Volunteers offer arts, culture Support at MEHS
- Daily Sitka Sentinel
- 10 hours ago
- 5 min read
By Anna Laffrey
Daily Sitka Sentinel
Volunteers are working with Mt. Edgecumbe High School students, staff and administrators to enrich the quality of life at the school and support students’ mental health by way of Alaska Native art forms, traditional foods and community connections.
“MEHS Arts Project” organizers this week launched a fundraising platform and volunteer sign-up form for people who want to support the initiative; Sitka Conservation Society is serving as fiscal sponsor, and is facilitating online donations.
The project is already inspiring students with drumming, singing and dancing, regalia-making with Native art instructors, and traditional foods like seal, salmon, herring eggs, akutaq and fry bread.
Project volunteers CeeJay Johnson-Yellow Hawk and Robin Sherman said in an interview today that the Arts Project effort began when community members learned in December that Mt. Edgecumbe students were struggling with mental health and overall well-being.
The state-run boarding school in Sitka each year draws about 400 students from across Alaska, many of whom come from small villages in Western Alaska. Together, they represent more than 100 Alaska Native communities.
A budget squeeze and associated staffing cuts, along with other changes, left MEHS with less capacity this year to support cultural and off-campus activities essential for students' health.
Sherman said that by the end of the fall semester, “we were hearing that there wasn't enough for students to do outside of the classroom, and as a result the students who didn't have an outlet in athletics were spending a lot of time in their dorm rooms, by themselves, on their phones. Students were struggling.”
“People in Sitka realized that these students are right here in our community, and jumped to ask, ‘What can we do to help?” said Johnson-Yellow Hawk.
While supporting students in December, Johnson-Yellow Hawk organized a student meeting and circulated an e-mail survey to ask how volunteers could help students feel safe and at home on campus.
"We learned that they want to do more traditional arts and traditional foods,” said Johnson-Yellow Hawk, who attended MEHS from 2001-2003. “A lot of them want to make regalia; they’re in dance groups, and we don't have a lot of regalia.
"And so it was, ‘How can we bring that here? How can we bring a piece of their home regions here to Sitka?’" Johnson-Yellow Hawk said. "That's when we started reaching out to artists from the different regions.”
Johnson-Yellow Hawk reached out to Yup’ik artist Golga Oscar with the idea that he could visit Mt. Edgecumbe to work with students. Oscar responded the next day, asking “When do you want me there?"
Administrators and volunteers worked together to coordinate a trip for the artist; the University of Alaska Fairbanks supported his travel costs and time.
“In these little miraculous ways, things have been falling into place, and people have been coming together and doing what they can with what they have,” Johnson-Yellow Hawk said.
For instance, after hearing about a need in the MEHS Culture Room, families with the U.S. Coast Guard donated working sewing machines for students to use for their projects.
A group of women in Fairbanks is gathering each week to sew regalia for students who practice with Mt. Edgecumbe’s Athabascan dance group.
“People have donated fur, sinew, and needles, and just shown up,” Johnson-Yellow Hawk said.
Students helped Johnson-Yellow Hawk build an “Amazon Wishlist,” which people can access through the Sitka Conservation Society website, and use to fill orders for materials that Mt. Edgecumbe students requested.
On Thursday, Tlingit chef Edith Johnson of Sitka prepared a meal of locally-caught sockeye salmon, donated by Shee Atika Corp. to Sitka Conservation Society's Fish to Schools program. Johnson prepared the sockeye with a wild spruce tip bernaise sauce alongside vegetables, a stew, fry bread and a salad of herring eggs donated by the local Herring Protectors nonprofit.
The dinner was a special send-off for Golga Oscar, who was in Sitka from Sunday through this morning as the first artist to visit Mt. Edgecumbe as part of the MEHS Arts Project.
Oscar “hit the ground running” this week, sewing baby booties with students and creating Yup’ik headdresses for student dance groups.
“It was wonderful for Golga to come in and sit with students and teach them something that their aunties and grandmas do back home,” Johnson-Yellow Hawk said.
While working with Yup’ik students, “he spoke to them in their own language, and he gave them direction in their language, and that just changed the entire dynamic, it made students comfortable and relaxed in a way that I hadn’t seen."
A release from the Sitka Conservation Society this week said that MEHS Arts Project fundraising will go towards hiring local cultural instructors and other visiting artists to work in the school, paying for art supplies, supporting students in outdoor and community activities, and funding student travel to Native cultural events through June 2027.
Sherman said these resources are critical because “when you give the students the opportunity to do something that they’re interested in, they come alive, and they thrive."
“That is the opposite of sitting in your dorm room and scrolling on your device,” Sherman said. “They’re doing something in the community. They’re learning more about their culture, or another Alaska culture.”
Johnson-Yellow Hawk said the project could tap into the network of proud Mt. Edgecumbe alumni who are living and working across Alaska, many of whom have relatives attending the school.
“We're hoping now that we have a structure, we will have a way to get connected with this amazing alumni network,” Johnson-Yellow Hawk said. “In the long term, we're hoping that current students are going to remember this, and they'll do the same thing for future generations of students.”
“Another goal and hopefully part of the legacy of the project is just having a stronger connection between the community and Sitka and the school and its students,” Sherman said.
“It's so amazing that we have these students here, with all of their cultural knowledge, and that they come every year,” Sherman said. “There's so many opportunities for, you know, interaction and cross-cultural learning. And hopefully the project will help create more. … Not only will it benefit the current students, it'll benefit the community."
People can learn more about the project and how to contribute by visiting https://www.sitkawild.org/mehs_student_arts_project
.• This article originally appeared in the Daily Sitka Sentinel.
