Relics Returned to Life

Smithsonian shakes dust off 600 Alaska artifacts that are coming to Anchorage for a 12-year exhibition.

by Mike Peters

The squirrel-skin parka was a problem.

More accurately, it was 93 problems for the conservators at the Smithsonian Institution's support center in Maryland last fall.

That's how many of the furry creatures were stitched together for the fine garment on the table, collected in the Alaska Arctic more than a century ago. Artfully restored with the help of Inupiaq elders and artists, the parka soon will come back to the Last Frontier, with about 600 other artifacts that will be on display when the Arctic Studies Center opens in the Anchorage Museum expansion next year.

Restoring the delicate parka for a touring exhibition would not have been attempted by the Smithsonian until very recently. Some of the stitching was coming apart. The dangling squirrel tails were fragile; a few had actually fallen off.

But in recent years, the nation's greatest repository of indigenous heritage has been pressed by Native communities around the country — and its own officials and staff — to open up its collections to the communities they came from. "That didn't just mean taking them out of bins and drawers where some had been stored untouched for more than a century," says Aron Crowell, director of the Arctic Studies Center in Anchorage. "It meant making them accessible to those origin communities."

That goal crystallized in an alliance with the Anchorage Museum back in 1993. By 1998, a development plan was taking shape to house a Smithsonian collection in the state's largest city. The Arctic Studies Center evolved quickly, part of a $100 million museum expansion scheduled to be completed in the next 15 months.

The numbers involved are a story themselves. For starters, the Smithsonian has about 30,000 items from Alaska. Fueled by grants from the Rasmuson Foundation and Native corporations, Crowell made seven trips to D.C. with groups of elders and other culture-bearers—artists, skin sewers, educators—from seven indigenous regions of the state. The visitors studied artifacts, helping curators narrow the possibilities to about 600 items that would go back to Alaska. They showed curators how items were made and used, how to repair them authentically, and told traditional stories behind the clothing, the warrior armor, the accoutrements for dance, and gambling games—producing 4,000 pages of single-spaced transcript at the end of conversations that lasted for days.

The Smithsonian's Alaska collection is the oldest part of its ethnology collection, says Landis Smith, the Anchorage project conservator at the National Museum of Natural History. That museum and the National Museum of the American Indian, also on the Washington Mall, hold most of the Smithsonian's artifacts from the 49th state, which were collected from the 1850s until the turn of the century.

Many items were gathered and documented by Edward Nelson, who came to Alaska in the 1880s and came to be known by Natives as "Man Who Collects Good For Nothing Things," says Smith. "Clothing and other items weren't going to last forever in that harsh country," she says, and people were happy to trade last year's boots, etc., for hard-to-get items, especially tobacco.

Smith notes that collecting for the Smithsonian was technically Nelson's second job.

"He was at St. Michael with the Alaska Commercial Company," she says. "The Smithsonian couldn't really afford to send expeditions everywhere it wanted to go, and so people were sent to fill jobs in places the institution wanted to collect from."

Nelson was a naturalist with a background in ornithology, and his official jobs were to record weather and study birds. But that left time for collecting and studying Native culture.

Most of the collectors who came to Alaska around that time showed up in town and let people come to them, says Kelly McHugh, project conservator for the National Museum of the American Indian.

"The great thing about Nelson is that he actually went out into the villages," she says.

Maintaining Cultural Integrity

At the museum's archives in Maryland last fall, conservators working with Landis and McHugh had finished preparing items from three cultural groups: Central Yup'ik, St. Lawrence Island Yupik and Inupiaq. A display case for the Central Yup'ik artifacts was assembled, and the staff was making some final tweaks: Were garments displayed at a lifelike height? Could a belt be suspended horizontally, in a waist-high circle, instead of being hung traditionally by the clasp?

Yes, and yes.

Then there was the question of the naked dance fans. An exquisitely carved pair of Yup'ik dance fans had lost their feathers over time. The question for the conservation team: Should they replace them?

Chuna McIntyre, one of the visiting consultants who helped choose items for display in Alaska, said the fans wouldn't make sense without feathers. But while Landis and McHugh thought they could replicate the originals with the guidance of the elders, they were sensitive about the appropriateness of such a restoration. For now, the fans will go back to Alaska unadorned, but the feathers may be restored here after local communities have a chance to study the objects and Yup'ik artists can collect the appropriate materials themselves.

That's all part of preserving the cultural authenticity of the collection, Landis says.

It's also part of the community interaction that the Anchorage collection is designed to inspire.

Touching the Past

Seven huge cases, each 14 feet high, were designed to allow handling of the objects once they arrive here. While the exhibits won't leave the second floor of the Anchorage Museum expansion, the goal is "to provide full access to the source community." That means the mounts were created to allow a certain amount of removal and handling, when culture-bearers visit the museum or art classes focus on a particular item.

That interaction is so important, Landis says, that fragile objects such as the squirrel-skin parka, and a loon-skin fire bath hat with feathers that aren't perfectly attached were repaired as much as possible and included in the exhibit.

"There's also a bird-skin parka from St. Lawrence Island that's not in ideal shape," she says. "But such items of that vintage are so rare that making it available to the original culture outweighed the value of keeping it intact in a drawer or on a shelf in Washington."

Since the cases won't be sealed, Crowell says, "the entire room will be environmentally controlled to protect the artifacts."

Making the hunting hats, dance wear, body armor, masks and game pieces available for study by origin communities is an approach Landis says is unique to the Smithsonian's Anchorage project.

Not the End of the Story

"This isn't like a Smithsonian exhibit of ancient Egypt, with cultures and languages that are finished," she says. "With our Alaska collection, you can't lay out the story with the beginning, the middle and the end."

Crowell says presenting the collection as part of a living culture is essential to the project. When the collection opens in the spring of 2010, there will not only be educational lectures and art classes related to the artifacts but:

  A listening gallery, so visitors can experience the indigenous languages of each of the seven regions;

  Interactive displays that will provide more information in audio, video and online formats.

  An expanded Web site that will eventually feature every item in the collection.

"That's why we're getting so many pieces and why they will be here for up to 12 years," he says. "Building basically permanent exhibit cases for a 'traveling exhibition' is really unheard of."

When it opens, Crowell says the exhibit will have a lot to offer visitors to Alaska who are discovering Native culture for the first time.

"But the real beauty is that some of these pieces have never been seen by the communities they came from," he says. "With the artifacts and the interactive displays, young people and elders will be able to experience the craftsmanship, and we hope the experience will inspire contemporary works."

Casual visitors won't be able to open cases or handle most items; that kind of contact will be reserved for classes and special events. But "everything will be accessible," says Crowell. "Nothing will be in storage and out of reach."

Mike Peters can be reached at 907-348-2433 or 800-770-9830, ext. 433, or .

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