'Bring Back The Spirit' Tlingit healing canoe launched at Pine Lake, Yukon

What began as a 6,300-kilogram western red cedar on Prince of Wales Island in Alaska is now a nine-metre dugout canoe set afloat for the first time this past weekend on Pine Lake, Yukon.

The creation of this Tlingit healing canoe was a journey — one that was spiritual, physical and bureaucratic.

"All obstacles you could ever imagine, never had any idea would happen, happened," said Wayne Price, a Tlingit master carver from Alaska.

For more than a decade, Price had been wanting to work with the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations in the Yukon on the project.

Plans were moving along, Price had selected the log, and just when it was about to start, the world effectively shut down because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"We just stuck with it and had to keep going," he said.  

Getting Price across the border into the Yukon was a team effort.

"We had lawyers involved, chiefs, Parliament. Somebody back in Ottawa I don't even know."

The log made it across the international border first, the only time Price had not traveled with a log destined to become a dugout canoe.

Eventually he was also able to enter Canada and made it to the Da Ku Cultural Centre in Haines Junction, Yukon. He spent two weeks in isolation there, alone with the cedar log, and began his work.

Price, a professor at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau, taught himself how to carve the ancient canoes after studying surviving dugouts from the past. It has become his lifelong passion; this canoe is his 13th project.

An apprentice team began with seven students. The process is not just about carving, but creating the boat with intention and resilience.

The work is symbolic, Price said.

"Each chip represents a life we've lost to alcohol and drugs in Indigenous country. And of all the chips that have come off, there's a broken home, a broken family," said Price, adding that his vision to create healing canoes came during a sweat lodge ceremony.

Price said each person involved in the journey to create the boat is changed through the process.

He looks to art as the backbone of Indigenous culture.

"It's been doing us for 10,000 years. We should never doubt it, we can rely on it completely [to] get us through the next 10,000."

The community launched the canoe at Pine Lake during the Da Kų Nän Ts'étthèt Dance Festival, naming the boat Bring Back The Spirit. 

"We launched it off with song and dance and prayer to send it off in a good way," said Rose Kushniruk, one of the festival organizers.

For now, the canoe is back at the Da Ku Cultural Centre in Haines Junction.

Kushniruk said the dance gathering on the weekend was more than just a festival, it was a chance to strengthen traditions.

"Singing the songs and telling the stories that come from this land, from our elders and from our many teachers," she said.

Kushniruk points to the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations's Dakwakada Dancers — celebrating their 31st anniversary this year — and says dance groups have been the unsung heroes of the cultural revitalization movement.

"It is our responsibility to continue dan k'e, our traditional ways, to heal and empower our people and community — and this is just one small way of doing that," she said.