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Celebration takes its spirit and sounds to the streets with final-day parade
- Mark Sabbatini
- 10 hours ago
- 3 min read
Visitors crowd the streets downtown to watch procession, but for participants it’s a commemoration honoring their people and heritage
By Mark Sabbatini
Juneau Independent
Hallie Hanlon says it’s been a decade since she’s been at Celebration due to serving in the U.S. Air Force. But on Saturday, with her insignia pinned to Tlingit regalia, she returned to join other service members at the front of a parade through downtown Juneau that’s part of the traditional final-day activities.
She and hundreds of other parade participants — mostly in large dance groups, but also a few lone individuals — made a winding circuit in occasional light rain through the streets from Ferry Way to Cenntennial Hall in a procession that lasted about an hour. A dense crowd of spectators along the streets included a mix of others attending Celebration, local residents and tourists in town for the day.
"It’s really for us because we have to show who we are," Hanlon said when asked who the parade is for. "All these tourists that are here, they don’t come to Centennial Hall, they don’t come to (Elizabeth Peratrovich) Hall. So we get to walk through our land and show people who've never been here, who've never heard of us, that we exist and that we're still here."
Carrying the Alaska flag in the parade, she wore a decorative bib gifted by her mother, Alberta Hanlon, atop an Air Force military jacket custom beaded by her cousin, Shaadootlaa Iyall. Hanlon, now living in Nebraska due to her service duties, said she returns to Southeast a few times a year to visit her father, but the timing for Celebration hasn’t worked out until this year.
"It seems bigger," she said, comparing to the last time she participated. Beyond that it's the same since "it’s still just all of our people getting together to celebrate who we are."
Other than the military service members at the front of the parade, there were no rules or registration for the other participants who lined up in the order they or their groups joined the cluster on the block-long Ferry Way.
When the procession began at 10 a.m. with a quick word from a Sealaska Heritage Institute official overseeing the event there were no leadoff police vehicles sounding sirens — or any vehicles at all in the lineup. But the sounds of singing and drums were abundant as the dance groups performed many of the songs featured during appearances at various Celebration venues since the gathering began Wednesday.
Watching the parade from a sidewalk bench across from City Hall were Barbara and Henry Jasny, who said they made their first trip to Alaska from their home in Falls Church, Virginia, so they could be at the various events during Celebration.
"We fell in love with it on YouTube," Henry Jasny explained. "She decided she wanted to come to Alaska and we were looking for what was going on, and Celebration was happening this year, and it beats being on a ship all week."
Barbara Jasny said among the moments she wanted to experience most were the arrival of canoes from other parts of Southeast Alaska on Tuesday and a dedication ceremony for a new totem pole at Southeast Alaska Native Veterans Memorial Park on Wednesday. But she also expressed thoughts similar to Hanlon’s about who the high-spirit events are meant for.
"This is not for the tourists, it’s for the people who all live here," she said. "And that it’s tradition and that made it fascinating."
• Contact Mark Sabbatini at editor@juneauindependent.com or (907) 957-2306.
More photos from the 2026 Celebration parade. (All photos by Mark Sabbatini / Juneau Independent)
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