Helping hand-me-down — Collaborative research, years of effort turn donated family heirloom into cultural display

By Jenny Neyman
Redoubt Reporter

Kenai Peninsula College’s newest cultural artifact was a long time and distance coming.

Not only is the Native Eskimo, black-and-white, bird-skin parka probably around 100 years old, it took about 25 years for Gwen Gere’s parents, and then Gere, to decide what to do with it, and another two to three years for the parka to be repaired, researched and readied for display in the Kenai River Campus commons area.

These days the family heirloom parka that was made in a region at least 1,000 miles away from where Gere lives is on display where she works.

Gere’s parents, Russ and Doris Riemann, lived in Anchorage since the early 1950s, running Book Cache stores and a magazine and book wholesale distributor around the state. The business would take Mr. Riemann to Nome and Kotzebue periodically.

“A lot of time people didn’t pay their bills,” Gere said. “In the ’50s and ’60s he was his own collections agent. He’d fly to Kotzebue and say, ‘OK, give me my money.’ A lot of time they’d say, ‘We don’t have any money, but here, would you like this ivory carving or a baleen basket?’”

Once in a while, Gere and her two sisters would take turns accompanying their dad.

“It’s one of those things you don’t get to appreciate at the time. He told me to take your shoes off and go wade in the Bering Sea, and I didn’t appreciate it. I just felt like a dork then,” she said.

On one of these trips about 25 years ago, he came across a historic bird-skin parka, worn by Natives of the region because of its waterproof, insulating qualities. The owner was considering selling it to someone from the Lower 48, but Riemann didn’t want it to leave Alaska, Gere said.

“A gentleman wanted to buy it for a collection someplace on the East Coast, but my parents didn’t think it should leave the state,” she said. “I don’t know how they ended up with it, if my dad bought it before the other gentlemen did or what, but they bought the coat then spent 25 years trying to figure out what to do with it.”

Gere said her parents wanted the parka to be preserved and displayed. Mrs. Riemann contacted the Smithsonian Institute, but didn’t get a response. And the Anchorage museum said it’d end up in storage, since it already had similar parkas. When her parents died about four years ago, Gere took on the task of finding the parka a suitable home.

“It was something my family really wanted to do because my parents really wanted it to be something where people could see it and enjoy it and learn form it, and they hadn’t been able to find that spot,” Gere said.

Gere is the bookstore manager at KPC’s Soldotna campus. She thought the University of Alaska system might be interested in the parka, so she approached KPC Director Gary Turner about it, with somewhat mixed feelings. She wanted the parka to be displayed and cared for, but she knew by donating it she was giving up her say in where it ended up and risking losing track of her family’s heirloom.

She was happy to hear that not only was the university system interested in displaying the parka, but that the parka would stay at KPC.

“He had the vision to see that it was something that was valuable and a learning instrument in the university, so I’m delighted that it’s down here because if you give it away, you give it away and you don’t know what will happen with it,” Gere said. “They realized the worth of it and the value of it. It really is a dream come true for me.”

The parka is now on display in the commons just outside the bookstore, with information about the parka, historic photos and a plaque about Gere’s parents, with their picture.

“My parents were visionaries. They really had a love for the state of Alaska,” Gere said. “That’s why they did what they did, why they tried to keep Alaskan things in Alaska and why they promoted reading and literature. It was their vision and they loved the state, so I think if that comes through, then I think it’s wonderful.

“It meant so much to my parents, all this time they hung onto it and tried to figure out what to do with it. It’s nice for me because I get to see it every day and people have appreciated the quality of it and its legacy, because it’s from a time that is no longer.”

The display itself took a long time to prepare — two to three years, Gere said.

Holly Cusack-McVeigh, a cultural anthropologist with the Pratt Museum in Homer, was teaching a course on Alaska Native cultures when the parka was brought to her attention. Her class just happened to be studying cultures of the Bering Sea region, where the parka was made.

“It was a wonderful opportunity for my students to learn about identifying an object, trying to connect it to a specific cultural group, and be able to follow all that research, as well, and learning how to handle objects,” she said.

Cusack-McVeigh took on the task of researching and preparing the display. First, the parka itself needed tending.

“Based on how long the family had it, and when it may have been made, it’s in really excellent condition for its age,” Cusack-McVeigh said.

A conservator from Anchorage mended a tear in the seam of a sleeve and created a museum-quality, custom-fitted mount that would support the parka, and a case design and the commons location was determined to protect it from harm.
“It’s fairly fragile and fairly delicate. It’s sensitive to light, in that bird feathers are one of the more light-sensitive organic materials,” Cusack-McVeigh said.

It took a few years to finish studying the parka and doing research for the display information — and there are still questions left unanswered.

Cusack-McVeigh figures the parka probably dates from the early 1900s, if not earlier. There were three district Eskimo groups of the Bering Sea region that made similar hooded, bird-skin parkas — the Inupiaq, Siberian Yupik and Central Yup’ik cultures — so she wasn’t able to determine where, specifically, it came from. Such parkas were worn as daily outerwear, since bird feathers are so water-resistant.

Murre, puffin, cormorant, loon, auklet, goose and duck skins were traditionally used to construct the parkas. Biologists with the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge helped identify the birds in this specimen. The main black-and-white pattern comes from murres, with a greenish sheen from pelagic cormorants.

The director of Arctic studies for the Smithsonian branch in Anchorage shared parkas from the Smithsonian’s collection with Cusack-McVeigh for comparative studies. And a linguist from the Alaska Native Language Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks helped Cusack-McVeigh make sure she had the correct words for the parka — “atkuk” for Central Yup’ik and Siberian Yupik, and “atigi” for Inupiaq — for the display, since the region’s cultural groups had different names for different types of parkas.

“There was actually quite a bit of research over the course of two or three years as we worked on putting the exhibit itself together,” she said.

Cusack-McVeigh said it’s a relief to have the parka protected and the display complete, so everyone at the college can appreciate the piece, just as she had.

“One of the most amazing things about this parka is the skill with which it was made. I feel that in part it survived and it’s in the condition it is in because the original maker was highly skilled — highly skilled in cleaning skins, highly skilled in preparing skins and just a meticulous sewer,” she said.

“This really is a legacy piece and there’s just an incredible amount of knowledge and skill that went into making a piece like this.”

Winding road — Life’s twists hold many surprises for Kenai resident

By Clark Fair
Redoubt Reporter

The year was about 1950 and Fiocla Wilson and her husband, Philip, were driving south of Soldotna on a recently opened section of the Sterling Highway. Suddenly, Wilson spotted something puzzling.

“We were going for a ride toward Kasilof, and I said, ‘What’s a horse doing back there in the woods?’ I only saw the back end, you know,” she said. “He said, ‘That’s not a horse. That’s a moose.’”
For Fiocla, that sighting was a first.

“I never saw a live moose until the highway was built to Homer,” said Fiocla, who was born in Kenai in 1916. “I never knew what a moose looked like.”

This may seem like a strange proclamation from someone who began life in Alaska 92 years ago and who subsisted, in part, on a diet of moose meat, along with salmon and wild berries, and some store-bought goods. Philip regularly hunted moose during open season, but Fiocla said that she never accompanied her husband on his hunts and never saw a moose wander into town prior to that drive to Kasilof.

Of course, Wilson knows that life can be full of surprises.

Born Fiocla Sacolof to a part-Russian father and a half-Russian, half-Athabascan mother, she found herself an orphan at the age of 9. Because of her young age then, Wilson said, she was unsure what caused her parents’ death, but she did realize that her life was about to change.

Her older sister took in her younger siblings, but could not afford to take in Fiocla, too. Since there was no road yet to Kenai, Fiocla was sent by boat to Anchorage to live with a relative. She attended school in Anchorage until she turned 12, at which point she decided to receive vocational training at the Eklutna Industrial School for Natives.

She arrived by train in Eklutna and stayed at the school until she was 16, attending regular classes in the mornings and training sessions in the afternoons. Wilson said she learned to work in a kitchen and a laundry, learned to sew and learned how to be a waitress, among other skills.

At the school, she was surrounded by more than a 100 other Natives from villages scattered throughout Alaska. Despite the many different cultures and languages represented there, only English was allowed to be spoken. If they were caught speaking Russian or any Native tongue, they were punished.

“There was another girl from Kenai, and I said something to her in Russian and the matron heard it,” Wilson said in a 1985 interview, recorded in a book called Our Stories, Our Lives. “We both had to wash our mouth out with soap! I don’t remember what I said. Wasn’t anything bad or anything.

“That’s how strict they were. And that’s why I can’t understand now why everything’s getting back so that they want us to talk our Native language.

“At that time the government wouldn’t allow us to talk in those languages. And now, they’re giving funds to get back to our heritage.”

Despite the strictness, however, Wilson — who was called “Fanny” by the matrons — said she was pleased that she had the opportunity to attend the school, and she fondly recalled one particular home-economics teacher who taught her an important lesson.

“I had a teacher that always told me, ‘Never be ashamed of your nationality.’ And it wasn’t your nationality that counted as much as your character and your personality. And she always told me that I would go a long ways if I would just be the way I was with my personality and character. Because she said I had an awful sweet personality.”

When Wilson left the school in 1933, she had a surprise waiting for her. A man she had always known as “Uncle Dan” met her at the train station in Eklutna, where he handed her $25 and an envelope containing a photograph of himself. He said he had written something on the photo, but he did not want her to read it until she had boarded the train.

On board, she learned that “Uncle Dan” was her biological father, who had run off to Anchorage with another woman when Fiocla was too young to remember. The man she had believed was her father had actually been a stepfather.

On the eve of her first steps into adulthood, “Uncle Dan” had reached out in his own way to let her know the truth.

A few days after leaving the boat in Kenai, Fiocla turned 17. Before the year was out, she was married to her first boyfriend, Philip, in a ceremony officiated by the Rev. Paul Shadura at the Russian Orthodox Church.

Philip, the son of a Caucasian father and a half-Russian, half-Athabascan mother, had been born in Kenai in 1912. He fished commercially in the summers and trapped in the winters. By the time the Wilson family had grown to six children in 1949, he also had an airplane, a single-engine Piper PA-12 Super Cruiser, which he used occasionally to fly out men on hunting trips.

One of Fiocla’s favorite times of year occurred when the family ventured down to their setnet site below Wildwood.

“I enjoyed that, taking the kids out on the beach,” she said. “Living in tents. It was just like a vacation for my children. They really enjoyed that.”

Fiocla smiled as she remembered the work involved in commercial fishing. “I liked picking fish. I used to think that was fun. I used to see how many I could carry. I could have 10 fish, you know — you put your fingers in their mouth and carry ’em like that.”

As she explained, she held out both hands, palms up, fingers and thumbs curled like hooks.
“And I used to run to (Philip’s) dory to put the fish in.”

From the dory, the fish went to a scow, and then on to a tender that carried them to the Libby, McNeil and Libby cannery across the wide river mouth. She said that when they began fishing in 1934, a single sockeye salmon fetched 7 cents, while a single chinook fetched a dollar. At the Kenai Commercial store at the same time, a pound of butter cost 25 cents.

Fiocla and her family fished the site until the early 1960s, when Philip decided to sell the place and buy a drift boat, which he named the Kenai. In her home today, Fiocla has a Jim Evenson painting of Philip’s plane on skis in the winter, and another painting, by one of her daughters, depicting Philip’s boat on choppy water, with the Kenai bluffs stark in the background.

Philip, who suffered from diabetes, died in 1975. Several years later, Fiocla moved into the home that she still maintains by herself, although one of her daughters lives right next door. She keeps busy with her large family — including 16 grandchildren, 16 great-grandchildren, and several great-great-grandchildren — and as a member of both the Kenaitze tribe and the Kenai Bible Chapel.

These days, the moose are more plentiful in Kenai. Some of them even wander into the neighborhood.

Art Seen: Dena’ina exhibit includes craftsmanship of usable, decorative arts

The “Dena’ina Art and Regalia” show at the Funky Monkey in November was an interesting compilation of works gathered by the Kenaitze Tribe.

You will see photography of interpretive sites by Kim Dolchok, as well as be able to pick up a flyer on “K’Beq” or “Footprints,” the Kenaitze-run interpretive site this side of Cooper Landing. Or you could peruse Maggie Jones’ 2007 anth- ropology class project, a series of stories incor- porating Dena’ina language. She has a fiber piece on exhibit titled “Three Friends” or “Tuq’ina Ida Sukdu,” which appears to be a story of three feathered friends who live in a coastal area.

Jones also displays a number of beaded leather garments, or regalia, at least one of which has earned an award at the Kenai Peninsula State Fair. Dentillia shells are utilized quite a bit in these pieces, which have a historic reputation for denoting wealth and prosperity. A handbag paired with a particularly beautiful garment has an authentic gut sack bottom, cleverly sewn into a heart shape as seen from below.

Dana Verrengia has her leather and beadwork displayed, as well, plus a series of four small wall hangings depicting various Alaska scenes, including a vibrant depiction of our beloved red salmon buddies.

Benjamin R. Baldwin has contributed two unique paintings. One is called “Dagedi T’et’ani” or “One That Makes Smoke” and is about Mount Redoubt erupting in the late 1980s. The piece is backed or matted by wild beach grass, and Baldwin has told his story using pigments made from fireweed, Alaska blackberry and powdered Kenai river rock. In “Nagh quinqudatl” or “They Have Returned to Us,” salmon are returning to their spawning grounds. In this he’s utilized fireweed, delphinium, Alaska blackberry, dog berry/leaf and crushed Kenai river rock. The depictions are subtle and earthy.

There is a sense of deep reverence and love that seems to come out of this compilation. It is good to see that efforts toward keeping the culture alive and well seem to be paying off. The dim but not sparse lighting of the space creates an ambiance that urges customers to feel comfortable with small talk as well as deeper discussion.

The next art show at the Funky Monkey will open with a First Thursday reception for photographer Allison Mattson from 6 to 8 p.m. Thursday. Kaladi Brothers will likely have new artists to check out then, as well, but look for most First Thursday venues to have something going on in February. The first Thursday in January falls on the first day of the year, a day not likely to yield receptions or openings.

Zirrus VanDevere is a local mixed-media artist and owns Art Works gallery in Soldotna. She has bachelor’s degrees in fine arts and education.

No bones about it — KPC anthropology professor charts path to distinguished career

By Clark Fair
Redoubt Reporter

Dr. Alan Boraas, professor of anth- ropology at Kenai Peninsula College, is the school’s most senior faculty member. But 36 years ago, the first time he asked for a job at the college, he was politely turned away.

Boraas had gone to Clayton Brockel, then the resident director of Kenai Peninsula Community College, a school in the process of building its first official structure, the McLane Building.

“He didn’t say, ‘Don’t ever come back,’” Boraas remembers. “He said, ‘We don’t have anything.’ He wasn’t overly encouraging. At the same time, he didn’t say ‘no.’”

Boraas, who grew up on a 1,000-acre wheat farm in Minnesota, had fallen in love with Alaska while beginning his master’s degree at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He had come to the peninsula in 1972 hoping to teach anthropology. Instead, he found himself living briefly in a camper in Soldotna’s Centennial Campground, working in a cannery, and then taking a job as a carpenter on the Damon Memorial Museum off Poppy Lane.

He was working on the museum roof early in the fall when Brockel pulled up in his 1963 blue Chevy Biscayne, affectionately known as “Ol’ Blue.” Brockel had an offer: “Would you like to teach ABE?” And Boraas replied, “Sure. What is it?”

“It” was Adult Basic Education, and the school had received a special grant to fund it. Brockel needed someone who could prepare adults to pass their General Educational Development (GED) tests.

“There was no promise of a future,” Brockel says now. “He went on a gamble. And he hung on there until we could get some money to hold on to him. He was thrown a bone, and he took it.”

Boraas soon parlayed this “bone” into his first anthropology class and also began teaching ABE classes to Kenai Native Association students at Wildwood through the Indian Action Program.

In the early days of his work in Wildwood, Jimmy Segura, the director of the Indian Action Program, said to him, “Our guys don’t have a lot of education.” Over the years, it was gratifying for Boraas to watch many of those “guys” — both women and men — earn an education and go on to become tribal, civic and community leaders.

Along the way, Boraas learned how gratifying teaching could be, and the importance of making a difference in people’s lives.

One thing led to another — it was “not career planning,” he said — and, as the college grew up around him, Boraas’ career also grew. He took on more anthropology courses and began making important local archaeological digs, including one in the mid-1970s at abandoned Kalifornsky Village. It was through this project that he met Peter Kalifornsky, who had been born in the village in 1911. Along with his sisters, Kalifornsky was among the last remaining speakers of the Outer Inlet dialect of the Dena’ina language on the Kenai Peninsula. He would come to influence the course of Boraas’ life and career long after Kalifornsky’s own death.

After a sabbatical at Oregon State University in 1979 to begin his doctoral work, Boraas continued to teach at the college and to further his investigation of Dena’ina prehistory, culture and linguistics. He also began writing articles about area history and culture for a local newspaper.

In 1983, he finished his doctorate, a study of the evolution of brain via specialization relating to the use of tools. He completed the degree over four years, focusing on it during summers and whenever possible while teaching, even traveling back to Oregon when it was necessary.

He laughed as he remembered that, after he had already presented and defended his doctoral thesis, he received a phone call from OSU.

“Got a call from the dean of the graduate school. ‘There’s a problem with your thesis.’ It’s the middle of summer. I’m out in the yard or something. The dean calls me. ‘It’s not on 20 percent rag bond paper. We can’t accept it.’

“In Soldotna in 1983, there was no 20 percent rag bond paper to be had.”

Finally, he located some 15 percent paper. Instead of retyping the entire thesis, he inserted the new paper into a photocopier, carefully copied his original work, and mailed it off to Oregon. No one was the wiser.

Sometime later, he received another notice from OSU.

“Since I didn’t go to my graduation (because of the expense and inconvenience), I didn’t get my diploma. And they sent me a card saying that, ‘If you want your diploma, we can send it to you if you send us $3.25 postage.’”

“I just spent thousands of dollars (in the OSU program), and they’re not going to send me my diploma unless I send them $3.25. So I never did get my diploma.”

It was the principle of the thing, he said.

In the mid-1980s, he had a life-changing encounter: Peter Kalifornsky, after the death of his younger sister, asked Boraas to help publish his collected writings. For years, Kalifornsky had, in his native language, been writing down stories of Dena’ina history, culture and mythology. He wished to compile his writings into a large volume that would feature all these stories both in Kalifornsky’s original language and in English.

“I was honored,” Boraas said of the opportunity. “When a man who is one of the last speakers of a dialect asks you to help him, you don’t ask questions. I daresay you don’t blink.”

He is reflective of that opportunity today: “The path one takes is often directed by the opportunities that present themselves. If you have the skills — background — to make a difference in whatever that opportunity is, you take advantage.”

With the help of James Kari of the Alaska Native Language Center, Boraas and Kalifornsky collaborated to complete Kalifornsky’s opus: the 527-page “A Dena’ina Legacy – K’tl’egh’I Sukdu: The Collected Writings of Peter Kalifornsky.”

In the early 1990s, Boraas was instrumental in the creation of Tsalteshi Trails at Skyview High School, and helped coach at the school. Skiing, Boraas said, is a means by which people of northern climates connect with their environment and embrace the range of seasons that the North has to offer.

Today, Boraas, 61, continues his Dena’ina connection. Although he is still at the college’s Kenai River Campus, he is not teaching this year. Instead, he is working to improve the Dena’ina language Web site to facilitate the reading and writing of the language, and is helping the Kenaitze tribe to finish analyzing an earlier archaeological project.

Despite all these accomplishments, however — and a lengthy entry on Wikipedia.org — Boraas, with a wry grin, refers to himself as “among the world’s most obscure archaeologists.”

Brockel, on the other hand, refers to him “as a real pioneer of the college.”

Beat of their own drum — Kenaitze youth group develops tradition of laughter

By Jenny Neyman
Redoubt Reporter

The drumming can be heard from the parking lot outside Fort Kenay in Old Town Kenai: a rhythmic pulsing that sounds like a heartbeat. In a way, it represents one.

The Del Dumi Intertribal Drum program’s goal is to promote sobriety, respect, cultural awareness and pride in area youth — the lifeblood of the Kenaitze Indian Tribe’s future.
The drum program, for ages 13 to 18, is part of the tribe’s Yaghanen Youth Programs (meaning “good place, a safe place for the heart”). The youth program also includes the Jabila’ina Dance Group and Ggugguyni Native Youth Olympics Team, all of which are open to all youths, whether or not they’re Native or tribe members. The drummers, dancers and NYO athletes gave a demonstration of their activities at the Pamyua concert Saturday in Kenai.

Michael Bernard, Yaghanen programs director for the Kenaitze Indian Tribe, said the youth programs began in the 1990s to give kids healthy activities to be involved in after a tribal youth committed suicide.

“The council decided we didn’t want this to happen again. We needed to come up with some things for our youths to do so they’re not going out drinking and doing drugs and alcohol and getting in trouble,” Bernard said.

The gravity of the group’s mission, combined with the steady thumps that reverberate in the windowpanes of the 100-plus-year-old log structure, sets a serious mood when walking into drum practice Thursdays. It’s immediately shattered by the howls of laughter that come whooshing out the log door with the warm air.

The group, gathered around a large hide-covered wooden drum, has disintegrated into laughter so incoherent it’s hard to tell what set them off. It could have been a drummer owning up to a missed beat or a premature start to a solo, and everyone else joining in to dispel any embarrassment.

“We laugh a lot but we don’t laugh at anybody,” said Doug Gates, a tribal advocate. “We won’t laugh at you, we’ll laugh with you.”

Or it might have been someone getting creative with lyrics. When the group practices Christmas standards around the holidays, for instance, “French hens” often becomes “French toast” in “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”

Or maybe it was Bernard attempting to sing falsetto — not a natural range for someone built like a football player.

Whatever the case, a brief break was in order for everyone to collect themselves and start again.

“We’ll get into this laughing fest where we can’t hardly play anymore,” Gates said.
But they can and do, because even in the drum group’s goofiest moments, there’s a sense of seriousness in what they do.

It plays out in myriad ways, from the respect in how they treat each other — they’ll laugh with you, never at you — to the traditions governing how the drum is played.

Songs have a specific format. Everyone drums on the same beat, and the leader —on Thursday it was 17-year-old Chris Anderson — starts the singing with a solo. There’s a chorus, and the leader signals with a sweep of his hand that the next solo is up for grabs. If someone wants it, they indicate so and Anderson acknowledges it, or he designates someone to sing. There are hand signals for speeding up and slowing down, and a motion to get everyone drumming on the same beat.

The drum itself has rules associated with it. It’s made from a cottonwood stump with hide stretched over it and special items sealed inside — an eagle feather and three agates, three being a lucky number and agates being lucky stones, Gates said. It was constructed in the early 1990s, Bernard said, when tribal elder Peter Kalifornsky was alive. Kalifornsky named the drum Del Dumi, because that was the sound he heard in his head when the drum played, Bernard said.

When drummers prepare to play, hide-covered drumsticks are always passed to the left. At the end of a performance, everyone places his or her right hand on the drum for a moment of silence. If dancers are performing, as well, they ring the drummers and place a hand on the shoulder in front of them. Then the eldest person at the drum says a prayer, offers a few words of thanks or in some other way commemorates the moment. When drummers pick up their chairs to leave, one chair is always left behind until the drum is removed.

Interior Alaska Natives, not the Kenaitzes, traditionally used large drums like Del Dumi. The Cook Inlet-area Dena’ina used more portable percussion devices, like handheld hide drums, wooden plank drums or birch sticks beat together, Gates said. The large communal drum was adopted into Kenaitze programs in the early 1990s as a way to promote sobriety from substance and alcohol abuse, said Maggie Jones, a tribal advocate.
“It’s to keep you focused. It really draws you in and you think about going out and being strong,” she said.

Anderson joined the drum group after moving to the peninsula from Palmer in 2004 and getting involved in the tribe’s NYO program. He started singing solos, realized he was good at it and became a drum leader.

“I love everything about it. There’s nothing to really point to, just everything — I like being here, the drumming, songs, the fun and the seriousness when we do an event,” Anderson said.

Jack Williams, 14, said he likes the drum group for the same reasons as Anderson. He joined a little before Anderson did, when his mother suggested he give it a try.
“I said, ‘OK, I’ll try it out.’ I think it worked out pretty good, actually,” he said.
Some songs are just for fun, like Christmas carols or Wilson Pickett’s “Land of A Thousand Dances,” where drummers fling themselves around in chair-bound circles at the end of each chorus: “Na, na na na na ... .”

“That makes me seasick,” Jones said.

Other songs have more traditional meanings, although it usually isn’t conveyed in the lyrics. The words that are sung usually aren’t even words, they’re vocables, Jones said. The song’s meaning comes from how and when it was used.

“This is one where we build it and build it and build it; it’s really powerful,” Bernard said of the “Badger Song.” “Think about why they’re doing this. It’s not just for something to do. Picture it; they’re getting people riled up. They’re like, ‘Come on, let’s do it.’ So at the beginning it’s like, ‘We’ve got something to go do,’ and by the end it’s like, ‘Let’s do it!’”

Del Dumi’s finale is “Red Earth,” an honor song. No matter what humor precedes it, “Red Earth” is played with complete seriousness. “We do some fun things that are really silly and goofy, and we do some really serious things. It’s kind of a mix of everything,” Bernard said. “It takes a special person to realize the drum is a serious thing, but it’s also a place to have fun with other people who like the same things.”

For Bernard, as a youth counselor, that’s the most impressive part of the drum group.

“They can have fun then turn right around and be completely serious. That says a lot about their character,” he said.

Name ‘redoubt’ has long history, different meanings in Kenai area

The Redoubt Reporter is a great name for the Kenai Peninsula’s newest newspaper. The term “redoubt” has a long history here in Cook Inlet.

The word derives from the Latin “reductus” meaning “secret place.” In French it became “redoubte,” or a temporary fort. Both the Russian and English versions (redoubt and redutskaya) mean a fort with a palisade or walled enclosure. Today the term applies to Mount Redoubt, but originally was used as the name of the third Russian fort to be built on the Kenai Peninsula, called Nikolaevsk Redoubt or Redoubt St. Nicholas.

Russians of the Lebedev Company started the post in 1791, hauling their ship, St. George the Victorious, up the small creek the Dena’ina called Shqit Tsatnu (Sloping Flat Cliff River), below what is today called Old Town. There, Grigor Konovalov and Amos Balushin and about 60 Russians built three walls and a roof using their ship as the fourth wall.

A year or so later the permanent Redoubt St. Nicholas was built at the top of the bluff in the vicinity of the present Russian Orthodox Church.

The redoubt was about 120 yards in its longest dimension and consisted of a large barracks, a foreman’s house and numerous smaller buildings, including a blacksmith shop and gunpowder storage. In addition, there were small dwellings where Dena’ina women taken as concubines of the Russians lived.

The post was surrounded by a double row of 12-foot-high spruce poles sharpened at the top. At either end of the parallelogram-shaped palisade was a blockhouse — each with a small cannon and number of loopholes for musket fire.

The Dena’ina called Redoubt St. Nicholas “uch’daltin,” derived from a traditional Dena’ina word for a spiritually induced protective shield the Dena’ina created around themselves in warfare. The Dena’ina uch’daltin was apparently more powerful than the muskets and cannons of the Russians, since they defeated their Russian occupiers at Redoubt St. Nicholas in a 1797 battle, and the Lebedev contingent left Alaska.

The fort site was taken over by agents of the Russian America Company, who operated a small trading post until the American purchase in 1867. During the whole of Russian America there were seldom more than about 10 Russians at Kenai, while the Dena’ina village of Shk’ituk’t in the vicinity of the senior citizen housing along the bluff behind the present Arby’s was populated by about a hundred Dena’ina. During that time, the Dena’ina population of the Kenai and Kasilof areas was several thousand.

When Battery F of the Second Artillary of the U.S. Army arrived in 1869, they found the Russian buildings mostly dilapidated. Some were used by the post, along with a number of newly built structures scattered between the bluff and the present Kenai Spur Highway.

The American fort, called Fort Kenay, itself was abandoned only two years later and Battery F was sent to the American West to fight in the Indian Wars.

Apparently the term “redoubt” was first applied to the volcano across the inlet in the mid-19th century. Captain James Cook had sighted the mountain (or possibly he was seeing Iliamna, it’s hard to tell) in his 1778 exploration of Cook Inlet but did not name it. His third in command, John Gore, named it Mount Vulcan in his journal because it was steaming at the time, but the name did not stick. Mikhail Tebenkov’s 1852 map calls the volcano Sopka Redutskaya, sopka meaning mount or mound and redutskaya a Russian version of redoubt named, of course, for Redoubt St. Nicholas. Before that the Russian mapmaker Constantine Grewink had called the mountain Gora Vysokaya, which means, “high mountain.”

My personal favorite name for the mountain is the Dena’ina name Bentuggezh K’enulgheli, which means, “One that has a notched forehead.” Redoubt has a volcanic blowout on its southeast side dating to sometime in the prehistoric era when magma migrating to the surface was blocked from going up the vent. Pressure built up and an eruption blew out the side, creating a “notched forehead.”

So this newspaper could be called the Notched Forehead Reporter. Or, if you wanted a complete Dena’ina name, “reporter” could be iqech’ dghini\u — literally “it is said.” So, the masthead would read Bentuggezh K’enulgheli Iqech’ Dghini\u. On second thought, maybe that would take too much explanation — Redoubt Reporter is just fine. But we should remember words and names carry on a long and important tradition at this place and are part of our heritage — as is the news.

Dr. Alan Boraas is a professor of anthropology at Kenai Peninsula College.