8 June 2022 (Posted 12 June)
We boarded the Matanuska at 2345 hours, we got our stateroom and went to bed. Well I tried to sleep. At about 0200 they announced over the ship’s intercom that we’re at the island of Kake. Not a stop for us, but I thought, what the heck let me go on deck. So I got up after two hours of sleep and walked around the ship. It is quiet and it is fairly light outside but not too dark to see the whales and the Eagles! I stayed up and went to the Observatory lounge gazing out the large windows into the waters ahead. Nope, I didn’t see Bob tonight.
I’m bored, so I’m sitting on the life raft boxes at the aft of the ship looking for whales. A man sat on the next box over and we chatted a little bit about our travels. He said he was from Boston, but of course he didn’t have to say, I could tell by his Bostonian accent. I asked him if he was a football fan and he said yeah, rather smugly, have you ever heard of a team called the Patriots? Oh no he didn’t just say that… I said yeah do you know how good they would have been if they never played the Giants in the Super Bowl! We laughed and talked about the old baseball days and how our current teams are doing.
Ann Marie was now (1100) in the lounge crocheting her blanket that she’s been working on since the beginning of the trip. It started no bigger than a pot holder and now it’s about 4 foot square and growing by the day. She uses it to keep herself busy instead of thinking about the rolling waves on our way up to Juneau .
Sitting close to Ann Marie was an elderly lady named Maryann Rainey, a Tlingit (pronounced “TLIN-git” or “KLIN-kit.”) from Petersburg ,AK. She was sewing and making some sort of a red and black scarf and I asked her what are you doing? She said I’m making a graduation shawl for my grandson. I said oh cool what do those symbols stand for? She explained she is a Tlingit of the clan Eagle/Ravens from the Thunderbird House from Petersburg. The symbols are from the Ravens and the Eagles and they’re not football teams, those are other tribal clans.
We got to talking and I asked her if this was the first one she’s made and she said, oh no she’s got six children 18 grandchildren and four great grandchildren. So she has had a lot of practice and she loves doing it and it keeps her busy and it passes on Tlingit tradition. She also said she has made six different Cedar Hats. At first I nodded my head, because I felt like I should know what they were, but I thought, “What the heck are they?
I asked her what a Cedar Hat is? She said it is a lengthy process of stripping the inside bark of red or yellow cedar. Care must be taken as to not hurt the tree, so a small amount of bark is removed and the inside “tender” wood of the bark is stripped to 1/4 inch wide thin pieces of wood. These hats are woven so tight that they can hold water, as the cedar swells when wet. The cedar hats have a lot of ancestry meaning, and can be painted with clan colors and symbols. I asked Maryann how much they cost if one was to buy them, and she said about $500 or more. Wow!
Maryann said a lot of her people (ingidinous) from Petersburg are on this ship to participate in the Celebration in Juneau. Celebration happens every two years and it’s a celebration of the tribal heritage of clans and tribes from all of Alaska. They all gather for a four-day event in their traditional regalia with song and dance. Celebration is one of the largest gatherings of Southeast Alaska Native peoples, drawing thousands of people, including more than 2,000 dancers. Indigenous groups gather every other year in Juneau for Celebration, arriving by plane, ferry and dugout canoe. It’s a chance for Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian and others to dance and share their cultures.
After four or five more hours of sailing, we docked at the island of Sitka which is just a stop over for us. Ann Marie and got off the ship to quickly walk around and stretch our legs and see what we can see. We have to be back on the ship in three hours.
We look to our left and we see a few people on the rocky beach and they have shovels and buckets. Well we love the beach and the tide was out, so off we went. We walked about a mile alongside the road to the boat ramp and around the beach, where we met Ed and his son AJ. Ed and AJ are from Hawaii visiting their uncle Arthur who really isn’t there uncle, but they met when Arthur was in Hawaii commercial fishing and became best friends. After we got to talking and sharing our travels with each other. Ed said, he thought that they were some kind of trouble when he saw us walking toward them!
Ed and AJ flew up to Sitka Alaska for a 10 day vacation to experience Arthur’s world of commercial fishing. Today they said they were just bumming around digging up the rocks on the beach to get clams. They said they were going to eat clam chowder and fish tonight. They had four buckets of clams so they were doing good!. All really good people, they were really surprised that we had our truck camper on the ship and island hopping. They didn’t know that could be done.
We walked back to the ship, and there were many indigenous people waiting in line to board, and one of the women was wearing a what? A CEDAR HAT! So I ask her if it was a cedar hat, and she confirmed that it was gifted to her from an elder of her clan. I asked her a few more questions than asked if I could take her picture. Kool, circle closed.
So we are sailing again, and I was taking pictures from the starboard side, I met Doug, who was taking pictures of the same whale I was. He lives in Ketchikan, originally from the middle of Texas and wanted to buy land in Alaska. He didn’t want to live in Fairbanks with his brother because it’s too cold there. So he was able to find some reasonably priced government land in Ketchikan. He travels the ferry system a lot with his jeep and a little tent trailer to see his brother in Fairbanks.
I heard on the ship’s intercom folks from Petersburg were going to gather and practice some of the songs in the upstairs lobby lounge. So I moseyed up there, stood in the doorway, turned on my video and discreetly took video of them practicing. Cool! We’re going to try to attend the Celebration parade there Juneau on Saturday afternoon.