The Eklutna area was the site of many Athabascan Indian villages as long as 800 years ago. Today's residents are descendants of the Dena'ina (Tanaina) tribe. A railroad station was built in 1918, and Russian Orthodox missionaries arrived in the 1840s. Brightly-colored "Spirit Houses" in the Russian Slavic style now lend character to Eklutna.But by far the best online resource on Eklutna is a personal webpage put up by an Alaskan identified only as "sunhusky" who has a wealth of pictures and well-informed explanations about Anchorage, the nearby Mat-Su valley and other southcentral Alaska attractions.
From the Sunhusky website we learn "the name Eklutna is the Anglicized version of Eydlytnu, which is Athabascan for 'village,'" the village site "dates back to about 1650 although it was probably inhabited much earlier than that," and it overlooks "the mudflats of Cook Inlet’s Knik Arm, which was where a string of fish camps and villages once stood." All this seems to check out with the information of Eklutna in Shem Pete's Alaska: The Territory of the Upper Cook Inlet Dena'Ina, which I read through pretty thorougly at the Border's in Anchorage. Of the church, dedicated to St. Nicholas, Sunhusky adds:
The first impression you’ll get is that [the Spirit Houses] look like tiny doll houses. They’re decorated with primary colors, usually reflecting family heritage. This custom developed as the Russian Orthodox Church adapted the native Athabascan’s custom of placing the remains of loved ones in bentwood boxes under the trees. The colors and geometric patterns aren’t chosen randomly, however. They distinguish different families, which was the only way early families had of marking the gravesites before they could read or write in Russian. The section you will see within the small fenced area isn’t the entire graveyard. It’s part of what is actually a much larger burial grounds which is largely hidden by the trees and brush to the rear. I noticed that the overgrowth makes it much more difficult to see with time, which is perhaps as it should be. It was the visible spirit houses that were the draw to tourists, however, and the village opened up the tours largely as the best means of protecting the burial ground from those who would trespass. Even today, while you are allowed to take photos, you are requested to stay on the sidewalk that circles this section of the cemetery. One of the things you’ll note is that while some stay brightly painted, others are allowed to follow the natural course of events and are slowly going the “ashes to ashes” route.There's a lot else at the Sunhusky website, which for some reason I've had a hard time finding with search engines, all of it fascinating.
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