunch and sets it aside, the gills an accordion of deep deep crimson. All the while, he jests as with customers in a corner butcher shop on a winding cobblestone street somewhere in Tuscany.
We follow to Lani’s house, where she opens the door to twelve strangers, welcomes us around her country kitchen table, feeds us smoked salmon and salmon salad on pilot crackers, rounds of hardtack the size of coasters. The salmon salad is sweet with chopped onion. An enormous yellow lab plays fetch with a board in the backyard. Lani shows us her weaving, a blanket in the Raven’s Tail style, made with distinctive geometric patterns and worn ceremonially, draped over the back of the wearer as he dances, telling a story with his body and clothing. The blanket is trimmed at the top with sea otter fur and at the bottom with long fringe dangling metal tubes that jingle when the blanket twirls. The wefts were once made of yellow cedar bark and goat hair, but now she uses merino wool, coarser in texture than the downy mountain goat skein her grandmother had spun and which she passes around for us to touch. Her grandmother and great-grandmother were renowned weavers of Chilkat blankets, blankets with representations of animals and spirits in complex ovoid shapes, including the Sockeye Robe, a famous blanket about two square yards with a foot of fringe at the bottom, that tells the story of a twenty foot sockeye that swallowed a boy. Lani’s blanket represents the Chilkat River, the mountains that surround it, the geothermal springs that seep at its bottom, the flow of its current. She dons another blanket and spins once, shyly, and says that wearing it embarrasses her, that it is too ostentatious. She says the Raven’s Tail style is meditative while the Chilkat style requires deep concentration, that each day of weaving is a battle that, often, the blanket wins. The weaving is remarkable, and I am too embarrassed to ask exactly how the stitches are done, hoping that the museum will provide a helpful diorama.
Kimberly had explained to us that the Cultural Center at Klukwan was not supposed to be a museum, that it was a living site where traditional knowledge was being implemented by people in their daily lives, and that’s how it felt being there, that we were welcomed as guests and allowed to stand by as the butcher cut salmon for that day’s dinner. He would be cutting regardless of our presence, eternally cutting, while we peered in through a window onto his place. I was so grateful to our hosts for opening that window, more grateful than I could fully express as we parted ways, and I was happy at the distance I felt, not only because Alaska, Klukwan, traditional Tlingit knowledge is so far from my home and my way of knowing, but also because I didn’t want to feel like I would at the Disney version of Klukwan, the museum version, where my sense of Tlingit culture and language would be packaged into a neat little t-shirt slogan, one that I could tote away with me and feel like I owned. I liked the sense of not nearly scratching the surface of understanding, of knowing that Nora would answer my question in a few sentences and then remain silent because there was infinitely more to know. Even when our hosts asked us who we were and we explained that we were “Searching for Wildness” (as both verb and adjective phrase), I was happy that we hadn’t found it here. Nora’s poem “Museum” says more simply and smartly what I am trying to put my finger on but can’t: “Alaska Native youth / flickering / in strobelight: disco diorama.”