Dena’ina Ełnena

The indigenous people of Anchorage, the Dena‘ina have enduredrelentless colonial and genocidal pressures. Waves of disease, the imposition of Christian missions, and the suppression of Indigenous spiritual traditions fractured community life. Children were taken into Western-style boarding schools where English-only policies cut them off from their languages and cultural teachings. At the same time, restrictions on hunting, fishing, and other subsistence practices struck at the very foundation of survival. These forces combined to threaten the existence of entire communities.
Native peoples of Dena’ina Ełnena were excluded from decision-making at every level. Federal, territorial, and later state governments ignored their voices. In an era shaped by open racism, they were regarded as inferior, their knowledge and sovereignty dismissed. Yet, despite these erasure efforts, a unique convergence of circumstances—guided by the resolve of Native leaders and the strength of community—sparked a movement of solidarity across the land. This movement ensures that the Dena‘ina people are able to share their history, have autonomy over their voice, and are able to carry their culture
forward into the 21st century. In this context our conversation began around community knowledge and public participation regarding the Indigenous history of the region. Specifically, with a focus on a public art project led by the Anchorage Park Foundation. This project, referred to as the Indigenous Place Names Movement, is set to erect 33 Dena’ina place name signs across the southcentral region of Alaska. The project was community-organized and led by representatives from the Eklutna Tribe and other partner organizations across Anchorage. MS’s contribution is marked by her design of the sign itself, a Dena’ina viqizdluyi (fire bag) as well as her art practice that relies heavily on community participation and guided by the need to protect her community through teaching and truth-telling. The specific design of the sign was inspired by a fire bag MS saw while doing research at the Ethnological Museum Berlin. Fire bags were used to carry fire starters but were also a symbol of a person‘s leadership. Each person that had a fire bag was gifted the bag as a representation of their responsibility, to keep the fire going for their community.

Qin Cheghi (ridge where we cry)
MS: Understanding the relationship that Indigenous communities have to their land is not just knowing the historical events of a place or even its specific use. As Dene people, we don’t have buildings, monuments, or obvious remnants of ourlife here. What we have are our stories and the passed downknowledge of each place. While yes, there are archeological sites throughout Alaska that date well over 15,000 years old, proving our timeline of being, what does that tell us about how we lived here? Without a written history, much of our existence has been negated by colonization, urbanization, and ongoing settler colonial biases. The bridge to understanding how we lived andour relationship to the land, is our place names. Our place names are our history. By bringing the communal knowledge of place names into public art, this work becomes a participatory art practice, and the sharing of Indigenous place names become a form of activism, centering Indigenous knowledge in the city. This visibility of Indigenous place names is not about placing Indigenous knowledge above another, it is about reconnecting ourselves as a community to the land as provider of sustenance, a place to grieve, a joy to celebrate, and a relative to care for.
It is a sensitive community-driven process that involves all experiences of life in each place and represents generations of resilience.The most recent sign that has been brought forth is Qin Cheghi (ridge where we cry). This place name speaks to the fact that Dena’ina people had public places for grieving. We recently held a community ceremony to share the new sign, and you could see this ridge at a distance. Looking towards this place was so powerful, I felt like it solidified something to me. This work of bringing the place names back into our memory and use, is also a way to bring community together. Having a specific place for grief is a method for us all to meet in our humanness. We needed the site acknowledged. While we can’t live as we used to live, we can find ways to live our culture and reconnect it to the places of our ancestors. In doing this we build a new community, with shared knowledge and a more complete history.

Remembering Forward

HZ: I remember when working with indigenous Elders from the Prince William Sound in Germany, I was asked to acknowledge the lands I stand on and to invite my Ancestors into the space. Acknowledgement in this moment was to honor the past. An awkward silence ensued as I could not bring myself to acknowledge and invite my Ancestors in the space, they were complicit in the Nazi Regime. For myself the lands I stand on are lands of atrocities devoid of honor. In this moment it became clear to me that we did not have a mutual understanding but that it was important to acknowledge and understand our differences in memory. A moment where we looked back, shared our discomfort and disconnection, so that we could enter a relationship moving forward.

MS: When we were working on the place names project, I realized it wasn’t about making physical signs in our language as a memorial to our culture, it was about bringing forth a new shared purpose of each place. One guided by the deep history of Dena’ina use. . It was about moving into new futures. Your anecdote reminds me of the process in activist circles of remembering forward. It entails remembering the past to inform and shape a collective future, rather than being trapped by past traumas or limitations. By using public art projects to bring place names in our public consciousness we are deliberately choosing to transform a place of Dena’ina history into a place of truthful history and shared use.

HZ: Unknowing non-indigenous people are confronted with their own blind spots when they spot the place name markers, but these Artworks are not made for them. Rather, it sounds like there is a far more intimate, profound and covert process of reclaiming the spaces all over the city, public parks and its surrounding mountains?

MS: Exactly by placing something that isn’t even in the English language we remember deeper knowledge systems that are very humanistic. Why are we doing this? Indigenous people know that these processes need to be witnessed publicly but they need to be a sacred and special places as well. It’s beyond ownership it’s about the human experience. There are probably many ways in which Qin Cheghi was used and why it was named as such. I don’t think people sat down and said this is what we do here, and we will call it by this name. I think it was an occurrence that was powerful for the people there and that the story was then shared and remembered for hundreds if not thousands of years. . All we have is the memory and what someone is willing to share. We don’t need these signs for it to be important, but its importance is lifted by the memories of a participatory community. And these signs help share those memories.

HZ: What makes this such a powerful way of memorializing is that it places the process of memory in indigenous hands. It stands as a stark contrast to what German Memory Culture coined “Vergangenheitsbewältigung”. Public memorialization often was a place of overcoming the past or coping with the past. The past is something that needs to be conquered and overcome through memory. The danger here is that as Y. Michal Bodemann called it Germany is in a state of memory theater. It is about creating a well orchestrated symbol of an oppressor that has been exonerated. Any questioning of that brings the theater’s dramaturgy out of balance. Public memorials are not spaces where community is lived, memory is shared, and futures are defined but rather are there to show that the oppressor has overcome the past. Even though public art projects create an identity or define a collective place of memory, communities create their own places of remembering forward outside of this memorialization. It is a difficult process when you are forced to live memory and community in a capitalistic market logic, actively working against the political symbolization of memory. In the end actual community work happens behind the scenes of the memory theater.

MS: We are as a community in a diaspora and so public art practices, for us, is community care and a process of relation ship building with our ancestors and each other. Participation in the art projects is an automatism that is intangible and that is felt at every ceremony for every place name . At times it feels frustrating and nonsensical in the larger context of the current political situation in the country but then I come back to the Qin Cheghi and it is that place that is a source of power for myself, my work, and my community. I am Melissa Shaginoff I am part of the Udzisyu (caribou) and Cui Ui Ticutta (fish-eater) clans from Nay’dini’aa Na Kayax (Chickaloon Village, Alaska). I am Ahtna and Paiute, an interdisciplinary artist and museum specialist for the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. I currently work on Dena’ina lands in Dghayitnu (Anchorage). I center my art practice around conversation, seeking deeper understanding through moments of exchange and reciprocity.