How Tlingit objects dispersed around the globe
In 2017, a delegation from the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska flew to the Mile High City to meet with officials from the Denver Art Museum.
The dozen tribal members came to discuss the return of a 170-year-old wooden house partition, painted by a master Indigenous artist. The panels — 67 inches tall, 168 inches wide — illustrate the story of how a raven taught the Tlingits to fish.
The delegation told the museum that this screen never should have left southeast Alaska and belonged home with its people under a 1990 federal law designed to repatriate objects of cultural significance to Native Americans.
But at the end of three days of meetings, the tribes left Denver without a promise of any repatriations.
“It felt like they were trying to hang onto those objects at all costs,” said Father Simeon Johnson, vice chancellor for the Russian Orthodox Diocese of Sitka & Alaska, who accompanied the delegation that day in Denver. “Their attitude was: ‘These are ours. They’re here and they’re going to stay here.’”
Tribal representatives say they’re still trying to reclaim their heritage from the Denver Art Museum, 34 years after the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act came into effect. Museum officials have been intransigent, condescending and insensitive in consultations, they allege.
To this day, a host of prized Tlingit cultural objects remain in the museum’s much-celebrated Indigenous Arts collection, despite three formal repatriation claims and numerous delegation visits to Denver’s premier art museum.
“They are probably the worst museum” we have ever dealt with, said Harold Jacobs, the Tlingit and Haida’s cultural resource specialist, who attended the 2017 meetings in Denver.
John Lukavic, the museum’s curator of Native arts who also attended those meetings, said in an interview that it was surprising and disappointing to hear the tribes’ reaction to their Denver visit. He disputed their characterization of museum officials’ behavior.
The Tlingit representatives never submitted a formal claim under the federal repatriation act for the raven screen, he said. The museum
Visitors to the Denver Art Museum look at “Drum (Gaaw),” a cultural item from the Tlingit and Haida tribes of Alaska, on display in the Northwest Coast and Alaska Native Art Galleries on March 27.
follows the same rubric in all dealings to comply with the law, he added, and even offered to help the tribe complete the necessary paperwork to request repatriation.
“We’re not in the business of just giving away our collections,” Lukavic said. “Nobody is.”
At least five pieces in the Denver Art Museum’s Tlingit collection come from the collection of Walter Waters, a former proprietor of Native American wares in Wrangell, Alaska — roughly 200 miles south of Juneau.
How Waters acquired those objects, however, is a matter of great pain for the Tlingit.
A number of objects in the collection came from Chief Shakes VI, a hereditary clan leader. Before he died in 1916, the chief was ordered by a Presbyterian minister to will his property to his widow and not his maternal nephew — contrary to Tlingit inheritance laws, Jacobs said.
All of his property ended up outside the clan. Waters got many of the objects, as did Axel Rasmussen, a local collector. The Tlingit tribe adheres to different property customs than U.S. law. Ownership of property resides within the clan as a whole, rather than within individual members. But American expansion into Alaska during the 19th and 20th centuries imposed U.S. customs on tribes, including the Tlingit, in efforts designed to strip Indigenous people of their culture.
“An individual clan member has the authority to ‘use’ clan property, but he/ she cannot independently transfer or alienate this right,” the tribe wrote in a repatriation request to a Maine museum last year.
The Chief Shakes pieces collected by Rasmussen and Waters ended up at the
University of Washington’s Burke Museum, the Portland Art Museum and the Denver Art Museum, former Denver Museum of Nature and Science curator Chip Colwell wrote in his 2017 book “Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits.”