I went back and forth about putting this page on a business website. Family history on a consultant’s site can come across as bragging.
I kept it because everything I believe about communications started here. Trust takes years. A business that answers to a community behaves differently than one that answers to customers. People come and go in a village. The ones who stay and put something in are the ones who get respect back.
So this is where it comes from.
Balance
The Tlingit world runs on balance. Balance is a verb. You work at it, you never finish it. Respect your relationships and carry your responsibilities and things hold together. Ignore them and they come apart.
That is how an Alaska Native corporation can run a for-profit business for its shareholders and carry old Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian values at the same time. From outside, those two jobs look like they cancel each other out. From inside, they hold each other up.
Native business leaders today are working off instructions from their ancestors. Provide for people now, and provide for the ones who are not born yet. Once you see that time horizon you understand why an ANC guards its reputation the way it does. In PR speak, brand.
Name
My Tlingit name is X’agat̲keen. It was my great-grandfather’s name too. He was hereditary chief of the Aantlein River Teikweidí.
We give our children the names of their grandparents and the people who came before them. That is how we keep them with us. When you are young and you are handed a good name, the name carries you. Later on you have to turn it around and carry the name.
He told the story
In 1973 my great-grandfather gave the only account anyone has of a battle between Yakutat Tlingits and the Russians. He was past a hundred years old by then. Our history was spoken. He wrote this one down.
He was born on Khantaak Island around 1870, a few years after the United States bought the territory from Russia and decades before statehood. Somewhere along the way he decided the history needed to be carried a different way.
That is my job too. Use whatever tools we have now to say we were here, and we are still here.
Tell me what you’re working on.
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