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Lawson Creek cemetery restoration effort continues as city seeks proposals for landscaping services
- Ellie Ruel
- 14 hours ago
- 9 min read
‘Show me your cemeteries and I will show you what kind of people you have’
By Ellie Ruel
Juneau Independent
Behind a rusted retaining wall off South Douglas Highway, headstones are slowly emerging from the undergrowth as volunteers cut and weedwhack the plot back to its state a century ago at its inception.
Jamiann S’éiltin Hasselquist has been leading the effort since 2021. She said she first felt a calling to cemetery work at age 13 and was inspired by work in her ancestral village of Angoon.
“We started in the Native section, and there were a lot of emotions to work through during that time. People were saying things like ‘Forget those people. Forget them,’” she said. “We’re talking about the harms in history and colonialism, how we have these cemeteries and wanting to honor our ancestors, and so I was looking out at the other people and was like, ‘What if we don’t forget about them, what if we just start taking care of them?’”
The city recently sought proposals for landscaping services, which Hasselquist said she was applying for earlier this week. But she was not involved in discussions beforehand and worries that new volunteers might not approach the project with the same care since there are still burial markers that need to be uncovered.
Hasselquist organizes biweekly work parties to continue clearing and restoring the grounds. Late last month, about a dozen volunteers worked under the pouring rain to cut back undergrowth that had already taken over from the last weedwhacking earlier in June.
“Show me your cemeteries and I will show you what kind of people you have,” Hasselquist said, citing the quote commonly attributed to Benjamin Franklin.
Since the group started work five years ago, they’ve knocked back some of the salmonberry overgrowth on the side closest to Gastineau Channel and exposed many of the estimated 514 burial sites. Others may be hidden under soil indentations, they said.
“You couldn't walk six inches, and we would be in there, and we would be lopping those salmonberry bushes off, and we'd be like, ‘We're seeing you!’” Hasselquist said. “We're clearing things out, we'd have to lop and throw things over the side of the hill.”
L’xook Jess Kinville and her son Kaax Tseen Joseph Kinville started working with Hasselquist near the start of the project.
“You can know a lot about a community by how they take care of those that have passed on,” Jess Kinville said. “It's just really important for us to take care of those that have passed on.”
Hasselquist said she was originally motivated by giving everyone a dignified final resting place and correcting injustices, before and after death. Many of the Alaska Native graves are in a heavily wooded area.
“We say someone has walked into the forest, so it also feels appropriate,” she said.
Through the restoration work, Hasselquist has found connections to the past, such as when the volunteers raised the headstone of Chief Johnson, chief of the T’aaḵu Kwáan.
“After Chief Johnson was raised, we were all having different spiritual things happen to us, and I told them, ‘The spirits are working with us,’” she said. “We're gonna have different experiences and people are coming back with their own stories and experiences and things that are going on.”
She was able to connect two of his living descendants through coincidental phone calls shortly after the raising.
“I was like, ‘I feel like your grandfather is reaching out,’” she said. “They made connections with each other.”
As she raked moss and leaves from the area around where Johnson is buried, Elizabeth Kell explained that cemeteries have always had a special meaning for her.
“There's some really nice cemeteries and stuff when I'm visiting family back in West Virginia,” she said. “That is on our list every time. We go to three different cemeteries. There's multiple family members buried, and we go there every time, maybe do a little tune up if needed, and just be like ‘I never met you. But I wouldn't be here without you.’”
She said she believes in respecting the history of the people who came before and noted her boyfriend’s ancestors were descended from Chief Johnson. In her two years of volunteering, Kell has picked up knowledge of how to uncover hidden items and information.
“I get to walk along and be like, ‘OK, these types of depressions, I know that this means there's somebody here,’” Kell said. “I do a lot of research and things outside of it.”
Kell said she hopes her final resting spot will receive the same care.
Fr. Maxine Gibson and parishioner Ian Niecko were covered in grass from weedwhacking the front of the cemetery plots closest to the highway. Gibson said they were inspired to come help by their yearly blessings of graves.
He noted the Russian Orthodox religion places an emphasis on blessing the departed.
Bella Kirchgessner was working with Kell to move moss and undergrowth. She moved to Juneau two years ago and said the work events have given her a chance to expand her community.
“The thing that I miss being here is a sense of family; I feel like I am able to care for people who have passed and be part of a community that takes care of people who have passed,” she said. “It makes me feel more connected to myself and working up with my sense of family and place.”
The interconnections she’s seen in the uncovered history have grounded her, she said.
“There's a lot to be said on these headstones, there's lots of history that's written on them,” Hasselquist said. “These people came from all over the world for the Treadwell mine. And so there's people from Germany, there's people from Finland, Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, they're from all over the place.”
Laury Scandling wielded an electric saw and chopped at tougher branches near the highway. She works at the Last Chance Mining Museum and is the editor of the Gastineau Historical Society’s newsletter. She started researching the cemetery and its inhabitants when the COVID-19 pandemic started out of curiosity about how Juneau handled the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic.
“I had done so much research, but research is theoretical. You’re not actually meeting the people,” Scandling said.
The very first headstone she uncovered was for a 14-year-old boy she had written about three years prior.
“I felt overwhelmed emotionally, because I have a son, and I know that to these people, in that moment, they were losing the most precious thing in their life,” Scandling said. “Every single one of the people here mattered to somebody.”
Scandling said she’s gotten attached to the Odd Fellows section, filled with cottonwoods and ferns. She and Hasselquist haven’t uncovered most of the headstones except one at the top of a dilapidated and overgrown staircase.
“We're going to need some equipment to pull out the cottonwoods, which are really awful,” she said.
At 72, she said some of the lifting required to clear the cemetery can be taxing and it’s unsustainable to rely on volunteers.
“The last person buried in all of the parcels is Kathleen McCormick, up by the cross. That was 1995. Her son, who's now 88, he can't do any more,” Scandling said. “As these generations fade, from former Treadwell workers, et cetera, it's appropriate that the city step up and take a role. We're doing our very best to kind of bring it to a level where they could do that.”
Hasselquist said she’d like to see it in the same shape as Evergreen Cemetery downtown someday with benches and marked pathways. Hoisting the heavier gravestones will require a specialized tripod, she said, and once raised they have to be stabilized with gravel. Trees will have to be removed carefully due to their proximity to the highway, and Hasselquist would eventually like to revegetate the cemetery with Kentucky bluegrass.
“The landscape is changing,” she said. “The more that we weed whack and keep things down, it allows other things to creep up.”
The past and future of restoring the cemetery
Who owns the land and is responsible for upkeep has proven a problem over the years. Some of it is private, some is owned by the city, and there’s a swatch with no name to the title, Scandling said.
The cemeteries, split by the highway, are made up of about eight different parcels of land. A 1995 report from the City and Borough of Juneau notes there are “three non-contiguous cemetery sites” in the area, respectively known as the Douglas Indian Cemetery, the Catholic Cemetery, and the Eagles Cemetery. The Catholic section encompasses the Catholic Cemetery, the Odd Fellows Cemetery, the Masons Cemetery, the Native Cemetery, the Asian Cemetery, and the Russian Orthodox Cemetery; while the Eagles Cemetery encompasses the City Cemetery, the Eagles Cemetery, and the Servian Cemetery.
According to a 1994 report by the CBJ Community Development Department, historical records of the Douglas cemeteries are difficult to find after many were destroyed in a fire in 1937. Sources differ on where Douglas residents were buried before the Lawson Creek cemeteries were formally established around the early 1900s.
The land was part of a mining claim area that mining engineer W.A. Sanders refused to allow people to use as a burial site despite a prior verbal agreement. Eventually, funds were raised for a gravel road and other improvements, and the land was split into nine burial sections and sold off.
The city survey found 514 burial sites and 157 grave markers. Some bodies from the Servian, Asian and Native cemeteries were moved when the Bureau of Public Roads constructed Douglas Highway to Cowee Creek in 1934. From 1967 to 1972, reports indicate that over 30 graves were disturbed or moved, but the exact number “is difficult to document as the records are not readily accessible or don't exist.”
Previous outcry about the state of the cemetery site came from Douglas residents in the summer of 1979 when a house was alleged to have been constructed within the bounds of the city cemetery, and the property owner reportedly “took extraordinary measures to make certain there was no problem.” A quiet title action decreed that the building site was adjacent to, not on top of the cemetery.
The city’s report states multiple residents turned out to clear brush and debris from the burial sites during the controversy, and asked the Assembly to halt construction.
On June 29, the city’s Parks and Recreation Department announced it was accepting applications from community partners to maintain the cemetery. Applications were due Wednesday.
“Several cemeteries near Lawson Creek, known collectively as the Douglas Cemetery, hold significant historic and cultural importance to the Douglas community,” a news release states. “Most are currently overgrown with dense vegetation and have received little to no regular maintenance. Due to limited funding, CBJ is unable to provide these services directly and is looking for community partners to take on this meaningful stewardship role.”
According to the attached Request for Information document, the city will provide “guidance and expertise” to parties willing to offer the service. The project only covers three CBJ-owned parcels. Marc Wheeler, director of the Parks and Recreation Department, said the request for proposals comes after a 2024 directive from the Assembly that’s now being followed through on due to staffing turnover.
“It's a very complex situation,” Wheeler said. “We haven't been given the charge from the Assembly to try to take care of the whole cemetery and we're just doing what we can with our limited budget.”
Wheeler said the city can provide assistance and ideas but doesn’t have a firm plan for the cemetery’s future due to land ownership complexities. He also noted that he was grateful for the work volunteers had already done.
Hasselquist said she felt a little blindsided by the RFI release and said the volunteers still have a lot of markers to find, so efforts to level the ground could bury them. She said her five years of working on the project have given her knowledge of what needs to be done and she has connections to stewarding the land.
“I'm a registered member of the Douglas Indian Association and also my great grandmother was born on Mayflower Island. And so I have a deep rooted connection to that land and the history as well as being Lingít,” she said. “My people come from Angoon, and we're Deisheetan of the Raven's Bones house. My mother, and her mother, my grandmother, moved here a long time ago when my mom was about 14 years old. I was born and raised here and we have ancestors buried in several sections of those cemeteries. So I definitely have more than an ancestral right; I have an ancestral responsibility to continue caring for those lands.”
Hasselquist said the city has been clearing debris piles left by the volunteers and provided rakes and wheelbarrows in June. She said they still need more tools, like shovels, rakes, and a tripod hoist for gravestones. Since she has to cart all the materials from her house right now, she noted a shed would also be helpful.
“I mean, think of how many decades it's been. It could take an equal amount of time before it gets to the place to where it's beautiful,” she said.
The next volunteer event is scheduled for Saturday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. and Hasselquist recommended people bring 12-inch screwdrivers to probe for burial markers. Another cleanup is planned for Aug. 1.
• Contact Ellie Ruel at ellie.ruel@juneauindependent.com.
