Alaska tribe fighting Pa. museum over artifacts

[Arrowheadology Staff]

Alaska tribe fighting Pa. museum over artifacts

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) - An Alaska tribe has demanded the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology return artifacts the tribe considers sacred.

The Anchorage Daily News said the collection includes a shaman's owl mask, brass loon spirit hat and faded hide robe that memorializes ancestors of the Hoonah T'akdeintaan clan wiped out by a tidal wave in Lituya Bay.

The Philadelphia museum has offered to return eight objects, and university spokeswoman Lori Doyle said it hopes to reach a settlement with the tribe. The federally recognized tribe wants the entire collection.

A federal review committee acting under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act voted Nov. 19 in Washington, D.C., to recommend returning the collection of about 40 objects to the clan, the newspaper reported Sunday.

The advisory decision now goes to the secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior for consideration.

"As long as there's one of us around, it belongs to us," said Marlene Johnson, a T'akdeintaan elder.

Most of the items were purchased for $500 in 1924 in Hoonah by Louis Shotridge, a Tlingit man from Klukwan who worked for the Philadelphia university. The school's museum added the items to its collection.

"I guess he believed he was doing the right thing by preserving it," review committee chair Rosita Worl said. "Whereas a good Tlingit wouldn't do that. They would see the most important thing is it's used in our ceremonies and see it as sacred objects."

The rest of the story can be viewed here.

[Old Stones]

In my mind there is no question the items should go back to Alaska. These cultural items hold no greater value to anyone, than they do to the culture that created them.

[joshuaream]

I tend to agree in cases where artifacts can be directly tied to a specific group of living people. The museum did a huge service by purchasing and curating them but now the relics would probably be more important to the tribe that created them than the general public. Anyway, the items were probably never on display...

I've read through some of the field notes of Squire & Davis and Stephens & Catherwood, and quite often they ended up paying the first person who could point them to sites for permission to collect excavate/collect relics for their respective museums. It didn't really matter if the person they paid had any claim or right to sell the items. Squire & Davis were two guys who ended up mapping and documenting many of the mounds in the midwest before they were touched by agriculture and modern development, their problem is that they were too darn good at finding and documenting sites... Stephens & Catherwood were doing exactly the same thing in Central America at the same time, and basically reintroduced the Mayans to the western world.

Museum buyers did the same thing in the NW, they'd recover the items and then find a local member of a tribe to sell them. That explains how the largest collection Haida totem poles, canoes, carvings, house walls, potlatch items, etc. is still in the UK. The ethnologist for the British Museum found a Tlingit translator that was willing to sell him a seasonal Haida village. The Haida have tried for years to get it back but with no luck.

[Massac]

Anyway, the items were probably never on display...

University museum...I'd say not.