With every chisel strike, Haida carver TJ Young brought history to life with the 360-degree totem pole standing at the Sealaska Heritage Square — a towering testament to culture, storytelling, and resilience in the heart of downtown Juneau.
Named the Sealaska Cultural Values Totem Pole, this fully carved piece honours the rich traditions of southeast Alaska’s three tribes — Lingít, Haida, and Tsimshian. It is an impressive 22 feet tall and four feet wide; its scale and intricate details make it a rare sight of craftsmanship.
“There are a few small, single-figure poles carved all the way around. This might be the largest 360-degree pole,” said Young.
Young spearheaded a team of talented artists, including his co-pilot Joe Young, and his apprentices Andrea Cook and Greg Frisby. David Boxley joined them to carve the Tsimshian figure, while Rob Mills shaped the Lingít figure with masterful detail.
“The logistics were something new for us. We never carved a totem pole 360-degree like that,” said Young. “There’s no real front and no real back. They [Sealaska Heritage Institute] wanted the front and back and the sides to be equally pleasing to look at,” he added.
Drawing alone was a lengthy process. Young made between 40 to 50 different renditions of the structure. The carving took the group at least six months.
A Common Story
Young, a Kaigani Haida, grew up in Hydaburg. He shares that his ancestors migrated in the early 1700s from Kiusta, a village in northern Haida Gwaii, to North Island in Alaska.
Three notable figures of guards are visible on the pole, which Young says symbolizes all three of the carver buddies: he represents the Haida, while the others represent the Lingít and Tsimshian.
Below is a raven and an eagle, symbolizing the cultural value of balance. Both are oriented in opposite directions and are proportionately equal.
Under the raven sits a strong, intriguing man whose story is shared among the Haida, Lingít, and Tsimshian, featuring variations of similar tales.
“We traded stories too, and crests. We didn’t just have our own and stick with them. We traded songs, stories, crests,” said Young.
This strong man was a warrior who got picked on most of his life. People underestimated him but didn’t realize that he would train in the dark at nighttime.
Then, one night, when the village was asleep, he fought and killed a big sea lion.
“And not only that, but he rips it in half, right down the middle. So you’ll see that warrior on one of the sides of the pole ripping the sea lion in half,” said Young.
This extraordinary moment of strength and triumph was captured in stories for generations to come.
The base of the pole is itself a big face. It’s a supernatural figure holding up the world with his hands.
“I actually threw a hidden figure in there. Nobody really caught on to it,” said Young.
From a certain angle, near the eagle is a figure wearing a mushroom hat.
“That’s paying homage to our shamans, who were methodically torn down by the missionaries one by one, in order for them to come in and start sharing their profits. They knew that our medicine men or our shaman were consulted with by the chiefs,” said Young.
“They were our medicine men. They were kind of our spirit guides. The missionaries that came in, they knew that. So they went after them. They were pretty rough on them, and they were the first to kind of be de-legitimized by the missionaries in the government."
“And after that, it was a little bit easier to convert a lot of the chiefs and the weavers and fishermen and the builders. I had to pay my respects to the shamans.”
Fading Away
“We know we came from Haida Gwaii. We’re pretty proud of that,” said Young. He has boated down to the archipelago plenty with his family.
Young says that when smallpox hit his forefathers’ village in 1862, the missionaries saw it as an opening for them to convert a lot of them successfully.
“A lot of us were just at that point, scared and desperate. And they took out 96 per cent of us, and when there’s mass graves going on, I don’t even know how they kept their sanity at that point, but they managed to keep their insanity...”
The atrocity was followed by Canada’s Potlatch Laws in 1885, which banned Indigenous people from practicing their Potlatch ceremony. This created a barrier to their cultural expression.
“So we couldn’t, at that point, we couldn’t be who we were. We knew we couldn’t just be white people all of a sudden, too,” the carver expressed.
“We [were] stuck in this ‘in between phase’ where we can’t even carve or do our own art, or speak our language.
“So we were kind of more or less like 'Okay, as it was a survival tactic, we had to convert, or we had to at least try to get an education'.”
Adaptation was the only way.
The artistic comeback
Young’s grandfather, Claude Morrison, whom he considers his inspiration for woodwork, transitioned from carving 70-foot canoes to building large sailing and patrolling boats to keep up with the times.
“So they were able to adapt, just in the generation, just like that,” said a proud Young.
“His attitude, their whole generation’s attitude was, ‘hold, we need to adapt, or we’re going to fade away.’ So he intentionally didn’t teach my mom the language.”
Young spent a lot of time with his grandparents growing up. He noticed his grandfather still made halibut hooks.
“He still carved and made halibut hooks and fished the halibut hooks... It was an 'aha' moment when we realized these cool things hanging on the wall. He still catches big halibut with them.
“So that was a profound moment when me and my brother Joe realized that he’s still one of the old Haidas, not just in speaking, but in actual practice, too.”
Morrison taught the two boys how to create gaffes and hooks, and from there, they both began exploring the world of art.
They found out about Bill Reid and Robert Davidson.
“We knew about them, we emulated them, we copied them,” said Young. They also started taking more inspiration from Charles Edenshaw and Jim Hart.
“Those were our Michael Jordan and LeBron James and Michael Jackson. Those were our heroes,” said Young.
Young says he lucked out by apprenticing under Robert Davidson for four years.
He and his brother were inspired by the talented carvers in Haida Gwaii and set a goal to represent their hometown, Hydaburg, Alaska.
“We took it personal,” said Young. They wanted to uphold that standard of carving in Hydaburg as well.
Both took pride in the fact that Robert Davidson, one of the greatest carvers, was born in Hydaburg, even if he only lived there briefly.
“That was enough for us to light the spark. Me and my brother Joe... we’ve been going hard ever since, like trying to represent Hydaburg in a good way, and not just on the basketball court, but in the carving shed as well. We’d like to tell ’em we carve on and off the court,” Young shared.
Ben, Joe and TJ’s other brother, is some of the only Kaigani Haida speakers who have taken up the mission of teaching and keeping the language alive.
“I know you get a lot of notoriety and attention for putting up a totem pole, but my brother, there’s the real cultural hero in preserving the language. Because without that, a lot of it would just go untranslated,” said the proud elder brother.
A fourth brother, Claude, is who T.J. calls the “subsistence guy.” He is skilled at hunting and fishing, and he does an excellent job with subsistence living. Claude focuses on feeding elders and children, teaching them how to hunt, fish, and skin sea otters.
“We’re all trying to do our part to keep and maintain, it’s been this way for thousands of years. The only difference is, there’s screens in front of our face now and so we’re just modern, or indeed like everybody else. But what we do goes back thousands of years, and we’re trying to keep that connection going. We don’t want to let that go."
"It’s a powerful, strong connection that we don’t want to sever.”
