Amid complaints from weed eaters, a dozen volunteers pushed back bushes that covered ancient graves off 3rd Street on Douglas Island. Stone markers placed at all angles around closed tombs.
Stefanie Bouma brought her two children – Ori, 5, and Yadi, 2. Equipped with small rakes, they combed through the leaves on the hillside.
Bouma said her family started volunteering at the gravesites last summer because they want their children to form a deeper relationship with the history and community around them.
“Every time we drive by, they always talk about the cemetery,” she said. “I think a lot of people probably haven’t paid much attention to it before.”
For three years, volunteers I came to the cemeteries for weeding, cleaning headstones and clearing brush. First, they worked to clean up the Native Burial Ground, a plot of land where Alaska Natives were buried for several decades, starting in 1901. Now, they have begun tending to the other cemeteries in the region, such as the Asian cemetery and the old cemetery in the town of Douglas which admitted only whites.
Now drivers can see the old headstones emerging between the trees on either side of the road, where they were not visible before.
Volunteers question city help
Volunteers say there is little they can do to combat rainforest overgrowth. Jamiann S’eiltin Hasselquist, who organizes the cleanups, said she has long wondered what the city could do to help.
“Bringing all these volunteers together is just one more way to make things visible,” she said. “And maybe that could add a little bit of pressure on the city and borough of Juneau to step up and start maintaining that area.”
Mike Kinville says he likes the community work the cleanup days create, but he thinks the city could take on some parts of the work, like sawing down long, dangling branches.
“For me, what would be perfect would be to see some sort of partnership,” he said.
Kinville was inspired by Bob-Sama clan leader in Sitka who began to restore the Russian Orthodox cemetery about thirty years ago.
As they began digging up old headstones, Kinville said Sam told them they needed to be careful, and that’s something he wants the city to help him with.
“His recommendation is to wait until it can be done methodically and correctly,” he said.
A confusing mosaic of land ownership
The city has long said it’s unclear who owns the land the cemeteries sit on.
Nearly 30 years ago, the city and borough of Juneau completed an inventory of historic graves that describes a complicated ownership story, starting with a mining engineer named WA Sanders, who owned the area. It says Sanders verbally agreed to deed the land to the city of Douglas – but refused to put it in writing.
Now the city plot 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 is isolated from the rest of the tombs.
Meanwhile, the the plot map seems to show that the Catholic Church owns at least some of the land on which the Native and Asian cemeteries are located.
A representative for the Archdiocese of Anchorage and Juneau said it was studying the issue.
“The owners listed on the parcel viewer are what we really know,” Assistant City Manager Robert Barr said.
Dozens of possible anonymous graves
Meanwhile, the cleaning work continues to intensify. Hasselquist’s team discovered dozens of other possible graves in the cemeteries – depressed rectangles in the ground.
“The report that was done 28 years ago only listed five Indigenous people and three Asians,” Hasselquist said.
She said she has since reported more than 70 possible unmarked graves at those two sites.
They found a headstone buried by accident last fall, when a volunteer’s rake screamed at it.
“There was a piece of marble, white marble under the moss,” Kinville said. “And we dug it up and put it up for the first time, this tombstone has been seen for I don’t know how long.”
Across the road, Hasselquist shows the work being done to make the town’s cemetery navigable again. She said that until recently you couldn’t cross it without cutting down smolt bushes. Today, a low blanket of deer heart leaves rests underfoot and a stuffed fawn rests on a child’s grave.
“There was a family — they knew an ancestor was buried there, but they didn’t know where,” Kinville said. “They bring flowers every year, and the kids come and help clean up and leave a stuffed animal.”
Stories like these are why Kinville finds this work so valuable.
“Meeting these people, these connections, these stories, it’s like a form of time travel for me and it gives me a sense of connection to the community,” he said.
Back at the Catholic cemetery, Ori and Yadi took care of the century-old headstone they were raking.
Their father, Ephraim Froelich, said he and Bouma wanted their children to grow up feeling invested in the communities around them.
“I think kids should be aware of what’s going on around them,” he said. “And we try to talk to our children like adults, so that they can become responsible future adults who are not shielded from important topics.”
Topics such as mortality, Froelich said, and the long-standing erasure of Native culture in Juneau.