SHI lecture to examine gendered burden of cultural continuity
Tlingit artist to speak on weaving, care, cultural survival
Aug. 25, 2025
(Watch Live)
Sealaska Heritage Institute (SHI) will sponsor a presentation this week as part of its lecture series featuring prominent voices in Native knowledge, art, culture and language.
Interdisciplinary artist and Chilkat weaver Ursala Kadusné Hudson will present her talk, “The Gendered Burden of Cultural Continuity.”
The lecture will explore the often-invisible labor of cultural survival carried by historically female-gendered Indigenous art forms such as weaving, sewing and beading. Hudson will examine how these practices, which are often dismissed as “craft” or domestic work, are foundational to Indigenous sovereignty, memory and resilience.
Hudson will also share how her groundbreaking project, a three-dimensional woven Chilkat totem pole, is an example of how care, ceremony and generational knowledge are embedded in material practices.
Themes of the presentation include the patriarchal valuation of “fine art” over “craft,” Indigenous feminist theories of rematriation and the role of intergenerational care in artmaking.
The lecture is scheduled for noon Thursday, Aug. 28, in Shuká Hít within the Walter Soboleff Building, 105 Heritage Way, in Juneau. The event will be livestreamed and posted on SHI’s YouTube channel.
Sealaska Heritage Institute is a tribal organization founded in 1980 to perpetuate and enhance Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian cultures of Southeast Alaska. SHI also conducts scientific and public policy research that promotes Alaska Native arts, cultures, history and education statewide. The institute is governed by a Board of Trustees and guided by a Council of Traditional Scholars, a Native Artist Committee, a Southeast Regional Language Committee and a newly formed Education Committee.
CONTACT: Therese Pokorney, SHI Communications Officer, therese.pokorney@sealaska.com