Sealaska Heritage Institute wants help identifying people in a late Lingít elder’s photo collection

In the basement of Sealaska Heritage Institute in Juneau sit thousands and thousands of photographs. They were taken by a Lingít elder who has since passed on, but for decades, he documented important events and everyday life. Now, the organization wants help identifying people and places in the photos.

Listen:

Ḵaalḵáawu Cyril George Sr.’s family unearthed the photo collection in the wake of his death 11 years ago. His granddaughter, Lillian Woodbury, says she was astounded at the volume of photos he kept in his small Juneau condo.  

“That tiny little room had been harboring all of these memories he captured in photo,” she said. “I mean, every time we thought we’ve got them all, we pulled out another box or another container, and I’m like, ‘oh my god, Mom, it’s another box of photos.’”

To Woodbury, George was “grandpa.” But Ḵaalḵáawu Cyril George Sr. left a mark on thousands of people in Southeast Alaska. He was a Lingít leader from Angoon who lived to be 92 years old. Videos of his speeches are used for Lingít language classes, and a collection at the University of Alaska Southeast library is named after him.

A family friend suggested to his family that they donate George’s photographs to Sealaska Heritage Institute, to preserve and store them. For the last few years, archivists like Emily Galgano have been combing through them. 

“There’s so much just joy in these photos,” she said. It’s one of my favorite things, looking through them and seeing people just having a good time, people dancing, people talking to each other, cooking out on the beach.”

Photos of everyday life

Some of the photos are now online, and printed in books that are available in Juneau and Angoon for elders to look through. 

SHI hopes people will recognize some of the faces.

“The first thing is, we tried to find photos where you could see people’s faces clearly, because the point of the book is really to try to get some identifications,” Galgano said.

There are 20,000 photos in the full collection. A lot of them are pet photos and landscapes. But of the 1,600 SHI has made available, most are of people: dancers in full regalia, fishing trips with strung up halibut, graduations and meetings. 

The photos are full of life — basketball games and Fourth of July parades. They show Lingít people living, working, teaching and making art. They show elders, and babies, and elders with babies. And those babies may be elders now themselves.

Lingít photographer Brian Wallace helped SHI scan the photos. He knew George growing up, and looking through the photos, he was surprised by how many there are of everyday life. 

“They seem mundane at the time,” he said. “But looking back into the whole scope of things, it’s just an amazing body of work.”

Wallace said the photos of ku.eex and early Celebrations stand out to him — that they show how Southeast Alaska Native cultures have endured. 

“They’re thriving when he took the photos, and still thriving,” he said.

Cyril George Sr.’s legacy

Some of the photos were deeply personal for Wallace. 

“And then I loved finding the photographs that he had of my parents,” Wallace said. “And to see some of those photos, and then also lots of photos of my aunts. My aunties cooking dinner or singing songs or just in the background of photos. It was always fun to see those.”

Woodbury, George’s granddaughter, said it was hard to part with the collection. The memory of his loss is still fresh, more than a decade later. 

“But we also didn’t want a lifetime of him making sure he carried that camera around to be lost,” she said.

She hopes that others, like Wallace, will look through the collection and find photos of loved ones who have passed on.

“I think if people walk away seeing these photos and they feel like he gave them that one moment in time back, that makes me happy,” Woodbury said. “And that will be a small part, a small part of this legacy.”

Another part of his legacy is Woodbury herself – she’s a photographer, too.

“I think I was 16, the first time he gifted me a camera. And that was all it took,” she said. “That was all it took.”

If you recognize any of the people, places or objects in the photos, you can contact SHI’s Archives and Collections Department at SHIArchives@sealaska.com. 

Here are more images from the Cyril George Photo Collection. You can expand by clicking on any slide.