Maka/Keixe Yaxti, a Tlingit woman of Yaakwdaat, carries within her the memory of a long migration - her clan’s journey down the Copper River from the North. She grew up in the homeland where her people have stewarded for hundreds of years, where ocean swells meet the forest and Mount Saint Elias stands as a guardian. She belongs to the Raven moiety of the Copper River Clan, the House of the Owl, and is also a child of the Kanien'kehá:ka people. Her earliest teachers were tide lines and berry patches, smokehouses and riverbanks. The land spoke first; her maternal grandparents helped her learn how to listen. Through them, she came to understand that knowledge is something breathed in, carried, and returned with care.

Harvest, song, and dance shaped her sense of time. Language, ceremony, and genealogy rooted her in a continuum where the living and the ancestors meet. In these practices, she learned that dreaming is not separate from waking life. Dreams are instructions. They are star maps.

Maka’s creative work rises from this confluence of story and vision, where memory becomes tangible. She creates from a belief in radical abundance: that there is more than enough love, more than enough future, more than enough room for Indigenous brilliance to flourish. Each piece she makes is an offering of a way of dreaming forward.

A lifelong student of Tlingit history and art, Maka walks with humility and intention, guided by Trickster Raven’s wit and Owl’s watchful gaze. Her work is a bridge between what has been carried and what is still becoming, and the enduring power of dreaming.