Haa Shagoon Photograph Collection | Sealaska Heritage Institute Archives

In the early 1980s various Tlingit from the Haines and Klukwan areas, including those from the Lukaax.ádi Clan, gathered for a peace ceremony at the Chilkoot River, Alaska. They gathered at the Chilkoot River to capture the attention of their Anglo-Saxon neighbors about ethical, legal, and moral issues facing their community since the influx of Euro-American settlers. Some of the problems that prompted this ceremony were the construction of a fish weir that blocked the flow of salmon to the Chilkoot River (presenting an ecological concern toward sustainable salmon runs) and the construction of a road that cut through a Tlingit cemetery area, exposing and desecrating skeletal remains. This gathering was also filmed and subsequently made into a short movie, Haa Shagoon, largely narrated by elder Austin Hammond. The film discusses many core Tlingit values, ceremony, ritual, and expresses the cultural needs of the Tlingit of Southeast Alaska.

Source: Fleisher, Mark S., review of Haa Shagoon, in American Anthropologist 86, no. 4 (Dec. 1984), 1062.