“That really provoked me to say, ‘We’ve got to put our presence here.’”

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In support of such an expansive pedagogical undertaking, SHI is building out a website with information about how the poles are made, what the symbols on them mean, and more, including a video about their creation. In addition, storyboards related to the carvings on each pole were put in place a few months after the initial dedication; each one includes a QR code that visitors can scan to access the website and enrich their experience of the trail.

As all that happens, the team at SHI is moving forward with fundraising—a necessary step on the road to completing the balance of poles, as each one costs about $200,000 from start to finish.

Mellon’s support “really gave us the boost and put us on the map,” Worl says. “We’re confident that now that we have these poles existing, it should make fundraising a little bit easier. We have something tangible to work to.” Master carvers are working with the Sealaska Heritage Institute to create the Totem Pole Trail—thirty sculptures celebrating Indigenous tribes who had been historically excluded from Juneau's monuments.
In a sense, it was a controversial statue of William Seward that kickstarted Kootéeyaa Deiyí, the Totem Pole Trail in Juneau, Alaska. Seward was the United States secretary of state who brokered the purchase of the Alaska territory in 1867, nearly a century before it became a state. His bronze likeness in the capital city gave Rosita Worl, a member of the Tlingit tribe, a big idea.

“Look around—you see all these monumental art pieces celebrating the colonization of Alaska, but you don’t see our art,” says Worl, an anthropologist and president of the Sealaska Heritage Institute, which preserves and promotes the cultural legacies of the Tlingit, the Haida, and the Tsimshian tribes who call the region home. “We were invisible here. Our cultures weren’t evident, and it began with the expropriation of our land.”

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Artist Tommy Joseph (Tlingit), a master carver, at work phone number list on his totem pole honoring the Eagle clan. Photo: Bethany Sonsini Goodrich/Sealaska Heritage
So, Worl got to work. Under her stewardship, the Sealaska Heritage Institute (SHI) embarked on the Totem Pole Trail. This Mellon Foundation–funded initiative has enlisted ten Indigenous master carvers and their apprentices to create the initial ten of thirty original totem poles that will be raised throughout the city in April 2023. Most of the master carvers are located outside of Juneau, in areas accessible only by boat and with scant economic opportunity. By design, the pole-carving project offers an infusion of capital into local economies, and pays the master carvers and their apprentices a wage.

Each master carver is partnered with a tribal clan and SHI to develop the themes and stories depicted on the poles. The master carvers make three-foot miniature models of their poles for review by clan representatives before starting on the final product. SHI plans to eventually install thirty such poles in Juneau and along its waterfront; indeed, waterfronts are where totem poles traditionally stand.

“Back in the day, you’d go by the pole in your canoe and you’d read it like a book. You’d say, ‘So-and-so lives there and he’s in the Raven clan,’” says TJ Young, a member of the Haida tribe and one of the master carvers at work on two of the ten poles. “It’s a book or a snapshot of a period in time.”

Totem poles typically depict “our relationship with the environment around us, which has sustained us for the last couple of thousands of years,” Young continues. “Animals are not to be hunted and killed; they are part of us. That’s why we respect them and take them on as clans and crests.”