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Native Americans, Musk Oxen, and More

Native Americans, Musk Oxen, and More

Last updated on: July 7, 2026 at 11:26 pm by Dan Peterson

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Native Americans, Musk Oxen, and More 2026-07-07T23:26:02-06:00 Dan Peterson

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Tlingit canoes head into the Auk Village Celebration, Juneau, in southeastern Alaska, from the North, via the Inside Passage. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

The principal reason that our little group came up from Utah and Arizona to Alaska a few days before we needed to do so was to interact with an element of our extended family, including a toddler, that lives here. But, of course, we’re also taking the opportunity to poke around the place a bit.

Our first stop of the day today took us to the Alaska Native Heritage Center, which is dedicated to promoting active observance of Alaska Native culture and traditions. It includes an open air museum centered around a small lake. We watched demonstrations of traditional Native sports, which were followed by traditional native dances, and listened to explanations of them. The outdoor museum — more modest, but reminiscent (to me, anyway) of the Norsk Folkemuseum near Oslo and the Freilichtmuseum der Schweiz in Ballenberg, near Brienz, in Switzerland’s Berner Oberland — features reconstructed traditional structures from the various regions of the state, each one of them staffed by one or more interpreters who provide explanations, point out important features and related practices, and answer questions from visitors.

I was particularly interested, among the interior exhibits, in the “Boarding School Period” — the arrogance and injustice of which can scarcely be overstated — and, for personal reasons, in the material related specifically to the Tlingit or Klingit people. I have a remarkably generous friend back in Utah, Tom Pittman, who has been of enormous and indispensable help to me in recent years, especially (but not only) with computer matters. He is a native Alaskan and a member of the Tlingit people or, as he seems to pronounce the word, the Klinkit. (That problematic initial consonant, which I’ve represented here both with a T and with a K, is indicated at the ANHC by an L with a slash through it that I am, alas, unable to reproduce here.) Anyhow, because of my personal relationship with a member of the Raven moiety of the Klinkit or Klingit or Tlingit tribe, I naturally paid particularly close attention to the relevant areas at the Alaska Native Heritage Center. By the way, as one of the Athabaskan languages (of which by far the best known and most widely spoken is Navajo) and Eyak, Tlingit is a member of the Na-Dene (/ˌnɑːdɪˈneɪ/ NAH-dih-NAY; also Nadene or Na-Dené) language family.

Some of the “spirit houses” at Eklutna Cemetery near Anchorage, Alaska (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

From the Alaska Native Heritage Center, we drove to the Dena’ina Athabaskan village of Eklutna. It was first settled more than 800 years ago, which makes it the oldest inhabited location in the Anchorage area. The name Dena’ina comes, incidentally, from two etymological components: dena, which means “person” and ina, which is, apparently, the human plural marker in the Dena’ina language. Accordingly, Dena’ina means “the people.” Once I had learned that interesting fact, I wondered whether Dena’ina might be related to the autonym for the Southern Athabaskan Navajo people, or the name by which they call themselves, which is “the people” — or Diné. Cue drum roll: The two words, the Alaskan and the Navajo, are cognates.

Russian Orthodox missionaries arrived at Eklutna in the 1840s, and the mixing of Orthodox Christianity with local Native practices resulted, somehow, in a very curious feature of the Eklutna Cemetery, which has been in use since 1650 and which is now both a historical park and a tourist destination. (We arrived at the cemetery simultaneously with a very large and full tour bus.) Both Old St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church and New St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church stand in or near the cemetery, but people come to see the small, brightly colored “spirit houses” that mark most of the graves. I would like to know and to say more about these, but there was nobody there to provide an account of them and I saw nothing that offered an explanation. So I have some homework to do.

At 20,310 feet (6,190 m), Denali (aka Mt. McKinley), on the right in this photograph, is the highest point not merely in the state of Alaska but in the entire United States and, in fact, in North America altogether. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

After Eklutna, we had lunch — yes, yes, I ate food again today — at a small Mexican restaurant in a town called Palmer. I mention it not to inflame my critics over at the Peterson Obsession Board (though, obviously, it will inflame them) but because I found one feature of the restaurant amusing: Our server had one of the thickest Scottish accents I’ve ever heard. It just seemed funny to me to be eating Mexican food in Alaska, first of all, and then to have it be served by a Scotsman. At first, we thought he was putting it on. But he wasn’t.

I’m disappointed that we haven’t seen Denali (which, being interpreted for MAGA types, is Mt. McKinley). It has been shrouded in clouds at every chance that we might have had to catch a glimpse of it.

A musk ox (Ovibos moschatus) in the Lüneburg Heath Wildlife Park (Wildpark Lüneburger Heide), Germany (Wikimedia Commons public domain image).

From Palmer, as absolutely anybody could have predicted, we drove to the Musk Ox Farm. Now, I must candidly confess that I’ve never been aware within myself of any great or consuming interest in musk oxen. And, left to my own devices, I would never have thought of signing up for an educational tour of a musk ox farm. But one of the local relatives recommended a visit to the place, and so we went. We spent about half an hour looking at exhibits about musk oxen and then took a walking tour for about 45 minutes or perhaps an hour out among the residents of the farm. (First, we were given a brief lecture on practices for safely visiting musk oxen, who, it seems, possess highly developed instincts for self-preservation from predators. Our primary job was to move together, in a kind of herd, thus convincing them that we were honorary musk oxen, rather than in a straggling and isolated manner that might suggest that we were, say, wolves, and that might involve a challenge or a charge. This was especially important around new mothers and their calves, of whom there were several.) It was a fun and interesting visit. Which I would not have predicted.

Posted from Anchorage, Alaska

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