Nudech'ghela Flag for The Ninilchik Tribe and Territory
This proposed new flag for my tribe and its land that I publicly unveiled for the first time on June 10th, 2020 is the culmination of years of ideas, experiences, and listening to those of others in my cultural group. While the main purpose of this flag is to give our people a visual icon to symbolize many aspects of the tribe, its land, and our neighbors within the land today, its creation is very much an example to demonstrate the importance of self-determination beyond just the political realm.
Without honoring and sharing what you perceive your culture to be, both good and bad, the narrative of your culture and its future becomes blurred and prone to the epidemic of culture loss. In Alaska and the rest of the world indigenous cultures have continually experienced being collectivized and averaged into larger meta-cultures that exist only as racial and ethnic counterparts to modern nation states recognized by the international community. What this collectivization does to individual cultural groups and communities is it forces them adapt into their respective meta-culture (in Alaska it is "Alaska Native") for survival because non-indigenous governments and institutions manage their relationships almost exclusively on a one-size fits all racial approach. Individual tribes, first nations, tribal alliances, tribal confederacies, villages, reservations, pueblos, rancherias, and all manner of self governing indigenous communities worldwide have a myriad of tens of thousands of languages, histories, traditions, political systems, cultural fusions, kinships, and collective identities, and no cultural aspect can be qualitatively assigned to the broad terms of indigenous or aboriginal cultures.
It is important to understand that one's own roots cannot be found within nor embraced by DNA tests which can only give you so much data on race. Only you can control your own cultural narrative and only the cultures themselves have the collective power to choose how they interact with the world.
For a full description of the flag's symbolism and design schematics please view the file linked below
Without honoring and sharing what you perceive your culture to be, both good and bad, the narrative of your culture and its future becomes blurred and prone to the epidemic of culture loss. In Alaska and the rest of the world indigenous cultures have continually experienced being collectivized and averaged into larger meta-cultures that exist only as racial and ethnic counterparts to modern nation states recognized by the international community. What this collectivization does to individual cultural groups and communities is it forces them adapt into their respective meta-culture (in Alaska it is "Alaska Native") for survival because non-indigenous governments and institutions manage their relationships almost exclusively on a one-size fits all racial approach. Individual tribes, first nations, tribal alliances, tribal confederacies, villages, reservations, pueblos, rancherias, and all manner of self governing indigenous communities worldwide have a myriad of tens of thousands of languages, histories, traditions, political systems, cultural fusions, kinships, and collective identities, and no cultural aspect can be qualitatively assigned to the broad terms of indigenous or aboriginal cultures.
It is important to understand that one's own roots cannot be found within nor embraced by DNA tests which can only give you so much data on race. Only you can control your own cultural narrative and only the cultures themselves have the collective power to choose how they interact with the world.
For a full description of the flag's symbolism and design schematics please view the file linked below
| nudechghela_flag.pdf |