Local Partner: Native Conservancy
The Eyak Athabaskan people have lived along the Cooper River Delta and the eastern Prince William Sound for more than 3,500 years, and they are the traditional ancestral stewards of this region.The project ultimate goal is to reconnect with place and protect Eyak lifeways. Place name workshops are popular with the Eyak community and effective in revitalizing sacred knowledge regarding villages and sites. Enhanced youth interviews with Elders will elicit knowledge about dynamics at sites. Participatory mapping will document harvesting sites for traditional foods. A Native women’s circle will be formed, so women will be able to practice traditionally harvesting subsistence food sources and processing for the community.
Together Eyak Elders and youth will successfully revive and protect Indigenous knowledge and stories that have never been written. Ultimately, this project will help ensure that future generations can: visit their ancestral villages and sacred sites, use new technologies to record heritage features; learn traditional foodways including harvesting and processing; and be legally recognized as the rightful stewards of their homelands.
Eyak Elders reestablished trust in genuine knowledge sharing and being interviews. Each month we hosted and facilitated between one to three Zoom meetings (due to COVID-19).These meetings brought together three generations of dAXunhyuu (Eyak People) focused on exploration of Eyak heritage. We have identified, located, shared and recirculated five key Eyak stories/legends related to AnAXAnAG and nearby place names on the delta.
Local Partner:
Native Conservancy is an organization that is governed by an all Native Board of Directors and based in the coastal village of Eyak (Cordova), Alaska. Native Conservancy’s mission is to create resilient futures for indigenous Peoples by preserving, repatriating and restoring ancestral homelands, traditional food sources and subsistence practices to revitalize Native Culture, habitat, health and spirituality.
