JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) – Juneau lost more than a world-renowned bead artist when Emma Frances Marks, 93, died Sept. 18.
“She was the face to the Tlingit people. She was the face of the culture,” said Rosita Worl, president of the Sealaska Heritage Institute. “She represented the best of the Tlingit people.”
“She was the matriarch, well-known and well-versed in the culture,” said her son, Paul Marks, one of the family members at her side when she died at Marks Trail, the family home site on Douglas Island.
The Alaska State Museum in Juneau has nine of Marks’ works in its collection, said registrar Donna Baron. One, a pair of earrings, is on loan to New York’s American Museum of National History for its traveling exhibition of Native jewelry. The museum held a show displaying more of her work in 1988.
Her son-in-law, Richard Dauenhauer, said her work was given to international dignitaries, including Bishop Desmond Tutu.
“What she went through in her lifetime was just incredible,” Dauenhauer said. “She was born into a Tlingit-speaking world, and now it almost doesn’t exist. All of these ways of life that people survived with for thousands of years are now obsolete.”
Emma Marks, whose Tlingit name was Seigeige’i, was born in Yakutat in 1913. A Raven of the Sockeye clan and the Alsek River Canoe Prow House, she grew up on Dry Bay and on the Italio River, still a remote area, Dauenhauer said.
She married Willie Marks and moved to Juneau in 1926. She and Willie Marks had 16 children. She outlived eight of them, as well as her husband. Marks learned beading and skin showing as a child, according to Dauenhauer.
The family was so traditional, he said, that the members lived on a boat, the New Annie, still speaking Tlingit at home after most other families had abandoned it.
Before failing eyesight and strength prevented her from continuing her art near the end of her life, her awards included the Alaska Governor’s Award for the Arts in 1989.
Marks was more than an artist, said Patricia Wolf, CEO of the Anchorage Museum of History and Art. “She is one of the best known and most skilled Tlingit bead artists,” Wolf said. “She was very willing to share her knowledge.”
Wolf remembered Marks as being very generous about sharing what she knew at beading workshops at two Alaska Native Heritage Festivals the museum held.
“She was a friend of the museum,” Wolf said. Although the museum does not have any of Marks’ work in its collection, it has displayed vestments she was commissioned to create for the consecration of St. Innocent Orthodox Cathedral, a Russian Orthodox church in Anchorage.
Worl said she is fortunate to have one of Marks’ beaded button blankets.
“She developed the art,” Worl said. “She contributed to the evolution of the art.”
Her first memory of Marks was many years ago at a funeral, as a Raven showing support for the Eagle side.
“She was always there to comfort the Eagles in their grief.” She knew their stories and made ceremonial regalia, attending every significant Tlingit event, Worl said. Marks knew what it was to be a Tlingit, where it is important to comfort the other moiety.
“She lived by our cultural values,” Worl said. “To be a Tlingit, you have to give of yourself and your resources.”
She passed along the best of the tradition and culture, which she carried through a period of her life when people tried to suppress the culture, Worl said.
“Her greatest contribution was her children – teachers and artists,” Worl said.
