Sorrel Goodwin

 My name is Sorrel Goodwin. I am the son of Katherine and George Charles Goodwin. I was born in San Francisco, California in 1971. I grew up in Ketchikan and Juneau, and on the Navajo Reservation in Chinle, Arizona. I am of Áakʼw Ḵwáan Tlingit, Ahtna, Ashkenazi Jewish, and French Huguenot heritage, and I fully embrace all of those lines of descent. I am a member of the L’eeneidí Yaxté Hít people here in Juneau. My Tlingit name is Yashkanda.ets'. That name was previously carried by my great-grandfather James Watson, who was one of the original founding members of the Alaska Native Brotherhood. My Hebrew name is Moshe Ben Sar. I have 25 years of experience as a professional in libraries, archives, and museums. I started my career at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Illinois in 1995, working on the repatriation of Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian artifacts, just after the passing of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. As they say, the rest is history. I’ve been doing this for the last quarter-century now.

“The name I carry is a very heavy name…the one way that I can earn my right to carry that name is to use the skills that I have to tell our stories accurately, because a lot of what passes for local Juneau history is simply incorrect…There’s still a lot of resistance to having those stories told accurately.”

Multi-cultural household

“I often tell my children, ‘We’re very lucky in that we have multiple wells from which to draw water.’ … Sometimes it’s nice to be able to draw from many wells to quench your thirst.”

you come from where you are

“There’s still this narrative here in Juneau that the Áak’w people just got up and abandoned our mother village, which makes no sense. It would be like abandoning your own mother. … The narrative that we just got up and walked away from our village and moved downtown because we were so excited to work for the mines is simply not true.”

Áakʼw Ḵwáan story