Over the whine of weed-whackers, about a dozen volunteers beat back bushes that covered old gravesites off 3rd St. on Douglas Island. Stone markers laid at all angles around gated-off gravesites.
Stefanie Bouma brought her two kids — Ori, 5, and Yadi, 2. Equipped with tiny rakes, they scooted leaves around the hillside.
Bouma said her family started volunteering at the gravesites last summer because they want their kids to form a deeper relationship with the history and community around them.
“Every time we drive by, they always talk about the cemetery now,” she said. “Which I think, many people probably didn’t pay attention to it much before.”
For three years, this group of volunteers has been coming to the cemeteries to weed, clean gravestones and clear brush. First, they worked to clean up the Native cemetery, a plot of land where Alaska Native people were buried for several decades, starting in 1901. Now, they’ve started caring for the other cemeteries in the area, like the Asian cemetery and the old Douglas city cemetery that only allowed white people.
Now drivers can see the old headstones peeking out between trees on either side of the road, where they weren’t visible before.
Volunteers wonder about help from the city
The volunteers say they can only do so much to fight the rainforest’s creep. Jamiann S’eiltin Hasselquist, who organizes the cleanups, said she has long wondered what the city could do to help.
“All these volunteers coming together is just one more way to make things visible,” she said. “And maybe that could add a little bit of pressure to the City and Borough of Juneau to step up and start maintaining this area.”
Mike Kinville says he loves the community work that the clean up days have created, but thinks there are parts of the work — like sawing off long, hanging branches — that the city could take on.
“For me, what would be perfect would be to see some sort of partnership,” he said.
Kinville was inspired by Bob Sam, a clan leader in Sitka who began restoring the Russian Orthodox Cemetery there about thirty years ago. Sam came to the Lawson Creek cemeteries in 1997 with Ed Kunz and Richard Dauenhauer and began cataloging the graves using information collected by Marie Olsen and others who researched the cemeteries in the 1990s.
Sam said it’s his life’s work to clean up cemeteries and advocate for the return of Alaska Native remains to their communities from boarding schools.
“There’s so much to learn from this work,” he said..
As volunteers begun unearthing old headstones, Kinville said Sam told them they have to be careful, and that’s something he wishes the city would help with.
“His recommendation is to wait until it can be done methodically, properly,” he said.
A confusing patchwork of land ownership
The city has long said that it’s not clear who owns the land the cemeteries are on.
Nearly 30 years ago, the City and Borough of Juneau conducted an inventory of historic gravesites that outlines a convoluted history of ownership, starting with a mining engineer named W.A. Sanders who owned the area. It says that Sanders verbally agreed to give the land to the city of Douglas — but refused to put that in writing.
Now, the city’s parcel map says some of the land on the east side of the road is owned by “Douglas” and former Juneau Mayor Merril Sanford. But Sanford says he only owns the Order of the Eagle Cemetery, which he maintains. It’s fenced off from the rest of the graves.
Meanwhile, the parcel map seems to show that the Catholic Church owns at least some of the land that the Native and Asian cemeteries are on.
A representative of the Archdiocese of Anchorage and Juneau said that they are looking into that.
“The owners listed on the parcel viewer is what we really know,” said Deputy City Manager Robert Barr.
Dozens of possible unmarked graves
Meanwhile, the cleanup job keeps getting bigger. Hasselquist’s team has uncovered dozens of other possible gravesites in the cemeteries — depressed rectangles in the land.
“The report that was done like 28 years ago only had five of the Native people recorded and three of the Asian people recorded,” Hasselquist said.
She said she’s since flagged over 70 possible unmarked gravesites in those two sites.
They found one buried headstone by accident last fall when a volunteer’s rake screeched against it.
“There was a piece of marble, white marble underneath the moss,” Kinville said. “And we dug it out and stood it up for the first time that headstone has been seen in I don’t know how long.”
Across the road, Hasselquist shows the work they’ve done to make the city cemetery navigable again. She said that until recently, you couldn’t walk through it without chopping salmonberry bushes. Now, a low covering of deer heart leaves lays underfoot, and a toy fawn lies on one child’s grave.
“There was a family — they knew they had an ancestor buried there, but they didn’t know where,” Kinville said. “They bring flowers every year, and the kids come and help clean up and they leave a stuffed animal there.”
Stories like these are why Kinville finds this work so valuable.
“To come across these people, these connections, these stories — it’s like a form of time travel for me and gives me a sense of connection to the community,” he said.
Back in the Catholic cemetery, Ori and Yadi took care with the century-old grave marker they were raking around.
Their dad, Ephraim Froelich, said that he and Bouma want their children to grow up feeling invested in the communities around them.
“I think kids should be aware of what’s happening around them,” he said. “And we try to talk to our kids like adults, so they can be future responsible adults who aren’t sheltered from important topics.”
Topics like mortality, Froelich said, and the longstanding erasure of Indigenous culture in Juneau.
Editor’s note: This story has been edited to include previous restoration work done at Lawson Creek Cemeteries.