This is Tongass Voices, a series from KTOO sharing weekly perspectives from the homelands of the Áak’w Kwáan and beyond.
Last week we heard from Master Carver Wayne Price, who’s currently carving a dugout canoe — or yaakw – in Juneau. Today, we’re hearing from one of the apprentices working alongside him.
Skaydu.û Jules first started learning from Price in Angoon a few years ago. They were working on the first dugout to be carved there since the village was bombarded in 1882.
Jules is from Teslin, in Canada’s Yukon Territory. She now lives in Juneau, where she’s training to become a Lingít language teacher and hopes to one day help carve a canoe solely speaking Lingít. Price said it’s amazing to hear her bringing language back to the practice of carving.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Skaydu.û Jules: Yoo x̱at duwasáakw Skaydu.û. They call me Skaydu.û, and I’m a carving apprentice under Wayne Price. And he says I’m the language person.
The last project in Angoon was shorter spurts here and there, when I could go over and volunteer my time.
And then ever since then, Wayne has said, because I got had the experience to go on a few journeys with him, like across the Salish Sea and through Tribal Journey, that it was time to do a dugout from bark to boat launch, which is the whole process from the log, and being able to see it all through.
And so this experience has been really full and like holistic, with so many of the teachings that I never learned from doing the whole process last time.
I was brought into carving, probably by Wayne, mostly. Yeah, I when I came here, I moved here to go to school and learn Lingít at University of Alaska Southeast, and learned a lot from Heather Burge and X̱’unei Lance Twitchell.
And from there, I had the experience to take a few carving classes and then a domino effect to really starting in these bigger healing projects with Wayne as my teacher mentor, my uncle, Lingít way. So it’s been a really amazing experience, and really like healing to a lot of my spirit being here.
It’s really hard to describe it. It can really feel like a sense of really putting the community above the individual, like when you come here, you’re part of a family, and not just the people who are here on this earth, but our Haa Shuka [ancestors] are the ones who came before us, and we’re doing this for our future generation of people, so they have this teaching, and we could pass on this teaching and learn this knowledge from Wayne.
So being able to practice this and all these chips represent a lot of our people who are struggling from drugs and alcohol and mental health, and to be able to be a part of something like this is just really makes the heart full, because I know that for my own experience, it has done a lot for me and has saved my life in a lot of ways.
I’m actually going to school to be a Lingít language teacher, and it’s a big part of my goal to do land-based teaching. So what that’ll look like is, you know, eventually, bringing a bunch of people out and doing this all in the language. So it’ll be a few years til that happens, but I’ll be done with school this year, and then we’re working on translating a lot of this knowledge into Lingít so we could start teaching our younger generations.
The invitation is that it’s not like a closed-off group, like it’s we’re always welcome to share these teachings of the healing powers of dugouts and Wayne invites you know everyone, if they have somebody who’s struggling or they know somebody that really needs help, that they can come write their family members name down on a wood chip. And then when we do our ceremony of steaming open, the dug up will be burning those wood chips in honor of all those people who need that extra support and this healing energy.