#edwardcurtis

Written by Patti Smith, undergraduate student employee

This post is inspired by the current exhibit on display in the Archives and Special Collections Reading Room: It Has Always Been All About the Land: Select Photogravures from the North American Indian by Edward S. Curtis, 1907-1930.  The original Harriman Alaska Expedition was in part responsible for Curtis’s fascination with what he perceived as a fading way of life for the indigenous cultures of North America.

Chief’s House with totem poles in front, Cape Fox, Alaska. Photographed by Edward S. Curtis: June 16, 1899 (Harriman, 1901-1902).

“In the afternoon we anchored off a deserted Indian village north of Cape Fox [Alaska]. There was a row of a dozen houses on the beach of a little bay, with nineteen totem poles standing along their fronts. These totem poles were the attraction. There was a rumor that the Indians had nearly all died of smallpox a few years before and that the few survivors had left under a superstitious fear, never to return. It was evident that the village had not been occupied in seven or eight years. Why not, therefore, secure some of these totem poles for the museums of the various colleges represented by the members of the expedition? This was finally agreed upon, and all hands, including the ship’s crew, fell to digging up and floating to the ship five or six of the more striking poles.”

– John Burroughs, Harriman Alaska Expedition (1899/1904).

So stated John Burroughs, scribe of the Harriman Alaska Expedition. This expedition, organized in 1899, brought together a whole host of geologists, naturalists, artists, writers, and photographers. One of those photographers was Edward S. Curtis, who would take inspiration from the expedition and embark on a lifelong journey to document every Native American tribe of North America west of the Mississippi River. The expedition was funded by railroad tycoon Edward H. Harriman and planned in part by C. Hart Merriam, who had helped found the National Geographic Society. The party set off from Seattle and went as far north as Plover Bay (Providence Bay), Siberia during the summer of 1899.

Though successful from a scientific perspective, discovering over 600 new species of plants, animals, and fossils, the expedition resulted in yet another transgression against Native American culture. Upon landing at Cape Fox, Alaska on their trip home, the party members were amazed by the array of totem poles in this abandoned village. Not realizing that these totems (as well as other artifacts removed from Cape Fox) were still imbued with cultural meaning to the Tlingit tribe, who had relocated nearby, the expedition members sought them as trophies. They shipped them back to the continental United States where they were disseminated to various museums, such as the Smithsonian and the Field Museum of Chicago.

Throughout the 1800s and early 1900s, this type of collecting was quite common, especially when looters realized that burials and gravesites could yield the most impressive artifacts that museums in the United States were eager to pay top dollar to acquire. It was not until 1990, after years of tribal activism, that the United States enacted the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). NAGPRA was designed to facilitate the return of culturally important objects and human remains to North American tribes. It also placed strict procedural requirements on archaeological materials discovered on tribal and federal lands, as well as criminalized the trafficking of Native American human remains and material culture acquired by breaching NAGPRA. For human remains and material items already in federal museums, NAGPRA required museums to document their ethnographic and Native American collections, contact tribes about potentially sensitive materials, and begin the process of repatriation if the tribes called for their return.

Ten years after NAGPRA was enacted, another expedition to follow in the footsteps of the Harriman Alaska Expedition was organized. Members included Tlingit representatives and Harriman’s descendants. They were retracing the steps of the expedition but they also had an even more important goal – to return the artifacts taken from the “abandoned” village at Cape Fox, Alaska. These artifacts, gathered from the Smithsonian, the Peabody, and Cornell University, among others, were returned and past grievances forgiven when the Tlingit descendants, the Saanya Kwaan, or “People of the Southeast Wind”, met with Harriman’s great-great-granddaughter. The Tlingit Saanya Kwaan initiated a Peace Ceremony with the Harriman Expedition Retraced crew. The purpose of the Peace Ceremony was “to lay aside their differences, to try to understand the ways and thinking of the ancestors and members of the Harriman Expedition,” (Litwin, 39).

Members of the Harriman Alaska Expedition Retraced (Litwin, 134).

Healing ceremony at Cape Fox. Clockwise from center: Ned Friedman, Irene Shields Dundas, Rosita Worl, Eleanor Hadden, and Margaret Friedman (great-great-granddaughter of Edward H. Harriman) (Litwin, 134).

The beginning of the healing ceremony with Eleanor Hadden (left) and Irene Shields Dundas (right) (Litwin, 134).

While there is still a long way to go to address the innumerable grievances against Native American tribes since the colonial era, instances like the Harriman Expedition Retraced are important steps to further communications and understandings between Native Americans and non-native peoples. 

References:

Harriman, Edward Henry, (1848-1909), sponsor.  Merriam, C. Hart (Clinton Hart), (1855-1942), editor. Washington Academy of Sciences, Washington, D. C. Alaska.  Harriman Alaska Expedition, with Cooperation of Washington Academy of Sciences. Eleven volumes. New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1901-1905. University Library System - Hillman Library - Q115 .H3