By Tom Morphet

Klukwan’s planned $10 million cultural center will feature a 13,500-square-foot longhouse-style museum connected to a boardwalk and a dining hall by a plaza depicting the village site on the Chilkat River.

The museum will include a crafts studio, artifact gallery and a model longhouse interior. One quarter of the interior space is reserved for clan-based and general artifact storage and offices.

About 120 residents packed the Klukwan ANS Hall Nov. 7 to see plans for the center at a dinner and auction that raised $10,697 toward the project.

Former village council president Joe Hotch told the crowd that the center represented the culmination of a decades-long idea, held back in part by Tlingit tradition that artifacts be kept in separate clan houses to maintain integrity and respect between them. Klukwan historically was comprised of 16 houses attached to four clans. Nine clan houses stand today.

"The dream of those that left us behind will be completed through you," Hotch told the crowd.

Center organizers are talking with clan representatives about storing artifacts in the new building and are "fairly assured" there will be agreement, said current village council president Kimberley Strong.

Dinner organizer Lani Hotch said the fund-raiser came off better than she had expected. "I had it in my mind that we could raise $10,000, but everybody up here thought I was crazy."

With $16,000 from previous fund-raising, the village is now more than one quarter of the way toward $100,000 it needs in localcontributions to leverage $1.7 million for the second phase of the project.

The project’s first phase – construction of cultural camp buildings, including a traditional longhouse, adzing shed and outbuildings – was completed this fall. "We might add on to it, but as far as we’re concerned, for now that phase has been done," Lani Hotch said.

Using some of the $2 million appropriated by the Alaska Legislature the past two years, the village will embark on the project’s second phase next spring. First comes a $600,000 bank stabilization project that will use pods of buried and exposed logs and root wads to prevent erosion while appearing to be a natural part of the river landscape.

The "engineered log jam" is necessary before starting on a $1.8 million dining and bathing facility, a 2,000-square-foot structure that will contain showers for the culture camp, cooking and eating space and the museum’s heating and ventilation system.

However, there’s also discussion of building the dining facility and bank stabilization simultaneously, said Strong. A full-time grant writer with experience on large projects will be hired soon, she said.

The village is investigating using revenues from tours of the cultural camp and use of the dining hall as a local match for the project’s third and final phase, the $7 million museum, Lani Hotch said.

Attorney Dick Folta, who attended last week’s dinner, said he was hopeful the center would be built, noting that other tribes have built comparable projects. "Effective representation in the Legislature is the key."

Organizers at the dinner credited Alaska Rep. Bill Thomas, R-Haines, with securing recent appropriations for the project.