Huna Tlingit Responses to Rapid Glacial Advance and Retreat in Glacier Bay, Alaska
by
Wayne Howell
Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve, P.O. Box 140 Gustavus, Alaska 99826
Coauthors: Daniel Monteith, University of Alaska Southeast, Juneau, Cathy Connor, University of Alaska Southeast, Juneau, Gregory Streveler, Icy Strait Environmental Services, Gustavus

Glacier Bay has been the homeland of the Huna Tlingit people for countless generations. Oral history tells of a time when Glacier Bay was not a bay at all, but a glacial outwash valley coursing with fish-rich rivers and lined with grassy meadows. Geologic evidence reveals that during the Neoglacial period, beginning about 5500 years ago, the main valley glacier re-advanced episodically from its post-Pleistocene retreat, reaching a point mid-way down the 60-mile long glacial fjord by about 3000 years ago, where it stabilized and began to slowly fill the lower bay with sediments. By 2400 years ago geologic evidence indicates that sediments had risen above sea level and an outwash plain was forming across the valley. Huna Tlingit legend provides a vivid description of life in this emerging environment –Chookanhéeni, the grassy river from which the Chookaneidi Clan (People of the Grass) derives its name and which they consider as their place of origin; L'eiwshaa Shakee Aan, or Sand Mountain (Dune) Town; Ghathéeni, the village beside Sockeye River; and looming in the distance up the valley, the glacier, Sít' T'ooch', or Black Glacier. But Chookaneidi legend tells of a young woman who broke a taboo, causing the glacier to advance “faster than a running dog”, threatening the village. To appease the glacier and halt its advance a Chookaneidi grandmother offered to stay behind as a sacrifice, while the rest of the clan fled into Icy Strait. Geologic evidence and early historical accounts bracket this glacial advance between 210-235 (1-sigma limit) to 285 years ago. Upon fleeing Glacier Bay, two house groups of the Chookaneidi Clan, the Kaagwagaani Hit and Wooshkeek Hit, separated and established their own clans. Geologic evidence suggests unstable living conditions for humans at this time, with shorelines subsiding due to isostatic depression, thus submerging intertidal resources such as clam beds, destabilizing supratidal shores and meadows, creating ragged and unstable beachfront forest edges and disrupting movements and populations of certain fauna. Cold katabatic winds coming off the glacier also dominated this landscape, leading eventually to the settlement of Xuniyaa, “In the Lee of the North Wind” (later conflated to Huna). Tlingit legend corroborates this scenario of harsh conditions, with tales of starvation and human conflict. Archaeological evidence of defensive positioning of villages and early historical descriptions of at least two stockaded villages along Icy Strait also reveal something of the human response to this rapid environmental change.

But the Little Ice Age glacial retreat was almost as rapid as the advance, and by the time of the Vancouver expedition of 1794 the Europeans encountered Huna people just a few miles from the glacier face and living in an environment the ship’s surgeon, Archibald Menzies, described as “a large bay choaked (sic) up with ice & backed by a considerable tract of country presenting a prospect the most bleak & barren that can possibly be conceived”. Subsequent visitors, including famed naturalist John Muir in 1879, encountered Huna Tlingits following the retreating ice-face up the bay, hunting seals and mountain goats and gathering other foods. Throughout the 20th century, both before and after the area was designated a National Monument, Huna Tlingits continued to utilize the resources of the bay to meet their economic needs. Today, Huna Tlingits, though inhibited by Park regulations –which they commonly refer to as “The Second Ice Age”- continue to visit the bay and enjoy her resources as they maintain their spiritual ties to their ancestral homeland, particularly to “The Woman in the Ice”. These visits are to places of the remembered past, as the ancient names are still applied to a drastically altered landscape. This spiritual connection has its roots in the pre-Little Ice Age history of Glacier Bay, and though an “intangible”, is the unbreakable tether that has bound the Huna people to their homeland through much adversity.

This paper will present geologic evidence, with relatively tight chronological control, of late Holocene environmental changes in Glacier Bay, including rapid glacial advance and retreat and the ecosystem-wide environmental changes brought about by these events. Oral history accounts of the Huna Tlingit people’s life in this landscape before the ice advanced and their subsequent adaptations to a rapid and constantly changing environment provides a unique example of human response to change - settlement relocation, social schism, conflict, resettlement, and through it all, spiritual continuity.

Date received: February 23, 2005