Member-only story
A Tlingit Woman Comes Home
Claiming my professional, personal, and indigenous identity during one trajectory-changing Alaskan summer
This is the story of the summer that set me up for the life I have now: writing full time, married to the love of my life, our newborn in my arms right now.
It’s my first day in seven years with an office to go to, and I’m on foot. I’ve tucked my silky dress into my rain pants, zipped up the coat, feel the little droplets beading on my cheeks. Over the bridge from Douglas to Juneau, the air smells like salt sea and green things growing.
It’s strange, at thirty-two, to take an internship. I’ve got a decade of experience in engineering: hard work, mentally engaging, remote. It’s not a bad life, and it pays well. But I’ve been burning out, steadily, for years now: job, relationship, degree, all at once. So this spring, I broke from everything. Suddenly, I’m in Juneau, Alaska: my tribe’s homeland, but not a place I’ve ever lived. And there are mountains rising up before me.
I don’t know it yet, but this is a summer that will change my life — and these mountains will save me. I will spend lonely hours awaiting texts from the man who will become my ex; long quiet afternoons reading forestry histories in the empty office; exalted minutes dipping into the…