Web posted June 28, 2005

Study to focus on migration of eight Southeast clans
Songs, dances, oral histories to be collected from elders with $40,000 from federal grant

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

The migration of eight Southeast Alaska clans will be documented through a federally funded project planned by Sealaska Heritage Institute.

A $40,000 grant from the National Park Service will pay for collecting clan songs, dances and oral histories from elders and other clan members.

The institute will record the information, transcribe it in Tlingit and translate and transcribe it in English. The materials will be archived and available to Native groups, scholars, archaeologists and historians.

There is a danger these songs and lyrics, which tell the story of Native migration to the Americas, will be lost without such an effort, said institute president Rosita Worl.

The Tlingit anthropologist said the importance of Native oral histories on human migration to the Americas was underscored in recent years with the discovery of 10,000-year-old human remains in a cave on Prince of Wales Island near Ketchikan. The bones were found in 1996.

Native groups in Southeast Alaska, including the institute, collaborated with scientists who studied the remains. The Native groups believed the research would prove what Native oral histories have long said, that the first peoples migrated along a coastal route to the Americas by boat.

Later migrations were across a land bridge between Alaska and Siberia and then a migration to the Southeast Alaska coast. In recent years, some scientists have advanced a new migration theory similar to the maritime migration theme in Native oral histories.

Worl said the institute's planned project should be able to show a relationship to scientific theories that are now emerging about a coastal migration into Southeast Alaska.

"It is vital not only to the Tlingit people that we document for all time our migration songs," she said. "It is vital to mankind's understanding of how the Americas were populated."