Carvers, apprentices from Southeast collaborate on latest Totem Pole Trail project
- Ketchikan Daily News
- 3 days ago
- 12 min read
Saxman master carver Lee Wallace hopes to send totem to Juneau this month as one of 30 planned for Kootéeyaa Deiyí along the waterfront
By Danelle Kelly
Ketchikan Daily News
Haida master carver Lee Wallace and his apprentices were working in Wallace’s Saxman home carving shed on Aug. 18, filling the air with the scent of red cedar shavings and an aura of joyful creativity.
Wallace was chosen to create one of 30 totem poles planned for the Sealaska Heritage Institute’s Kootéeyaa Deiyí totem pole trail being installed along the Juneau waterfront.
The first 10 poles were funded by SHI with a $2.9 million grant in 2021 from the Mellon Foundation, according to SHI information. Haida artist Warren Peele was hired to create a totem pole with a separate grant from the Denali Commission.
There also is planned an installation of bronze masks titled “Faces of Alaska” on the SHI arts campus which, like the totem poles, are to honor the Native groups of Alaska. The totem poles and masks represent the Inupiat, Yup’ik, Alutiiq and Athabascan Native groups. A fifth group honors the combined cultures of the Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian.
SHI initially hired 10 Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian artists to create the first 12 totem poles: Nathan Jackson of Ketchikan and Jackson Polys/Stephen Jackson of Ketchikan and New York City, TJ Young and Joe Young of Hydaburg, Jon Rowan of Klawock, David R. Boxley of Metlakatla, Nicholas Galanin and Tommy Joseph of Sitka, Robert Mills of Kake and Mick Beasley of Juneau.
Those totem poles were dedicated in an April, 2023 ceremony held in Juneau, along with five bronze masks.
The Mellon grant also funded apprentices to be mentored by each of the master artists.
According to information at www.micd.org, the City and Borough of Juneau has agreed to maintain the totem poles once they are erected.
Wallace on Aug. 18 was accompanied by his son and apprentice Charles Peele, apprentice Dave Ketah and his 5-year-old granddaughter and upcoming carver apprentice Elizabeth Jáadsangaa Peele.
By the end of August, Wallace had secured carving apprentices Wesley Pawlik-Jensen and Michael Milne to assist with carving the totem pole.
Wallace said that he aims to have the pole ready to send to Juneau by the end of September.
Wallace’s work is likely familiar to most Ketchikan locals, as he is the artist who created the six totem poles at the entrance to Cape Fox Lodge, titled the “Council of the Clans.”
The Western red cedar log that Wallace’s pole is carved from was sourced from a Sealaska sort yard on Prince of Wales Island, he said. Sealaska sets aside logs that are found to be suitable for poles and has been providing them for the carvers of the totem trail poles.
Wallace said that his totem pole is for the Tlingit Sukteeneidi clan, who are of the Raven moiety from the Dog Salmon clan. The traditional homeland of the Sukteeneidi people is in Tebenkoff Bay near Kake.
Wallace said that Sealaska planned that the 30 totem poles for the trail would “cover all the clans that exist here in Southeast Alaska.”
Each carver was assigned a clan for which to carve a pole by Sealaska.
“I’m really grateful that they actually called on me to carve,” Wallace said.
He said that, years ago, he spent 20 years carving in the Saxman Edwin DeWitt Carving Center, then took about 20 years off, during which he focused on serving in tribal government.
He said that he’d planned to retire from government work when he turned 70 years old, which he did.
When Sealaska approached him to carve a totem pole for the Kootéeyaa Deiyí trail, Wallace said that he told them he hadn’t carved for about 20 years, but they were persistent in their request.
Sealaska provided the data and history of the Sukteeneidi people to Wallace so that he could accurately plan the pole’s design, he said.
“What I was really hoping for was a Sukteeneidi clan story, but they really didn’t have any,” Wallace said. “So this was more of a historical thing with the Sukteeneidi clan.”
Wallace gave an overview of the initial schematic drawing that he created for the totem pole, which was tacked to the wall of his carving shed and displayed the precise and intricate designs planned for the pole.
Wallace, as his granddaughter hovered nearby, explained that Elizabeth Jáadsangaa has her own carving set and mallet, and that she not only painted some of the portions of the totem pole, but carved out some of the log’s troublesome knots.
Her father, Charles Peele, said that she started helping with carvings when she was 3 years old.
Wallace then gave a tour of the pole to the Daily News as Peele and Ketah carved sections of the pole.
“The base of the pole is dog salmon swimming in the grass before going upstream to spawn,” Wallace said.
Above the salmon carvings is a male figure whom Wallace said was called Xaa Tinch.
“Part of the data they gave me was the Sukteeneidi clan leader in the 1850s, he was leaving Tebenkoff Bay on a sailing boat, he’s dressed in Western wear,” Wallace said.
He gestured to that figure on the pole and described the design.
“He’s got these black boots, black pants, so in the black pants I put a dog salmon,” Wallace said. “For his sleeve coat, I put a raven.”
He continued the clan leader’s story.
“He’s on the sailboat, and his little granddaughter is with him and she notices that he’s kind of weeping really hard and he’s an elderly man.”
Wallace said that he had to ponder why, in the story, the man may have been weeping, as there was no information provided about the cause.
“I think he was probably reminiscing,” Wallace said. “There was probably happy tears and sad tears all along, so that as he left — and he never did return — he died with pneumonia that winter.”
Above the clan leader figure is a medicine man who bears the same name, Xaa Tinch, as the man in Western garb. That figure was a Sukteeneidi shaman in the 1600s, Wallace said.
“He has this vision that a cross is coming,” Wallace said. “He’s visualizing a Christian cross coming to their land in the 1600s. He said there’s going to be a day of rest coming — you’re looking at Christianity, right? And so, he instructs the people to construct a large cross in the village and they do so. Some years later, the people from Kake wanted to go down to Tebenkoff Bay to see if that cross existed yet.”
The searchers were scouring the ground, looking for the promised cross, Wallace said, “but someone looks up in the trees and they see the cross got entangled with branches and got lifted up,” he added.
The shaman figure on the totem pole is holding a spherical rattle with a spiral carved into its surface.
Wallace explained that another clan the Sukteeneidi claimed was the Snail.
“So, where do I put a snail on this guy?” Wallace said he pondered as he planned the pole’s design.
“I visualized a snail here on his high-top moccasins, so there’s a snail there — you can see its tail, its head, and again, it’s under the Raven moiety so there’s a raven’s beak there,” he noted.
He said that the shamans that he researched also utilized round rattles, so he carved a spherical shaman’s rattle with a spiraling snail shell design. The shaman also features a raven carved into the back of his hand. Wallace explained that tattoos were often placed on that location in the Sukteeneidi culture.
The shaman’s head is topped by a headdress that is fitted with large, black curving “bear claws” that Wallace carved and that fit tightly into round sockets cut into the main pole.
Wallace also fitted the shaman with copper tin’aa earrings, which Wallace said were left over from his Cape Fox Lodge totem poles. Wallace also added a nose piercing for the shaman made out of a polished spike of walrus tusk.
Sitting atop the shaman is a raven, which is perched on a bulging chest.
“I wanted to make it bulging,” Wallace said. “A lot of times they’re just flat, but I wanted it bulging because really, SHI, they’re the ones that are finding the funding for all of these 30 totem poles, so they’re wanting to perpetuate the art, the language, and the culture, so I kind of have that this box of knowledge is full here. It’s bulging with information, to reach out and share it.”
Wallace noted “an interesting thing about this raven.”
He explained that when he first brought the cedar log into the carving shed, it was on its back, then he and his apprentices rolled it on its side. That necessitated he and Peele to begin carving the pole in that position. When they rolled the pole upright, Wallace realized that the beak that he’d carved looked more like a hummingbird beak.
“That couldn’t really be,” he said.
They then removed that beak then patched in a new block of cedar and carved the raven’s beak a second time.
Another challenge that they faced while carving the beak of the raven was the discovery of some heart rot deep in the log. They worked to remove the rot and to repair the area.
He said that there also were “extensive knots” on the log, which they had to cut out then plug with smoother “face grain” wood that is able to be carved.
The top figure on the pole, Wallace said, represents the current Sukteeneidi clan leader. That figure holds a staff, and dog salmon will garnish each side of the figure’s helmet. Peele, Wallace said, had been carving the figure’s clan hat that features potlatch rings carved horizontally around the cylindrical upper portion.
Each ring symbolizes a potlatch that the leader has held, Wallace said.
Wallace said that his carving career began as an adult, and he served as an apprentice to master carvers Nathan Jackson and Wayne Price.
“The carving goes back five generations on the Haida side of my family,” Wallace said. “My grandfather (John Wallace) was the head carver over at Hydaburg at the Totem Park over there in Hydaburg during the (Civilian Conservation Corps) days, and also he had a hand in some of the poles out in Totem Bight (State Historical Park.)”
Wallace said that when he graduated from high school in 1970, he was aware of his family’s history of carvers.
“But at that time it was really the beginning of the era looking at reviving the art,” he said. “Tanana was ahead of us somewhat, and so I finished high school, I went off to college, I got a degree in electronics technology and later on in life, the early ’80s, I started taking up the art on my own and just looking at books and doing smaller stuff.”
During that time, Wallace said he was working for an airline company in Seattle, and his wife Winona Wallace, who is Navajo, asked him whether they should move to Arizona or back to Ketchikan.
“I said, ‘Well, I want to come back to Alaska,’ knowing Nathan (Jackson) lives here in Ketchikan,” Wallace said. “My hopes and dreams were to perhaps work with him someday.”
They moved back to Ketchikan soon after, when the Saxman Clanhouse was under construction, and Wallace said he was hired to work as an “adzer” on the project under the tutelage of Jackson.
Wallace said he’d sometimes bring his small carvings for Jackson to critique.
“Then one day, he came knocking on our door and he had been commissioned to do all the artwork at the Beaver Clan House,” he said.
Jackson asked Wallace whether he’d like to carve the artwork alongside him, and Wallace said he answered “absolutely!”
Master carvers Ernest Smeltzer and Dempsey Bob also were working on the project, Wallace said.
Wallace said that he worked on that project with Jackson for two years, then worked with Price on two totem poles. Wallace continued to carve for a total of 20 years before turning his focus to serving in tribal government roles.
He’d known, Wallace said, that he wanted to return to carving once he turned 70 years old.
When that point came, Winona Wallace had a great idea.
“When we added the garage, my wife said, ‘Make it large enough for a totem pole,’” Wallace recalled.
He said his carving shed/garage is large enough for a pole up to about 30 feet tall. The Sukteeneidi pole is about 25 feet tall, he noted.
Dave Ketah, Wallace said, also has a long family history of carving.
“Dave’s great-grandfather was the head carver over in Klawock Totem Park,” Wallace said. “So here we are, generations doing a project together.”
Ketah said that he made his first carving in about 1983 when he took a class at Schoenbar Middle School from artist Doug Hudson.
“I found out about my family carving history from Emily Moore’s book,” Ketah said.
According to the synopsis in Moore’s 2018 book “Proud Raven, Panting Wolf: Carving Alaska’s New Deal Totem Parks,” the book is a history of “how Tlingit and Haida leaders were able to channel the New Deal promotion of Native art as national art into an assertion of their cultural and political rights.”
Ketah said that he read the book during the 2020 pandemic.
“Just some of the disruption over the last couple of generations leads to things like the conversation I had with my dad when I read the name ‘Walter Ketah’ in Emily’s book,” Ketah said. “I called him and I said, who’s Walter Ketah?”
Ketah said that his father answered, “That was my grandfather.”
Through several conversations with his father, Ketah said that he became more aware of cultural training and some of the damaging events that affected Native families and Native artists in past generations.
“After learning that Walter, my great-grandfather, was a lead carver of the CCC project there in Klawock, I decided to go there and I contacted John Rowan, who’s the carver over there now and asked him if I could come and hang out,” Ketah said.
Currently, Ketah said he is a high school teacher in Portland, Oregon, and his teaching schedule allowed him to spend time in Klawock during the summer of 2021.
Rowan has been carving totem poles for 30 years, Ketah said, and Rowan welcomed him to spend time with him in his carving shed where he worked every day from 6 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.
When Rowan asked what his goals were while visiting, Ketah said he answered that he was eager to learn more of his family’s history and to maybe carve a mask.
“He hands me a piece of wood and walked me through how to carve a mask,” Ketah said.
Following that experience, he said that he secured more carving mentorships, and Wallace’s totem pole is the third that he’s worked on.
“I think I’ve hit the jackpot in life that a lot of us look for, because you hope to find something in your life that you just have endless energy and passion for, that just comes easily and I don’t know if everyone finds that, but I think that I did with carving,” Ketah said.
He laughed when he added, “I think it’s easy for me to spend all my time on it that I have. When I tell about it I say, ‘Well, I’ve got my job, which is teaching, I’ve got my domestic duties at home and then all the rest of the time goes to carving. All of the rest of my time.’”
Ketah said that he also has been a Tlingit language student for the past four years and he enjoys sharing his new skills. He also has been delving into reading about his culture’s ceremonies and traditions.
When his cousin Ken Ketah died, he decided he would employ his newfound skills to give a eulogy at his cousin’s service in the Tlingit language.
“At the celebration of life for my cousin where I did share those words, I met Lee and Winona and found out about this project,” he said, gesturing to the Sukteeneidi totem pole he was working on.
Ketah said that he is very grateful for the opportunity that Wallace gave him to work on the Sukteeneidi pole as an apprentice, as finding carving opportunities can be the biggest challenge for a novice carver.
“They invited me to be a part of it and it kind of feels poetic to me,” Ketah said. “There’s the drive for the language because of the experience that I had with my Tlingit grandparents and how traumatic it was for them to endure the kind of stuff that was going on with respect to language in their lifetime — prohibited from speaking their language, severely punished in school for speaking the language.”
Now, as a teacher, Ketah said that he starts every new class of students by speaking to them for about 90 seconds in the Tlingit language.
“It’s unlike anything that they’ve ever heard before, so it gets their attention,” Ketah said, “and then afterwards I tell them about my heritage and that it’s really a privilege for me to be able to speak the Tlingit language in a public school because not too long ago it was absolutely prohibited in school, and if my grandparents were alive today, they’d be pretty excited that that can happen.”
Ketah said of the SHI Kootéeyaa Deiyí totem pole trail project, that the idea of providing funds for each master carver to employ two apprentices is a valuable part of the project, as it will enable newer Native carvers to gain the experience to then create their own carving projects and become lead carvers while growing the base of master carvers.
“I don’t know if there’s ever been anything like it since the CCC days where there were this many poles carved in one initiative, and so that’s a significant thing that shouldn’t be overlooked,” Ketah said.
“SHI is supporting the future,” Ketah said. “As a single initiative, it’s a pretty big deal.”
He added, “Lee and I enjoy that we’re both descended from master carvers that worked during the CCC days and for us to be working together on a pole is really neat that his grandfather and my great-grandfather were lead carvers of CCC projects, so that kind of to me, for those of us who are really passionate about the carving heritage and the Native heritage, to me it’s symbolic of — the heartbeat is still alive, it’s still beating — and that, coupled with the initiative of SHI, it speaks to the future of carving and the future of this monumental art form that I think draws a lot of people to come here and see it.”
• This story was originally published by the Ketchikan Daily News.
