Day 847. The house screen is almost finished. Qa ca yi says we are ready to learn the eyes.
What We Do When We Are Not Surviving
Two years in, we have learned something the old world forgot: survival is not enough. You can feed yourself, shelter yourself, keep yourself warm and dry and alive, and still lose something essential. The first winter, nobody made anything that wasn’t strictly necessary. The second winter, Qa ca yi started carving again. Not because we needed what he was making. Because we needed him to be making it.
Now others are learning. Not because it is required — Council has never mandated art instruction — but because something in people reaches for it once the desperation lifts. Marcus, who was an accountant in Juneau, is learning to carve spoons. Dana weaves spruce root baskets that actually hold water. Three of the children can identify ovoid forms in nature before they can find them on paper.
What follows is our record of the visual language we are learning, the making we are doing, and the traditions we are trying to carry forward. Qa ca yi reminds us regularly: this is not our art. It belongs to the clans, to the lineages, to the people who developed it over thousands of years. We are guests in this tradition. We learn with permission and with gratitude.
The Visual Design Language
When you look at the art of the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian people, you are not looking at decoration. You are looking at a sophisticated visual design language developed and refined over thousands of years. It communicates identity, clan relationships, spiritual beliefs, and stories across every surface of daily and ceremonial life.
What makes this tradition remarkable is its consistency and adaptability. The same design principles that guide the painting of a massive house screen also inform the carving of a tiny fishing hook. From the monumental to the intimate, from wood to wool to copper to bone, the artists of this coast developed a visual grammar flexible enough to wrap around any form while maintaining its integrity and legibility.
Formline: The Grammar of the Coast
The design system known as formline — a term from Western art scholarship, though Tlingit has its own words for these shapes — operates like a visual grammar. Primary formlines carry the main weight of a design. Secondary elements support and elaborate. Tertiary details create tension and balance. These relationships stay consistent whether you are looking at a forty-foot totem pole or a three-inch spoon handle.
The ovoid is the foundational shape. Once you learn to see it, you find it everywhere — in the eye socket of a carved mask, in the joint of a painted figure, in the bend of a river viewed from above. The U-form and S-form complete the basic vocabulary. From these three shapes, entire worlds are built.
The challenge for the artist is to adapt this grammar to the object at hand. A paddle blade needs visual weight distributed differently than a bent-corner box. A bowl carved in the shape of a seal asks the design to follow curves and hollows. A woven hat demands translation into an entirely different medium. In every case, the underlying logic holds, but the application requires knowledge, skill, and creativity.
Function and Meaning Are Inseparable
Our ancestors did not separate art from utility. A beautifully carved halibut hook was not decorated to make it pretty. The design carried a spiritual call to the fish. A dagger with a clan crest on its handle brought the power of that lineage into the hand of the one who held it. Grease dishes shaped as beavers or seals — the animal’s body became the vessel. Mountain goat horn spoons with formline design so precise they require a magnifying glass to fully appreciate.
This is what we are learning at Chuck Creek. Not art for art’s sake — that concept would have made no sense to the people who developed this tradition. We are learning that every object your hands touch is an opportunity to speak. To declare who you are, where you come from, and what stories you carry.
What We Are Making
The House Screen
The largest project in the settlement right now is the house screen for the community longhouse. Qa ca yi designed it. He is teaching four of us to carve it. The process is slow — deliberately slow. He says the carving teaches patience before it teaches anything else. You learn to read the grain of the wood. You learn which way the adze wants to move. You learn that the design is already in the plank and your job is to let it come forward.
House screens controlled passage through the most important doorways. They announced whose house you were entering. Ours announces that this is everyone’s house, built on ground that belongs to no one who lives here, maintained with the permission of those whose ground it has always been.
Bent-Corner Boxes
We are making bent-corner boxes again because we need them. For storing smoked fish, for rendering oil, for keeping things dry. A bent-corner box is carved at three corners from a single plank, then steamed and folded, sealed at the fourth. The design must remain continuous across multiple faces and around sharp corners. These are not puzzles solved once — each box presents a fresh challenge.
Marcus made the first usable one last month. It is not beautiful in the way Qa ca yi’s boxes are beautiful. But it holds fish and it does not leak, and Marcus wept when he finished it, which is information the Council minutes do not record but this page does.
Weaving
Dana and two others are learning spruce root basketry. The baskets are functional — we use them for gathering, for storage, for cooking. But basketry carries its own design vocabulary. False embroidery on spruce root and cedar bark creates surface patterns distinct from formline but born of the same cultural world. Regional variations in technique and motif mark community and lineage as clearly as crest art.
Chilkat weaving — translating formline into fiber — is beyond our current skill. But Qa ca yi has the pattern boards. He says when we are ready, we will learn. Raven’s Tail weaving, geometric and angular, older than Chilkat, uses primarily white, black, and yellow to create powerful graphic patterns. It is currently experiencing a significant revival among weavers across the region — or it was, before The Correction. We hope it still is.
Carving
Spoons, bowls, fishing implements, tool handles. The everyday objects that move through your hands. Qa ca yi says to start small. A spoon handle teaches you everything a totem pole will ask of you, but it forgives your mistakes faster. He is right about this, as he is right about most things, which we have learned to stop finding annoying.
The children are carving too. Small things — toggles for their rain gear, pieces for a game Qa ca yi taught them. Their hands are learning a grammar their mouths are also learning, because Qa ca yi teaches carving in Tlingit. You want to know what the tool is called, you learn the word. You want to know the name of the shape, you learn the word. Language and making, bound together the way they were always meant to be.
What Ceremony Looks Like Now
We are not qualified to hold a potlatch. Qa ca yi has been clear about that. The protocols are specific, the obligations are real, and most of us do not have the cultural standing to participate in the way the tradition requires. But we gather. We eat together. Someone always sings.
Qa ca yi has taught the children three songs that are appropriate for guests to learn. He has been careful about this — songs belong to clans, and singing the wrong song is not a small thing. The three he chose are teaching songs, meant for exactly this kind of learning. The drumming is simple. The children love it with a ferocity that makes the adults quiet.
On the longest night of the year, we lit the longhouse with firelight and Qa ca yi told a story in Tlingit, with Dana translating. It took two hours. Nobody moved. The fire popped and the rain hit the roof and his voice filled the space the way voices have filled spaces like this for eight thousand years. None of us were the same afterward, though we could not have told you what changed.
Resources: Learning More
These links were cached before The Correction. Some may still be accessible if you have connectivity.
Visual Design Language and Formline:
Sealaska Heritage Institute — Cultural programs, language resources, and Northwest Coast art education.
Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture — University of Washington. Significant Northwest Coast collections and educational resources.
Louis Shotridge / Penn Museum digital archive — Historical Tlingit objects collected by Louis Shotridge in the early 1900s. A complex legacy of preservation and contested ownership.
Weaving and Fiber Arts:
Sealaska Heritage Institute — Weaving Programs — Chilkat and Raven’s Tail weaving instruction and revival efforts.
Carving and Material Culture:
Totem Heritage Center, Ketchikan — Preservation and interpretation of historic totem poles from Tlingit and Haida villages.
Music, Dance, and Oral Tradition:
Celebration — Sealaska Heritage Institute — The biennial gathering of Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian people. Dance, song, regalia, and cultural renewal.
Every object our ancestors touched became an opportunity to speak. To declare who they were, where they came from, and what stories they carried. We are learning to do the same.
Gunalchéesh.