Quakers contribute more than $92k to develop a healing center in Kake
An unused U.S. Forest Service building in Kake may soon be a healing center for the community to move forward from generations of trauma after a boarding school harmed members of the Alaska Native population.
When Joel Jackson, president of the Organized Village of Kake, saw the building on an access road between Kake and Petersburg, he said he was surprised. “A cultural healing center has been on my mind for decades,” he said. “I said to myself, ‘Hey, there’s our cultural healing center.’”
Now, with nearly $93,000 in reparations money, Jackson can insure the building and move towards renovations. Quakers with the Alaska Friends Conference and from Washington and Oregon contributed money with the goal of helping to repair the damage from colonial influence and boarding schools in Southeast Alaska at the turn of the century.
Quakers built a mission in Kake in the 1890s before the federal government handed the Quaker building over to the Presbyterian Church, which operated a boarding school there. Jackson said the legacy of forced assimilation has been hard in his community.
“I never knew anything about intergenerational trauma until I attended a few workshops when I traveled to different conferences. And then I realized how that can be passed on through the generations and how it affects our people. That made sense to what I witnessed growing up,” he said.
Jackson said he witnessed people in his community struggle with alcohol as they aged and he sees that as a result of forced assimilation among people who experienced boarding school and their children. “That was the generation that was subjected to forced assimilation, where they couldn’t speak their language or do the things that they normally do,” he said.
He said the colonial presence also disrupted transmission of the Tlingit language by supplanting it with English. “We have very few fluent Tlingit speakers anymore. Most of them are leaving us,” he said, referring to how many fluent elders have died.
“Hopefully we can get people over here that are struggling with addiction and alcohol. It’s not just going to be for our community, it’s going to be regionwide,” he said. “I want to open it at first to the rural smaller communities because a lot of times they don’t have the option of going to treatment because, you know, most centers are in the bigger cities. And there’s usually a waiting list to get in there. So yeah, I want to open that up for them.”
The reparations were announced at Kake Day, a yearly celebration of when the Southeast Alaska city incorporated in 1912 and its residents became the first Alaska Natives to have United States citizenship and have the right to vote. The reparations follow an apology the Quakers made in Juneau in 2022 to the Alaska Native community for the harms of boarding schools.
read more: https://ictnews.org/news/reparations-follow-quaker-apology-to-alaska-native-community