Voices on the Land
Voices on the Land provides literacy-based, artist residencies in 4th and 5th grade classrooms, with Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian languages and cultural values forming the basis of instruction. The program integrates visual, performing, and digital arts with traditional knowledge. Through the experience, students use storytelling to create stop motion animation videos; learn the elements of Northwest Coast formline design, while keeping an artist’s journal and making a traditional drum; and use the skills of the actor’s toolbox and reader’s theater to explore and perform Raven Stories handed down through the ages. Voices on the Land also provides an in-person summer and winter arts intensive program for students in grades 4-8, as well as a virtual summer intensive program for students in grades 4-8 who live outside of Juneau.
Atnané Northwest Coast Arts Academy
SHI sponsors Atnané Northwest Coast Arts Academy, a culturally integrated college and career readiness program for Alaska Native/American Indian high school students. Northwest Coast arts classes, team building activities, entrepreneurship training, and culturally affirming artistic lesson plans help students enter a career pathway in Northwest Coast arts. Open to all Sealaska shareholders regardless of residency. SHI will pay travel and lodging costs. In addition, SHI has partnered with the Juneau, Sitka, and Klawock school districts to offer Northwest Coast arts courses to high school students in six high schools. Students have the option to earn college credit as well as high school credits, and the program supports the courses with accessible, authentic cultural resources.
Museum Studies
SHI offers summer internships to undergraduate and graduate students at SHI in Juneau and the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Interns gain hands-on experience with cataloging museum collections, object storage management, and exhibition planning, research, and installation.
Art Studies
SHI offers summer internships to art students who are pursuing an arts and science degree, preferably with a focus on Northwest Coast or Alaska Native arts through studio arts, performing arts and technology, or creative writing.
Art and Museum Studies
SHI offers scholarships to undergraduate or graduate students who are pursuing: - Arts and science degrees with a focus in studio arts, performing arts, cinematic arts and technology, or creative writing, and which incorporate Northwest Coast Arts studies in their degree; or, - A degree with a concentration in museum studies Art students must be enrolled in NWC arts courses at the University of Alaska Southeast or arts courses at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Museum studies students must be enrolled full-time at a US college.
Celebration Native Artist Market
SHI sponsors a Native Artist Market during Celebration, a biennial dance-and-culture festival that is one of the largest events in the state.
Master-Apprentice System
SHI sponsors master-apprenticeships to perpetuate and revitalize Northwest Coast art, especially endangered traditions, such as spruce-root weaving and dugout canoe carving. The program was fostered at SHI's first Native Artists Gathering, which brought together nearly 30 artists in 2015 who identified the most imperiled Northwest Coast Native art traditions. This traditional method of training younger artists still provides the best instruction.
Native Art in Alaska Prisons
A significant population of Alaska Natives is in correctional institutions. SHI collaborates with Lemon Creek Correctional Center to offer NWC art training in prison as a way to connect Native inmates with their culture and give them a means of supporting themselves through art sales upon release.
Designated Artist’ Spaces
SHI operates an artist-in-residence study room at the Walter Soboleff Building named after master artist Delores Churchill to encourage the study of NWC art. Artists have access to SHI’s extensive ethnographic collection for study while they are in residence. SHI also hosts artists at its Sealaska Heritage Arts Campus and accommodates artists working on large-scale projects, such as totem poles and dugout canoes.