In 2024, the National Trust for Historic Preservation listed Sitka’s Tlingit Clan Houses as one of the Eleven Most Endangered Historic Places in the United States. Sitka’s Historic Indian Village, on Katlian and Kaagwaantaan Streets, was once comprised entirely of Clan Houses, multi-generational houses for families of a particular clan, related by matrilineal descent.
The Sheet’ká Ḵwaan (Sitka people) have owned this part of Alaska for thousands of years, and originally had Clan Houses on Noow Tlein, now also called Castle Hill, and in settlements throughout Sitka Sound and along the coast. In 1805 Tlingit leaders allowed the Russian-American Company to operate a post at what is now downtown Sitka. The current Sitka Indian Village was built in the late 1820s as a consolidated settlement adjacent to the Russian outpost.
Clan houses are units of matrilineal lineage, heritage, and identity, as well as physical structures. In Tlingit culture, the physical clan house is significant mainly as a space for clan traditions. Clan houses have historically been rebuilt or expanded to meet the current needs of the clan, while retaining the same significance.
For generations after the 1867 transfer of Alaska to the United States, Native people were excluded from citizenship and most economic opportunity, which prevented the accumulation of generational wealth. The tradition of multi-generational extended families living together in clan houses, like other aspects of traditional culture, was discouraged in favor of the western practice of living with nuclear families and patrilineal inheritance. Additionally, many of the remaining Clan Houses are in federal trust, and due to the opaque federal system for managing inheritance, ownership is often by multiple descendants.
Today, only eight of the 43 clan houses that were standing in 1940 remain and even fewer still function as traditional clan houses, as part of Tlingit hereditary matrilineal identity and centers of ceremony and tradition. The so-called “Last Potlatch” was held in the Village in 1904, sanctioned by Governor John Brady. After that, traditional ceremonies continued, but with fewer participants, and out of public view.
Tlingit tribal members are leading the effort to recognize and restore clan houses for their original intended use, to restore clan ownership, and rebuild clan houses that have been lost, as a way to support all aspects of Tlingit cultural and language practice.
In 2024 members of the Kiks.adi Clan Point House lineage formed a nonprofit, Katlian Collective, PointHouse.org, in order to build a reconstruction of the Point House, a Kiks.adi Clan House, on its original site, which has been repatriated to the clan. The effort is to encourage preservation, new construction, and ownership restoration of clan properties throughout the entire Village area and in other towns and villages as a part of supporting traditional Tlingit culture.
