Hoonah is a community on the eastern shore of Port Frederick, on the northeastern coast of Chichagof Island in the Alexander Archipelago of Southeast Alaska, about 40 miles (64 km) west-southwest of Juneau and 24 miles (39 km) south-southeast of Gustavus, Alaska. Its name approximates the Tlingit word Xunaa, meaning protected from the north wind, and its people are known as the Xunaa Kwáan. The village’s Tlingit name is Gaaw T’ak Aan. Port Frederick is a fjord about 19 miles (30 km) long that runs south from Icy Strait. Captain George Vancouver named it in July 1794 for Adolphus Frederick, a son of King George III of England. The Tlingit name, Komtok Hon, was recorded in 1869. Captain Yuri F. Lisianski of the Imperial Russian Navy named Chichagof Island in 1805 for Vasili Chichagov, a Russian Arctic explorer who never visited Alaska. The northeastern part of the island is underlain by the Alexander terrane, a sequence of Precambrian to Middle Jurassic sedimentary, volcanic, and plutonic rocks interpreted as intermittent volcanic arc activity on a tectonic crust fragment that drifted across the proto-Pacific Ocean and eventually attached to the North American Plate. The timing of that docking is debated. Chichagof’s steep, U-shaped valleys show its recent glaciation, and ice still blocked the mouth of Glacier Bay when Vancouver arrived in 1794.

According to Tlingit oral tradition, the ancestral home of the Xunaa Kwáan was in Glacier Bay until advancing glaciers forced its people south. The archaeological record includes sites at Groundhog Bay, on the north shore of Icy Strait, dated to about 10,000 years ago. Xunaa Kwáan territory extended from north of Lituya Bay on the Gulf of Alaska south to Lisianski Strait, which separates Yakobi Island from Baranof Island, and took in the whole of Cross Sound and Icy Strait. Hoonah has been the primary permanent settlement since the 1750s. Villages were also documented in the early 1900s at Excursion Inlet, at Homeshore just east of its mouth, at the mouth of the Alsek River, and north of Dry Bay. The 1880 census counted 900 Huna in five villages, but by 1890 their combined population had fallen to about 425 amid massive disease and death. Consolidation into Hoonah began around 1900. The North West Trading Company opened the first store in 1880, the Presbyterian Home Mission and School followed in 1881, and a post office opened in 1901. In 1912, the Hoonah Packing Company built a large cannery north of town, which closed in 1923. Icy Strait Packing Company took ownership in 1934. A fire destroyed much of the town on June 14, 1944, and federal aid helped rebuild it.

The Xunaa Kwáan historically ran subsistence fish camps around Glacier Bay and much of Icy Strait. Pacific salmon were the most important resource, caught with fish traps, gaffs and spears, but steelhead, herring, eulachon and Dolly Varden were also taken, along with seals, halibut, chitons, seaweed and beach asparagus. Clans or houses owned fishing sites. On the islands, a stream and its estuary belonged to one group, while on the mainland, individual sites along large rivers such as the Chilkat, Taku, Stikine and Unuk were owned rather than whole rivers. Today residents harvest all five species of Pacific salmon, using beach and purse seines for sockeye, chum and pink salmon, and trolling or rod and reel for coho. Hoonah had 931 residents at the 2020 census, up from 760 in 2010, and its population swells above 1,300 in summer. Icy Strait Point, a cruise destination on the old cannery site, is owned and operated by the Huna Totem Corporation, which says most of its staff are local Tlingit. In 2024, about 240 cruise ships called there, bringing roughly 500,000 visitors. The Local Boundary Commission approved a Xunaa Borough petition in 2024 by a 3-2 vote, but a court stay has paused the approval pending appeal. Read more here and here. Explore more of Hoonah and Port Frederick here: