The Sitka National Historical Park is celebrating its Centennial this year with an impressive series of events. One of the most important, the 2010 International Conference on Russian America, just concluded this past week. Randy Larson, Dusty Kidd, Bob Medinger, Sandy Lorrigan and many others deserve a tremendous amount of credit for organizing this event and making it such a huge success.
Co-sponsored by the National Park Service and the International Association of Specialists on Russian America, the week-long conference brought together an international group of over 150 scholars, historians, authors, scientists, curators and artists to celebrate Alaska’s rich Russian American heritage. Seven countries were represented at the conference which included workshops, seminars, dissertations and on-site archeology. I was unable to attend the entire conference, but I did manage to sneak away for an interesting panel discussion on Russian explorer Aleksei Chirikov and was honored to welcome conference attendees at a dinner Thursday evening.
In conjunction with the conference, the ‘White Nights’ Festival of Russian Culture was held Friday evening at Harrigan Centennial Hall. This is the first time this three year old festival has been held in Sitka and nearly 500 people turned out to enjoy a wonderful program of Russian music, song and dance. I’d like to personally thank Alexander Dolitsky of the Alaska-Siberia Research Center for his hard work in bringing the festival to Sitka and my colleague, Juneau Senator Dennis Egan, for agreeing to participate.
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