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- By Neely Bardwell
As part of the work to commemorate the challenges Alaska Native peoples face presently and historically, the Mellon Foundation has awarded $3.5 million to the Alaska Native Heritage Center (ANHC) for their Healing Garden and Monuments project.
The Healing Garden Project, titled "Ngíisdla," derived from Xaad kil (Haida) meaning "to heal, recover, and get well again," is an addition to the October 2023 raising of a healing totem pole in honor of those impacted by Indian Boarding Schools and the children who passed while attending the schools. The project plans to add more monuments in addition to the totem pole bringing the total to ten monuments, each dedicated to a different issue the ANHC and community want to raise awareness.
On top of the funding from the Mellon Foundation, the project also received several thousand dollars from the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Marilyn Balluta, Senior Manager for the Community Healing Garden & Monuments at the ANHC, said she hopes the space will give visitors a chance to learn and heal.
“This is a historic step towards healing for Alaska Native communities from all the historical trauma inflicted by colonialism. This is the time for people to come and have a space of their own where they can do their healing, and they can do their ceremony,” Balluta told Native News Online.
Two monuments set to join the Healing Garden are a Veterans Monument dedicated to the Alaska Natives who are or have served, and a Missing Murdered Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit monument. Both were advocated for by the local Alaska Native community.
The garden portion of the project will be built around the monuments featuring sacred and medicinal plants native to the Alaska area. Each monument will be created by Native artists, and the ANHC has hosted several community engagement meetings to discuss what the community wants to see reflected in the project.
Each of the community meetings are recorded and photographed in hopes that a short film will be created as part of an Oral History Project. The next community engagement meeting will take place May 23.
“We’re re-defining monuments. It's not going to be your regular steel and cement monuments. These monuments will represent all Alaska Native people from the five regions, and it's the community input that these monuments will be created by,” said Balluta. “These monuments will also come with the ceremony and the healing from the community who will decide how and when to do ceremonies.”
Currently, the ANHC is overseeing the development of the land and working directly with Alaska Native artists to solicit proposals on the development of the monuments.
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