HISTORY CHAPTER 1
Ancient shores
Time Immemorial
Long before a Norwegian fisherman saw the possibilities of a glacier, these waters were already a fishery. The Tlingit and Haida peoples had been fishing Mitkof Island and the surrounding passages for thousands of years, following the salmon runs, reading the tides, pulling halibut from the deep channels. This was not wilderness. It was home. This place is Séet Ká Kwáan — home of the people of the fast-moving waters, named for the strong currents of the Wrangell Narrows. The name belongs to the place, and to the people of that place.
Five thousand years ago, people on Mitkof Island were already engineering the tide to catch salmon. Their fish traps — including heart-shaped formations found nowhere else in the world — still mark the shoreline, and large-scale traps of various ages have been documented in every major waterway on the island. The evidence runs deeper still: stone tool remnants on Kupreanof Island date back 10,000 years. A shell midden near town has been radiocarbon dated to 1,120 years ago. Ancient petroglyphs carved into coastal rock at Sandy Beach — images that have resisted full interpretation for as long as anyone has tried to read them — have been here at least a thousand years. On the mainland in the Tongass National Forest, more carvings remain, pecked into a bedrock outcrop above glacial waters. Their meaning belongs to the people who made them. Forest Service archaeologists Gina Esposito and Jane Smith have documented more than 900 archaeological sites in the surrounding region.
Forest Service archaeologists on the shell middens, petroglyphs, and fish traps that show thousands of years of Tlingit life around Petersburg.
Summer fish camp — woman at the fire, drying fish above, with canoe.
Clausen Museum Collection
The people who made these marks had specific names, specific clans, specific territories. The Kake Tlingit, from Kupreanof Island across the Narrows, had long used the north end of Mitkof Island as a summer fish camp, setting up trolling camps where the Narrows meet Frederick Sound. Over time, some made it permanent — among them Chief John Lot, who settled year-round. The Tlingit villages at the mouth of Petersburg Creek and across Frederick Sound in Thomas Bay were established communities, not passing camps, built where the salmon came home.
Tom Ukas 1940s Potlatch - headdress and regalia
Clausen Museum Collection
Their relationship with this land, this water, and these fish was not simply economic — it was cultural, spiritual, and deeply encoded in their art, language, and ceremony. Traditional canoes navigated these same channels. Woven hats and baskets carried the aesthetic of a culture that found beauty in function.
Tlingit halibut hook, made to fish the deep channels for halibut. One of several on display at the Clausen Museum.
Clausen Museum Collection
Ancient stone tools shaped by Tlingit hands are among the oldest artifacts in the Clausen Museum’s collection — physical evidence of a presence that has never left.
KOOTÉEYAA
Eagle & Raven Totem Poles
Two 35-foot red cedar poles
Carved 2000 · Raised 2001 • Cleaned 2013
master carver
Naal xák'w · Tommy Joseph
Petersburg Public Library Collection
A committee of Petersburg residents spent years planning and fundraising before Tlingit master carver Tommy Joseph carved the Eagle and Raven poles. In 2001, the community raised them by hand. In Tlingit society, every person belongs to either the Eagle or the Raven moiety — here, the two stand together.
Raven & Eagle Poles downtown Petersburg, on the corner of Main & Haugen, 2013
Petersburg Public Library Collection
“When you read a book, you don’t read the last chapter, and that’s the whole story. We have the last chapter, but we need to celebrate what was before that.”
— Brenda Norheim,
Petersburg Indian Association
tribal council member
Young man in ceremonial headdress, with drum
Clausen Museum Collection
Celebrating our diverse stories - past, present and Future
The Clausen Museum is helping unpack that history. Its collection displays stone mauls and adzes from Mitkof and Kupreanof Islands, along with baskets, carvings, a canoe, halibut hooks, stories, and photographs. All of it now carries Lingít names alongside English, because the story here starts long before Petersburg.
Petersburg calls itself the town that fish built. It was built on a fishery five thousand years in the making. Long before it was Petersburg, it was Séet Ká Kwáan.
Voices of Séet Ká Kwáan Stories of Petersburg’s Indigenous history in their own voices — produced by the Petersburg Public Library
Sandy Beach petroglyphs see the carvings up close, with USFS archaeologists Gina Esposito & Jane Smith
Tommy Joseph — Tlingit master carver interview with Fine Woodworking
Alaska Natives Without Land — Petersburg Full history of Séet Ká Kwáan: fish camps, village locations, and the Petersburg Indian Association
Where the stories meet — Tlingit and Norwegian, on a town learning to tell both of its stories. — Alaska's News Source, 2023