Banner photo: Andrea Cook Ts'áak' KáJúu (Singing eagle) holds her Eagle Woman mask she carved during quarantine in her apartment
Andrea is the kind of person who rescues off cast paintings from thrift store racks. She appreciates art, not for prestige – but for the storied strokes, the soul captured within, and the commitment to creating. Still-life flowers, a vase, and fruit paintings, probably discarded from other University art students, are lovingly given gallery space in Andrea’s apartment beside her own work.
COVID-19 mended everyone tightly to our spaces and Andrea’s apartment is an extension of herself. So thoughtfully situated and cared for, this is a space she can’t really afford– but prioritizes, nonetheless. It represents independence for her, a sacred space where sage is burned, little fish bubble through the vines of the thriving pothos she grabbed at Fred Meyers, and where her naan’s Haida song cassette tapes don’t gather dust.
Andrea Cook, Ts’áak’ KáJúu (Singing eagle) is Kaigani Haida and a student at the University of Alaska Southeast. I’ve known her since she graduated from boarding school in Sitka when I hired her for an internship and followed her down salmon streams and across the streets of Hydaburg where she is from. I didn’t realize then, how much she would mentor me.
Andrea is an old soul on fire, both tranquility and fury swirl behind the whirlpool of her eyes.
At 22, Andrea’s artist heart thumps with a fiery intensity that is balanced by ten thousand years of ancestral wisdom. She experiences waves of unspeakable trauma that temper her, but do not define her.
Andrea’s apartment is a cared for extension of herself. During the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, Andrea spent her time in this apartment bringing her first mask to life. Left, thrift store purchases hang beside her original art. Right, her grandmother’s cassette tapes are cherished and played.
In her little apartment, my friend tells me about bringing her first mask to life within these walls. She tells me about carving in quarantine.
“I was literally the last student to leave the University. They even took a picture of me,” Andrea laughs describing how she was intimidated to leave the in-person instruction of her teacher Wayne Price. “I was texting him constantly.”
But as the mask came to be, it suddenly took Andrea’s hand and guided. “It was strange, like a form of constant communication during isolation. It took me to new places and made the mask look different than what I intended it to.”
Andrea wanted to carve a wild woman, similar to a Gagiit (wild man) mask, to reflect the state of mind she was in. The Gagiit is ruthless, both human and beast. “I was in those times very hurt and going through my own issues and then there was the isolation aspect of the pandemic. Some of the feelings just didn’t feel human, it was so hurtful,” Andrea explains.
Carving tools kept safe in a sealskin roll at the University of Alaska Southeast, where Andrea worked close with Wayne Price until the school closed because of the hunker down mandate.
“My spirit wasn’t right and I thought that making something that reflected that would help me.”
The woman in the mask had other plans. When she pushed into the wood, it pushed back on her with reciprocity. A mouse woman appeared in her mouth instead of a snarl, she became more refined than her original sketches.
“I call it my eagle woman mask now because it resembles an eagle to me in the human form. The mask reflected a lot of the growth that I was experiencing and maybe it was more of what I needed. It brought me a lot of wellness by just finding myself in my work in a way I wasn’t able to see myself in day-to-day life.”
Andrea suggests that the spirits were not only helping shape her mask but carving her character too. The process helped to mend her mind and face the continued challenges of a world in crisis.
“There were times while I was working late that I would think about how many masks I might do in my life. This is the first one. I would become lost in thoughts of all the things that I want to accomplish and when you start looking towards the future, and being hopeful, I think that just helps no matter what it is you’re going through. And it really did help me during this difficult time in quarantine.”
Also, there would be times where I’d be working on it and thinking about the past-not just the future. I would think about people in my life who aren’t here anymore and how happy and supportive or proud they would be to see it and it would make me pretty emotional and I’d be crying while carving. But it was never sad crying.”
Views of Andrea in her Juneau apartment. Sketches for a drum hang above her desk (Right). Andrea holds her mask on her sofa beside the window (Left).
Andrea comes from one of Hydaburg’s most notable carving families. “I am a seventh-generation carver and the first female that I know of in my family to carve,” she explains while tossing a pot on the burner. She wants to boil cedar bark so we can make bracelets.
She tells me about a trip to Colorado where she and her family helped honor her many-great-grandfather Dwight Wallace’s totem pole being raised in the Denver Art Museum. Another exhibition also caught her eye. “I noticed that Monet and my grandfather were making art at the same time!” Both were expressing humanity through adze strokes and brush strokes across the planet simultaneously. The power of art is universal, though, Monet was never forbidden to practice his.
“My ancestors had been through colonization and when our people weren’t allowed to practice this artform in the light, people were making art in the dark. They went through smallpox, they were going through huge pandemics and introduced diseases, they went through all of this that we are facing today. In those times, they were still making art.
‘It is because this artform is so tied to our spirituality and who we are as Haida people. It’s our crests, it’s our stories that have helped us through hard times and also stories of how we came to be. It is literally the form that embodies our language, before writing, before English.”
We scarf down dinner on our asses around a coffee table. We eat pizza and talk about hard things, like the feminine experience as portrayed through art, about violence against women and the shades that colonial trauma casts across the communities of today. She tells me about the process of healing and how art as identity is a catalyst for change.
“It brought me a lot of wellness by just finding myself in my work in a way I wasn’t able to see myself in day-to-day life.” Andrea sees herself reflected in her Eagle Woman mask. Pictured, Andrea with her mask.
“These issues are real. Colonization brought so much hatred and the need to tear apart Indigenous communities. To do that, you start with the women who keep community together, the ones that birthed all those people, the ones that teach traditions and language and things that make people who they are. Women do that and women raise the next generation. You start by hurting them.
‘And we are still living in a colonial world, we still have ideologies existing in our society that make it okay in the minds of outsiders to do that to our women. Within the last century, Indigenous women were being sterilized by healthcare because they didn’t want them to continue reproducing our people. That is violence against our women, normalized at a governmental level. History repeats itself if it’s not addressed.”
But don’t Indigenous men also hurt Indigenous women? Andrea hears that a lot.
“Yes, you see it within your own communities and its internalized oppression. The colonizer’s mission was to destroy the Native people and their identity. You do that by making them destroy each other so they do the work for you. And now they are using the oppressor’s tactic, that’s how oppressed they are inside. They are using the thing that crushed them to try and crush their own people and there’s no winning.”
We turn to discussing solutions and Andrea talks about the need for honest reconciliation, the importance of unlearning and addressing rosy histories taught about the birth of the United States. She speaks to problems in the policing systems in the villages. She ends where we began- with art as personal and collective healing.
“As a Native person, it is essential to reaffirm yourself as a human. The art is one way to go, language is another, or gathering and preparing traditional foods too. The best way to make yourself strong in this world is to learn who you are. Do the artform that has been around for so long. Do the things that are literally relevant to your core, to the center of you. That will bring you on your own journey of healing. It will bring you on your own journey of understanding yourself, others, and the world we live in.
‘Most of the time when people are hurt, it’s because they don’t know themselves. When they are hurt they are avoiding themselves, they don’t have a strong identity in themselves so they go out and destroy others.”
In Hydaburg, the carving shed is a center for healing and for strengthening identity through pride.
The Carving Shed in Hydaburg is a center for healing and strengthening identity through pride. The community lifts a raven pole for the community totem park during Culture Camp.
“Even people who struggle with addictions still come into the carving shed along with kids, adults, elders, everyone. Everyone comes to visit and see what the carvers are up to. It’s such a sweet spot, it is a community home. When people see the art, when they see their crest being displayed, totem poles coming to life, they are proud. It’s such a good feeling. When we have an identity that is more purely aligned with our spirit, we won’t go around hurting each other like we do.”
The cedar bark is ready.
Cross legged on the carpet, we hold the ends of the bark that Andrea anchored to a nail on her desk. We tug. Individually we twist one way, together we twist the other. Giggling, tightly gripping the strands between the pads of our fingers, we make rope as delicate and beautiful as a gold chain but strong enough to heave a halibut up from the deep.
She learned this technique in Hydaburg, where she spent the summer apprenticing in the carving shed while conducting research on cedar through interviews of community members with the United States Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research lab, Sitka Conservation Society, and First Alaskans Institute. Many she interviewed believe firmly that the Forest Service, who manages 17 million acres of Southeast Alaska, fails to recognize the true value and cultural significance of old growth cedar. They aren’t alone. Despite the immensity of responsibilities tribal governments face supporting citizens through a pandemic, four including Hydaburg’s tribe, organized a petition demanding the Forest Service to better manage the forest to protect cultural wood from commercial logging exports.
In 2020, Andrea worked with the Sitka Conservation Society, the Pacific Northwest Research Lab, and the First Alaskans Institute to interview Southeast Alaskans about the significance and scarcity of old growth cedar trees. Finding cedar that is of the right quality and age for totem poles, canoes, masks, weaving, and other art forms is increasingly difficult.
“I keep having these visions of one old growth tree left standing. My heart would be broken and I would probably chain myself to the tree. If they were willing to just take and take, logging until there is nothing left like that, then they might as well just take my life with it.
‘Because this is literally my heritage, my culture, it’s what has served my people in so many ways. Cedar was our clothing, it was what helped us gather our foods in baskets, it was our stories carved in poles, it was our transportation and canoes, our masks. It has served as our ways of life for a long time. It is a resource that preserves our identity. If it were to disappear, it would be taking away a whole way of life and not just that, it would be destroying our land, our fish and doing away with a lot of things that are vital to the earth that we walk on.”
It’s late, we’ve been talking for 4 hours so I leave Andrea in her apartment. That night, as I am falling asleep anxious for the state of the world, a soft smile slinks across my face. I am buoyed by my friend’s brilliance, knowing that with people like Andrea at the helm, the shared ship of humanity can conquer any storm.
—
It’s been a year since the hunker down mandates confined Andrea to her apartment. The Eagle Woman mask is a gift for her naan, a surprise. Like all of us, Andrea is finding ways to move on from 2020, in her case by literally moving and packing up her sweet little apartment.
Andrea will keep memories of this space and time close however- memories of carving in quarantine, of transforming a piece of wood that transformed her. As the seams of the world first started to unravel, in isolation Andrea was kept company by her eagle woman mask with a mouse tucked between its lips.
Wherever she goes, she will always create. Andrea wishes to carve until she’s an old gray lady like her grandfathers before her. My young friend is the next rung in a ladder of legacy, with its base anchored firmly in these verdant shores. Whatever tragedy, pandemic, or powerful quake attempts to keep her from climbing, Andrea holds firmly to the rungs of her ancestors. Strong in her identity, she continues to rise.
