NORTHAMPTON, Mass. – Tlingit leaders were preparing a warm welcome in Ketchikan, Alaska, for an expedition from Smith College which is returning clan totems taken more a century ago.
When the Clipper Odyssey docked at the southern Alaska port July 23, it unloaded a 25-foot totem pole of the Neixadi clan and two 11-foot house posts of the Teikweidi clan that were collected at old Cape Fox Village in 1899. Another trove of house posts and fragments and two more totem poles had already arrived.
The repatriated treasures were greeted by a day of festivities at the Ketchikan Civic Center and the Saanya Kwaan tribal home at the Saxman Beaver Tribal House. The welcome home ceremonies capped years of repatriation efforts by the Cape Fox Corp., the Alaska Native corporation composed of descendants of Cape Fox Village located 50 miles south of Ketchikan.
The trove was taken from the empty village 102 years ago by the famous Harriman Expedition, the first comprehensive exploration of the Alaskan coast by white Americans. They returned as the first stage of a retracing of the expedition by a team from Smith’s Clark Science Center.
The expedition is co-sponsored by the Public Broadcasting System and Florentine Films of Haydenville, which is making a documentary of the 9,000-mile itinerary.
The project supported the Cape Fox repatriation efforts to correct a blunder by the original expedition. The crew organized by industrialist Edward Harriman included some of the most prominent western scholars of the time, including George Bird Grinnell, John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, and photographer Edward Curtis, the epic collector of American Indian images.
But when it landed on Cape Fox Island, it thought the villagers had all died of small pox and helped itself to their artifacts. In fact, the inhabitants had moved to a new location in Saxman five years earlier.
Their descendants struggled for years to regain the cultural items, widely scattered among major universities and museums. But the corporation said until passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990, “the ability to achieve this goal was unattainable.”
Plans for the new expedition provided the coordination to pull the trove together. “Smith was a big catalyst,” said Laurie Fenlason, media representative for the Northampton woman’s college.
Artifacts are being returned by the Chicago Field Museum, Cornell University, University of Washington’s Burke Museum, Harvard University’s Peabody Museum and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. Representatives of these institutions were to join tribal leaders and expedition members in the welcoming ceremonies.
