Published: July 20, 2024
Dear Editor,
Would you consider sharing the following article with your readers? It is an excellent interview conducted by Judy Mauer, the editor of the newsletter for Sierra Cascades Yearly Meeting of Friends.
Warm Regards,
July Peyton
A Conversation between Joel Jackson of the Tlingit tribe and Judy Mauer of Sierra Cascades Yearly Meeting of Friends.
I interviewed Joel Jackson on June 15. He has served on the tribal council of the Organized Village of Kake, Alaska, for thirty years. The village itself is both a Tlingit tribe and a municipality.
Kake is on one of more than a thousand islands in the Alexander Archipelago, which spreads out south of Juneau, in Alaska’s panhandle along British Columbia. Kake is surrounded by the Tongass National Forest, the largest national forest in the US. Kake can be reached only by boat or small plane.
Kake's name in Tlingit is Ḵéex̱’. Quakers had a mission there from 1891–1912 and ran the government day school there. Kake is on both ancestral and current Tlingit land.
This is as much an interview with Joel's community as it is with Joel himself. He could not turn on video during the zoom call because his rural internet service is not strong enough.
– Judy Maurer, Sierra Cascades Yearly Meeting of Friends
----------------
Judy Maurer:
You sent me an email a while back about having lost two brothers. That sounds like a lot.
Joel Jackson:
I had seven brothers. I lost two of them to alcohol. Then I lost five more that just passed away from different causes. So I just got one brother and one sister left. I had three sisters. There were eleven of us total.
Judy Maurer:
Oh, my. Just one brother and one sister left. I was just reading up on really high mortality rates in rural Alaska. That's painful.
Joel Jackson:
Well, we're all getting old. I'm the youngest now and I’m 68 years old. We had one younger brother. He's one of the ones that passed away.
Judy Maurer:
I really admire that you've taken that pain of losing two brothers to alcohol and making it redemptive, in helping a culturally-based treatment center get going. It seems like a really good way to deal with grief.
Note: On October 28, 2023, Sierra-Cascades approved giving $75,000 to Kake toward the development of a culturally-based addiction treatment center on US Forest Service land.
Click here for more information on the tribal council’s plans for the center.
Joel Jackson:
Well, I've lost a lot in my life. I've learned how to deal with grief, thankfully, or it can be devastating. I look at it in a totally different way than a lot of people, but I do feel bad about losing my brothers, you know. It's tough . . . I lost my wife too.
Judy Maurer:
Would you like to talk about how you look at it so differently than other people?
Joel Jackson:
When we were younger, our parents took us to funerals, so we were exposed to that early. We watched how people acted back then. They knew the cycle of life. They took it with great dignity. I really admired them for having that in such a sad time. I do get emotional, but I try not to hold on to anything.