Eight years before she died, Tlingit elder Helen Watkins began making videos about traditional ways to harvest and process food and medicine. She narrated, directed and even filmed some of the movies herself with a handheld video camera, with help from her husband and others.<\/p>\n
The films were meant for her family: three kids, eight grandkids, seven great grandkids and generations beyond.<\/p>\n
\u201cI hope someone in my family will continue with everything that\u2019s on here,\u201d Watkins said about the films before she passed. \u201cIf you got questions, I hope you can pick up a video, and you can see how it\u2019s done.\u201d<\/p>\n
Watkins\u2019 desire to keep her audience limited changed last summer, when her doctor told her she only had about a year to live. She reached out to a friend, filmmaker Sarah Betcher.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe told me because she had limited time to live, she would allow me to make a film for public release,\u201d Betcher said. \u201cI had been doing video work for several years, and Helen had never allowed me to produce any videos on her.\u201d<\/p>\n
Last June, Betcher \u2014 who had just received a grant from the National Science Foundation to make a short film series on ethnobotany, the scientific study of the relationship between people and plants \u2014 started filming Watkins.<\/p>\n
Betcher followed Watkins around Douglas Island, where Watkins lived, as she harvested and processed devil\u2019s club, a thorny plant that covers the forests of Southeast Alaska.<\/p>\n
Since Watkins\u2019 death in February, Betcher has finished turning the footage into a 22-minute short instructional film, \u201cDevil\u2019s Club: Tlingit Traditions of Helen Watkins.\u201d It\u2019s the first installment for Betcher\u2019s film series, \u201cTies to Alaska\u2019s Wild Plants.\u201d<\/p>\n
Betcher put the video up online this week.<\/p>\n
\u201cI felt like I\u2019d been given a gift to be the one to do (this) for her and help preserve her knowledge,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Tribal leader<\/strong><\/p>\n Helen Anna Abbott Watkins was born in Haines on November 16, 1939, raised in Haines and Klukwan, and spent her adult life in Juneau. She was a Chilkat Eagle Tlingit of the Shangukeidi Clan from the Thunderbird House, Kaawdiyaayi Hit in Klukwan. She died Feb. 9 from pulmonary fibrosis.<\/p>\n \u201cShe was one of the ones among us that grew up in a very traditional way with her mother and her grandparents, as well as her aunts,\u201d Thunderbird Clan leader David Katzeek said. He called Watkins his tribal sister.<\/p>\n He said Watkins\u2019 knowledge on the art of processing natural resources was endless. Her areas of expertise included red seaweed, smoked salmon, salmon caviar, aged salmon heads, soapberry meringue, salmon berries, raspberries, blueberries, currants, huckleberries, high bush cranberries, thimbleberries, hooligan oil, seal oil and seal meat.<\/p>\n \u201cBecause we used all the parts of the animal, she\u2019d use the sealskin to make seal moccasins,\u201d Katzeek said.<\/p>\n Katzeek noted that Watkins\u2019 kindness, appreciation and respect for natural resources extended to people.<\/p>\n \u201cShe was a person who appreciated human beings and worked with them and complimented them and enjoyed watching who they were,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n As an adult, Watkins often gave presentations in the Juneau school district, throughout the community and helped with different cultural camps to share her traditional knowledge. She spent many years with Tlingit and Haida Head Start as a cook and a teacher, later worked at REACH and volunteered at the Glory Hole Shelter and Soup Kitchen.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen she passed away, a lot of her food that she processed the previous year was served at the Church of Christ after the memorial service. The food was totally consumed. That included the hooligan oil and the seal oil,\u201d Katzeek said.<\/p>\n Close friend Leona Santiago said Watkins was extremely generous and continued to make homemade crafts even as her eyesight deteriorated in recent years. The two had known each other since 1972.<\/p>\n \u201cShe was so talented in her ways, and she would give beautiful things as gifts to people,\u201d Santiago said. \u201cLast summer she could barely see but she made me a pair moccasins, and I proudly wear them when I dance.\u201d<\/p>\n Devil\u2019s club<\/strong><\/p>\n Ethnobotany has long been a passion for filmmaker Sarah Betcher and was the reason she reached out to Watkins eight years ago when Betcher was working in Glacier Bay National Park.<\/p>\n \u201cSomeone suggested I meet with her, so I called her over the phone and we had a nice chat,\u201d Betcher said.<\/p>\n The friendship first developed over the phone, then in person.<\/p>\n \u201cEvery time I went through Juneau, I would meet up with Helen and we would talk mostly about plants and fish. We both really enjoyed hanging out together because we had the same interests,\u201d Betcher said in an interview this week from her Juneau home.<\/p>\n Once the filming process began last summer, the two saw each other much more frequently, from twice a year to about four times a month. Between last June and into the fall and winter, Watkins\u2019 health worsened and she eventually needed a breathing machine. Filming times would be intermittent, sometimes in 15-minute time chunks, sometimes only five.<\/p>\n \u201cIn the summer when we were outside and were harvesting, she was feeling better and she wasn\u2019t on the breathing machine yet, but once winter hit, it was much shorter segments of time,\u201d Betcher said. When they weren\u2019t filming, Watkins was on her breathing machine, eating a snack or taking a nap, and Betcher enjoyed just hanging out.<\/p>\n Almost the entire film that Betcher created takes place at Watkins\u2019 house on Douglas Island.<\/p>\n For part of it, Watkins sat outside, wearing a thick red, grey and white flannel shirt and heavy gloves. Using a butter knife, she scraped the needles off a thick devil\u2019s club branch down to the green bark, the part of the plant she was after.<\/p>\n Watkins said on screen that it\u2019s better to remove the bark in the spring. \u201cThe green comes off easier. It peels like a banana,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n She used her nails and teeth to peel off long strips of bark.<\/p>\n Later in the film, Watkins is shown standing over her stove inside her kitchen. She explained how to make salve and oil infused with the bark.<\/p>\n Watkins explained the healing powers of the plant.<\/p>\n \u201cYou get the medicine out of the bark, and it goes into the oil. Makes you feel good and it heals your wounds. All-around good medicine. I put it on my face and hands. I don\u2019t want to waste it,\u201d Watkins said in the film, as she rubbed her hands together and inhaled through her nose. \u201cSmells so good.\u201d<\/p>\n Going public<\/strong><\/p>\n All the videos that Watkins made herself over the last decade of her life will become public as well, Betcher said \u2014 eventually.<\/p>\n \u201cWe talked about if she would want them to be available for people outside of her family once she passes and she said yes. We talked about them being available in schools and in libraries,\u201d Betcher said.<\/p>\n On her own time, Betcher has gone through several hours of Watkins\u2019 footage. They\u2019re categorized into nine different topics, including gumboots, soapberries, salmon eggs and salmon.<\/p>\n \u201cThe film quality isn\u2019t high quality, but the content is amazing, and she was really amazing at narrating everything that she was doing and explaining it and who taught her,\u201d Betcher said.<\/p>\n Betcher is looking for grant funding to allow her to finish editing Watkins\u2019 videos.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m glad she made those videos because now my youngest can see them,\u201d said Tonya Howard, 34, Watkins\u2019 oldest granddaughter. \u201cThat\u2019s the biggest fear that my grandma had was that my 3-year-old is never going to remember her.\u201d<\/p>\n Growing up in Juneau, Howard spent the majority of her childhood at her grandmother\u2019s house. She often participated in traditional activities, like going to fish camp in Klukwan where her grandmother taught her how to cut and smoke salmon.<\/p>\n As an adult who is raising children and working, though, Howard said she unfortunately doesn\u2019t have time to practice as much. The videos will help her as well, she said.<\/p>\n \u201cThere was just so much stuff, there\u2019s no way I could\u2019ve learned all of it,\u201d Howard said.<\/p>\n Lasting legacy<\/strong><\/p>\n At Watkins\u2019 memorial in Juneau on Feb. 13, Betcher shared a six-and-a-half-minute video that she just filmed in December, just six weeks before Watkins passed.<\/p>\n In the footage, Watkins sat in a living room chair and looked at the camera. She thanked family members who helped her with the videos.<\/p>\n She thanked her husband of 35 years, local carver Ray Watkins, for being there during every project.<\/p>\n \u201cEverything we did with clam digging in winter and picking berries, cutting up branches of herring eggs when they came in. He would pick a lot of berries for me. He\u2019d go fishing for me,\u201d Watkins is seen saying. \u201cAnd there was a time when I could show him how to do it; now he knows everything that I know. He can do all of it.\u201d<\/p>\n She shared memories of catching and smoking salmon at fish camp. She talked about loving her family. She reminisced about collecting red seaweed in Haines.<\/p>\n \u201cI used to take two gunny sacks and go down to the beach and fill them both up. Not lightly. I had to push them all down and then shake it down, pick more, fill it \u2018till I could only grab the top. I\u2019d fill two bags up and carry them up the beach, get two more bags and go back down the beach and this happened about three or four days,\u201d Watkins said.<\/p>\n Her final memory in the video surrounds clamming with a friend.<\/p>\n \u201cI had on my boots, my big pants, my coat, my hat, I had a bucket and had a rack, and I came down the stairs and I was singing, \u2018Here she comes, Miss Alaska.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Watkins\u2019 singing trailed off in laughter, \u201cI wish I had a photo of that.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2022 Contact reporter Lisa Phu at 523-2246 or lisa.phu@juneauempire.com.<\/p>\n \u201cDevil\u2019s Club: Tlingit Traditions of Helen Watkins\u201d was made available this week on Sarah Betcher\u2019s website, www.farthestnorthfilms.com. It\u2019s also on the University of Alaska Museum of the North\u2019s website, www.uaf.edu\/museum\/collections\/herb\/ethnobotany\/.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Eight years before she died, Tlingit elder Helen Watkins began making videos about traditional ways to harvest and process food and medicine. She narrated, directed and even filmed some of the movies herself with a handheld video camera, with help from her husband and others. 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