Remembering Hardships and Hard Work on Chenega Day

Chenega Village during the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill.

Photo courtesy of ARLIS Reference.

March 27 is Chenega Day, and the Valdez Native Tribe (VNT) recently held a gathering circle on Facebook Live to honor the history of the Village of Chenega and celebrate the strength and determination of its people in reestablishing the community after natural and manmade disasters.

Larry Evanoff was at a boarding school in Wrangell when the Great Alaskan earthquake shook the state on March 27, 1964.  One of the tsunamis it caused destroyed the small Village of Chenega in Prince William Sound where he is from, killing an estimated third of the people who lived in the village according to the Chenega Corporation’s website.

The remaining residents were relocated to nearby communities, and Evanoff went on to become an air traffic controller in Cordova then Anchorage.  He said it wasn’t until after the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act in 1971 that talk started of trying to move back and reestablish the village. 

“Everybody was pretty excited.  We met every year and talked about it,” Evanoff said.  “And finally, people were starting to lose interest because every time we came together, we just talked about it, that’s all we did was talk.”

Evanoff said that changed in 1981 when the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization went on strike.  He was one of the thousands of air traffic controllers who were fired by President Reagan after refusing to return to work, and he said he put 110 percent into rebuilding the community after that.

“It was very difficult because everywhere we went and everywhere we turned, people said, ‘It will never happen. You guys can’t do it,’” Evanoff said.  “As soon as your honey bucket freezes over, you’re going to come home.  You’re going to come running back to Anchorage.”  

After several trips to Juneau and negotiating with “Uncle Ted in D.C.,” Evanoff said funding for housing and infrastructure was finally approved.  Twenty-four houses were built in halves in an Oregon warehouse and barged up to new Chenega, located on a different island several miles away from the original village site, in pieces.

He said they worked 10- to 14-hour days to prep the house sites and get them in place.  And in 1984 the community was declared livable.

“We put numbers in a hat, and you picked the number, and that was your house,” Evanoff said.  “It was very exciting.  We had a big ceremony when all the houses were complete, and the families had the key in hand.”

Evanoff said it made the community whole again and to honor both old and new Chenega, they decided to make March 27 a regional holiday.

“Every year after Chenega Day was declared a holiday, we would get together as a community and have a huge feast,” he said.  “In fact, we’re going to be having a huge feast here in about another week.”

This year’s feast will include six deer that the council requested Fish & Game allow them to take for the event.  Additionally, his wife, Gail Evanoff, said children ring the church bell 23 times throughout the day in remembrance of the 23 lives lost in the tsunami.

“All the kids go up there and take turns and ring that bell, make as much noise as they can,” he said.  “It’s just a fun time.”

About five years after reestablishing the community, and almost 25 years to the day after the tsunami, an oil tanker ran aground in Prince William Sound, spilling millions of gallons of oil into its waters.  As oil washed ashore and covered beaches on the island, residents of Chenega saw a different kind of death and destruction, this time to the sea life they subsisted on.

According to a study by Duane A. Gill and J. Steven Picou published by the New York University Press, it took 12 years for the village’s subsistence harvests to return to pre-spill levels.  Despite the improvement though, residents had to increase their harvest of other resources and spend more time and money traveling farther from their homes to fill their pantries.

The gathering circle was hosted by Samantha Rice and Keristyn Weber as part of a monthly series presented by VNT’s Victim Services Program.  A recording of the video can be found on VNT’s Facebook page.

By Amanda Swinehart

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