Updated September 28, 2026 at 12:31 PM CDT
“Kutulagaaw: The Tlingit-Russian Battles” tells the story of the 19th-century battles between the Tlingit tribes of what is now known as southeastern Alaska and the Russians. The new opera will be performed in the Tlingit language.
Here & Now’s Peter O’Dowd spoke with Vera Starbard, who wrote the opera with composer Edward Littlefield, and Madeline Soboleff Levy, who is one of the opera’s principal performers.
7 questions with Vera Starbard and Madeline Soboleff Levy
Let’s start with the story of this war between the Russians and the Tlingit people. At its core, what’s the conflict about?
Vera Starbard: “In 1802, while the Tlingit people all over what’s now known as Southeast Alaska, did allow some Russians to be there, they were breaking Tlingit law. They were abusing people, abusing our resources.
“All the Tlingit clans decided they needed to be removed from the region. So in 1802, they were removed [in the first battle.] [The opera] follows that into 1804 when the Russians came back to [Sitka, Alaska], two and a half years later and had a second battle.”
What did the Russians want?
Starbard: “Primarily, sea otter: hundreds of thousands of pelts in the decade that they came. So they were just wiping out sea otters, right and left, and were coming back for more.”
As a Native Alaskan, how steeped were you in this history before this project started? How much did you know?
Starbard: ”What’s funny is it’s a common history for Tlingit people to know and yet, unknown outside of Tlingit [culture], even though it’s a huge history that affected the geopolitics from that time until now. These battles impacted how the United States was formed.”
Madeline Soboleff Levy, you are of Tlingit and Haida descent. What was the tradition for you hearing these stories growing up?
Madeline Soboleff Levy: “I knew less about this growing up, and being a part of this production was really a learning opportunity. And the questions that we were able to ask with folks who had done historical research, but also folks who had learned through oral traditions and the traditional passing of knowledge from their grandparents, from their grandparents’ grandparents about the battles, not just in Sitka, but also in other communities, it was a lot of new information for me.”
Almost the entire show is in Tlingit. I know you had to work with a translator to put your story into the language. How essential was it to do the opera in the Indigenous language?
Starbard: “This is a huge part of so many Indigenous peoples’ work, to bring our languages back when they were stolen from us.
“[It was] literally illegal for performing arts to happen, for these languages to be spoken. So to have our traditional performing arts happen again was important. But to be in the original language we’ve been speaking on this land for millennia was the most primary emotional, educational, legal way we wanted to do it.”
Madeline Soboleff Levy, you had to sing for 2 hours in a language I presume you didn’t know. What was that like?
Soboleff Levy: “I’m nowhere near fluent and I would even hesitate to call myself a Tlingit language learner. My three younger children all went through a Tlingit immersion preschool, and so their Tlingit journey has brought me along as a Tlingit language learner.
“Tlingit language has four different Xs, and they all have a different pronunciation. And so, as I was practicing at home, I could ask my children, which one is this? And they know enough to be able to help me.”
This opera did an amazing job of bringing the history forward and showing why it matters today, and also showing to the audience that the blood of your ancestors is flowing through you at this very moment. And I wonder for both of you if this project helped you reclaim some of your own identity?
Soboleff Levy: “I think very much so. To appreciate the southeast community making a collective decision and working together to achieve something so incredible and then to be winning such a victory in achieving this opera, it felt very grounding and very empowering.”
Starbard: “It was highly about language for me because I’m not a fluent speaker, and that was something that was challenging. To be able to do this, but to try and reclaim some of those [words] and learn and keep learning and be humbled and learn with so many other people. Still I’m without words for what the entire experience has been.”
This segment was edited for clarity.
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Emiko Tamagawa produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Todd Mundt. Tamagawa also produced it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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