Anchorage clinic offers kuspuk, beading, and talking circle classes

At a clinic in Anchorage, one of the prescriptions looks a lot like a sewing lesson.

Southcentral Foundation's Traditional Healing Clinic, tucked inside the Anchorage Native Primary Care Center, runs a rotating series of Alaska Native cultural classes — beadwork, garment-making, talking circles — that sit alongside primary care as part of how the clinic understands wellness. Recent sessions have included a Talking Circle introduction to the ceremony's role in healing, beaded wristlets and wrapped charm bracelets, and a three-part course on sewing a kuspuk, the loose, big-pocketed overshirt — qaspeq or atikluk, depending on the language — that generations of Alaska Native families have worn.

What keeps it from being a craft calendar is the clinic's reason for offering it. By SCF's own description, the classes are taught by Traditional Healing Clinic staff who pass along knowledge handed down from Alaska Native Elders, giving customer-owners a way to connect with their Indigenous ways of living through traditional skills. The same clinic keeps a healing garden of edible and medicinal plants and blends traditional Alaska Native healing techniques with modern medicine — part of SCF's Nuka System of Care, a health system owned and run by Alaska Native people for Alaska Native people. In that frame, learning to thread a needle around a kuspuk hem is less hobby than therapy: continuity, made by hand.

The classes are held in person at 4320 Diplomacy Drive, Suite 1010, space is limited, and registration is required — the kuspuk course asks participants to commit to all three sessions, since you can't finish what you started in week one without showing up for weeks two and three.