Young people are cherished in Klukwan. That’s why Shawna Hotch moved back home to the Jilkáat Kwáan, the people and land of the Chilkat, in Southeast Alaska. Shawna was expecting her first child and had been living in Montana with her partner, working for a tribal board of health, when her grandma and uncle passed away weeks apart. Less than a year later, she flew and ferried home to be with family and introduce her 3-month-old son to the community of Klukwan (Tlákw Áan).

After the loss of her grandma and uncle, there was a lot of grief in the community. “We were there and I saw the joy on everybody’s faces and how healing the presence of my son was for everybody,” she said. Observing this joy and healing affirmed her need to return home to raise her children with strong community values. “He was cherished,” she said.

The town of “seventy-five people on a good day” doesn’t have many youth. In 2024, 13 students were enrolled in the local school. “Everybody always talks to our youth,” Shawna says with a smile. “They either speak to them in Tlingit or ask how they’re doing. Any kid in Klukwan is the most popular person around.”

The community of Klukwan is 90 miles north of the capital city of Juneau and 17 miles from the Canadian border. While most people would classify the town as remote, and it is remote, the ancestral connection to the place and its people makes Klukwan the center of the world for many who live there. The way of life, language, and culture born from the land and water surrounding the community is what keeps Shawna working hard to uplift the people and the place she loves.

“You know, the Chilkat way or the Tlingit way of thinking, we have a different worldview,” Shawna says. “We have an ecological sense of awareness where we recognize that we are connected to everything and respect everything. Everything has spirit. Everything deserves respect.”

Shawna carries this wisdom with her. Like many Indigenous leaders and everyday doers, Shawna is guided by the wisdom of earlier leaders. When she was just a kid, she remembers hearing her grandfather call the community to action. She says the message was more for the generation before her, but her little mind and heart heard his words and they have remained with her and guide her work every day.

“The salmon bite the banks of the river to leave their scent behind so their next generations know how to come back home,” Shawna says of her grandfather’s call to action. “He challenged everybody to do that. To learn your culture. To learn your community. So that our next generations can come back home. 

That’s what I always lean into,” Shawna said.

Some of Shawna’s work with Alaska Venture Fund is a movement to support the traditional ways of life in the Chilkat Valley through the Chilkat Forever campaign. The Chilkat Forever logo displays her grandfather’s call to action and embodies the importance of a core cultural value, Haa Shuká (honoring our past, present, and future generations), demonstrated by a formline fish, the vegetation of the riverbank, and salmon eggs.

Alaska Venture Fund invests in leaders like Shawna, knowing community-driven initiatives reveal locally rooted solutions, strengthen communities, and create models of success that others can learn from and build on. Through her job with AVF as Tribal Liaison of Strategic Initiatives, one of her goals is to find opportunities and pathways to empower the people of her community. “If you want something to be sustainable, if you want a sustainable community, you have to empower the people and resources that are already there,” she says.

She connects with people throughout the valley to understand what they’re passionate about so she can then connect those individuals and organizations with possible funding or engagement opportunities. Further, she believes everyone in her village has a meaningful role. “That’s how we were traditionally,” she says. “If we have the belief that everybody has a role in the community, and finding them and valuing them, I think that does immeasurable things for building our community.”

One thing is clear. Whether working on climate vulnerability and geohazards issues, affordable energy, housing, air quality and water monitoring, Shawna works to ensure the generations after her can continue to live and thrive at home in Klukwan. She and her husband are raising their two children with a baby on the way. Since her move home, the community has experienced a slight baby boom with those closest to her having children of their own.

Shawna holds a bachelor’s degree in Public Health from Fort Lewis College and a master’s degree in Public Health with a focus in Community Health Sciences from North Dakota State University (NDSU). She is currently completing a second master’s degree in Rural Community Development with a focus on nonprofit management and working with Native Communities from NDSU. Whether as a granddaughter, daughter, sister, mother, or tribal councilwoman, Shawna’s work is rooted in the same purpose—honoring the past, strengthening the present, and protecting the future for the people of Klukwan.

Learn more about Shawna and Alaska Venture Fund’s impact in Tlákw Áan (Klukwan) here.

Alaska Venture Fund’s Place-Based Investment Strategy

We believe the path to a thriving Alaska begins in place, with the people who know it best. Alaska Venture Fund partners directly with Tribes and Indigenous leaders to support community-driven efforts rooted in cultural revitalization, climate resilience, and self-determination. By investing deeply in a small number of communities, such as Tlákw Áan (Klukwan), we help build locally led models of well-being and nation-building that can inform systems change across the state.

Written by Laureli Ivanoff, Communications Lead for Indigenous Programs and Projects
Published: April 2025

Images shared with permission of Shawna Hotch.