How to Provoke a Glacier
Three hundred years ago, around the time of the Salem Witch Trials, the founding of Albuquerque, and the birth of Benjamin Franklin, the Xunaa Ḵáawu, or Huna Tlingit, lived in a verdant valley on the shores of the Icy Strait. Like so many self-denominations of indigenous peoples, Tlingit means “the People”; yet, in their case, since they were the only people when they settled in the area an estimated 11,000 years ago, the name seems unusually apt.
Four clans of the Xunaa Ḵáawu (“People from the direction of the North Wind”) inhabited enormous plank hít (clan houses) constructed beside two salmon-clogged rivers winding through the thick grasslands and forests of the homeland they named S’é Shuyee (“Edge of the Glacial Silt”). The valley was not expansive, at most fifteen miles wide and a little less long. At its head, a freshwater lake birthed the largest of the two streams; beyond, reared a wall of ice more than 10 miles wide and 4,000 feet tall, which they styled Sit’ Tlein (“Large Glacier”). Tlingit names may lack poetry, but they make up for it with frank descriptiveness. Though life was harsh, the verdant valley, its wriggling streams, and the seal-rich ocean provided an idyllic home for the Huna Tlingit.
Shortly after breakfast, we sailed directly over the top of it in water 200 feet deep.
Sometime after 1700, the Tlingit recall, “someone angered the spirit of the glacier.”1 One oddly specific tale recited by a Chookaneidí elder recounts that a teenage girl, confined in a cedar-bark hut built against the clan house because she was menstruating (and therefore ritually unclean), grew bored:
At this time, there was a feast. … Kaasteen could not go to the feast. … Her mother gave her some sockeye strips. … Suddenly, Kaasteen lifted the edge of the [bark] wall. She put her hand outside. She had dryfish in her hand. She called, “Hey glacier, here, here, here, here. Hey glacier, here, here, here, here. … A young girl heard Kaasteen calling to the glacier. She was the only witness to see Kaasteen calling to the glacier. All of a sudden, the earth shook. People thought it was an earthquake. Again, and again, the earth shook. Suddenly, the people realized it was not an earthquake. Ice was crushing against itself. The glacier was moving towards the village. Kaasteen had broken a taboo. She called the glacier as she would call a dog. That was taboo. The glacier entered the village. The glacier knocked over houses. The people were scared. “Quick, let’s get out of here,” they yelled. They decided to take Kaasteen with them. However, Kaasteen refused to leave. The people tried to persuade Kaasteen to leave with them. Still, Kaasteen would not leave. So, the people brought Kaasteen food and clothing. … [T]he people reluctantly left Kaasteen behind. As the people drifted away, … the glacier tipped the house over. Kaasteen’s mother screamed. The other women screamed too. The people stood up in their boats. They were crying. Kaasteen was dying and they could not help. They sang two songs. Kaasteen’s house was pushed into the ocean.2
Initially, this tale feels suspiciously like an oral tradition’s version of social media trolling; what could a pubescent girl have done to deserve such enduringly bad press? Yet, I discovered Tlingit legend reveres Kaasteen as “a brave and determined woman [who] refused to abandon her homeland … as the glacier advanced.”3 To the Tlingit, her stories are the legal deed to their homeland. (The Tlingit conceptions of property and ownership are as complex and intriguing as their geographical names are prosaic.) But I digress.
Whether due to gravity and the cumulative effect of the “Little Ice Age” (which began in the 13th and persisted until the mid-18th century) or to the impudence of a bored young woman, the enraged wall of ice surged forward “as fast as a running dog, “4 churning the land and water before it. It pulverized the forests, grasslands, villages, salmon, dogs, bunny rabbits, limpets, and unicorns; ground away the supporting bedrock; and sank the earth’s crust beneath its mass. By the 1750s, the glacier extruded from the valley and bulged halfway across the Icy Strait. The Tlingit scattered, and in 1754 settled across the strait and twenty miles to the south in a village named Xu.naa (Hoonah), “where the north wind doesn’t blow.”5
Sit’ Eeti Gheeyi
The glacial prolapse was brief. Whether it yielded to marine erosion or had simply made its point, the glacier soon began to recede. By the time George Vancouver anchored H.M.S. Discovery at Pt. Althorp in 1794, the glacier had withdrawn five miles into the valley. Icebergs choked the strait, so Lt. Joseph Whidbey and a survey crew climbed into longboats and precariously wended their way through the icepack to chart its waters. He described a shallow bay terminated by mountains of ice — the source of the bergs clogging the strait, which, with a soaring imagination, he named Icy Strait. (He could have been born Tlingit.)
A period of continuous and remarkably rapid glacial recession had begun. When John Muir arrived in 1879, the glacier had retreated forty-eight miles up the valley, and the ocean had followed, extending the bay and still eroding the ice. The Tlingit named the new fjord Sit’ Eeti Gheeyi (“the bay in place of the glacier”). The glacier was retreating as much as a mile each year, unveiling a treeless landscape polished by the scouring ice. Muir dubbed the glacier the Grand Pacific. I presumed that the Tlingit would have renamed their nemesis “the glacier that crushed our villages, pets, and teenagers to paste, chortled at our lamentations, and thrust us where the north wind doesn’t blow”; but that must be too lyrical. They still call it Large Glacier.
It may appear that I’ve drifted off course; I could have related my passage into Glacier Bay in vapid travel-log fashion without ever mentioning the Tlingit. I lounged in buffet-sated ignorance as I glided over their lamented, glacier-obliterated homeland. I was searching for whales, not connections to a rich indigenous culture. I knew little of the Tlingit until later, though my curiosity was piqued when a park ranger noted the contribution of Tlingit oral traditions to our knowledge of the past. Yet, as I’ve mentioned, this isn’t a travel blog.
Ignoring the Tlingit’s story while coasting in and out of Glacier Bay in a floating luxury hotel would be callous and chauvinistic. The bay is their homeland and has been for millennia; the land is inextricably entwined with their cultural identity. The Tlingit perceive no distance or distinction between humans and nature; the scenic and scientific value we attach to Glacier Bay are alien. The bay is “the main place of the Hoonah people” — their kitchen and living room.6 We evicted them when we designated their homeland as a national park. Ignoring the story of the Tlingit further displaces them and robs us of a deeper context and connection to the land we seek to experience and explore.
On the Trail of Sit’ Tlein
Navigational charts label the mouth of Glacier Bay as “whale waters” and place restrictions on vessels’ speed and course (between May and September) to protect and avoid humpback whales. I didn’t spot any: my first humpback encounter lay in the future. The water is thirty fathoms (180 feet) deep. For the next fourteen miles, through Sitakaday Narrows and abeam Willoughby Island, the valley-bottom slopes gradually downward to 360 feet beneath the calm, translucent surface. Then the stone plunges precipitously to a depth of 130 fathoms (780 feet). Here the face of the glacier once rested, waiting, before its abrupt surge into the strait. Beyond lay the lair where the ice lurked for millennia, gnawing at the roots of the mountains. The glacier-gouged floor of the valley swiftly descends to more than 1400 feet below the ocean surface.
Glacier Bay National Park covers about 3.3 million square miles and encompasses the largest UNESCO protected biosphere in the world. There are no trails or roads in the park; the only access to the interior is by water. It is possible to kayak up the bay but landing and camping locations are extremely limited by the steep and rocky valley walls. Access to the bay is rigorously restricted, making the wilderness truly pristine.
The view from the bay is breathtaking. There are over 1,000 glaciers in the park (27% of the park is covered in ice), most high in the mountains; only a few reach the sea. All but a handful are thinning and receding. The climate has been changing over the last several decades: winters are warming, reduced snowfall is starving the ice fields that feed the glaciers, and decreased summer cloud cover and precipitation is accelerating melting.
If you had sailed into Glacier Bay around the time of the Civil War, it would have ended just north of Geike Inlet in a wall of ice.
As we entered and glided slowly up the bay, the weather was overcast and brooding: typical for the Pacific Northwest in late summer. The glowering clouds paradoxically made the vast wild vistas more intimate. It felt silent, though the sounds of birds, the low muted rumble of the ship, and the susurration of the parting water surrounded us. Tufted Puffins sported as we passed, and a sea otter swam curiously beside us. Fifty-three miles from its mouth, the bay splits into two inlets: Tarr to the right (northwest) and Johns Hopkins to the left (west and southwest). Russell Island rests near the fork.
Only two large vessels (cruise ships) are allowed into Glacier Bay each day, and once again, we were second. We dallied off Russell Island waiting for the same Holland America craft we followed into Disenchantment Bay to return down Tarr inlet. I would wake the next morning to find us moored behind the Black and White ship at the quay in Skagway.
1. “Glacier Bay National Park,” accessed February 25, 2020, http://alaskanativevoices.com/glacier-bay-national-park. si
2. Told by Amy Marvin (Kooteen of the Chookaneidí clan), translated by Nora Dauenhauer. Excerpted from Haa Shuká, Our Ancestors. Sealaska Heritage Institute, Juneau, and
University of Washington Press, Seattle. 1987. https://www.sealaskaheritage.org/sites/default/files/Unit%202_3.pdf
3. Glacier Bay National Park, Alaska, and Conveyance of Lands in Alaska: Hearing Before the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, United States Senate, One Hundred Sixth Congress, First Session, on S. 501 … S. 744 … April 15, 1999, Volume 4, P. 46
4. Tlingit Migration Story Told by Susie James (Kaasgéiy of the Chookaneidí clan), translated by Nora Dauenhauer. Excerpted from Haa Shuká, Our Ancestors. Sealaska Heritage Institute, Juneau, and University of Washington Press, Seattle. 1987. https://www.sealaskaheritage.org/sites/default/files/Unit%202_3.pdf
5. “History of Hoonah: City of Hoonah,” city of Hoonah, accessed March 2, 2020, https://www.cityofhoonah.org/history-of-hoonah.
6. Theodore Catton, “Indigenous People,” in Land Reborn: A History of Administration and Visitor Use in Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve (Anchorage, AK: Printed by National Park Service, 1995). https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/glba/adhi/chap1.htm