Stroll among theīirch and alder trees in the summer and discover treasures like the dredge bucketsĪnd hand cart used by gold miners and pioneers in early Fairbanks. The museum grounds are an outdoor exhibit, with larger-than-life sculptures, historicalĪrtifacts, and cultural carvings displayed in a real world setting. It left Seattle on May 31, 1899, followed the Inside Passage, and traced the Alaska Peninsula to the Aleutians and to the Bering Strait before returning to Seattle.Outdoor Exhibits Walk around the museum to experience the architecture and see outdoor exhibits: Denali by Christiane Martens Totem by Bernard Hosey totems by Nathan Jackson and Amos Wallace a Trans-Alaska pipelineĬleaning pig, and an 1841 Russian-American Blockhouse. The Harriman Expedition was credited with documenting previously unknown species and fossils and mapping the coastal region. The Peabody, the Burke and the Smithsonian have accepted, and Nathan Jackson, a master carver in southeast Alaska, has begun work on a pole for the Peabody, Palmer said. ``All the artifacts tell stories of their clans’ beginnings,″ she said.Ĭape Fox has offered cedar trees to the museums in return. Monday’s ceremony is being billed as ``100 years of healing,″ to mark the ongoing effort to recover songs, dances, arts, even Tlingit names, after the chaotic past century, Dundas said. They are being returned under the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act at the request of Cape Fox Corp. The treasures taken by the Harriman Expedition wound up in the collections of the Smithsonian, the Field Museum in Chicago, the University of Washington’s Burke Museum, and Harvard and Cornell universities. Survivors moved to Saxman, just outside modern-day Ketchikan, where missionaries had built a church and school. The disease left 177 of about 1,000 people alive in the Cape Fox village, Dundas said. In fact, Alaska natives had already had 125 years of contact with white explorers and fur traders, and Gaash had been decimated by smallpox. Members of the Harriman Expedition, including photographer Edward Curtis and naturalist John Muir, believed they were seeing an untouched world on the brink of cataclysmic change. Others tell stories or were carved as memorials.īeing Tlingit (pronounced KLINK’-it) and knowing the symbols of the different clans, ``I could look at a pole and know whose clan that pole belongs to,″ she said. The largest is coming from the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian: a 45-foot totem pole depicting three bears and a loon.ĭundas said most of the totem poles are mortuary poles with clan crests, like eagles, beavers or halibut. The totem poles all feature the stylized painted symbols that distinguish the art of the Tlingit people and other Pacific Northwest and Alaska coastal tribes. ``But if they weren’t taken, they wouldn’t be here with us today.″ ``A long time ago when they’d taken the things, we might have been upset,″ she said. Irene Dundas, repatriation director for Cape Fox Corp., said the village clans are pleased to be getting the articles back and appreciative of the museums’ respect for their arts. ``Why not, therefore, secure some of these totem poles for the museums of the various colleges?″ ``It was evident that the village had not been occupied in seven or eight years,″ wrote nature writer John Burroughs, who was with the group.
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