e used to say—this is something we used to say—that we don’t have a word for art,” says Rosita Worl, emphasizing her own Tlingit heritage. Even though she has a PhD in anthropology, the president of Sealaska Heritage Institute (SHI) was surprised when she learned the Tlingit language can in fact convey the concept.

It happened at a council of traditional scholars. Worl recalls, “Our meetings are all held in Tlingit and we have simultaneous translation, and the translator came running out and said, ‘What is that word, At.nané?’ It was actually the chair, Ken Grant, who said, ‘It refers to an iconic event between a supernatural being and a human being.’”

When At.nané is memorialized in a visible form, Worl explains, the result is recognized as art. When invested with sacred importance, such as a clan crest, it becomes At.óow.

The art of the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian people of Southeast Alaska and British Columbia is particularly distinctive for one of its foundational features: formline design. The term itself, barely fifty years old, describes an aesthetic system that developed around the same time as Greek vase painting yet is still inspiring new works of graphic art, clothing, jewelry, architecture, and totem poles.

“There are very specific rules around how the different forms and shapes are put together,” says Kari Groven, art director at SHI. “You can see that there are some key types of shapes that are repeated over and over again. You can’t just put them together randomly. There’s a strict system with a lot of personal interpretation opportunity in there.”

Bronze copies of wooden totem poles outside the Walter Soboleff Building blend a design system carried through a hundred generations with a metal alloy introduced to living generations of Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian people.

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The rules evolved over time but achieved their familiar form thousands of years ago. Lee Kadinger, SHI’s chief of operations, observes that the rich ecology of the temperate rainforest afforded the luxury of intricate designs and wooden monuments. “There was far less worry about gathering food here,” he says. “A lot of that time was poured into art, and that’s why you see such a complex art form.”

After contact with Europeans, the rules were in danger of being forgotten. Even as the artifacts themselves were coveted by collectors far and wide, the cultures that produced them were diminished by disease and assimilation.

Worl recalls, “After we had a juried art show in 2000, the master artist Robert Davidson told me he thought that our art was deteriorating. So I freaked out because art is the basis of our culture.”

Sealaska Heritage Institute, a nonprofit founded in 1980 to perpetuate the indigenous cultures of the Panhandle region, evidently had work to do. That work was organized around a strategy with one clear goal: establish Juneau as the capital of Northwest Coast art.

Worl’s “freak out” triggered fifteen years of planning and fundraising, which culminated in 2015 with the grand opening of the Walter Soboleff Building, named for the longtime chairman of the SHI board of trustees. More than merely a museum or gift shop—although tourists visiting downtown Juneau can easily appreciate both of those things—the exterior commands attention with its decorative flourishes, and the interior accommodates a gathering space for a living culture.

Built with yellow cedar timbers and hammered copper, the Soboleff Building also incorporates forward-looking elements. Kadinger points to the clan house inside, featuring glasswork by Preston Singletary. “They didn’t have glass a thousand years ago here, but we do now,” he says. “It’s very traditional, but it’s moving into the contemporary.”

The Sealaska Heritage Institute Arts Campus, across the street from the Walter Soboleff Building (to the right of this picture), is designed to resemble a giant Tlingit bentwood box. The plaza, formerly the parking lot of Sealaska Corporation headquarters, is inlaid with Ravenstail patterns from Tsimshian weaving.

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Likewise, on the street, a trio of totem poles are matched by copies cast in bronze, a material unknown to Tlingit metallurgy. Kadinger says the design shows how tradition adapts to new ways, “progressing into the future while reflecting on its past.”

For the time being, the building is not historic at all. Not officially. When SHI proposed new construction in the vacant “pit” kitty-corner from Sealaska Corporation headquarters, where the Skinner Building burned down in 2004, the local Historic Resources Advisory Council said no. Victorian or Art Deco designs would fit in the district, SHI was told, but Native architecture was not considered historic.

To let the Soboleff Building go forward, the boundary of the historic district in downtown Juneau was redrawn to exclude the lot, with the intention of amending the rules later. “Now our work is to remedy the historic district, to be more inclusive of Native art and architecture, and then to add us back in,” Kadinger says.

Native voices drove the development of the Soboleff Building, but the art director is not Alaskan at all. Groven is from Norway, and she came to Juneau as a singer in a band. She helped the Juneau Arts & Humanities Council convert an old armory into the Juneau Arts & Culture Center, so SHI hired her as part of the launch of the Soboleff center.

To fulfill its artistic mission, the institute decided something was still missing. That vacancy was filled in June with the grand opening of the Soboleff Building’s next-door neighbor.

Hallways still smell faintly of cedar inside the brand-new Sealaska Heritage Arts Campus, across South Seward Street from the Soboleff center. The main floor contains workshops for metal and wood crafts, with huge windows visually uniting the interior with passersby outside. Upstairs contains rooms for weaving and skin sewing. Groven points to six refurbished factory-grade Bonis Brothers sewing machines around the studio. She says artists had input about the height of workbenches and chairs, and at the weavers’ request the blueprints included a “wet room” with a sink and stove for dyeing.

Lessons in traditional crafts have been part of SHI’s program for years, and the Soboleff center includes an art studio, but Worl says borrowing other people’s classrooms and conference rooms was not enough. The institute needed its own space.

The architecture echoes the Soboleff building, resembling a giant wooden box decorated with formline designs, surrounded by garden plantings of devil’s club, or S’áxt’, used medicinally by Tlingit people. “We strove to build a work of art that befits the great traditions of our ancestors,” Worl says. “We have taken an ancient art form and rendered it on metal in a modern way, and we have created monumental bentwood boxes. To me, it expresses the antiquity of our culture but in a new and vibrant way.”

The campus encompasses approximately 6,000 square feet, plus outdoor space for monument-sized works. Formerly a parking lot, the plaza is paved with black-and-white geometric designs of the Ravenstail tradition and includes a wooden awning attached to the Sealaska Corporation building. The covered area becomes a performance space for gatherings in the plaza, which can also be set up as an open-air market. Kadinger says this feature was inspired by a town square in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

The plaza had its shakedown in June hosting the return of Celebration, the biannual gathering of Alaska Natives from across Southeast.

Watching over the plaza is an unusual sentinel: a 360-degree totem pole. The first of its kind in Alaska, the design uses the entire circumference of the totem to depict the four cultural values that guide SHI programs. Haida carver TJ Young enlisted Tlingit and Tsimshian assistants to ensure representation of the three tribes of Southeast Alaska.

SHI raised $13 million to create the arts campus, and though the building is open, the project is not yet complete.

More totem poles are on the way. The first ten of thirty poles are scheduled to be raised next year for Kooteìeyaa Deiyiì, the Totem Pole Trail. Each totem will be placed along a pathway from South Seward Street to the Juneau Public Library, past the cruise ship passenger dock.

“That’s something you would’ve seen 200 years ago,” Kadinger says. “If you came on the water, you would’ve seen totems adorning the waterfront.”

Sealaska Corporation donated the logs, and the Mellon Foundation awarded a $2.9 million grant for SHI to hire carvers from around Southeast Alaska to create the first batch of totems. The designs are meant to represent Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian clans—not unlike the flags of all fifty US states that fly along the road leading to downtown Juneau. The first poles are dedicated to Áak’w Kwáan and T’aaku Kwáan, the Tlingit clans that originally inhabited the area.

Kadinger says the Totem Pole Trail gives SHI another visual aid to integrate into the school curriculum, “giving that identity to Native youth so they can say, ‘This is my clan’s pole.’”

The educational mission of SHI is expanding through its partnership with UAS. Starting this fall, the university is offering a bachelor’s degree in Northwest Coast arts. Further, SHI negotiated an articulation agreement with the Institute of American Indian Arts to help UAS students more easily transfer credits to the school in Santa Fe. The arts campus is also configured to host college-level classes, both in person and by distance learning.

The Totem Pole Trail is phase three of SHI’s plan to make Juneau the Northwest Coast arts capital. According to the strategy laid out in 2017, the Soboleff Center and Arts Campus were phases one and two. There is a fourth phase, but Worl says she is not at liberty to discuss it.

One major initiative she can discuss, though, is the effort to have Congress declare Northwest Coast art a national treasure. “In the same way that jazz has been declared a national treasure, we think this 4,000-year-old art tradition that is coveted around the world should also be recognized as a national treasure of our country,” Worl says. Such a declaration might take a while; Congress is also sitting on a similar resolution to declare stage magic a national treasure.

A declaration, if it comes, would not make Juneau the capital automatically. Designating a seat of government is one thing, as Juneau was in 1900, but a city becomes the capital of an art form through innumerable gestures. Those include, as Kadinger points out, incorporating Native design and place names, visible on guideposts and in sidewalks. For instance, in 2018 the City and Borough of Juneau renamed the intersection outside the Soboleff Center “Heritage Square,” and the pavement at Front and Seward Streets is decorated with formline-inspired insets.

“We’re well on our way” to becoming the capital of Northwest Coast art, Kadinger says, “and we have a lot of exciting work coming up.”

Of course, Sitka has its Fine Arts Camp and Ketchikan is Alaska’s First City, so why should Juneau grab a double helping of capital status?

“In Juneau, we are a hub and we’re a gateway to the region,” Kadinger explains. “We’re buying from artists that live in Hoonah as well as other small communities. We’re flying artists in to take our workshops. Sometimes we’re Zooming them out to those communities.”

Juneau has also invested in welcoming visitors, which adds to its cultural centrality. SHI has a policy to promote cross-cultural understanding for visitors, provided it has no adverse impacts for the land or its people. Worl says SHI makes a conscious division between culture that can be shared and what must be held sacred.

As a latter-day magnet for tourists, the place known to the Tlingit as Dzántik’i Héeni is positioned to propagate Native culture as a valuable feature of the visitor experience, as well as for its own sake.

“We’ve gone through climate change and an Ice Age, warming periods. And then we went through a not happy part of our history when we had these cultural encounters,” Worl says. “Even with all of these things that have happened, we survived as an Indigenous people. So there must be some good things in our culture that we can offer to the larger society. For us to have the opportunity to educate visitors and the public, that is very rewarding.”