KNLS Alaska Postcard, Page Three

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KNLS English Service

Transcripts for Postcards From Alaska

Postcards From Alaska introduces KNLS listeners to America's last frontier. Remember, this is a broadcast transcript and so may include editor's notes.

Native Subsistence Hunting and Fishing Rights In Glacier Bay

HOST: Sail Alaska’s Inside Passage and the rocky fjords, tidewater glaciers, and abundant wildlife of Glacier Bay National Park will be the highlight of your cruise. (See a photo of Marjorie Glacier in the bay?) But while the Bay is increasingly accessible to tourists, the Alaska natives who call the region home are not always welcome there.

SFX: The sound of gulls, water, wind and the boys collecting eggs, up, then down and under to.

MIKE: In June of 2001 two teenaged boys revived a native tradition denied their people for more than eighty years by international treaty. Kevin Skeek and Johann Henchman (See a photo of the boys?) visited a small, windswept island just outside Glacier Bay named Middle Pass Rock, where they gathered three dozen sea gull eggs.

SFX: Egg collecting sound back up and then down and out to…

MIKE: Recent changes to the international treaty that protects migratory birds made the egg gathering legal for the first time since 1918. But United States Park Service regulations still prohibit subsistence food gathering of any kind inside Glacier Bay. The local native people, the Hoonah Tlinget, are pushing hard to have their subsistence rights within the park restored as well.

TAPE: AUSTIN :13 seconds "My name is Kenneth Austin. I’m from the Chookanady Clan. My people from Hoonah, called Hoo – nee – yah are considered the original owners, the primary owners of Glacier Bay."

MIKE: In addition to being a native elder, Austin is also a cultural anthropologist. He’s just completing a two year Park Service study into the historic, religious, and cultural ties the Hoonah Tlinget have to Glacier Bay. The surprisingly swift movement of glaciers in the region presented some interesting challenges.

TAPE: AUSTIN :37 seconds "Standard archeology, you can’t find places where we had human residential existence, because the ice sheets that came through here, went all the way – maybe six more miles further out. And when it started moving back it took every evidence of human habitation with it. From the clan houses to the canoes, you name it, it’s not there. Huh? But there is, there are three other things; place names, clan songs and the clan – the oral history."

MIKE: Austin compared the geologic record to the way native place names for the bay changed over the centuries as glaciers advanced and receded. His findings indicate the Hoonah Tlinget have lived in Glacier Bay for at least nine thousand years.

TAPE AUSTIN :24 seconds "After the Pleistocene era ended about ten thousand years ago, when the ice sheets started moving back, the Tlingets here, had a name for the bay after the ice sheets moved back. It was called Sigh-yeah-shou-yee…area at the end of the glacial silt. Huh? Even our oral history goes back and tells about those times."

MIKE: While ancient Tlinget lore may help unravel the bay’s past, the precarious nature of oral tradition is fueling a growing desperation among the Hoonah to regain access to the Park today. Kevin Skeek is one of the native teens chosen to gather gull eggs on Middle Pass Island.

TAPE: KEVIN :36 seconds "In the Tlinget culture your uncles were supposed to educate you, because your father or your mother would be too easy on you and you wouldn’t be able to survive. So, like the first time going hunting. My uncle took me out and showed me how to hunt and things like that and then my first time fishing he showed me how to do that. And it’s things like these that are passed on. Like now, when my nieces and nephews get old enough I will teach them and teach them how to hunt and fish and, you know, certain things like that."

MIKE: But in Glacier Bay that cycle has been disrupted. As the years pass, there are fewer and fewer native elders who remember life in the bay before federal preservation. Skills, rituals and traditions normally taught by family are not being passed down and may soon be lost. Kevin Skeek had to go back two generations to learn something about egg gathering.

TAPE: KEVIN :21 seconds "I was told from my grandparents exactly how to gather sea gull eggs. If you look in the nest and there’s one or two eggs you can take both of those because they’ve just been laid and they haven’t been incubating that long, so. But if there’s three you don’t know which egg was laid first or last or anything so you just leave all three eggs alone.".

MIKE: Park Service biologists have confirmed that this tradition compliments the gull’s reproductive cycle. If followed precisely, the purloined eggs are quickly replaced with a new brood. United States Senator from Alaska Frank Murkowski believes that, with nine millennia worth of experience at their disposal, the Hoonah Tlinget may have a great deal more to teach us if given the chance.

TAPE: MURKOWSKI :30 seconds "They know the seasons, they know the frequencies of the bird migration, just like they know the movement of the halibut, when the halibut move in and out. And they, through their own sensitivity, manage that resource for renewability. And these are based on the observance and participation of people who, you know, are very wary of over fishing or over gathering because it would affect their children or their children’s children."

MIKE: Glacier Bay Park Superintendent Tommie Lee seems committed to granting the natives greater access to the park, but she wants the process to move slowly to avoid making costly mistakes. Park Service mandate insists that Glacier Bay resources be preserved for future generations at all costs.

TAPE: LEE :29 seconds "It’s like taking a pebble and dropping it in a pond and all the ripples go out. That’s an impact, but not necessarily an impairment. So what we need to do is not allow an impairment while still allowing some gathering of food stuffs that will not impair that particular resource. That it’ll be there for generations and generations and generations ….hopefully, forever."

MIKE: Johann Henchmen, also gathered eggs in June of 2001. He plans on a career in the United States Coast Guard, but hopes to return to Glacier Bay one day, raise a family, and continue the traditions of his people.

SFX: Back to the sound of gulls, water, wind and the boys collecting eggs, up, then down and under to.

TAPE: HENCHMAN :19 seconds "I don’t plan on staying up here very long. I want to go out and experience the world and what not, but definitely I want to come back and live here. If I had a family, I’m definitely going to teach them how to be able to do traditional harvest or even hunt. There’s a whole lot of things out there in our culture that we can be able to do."

SFX: Gulls, water, wind and the boys collecting eggs, back up, then down and out.

If you would you like to learn more about Glacier Bay National Park, or the native village of Hoonah, visit them online.

Would you like to review more Alaska Postcard transcripts, or would you like to return to the page containing all KNLS transcripts?

Skagway's "Days of '98" Musical Review

Photos of historic Skagway:

MIKE: A postcard from America’s last frontier for you now. Today’s postcard takes us to Skagway, Alaska to enjoy a musical review called THE DAYS OF 98.

SFX: Music from the show is heard…

MIKE: The show has been performed in Skagway since the 1930’s and celebrates the town’s pivotal role in the Yukon gold rush of 1898. Jim Richards has been a part of the show’s cast for nearly three decades. He talks about how the review got its start.

JIM: It’s actually started 76 years ago as a fund-raiser for the local hockey team here in Skagway. He used to travel the White Pass Railroad to White Horse and play the fellows up there, and it was quite a rivalry. It was held in the old White Pass Athletic Club. It was an all-volunteer show done by the people of Skagway up until 1978, when the cruise industry started overwhelming Skagway with the numbers and the amount of boats. There used to be maybe just five boats a week in Skagway in the early 70s, so there was lots of time off to enjoy yourself. But the old ‘Days of 98’ show used to run just at night, and they’d do four or five shows during the week. The business gradually switched to the daytime; the main business in Skagway. And with everybody working their summer jobs, there was no time for these people to come and do the shows. So it was either turn it over to some professionals, or discontinue the whole thing. We came in here in 1978, and we’ve done a lot to preserve this old place. We are into our, what, 25^th year, here in the Eagle’s Hall? But it’s the 76^th season of the ‘Days of 98’ show.

MIKE: Over the years the Days of 98 review has been refined to the point where it can be performed by a cast and crew of only seven.

JIM: We have five on stage, and one in the light booth, and one watching the ‘till’ during the show, basically. We get our people from all over California, Utah, New York, New Jersey, Arizona, Washington; they come from everywhere. People are screened by the director, and our choreographer lives in Portland; the director lives in Utah. And they are hired and brought up here in the summer time for five months. There’s about 18-20 shows a week that we put on; three times a day on Sunday, and Tuesday through Friday, and then two times on Saturday and Monday.

MIKE: The show is seen each summer by thousands of cruise ship tourists who arrive in Skagway each morning and leave at day’s end. On a typical summer day Skagway’s year round population of 800 can swell to more than twelve thousand. Performances are schedule to match the arrival and departure of the cruise ships. The show is based on the last day in the life of Skagway’s most infamous resident, a con artist named Soapie Smith.

JIM: We are taking a little artistic license by putting a show on in Soapie’s saloon, which would be more or less indicative of the shows that were put on during the 1890’s with appropriate turn of the century music. We run through the demise of Soapie Smith We get his name going first; we let people know about how he got his name. Then it switches immediately to his bar here in Skagway. And it’s his last day, and he’s absolutely losing it, and he goes off and gets killed.

MIKE: Richards goes on to introduce us to Soapie Smith and explain how he came to die on that fateful day.

JIM: Soapie was born in 1861 in Noonan, Georgia which is quite near Atlanta. The family fortune was wiped out by the Civil War, and Sherman’s march toward the sea didn’t help things either, for the Smith family back there. And it’s reported that he went west and started punching cows in Texas and Kansas. He reportedly ended up in Leadville, Colorado with a month’s wages in his pocket, where he was promptly relieved of the money by a fellow by the name of ‘Clubfoot Wilson’ who knew how to play the shells really good. So Soapie decided to stand on that side of the shells rather than stand under the end of the cows he had been standing under. He became a con man about late 1880’s. He was in Denver, Colorado for about 12 years; he had a showdown with the governor there. There was some sort of dispute going on, and rather than having a bloodbath, the governor backed down. He was in Creed, Colorado where Bob Ford was killed by his gang, the killer of Jesse James. And then things got a little bit too hot for him there, so he heard news of this Klondike goldrush, and it’s a perfect opportunity for bunko artists and con artists to follow the rush. So he came to Skagway, and set up his illegitimate con games, and his prostitution and bars, and he went to work here in Skagway. It went fine as long as the mad rush for gold was on, but when Skagway began getting, more or less, civilized, with the railroad moving in and all, they decided it was time for Soapie to go. So the vigilantes were organized, and everything was pretty much closed down. So it was just the civilization of the west that was the demise of old Mr. Smith.

JIM: Actually, he was buried ten feet outside the cemetery. The story is, a flood came down and washed his grave out into the Skagway River, and then another one was set up just for the tourist trade. So that’s where his grave is, up in the Goldrush Graveyard. About 75 feet away is Frank Reed’s grave, which has a huge granite monument with an inscription ‘He gave his life for the honor of Skagway’. Soapie has just a plain wooden head marker up there which I restored with help from the family. I know Soapie’s relatives, the great-great grandson lives down in Fontana, California. I knew his father and his brothers and their wives through the years.

MIKE: Soapie was killed by a vigilante named Frank Reed. Soapie’s body reportedly lay on the city docks for more than a day. Reed was also shot in the exchange, but lingered on for more than a week. Reed was given a hero’s burial in the Skagway cemetary. Smith was buried a few meters away.

JIM: It’s a really funny show. We’ve, more or less, tried to turn Soapie into the good guy. Of course, he wore a white hat when he road his horse in the parade July 4, 1898. So we still have the ‘white hat, good guy’ image. But, you know, it’s just kind of for fun. With the song and dance numbers that we have in the show, it offsets the seriousness of what actually happened to Smith, so as far as entertainment is concerned, its great entertainment. But it also tells the actual history of Skagway and Soapie Smith.

MIKE: Enjoying the DAYS OF 98, a musical review celebrating the gold rush history of Skagway, Alaska. Today’s postcard from America’s last frontier.

Would you like to visit the Skagway tourism website?

Would you like to review more Alaska Postcard transcripts, or would you like to return to the page containing all KNLS transcripts?

The New Life Station is pleased to provide transcripts online for a number of KNLS programs. Please note that all scripts are the property of World Christian Broadcasting and/or SeedSower Productions. They are provided here for your personal enjoyment only and may not be disseminated in any fashion without prior written permission.