The Native Village of Eyak (NVE) has received the green light to begin the process of re-building the Ilanka Cultural Center in downtown Cordova.
The Tribe has been searching for a larger space to accommodate current needs and future growth for a number of years, and last year offered the city $700,000 to buy four municipal lots near Mt. Eccles Elementary School for a new cultural center.
“This will be a great addition to our community,” Council Member Kasey Kinsman said. “As I’ve traveled around Southeast, many of the communities have very noticeable cultural centers and it’s just a beautiful addition and a really important addition.”
Originally opened in 2004, the Ilanka Cultural Center is the Tribe’s museum, repository, and library that showcases and celebrates the ancestral Indigenous communities of the region – the Eyak, Sugpiaq, Tlingit, and Ahtna peoples. The cultural center also offers a variety of classes, including traditional Indigenous language and arts courses.
The current Ilanka Cultural Center building sits where First Street meets Railroad Avenue. But the current location, according to the Tribe, is both too small to accommodate all the cultural center’s programming, and it lies in the city’s tsunami zone.
According to NVE’s proposal, the Tribe plans to build a new and improved cultural center downtown – which would include the museum, gift shop and Native marketplace, Tribal library, archive center, cultural repository, a recording studio, classroom and program space, a visiting instructor apartment, the Tribal hall and commercial kitchen, meeting rooms, and office and storage space.
The Tribe estimates the whole project will cost between $19-39 million.
City officials originally said they wanted a five-year timeline for the project, but because of the scale of NVE’s project, the Tribe says it’ll likely take upwards of 15 years to actually open its doors.
“I look forward to this being done, hopefully well within 15 years, but good things are worth waiting for and this is no small project,” Kinsman said.
The Cordova City Council indicated support for the project last fall, and officially approved NVE’s plans earlier this month during its April 1 regular meeting.
The Cordova Times has reached out to NVE for comment and is awaiting response.
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