We stayed inside for days, the nonstop rain pelting the windows. We waited for the sun to come out to explore our new community. We were California girls. Little did we know the sun was not coming out; it can rain six to 12 feet a year in Southeast Alaska.
I answered a knock on the front door to find two shy, Alaska Native boys. They had come to show my sister and me their island.
We picked blueberries in the rain, hiked a steep winding trail through a dark, dripping rainforest to a waterfall, saw a beach where 3,000-year-old petroglyphs were carved into the rocks, and visited Shakes Island where very old totems told the stories of the clans who had erected them.
I fell in love with the Three-Frog Totem, a tall pole with a crossbar at the top holding three fat, green frogs in a row.
My parents were busy laying out the newspaper they had just bought that year (1976), and I showed my mother the Three-Frog Totem. She took a photo which my father sent to his friend, an artist for the San Diego Union, who created a three-frog masthead for the Wrangell Sentinel, which was used for the next 50 years.
I was dismayed when we received our copy of the Sentinel last week. The frogs were gone from the masthead.
The three-frogs was a shame totem, set up in the 1800s to shame another clan who had reneged on their promise to marry three of their women to the chief’s sons. A shame totem stands until it falls, at which time the debt is considered forgotten and forgiven.
As the Three-Frog Totem disintegrated over many years, the U.S. Forest Service replicated and replaced it, and then so did the Wrangell tribal council decades later.
This year, the clans had had enough. In a ceremony with dozens of people attending, the totem was pulled down, the three-frogs crossbar to be cremated.
“We will not speak of this again, and the totem will not be put up again,” said one of the clan’s leaders.
The Three-Frog Totem had wide appeal. But we had disrespected the Native clans when it was reproduced and when it was used as the masthead for my father’s newspaper. We can be tone deaf to cultures not our own.
As a teenager, my self-centered, California-girl perspective changed the day that the two gentle Tlingit boys reached out to us to share their community, their clan’s beliefs and their centuries-old culture.
As much as I grieve the loss of the totem, it was never mine to love.
— Betsy Luce
Boise, Idaho
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