Monday, July 21

In his zeal to establish Presbyterian churches and missions to the native people, Sheldon Jackson travelled to the farthest reaches of Alaska, and in the process collected art and artifacts from all four of its native groups: Eskimo, Aleut, Athabascan, and Northwest Coast (Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian) . In 1895 he erected the first concrete building in Alaska to house his collection, and it now forms part of the Alaska State Museums. It is a collection worthy of any university museum of ethnology, with everything imaginable from boats to clothing to the needles with which to sew it.

One of the few benefits to accrue to the Northwest-coast Indians from their contact with Euro-Americans was new tools and materials to enrich their art: metal for various types of knives to facilitate their carving, Hudson Bay blankets and little white mother-of-pearl buttons to make ceremonial regalia. Typically entire blankets are worn as robes, with the clan crest appliqued on the back and outlined with buttons. We saw this regalia both in the museum and worn in action at a performance of the Sheet'ka Kwaan Naa Kahidi Performing Arts Theater. The troupe consisted of about twenty Tlingit people of all ages, including babes in the arms of their mothers or grandmothers. They sang and danced, and a narrator explained the meaning of the songs. It was interesting to compare this to the performance we saw in Haines. Both were put on for tourists, in Sitka by the native community and in Haines by a small group of whites steeped in the native traditions (in past years there have been native performers as well.) I am not convinced that the Haines performance was less authentic; they told the ancient stories using carved wooden masks such as we have seen in museums, using pantomine to present the story in a dramatic way.

On this, our final day in Sitka, the weather finally cleared sufficiently to reveal Mount Edgecumbe, the extinct volcano that guards its harbor, in all its glory.