Princeton students in SE to study Tlingit art, history
- Daily Sitka Sentinel
- 5 days ago
- 4 min read
By Anna Laffrey
Daily Sitka Sentinel
A group of Princeton University students visited Southeast Alaska last week to learn about the Tlingit clans and federally-recognized tribal governments working to repatriate precious cultural objects that have been taken from this region.
Princeton professors Rachael Z. DeLue and Sarah Rivett worked with University of Alaska Southeast professor Judith Dax̱ootsú Ramos and other Tlingit culture bearers as they planned the trip through Southeast with 15 students enrolled in their 400-level Art and Archaeology Department course, “Alaskan Art, Spirit and Being: Healing Histories of Dispossession.”
The course is centered on Princeton Museum’s collection of Tlingit cultural objects, many of which were collected by the Presbyterian missionary Sheldon Jackson in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
DeLue explained last week that “the purpose of this class was to say, in the absence of these items journeying home, how can we, Princeton, figure out what the story of these belongings are apart from Princeton, before they were captured.”
While in Southeast last week, the class stopped off in Juneau and Ketchikan; they had planned to visit Sitka to tour the Sheldon Jackson Museum, Sitka National Historical Park, and the Sitka Indian Village, but had to cancel their Sitka plans due to flight delays.
In a student lounge on the UAS campus in Juneau amidst a snowstorm last Monday, Lduteen Jerrick Hope-Lang, of the Sitka Kiks.ádi clan, gave a presentation to the Princeton cohort on his work in museum studies, and in facilitating the repatriation of precious Tlingit clan objects.
He spoke of how Sitka Tribe of Alaska and its citizens in recent years have repatriated a number of sacred, clan-owned objects from museums throughout the country. He told of the recent return of the raven helmet that the Kiks.ádi warrior Ḵ’alyáan wore while leading attacks in the battle of 1804 between the Sitka Tlingit and the Russians.
Early this year the Sheldon Jackson Museum officially vested ownership of the helmet with Sitka Tribe of Alaska, pursuant to a Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) process that Kiks.ádi clan members initiated about 25 years ago.
The SJ museum held the helmet for 120 years, beginning in 1906.
Hope-Lang began his presentation by describing “two real colonial forces that impacted my people, which were Russian occupancy, followed by Presbyterian boarding schools.”
He presented a timeline of events beginning with the battle of 1804, and demonstrating the impact of settler colonialism on Tlingit people in Southeast communities over the past 200 years. In the late 1800s and 1900s, assimilation policies intensified, he said.
“Missionaries such as Sheldon Jackson established boarding schools designed to replace Indigenous cultural systems with Euro-American education and religion,” Hope-Lang said. “At the same time, traditional ceremonies such as potlatches were discouraged or suppressed.”
Individuals such as Sheldon Jackson reinforced the idea “that suppression won,” and that Tlingit people were freely giving up their cultural objects to institutions like museums, Hope-Lang said.
In 1906, the raven helmet ended up in the Sheldon Jackson Museum after three Kiks.ádi men, including a descendant of Ḵ’alyáan, took it to Alaska’s Territorial Governor John Brady, who co-founded the Presbyterian-run Sitka Industrial and Training School, now known as Sheldon Jackson College.
But Hope-Lang said there is no documentation proving that Brady or the museum ever had a legal “right of possession” to the helmet, an object of cultural patrimony belonging to the Kiks.ádi clan.
In the early 2000s, Kiks.ádi clan members including Hope-Lang’s grandmother worked to submit a claim to the raven helmet.
That claim spurred a 25-year-long legal battle, Hope-Lang said.
Last year, clan members found a path for Sitka Tribe to assert its right of possession to the helmet.
Hope-Lang said he worked with Jermaine Ross-Allam, director of the Center for the Repair of Historic Harms with the Presbyterian Church, to get a letter stating that the church never rightfully owned the helmet.
He also helped settle a competing NAGPRA claim to the helmet by the Central Council of Tlingit and Haida, which had complicated the repatriation process.
This work helped lay the groundwork for Sitka Tribe to submit an updated NAGPRA claim to the helmet last year.
With that new claim, “what had been a 25-year legal battle transitioned into an 84-day success for us, where our helmet was returned 84 days later,” Hope-Lang said.
“So after more than a century in museum custody, the raven helmet was returned,” he said. “It's a sacred artifact to us. It's very important.”
STA will continue displaying the raven helmet and other repatriated items in the SJ museum, he said, “but under the ownership of us, and under Indigenous narratives, under trust, and we will be the ones spreading the history of these items.”
Hope-Lang thanked the Princeton professors for bringing the students to the original home of the Tlingit objects being held in the Princeton Museum; the next step is for Tlingit people to visit Princeton to get a clearer picture of the objects in the university’s collection, and work toward repatriating some of those objects, he said.
Also during the presentation, Hope-Lang and L’geiki Heather Powell-Mills discussed ongoing work to restore Tlingit clan houses, which are central to Tlingit social structure, and important to protecting precious clan objects.
After the presentation, Princeton junior Rose Habib, an ecology student, said that, for the Princeton class, the spring break trip is “as close as we can get” to understanding the history and meaning of the Tlingit objects that are the subject of the Art and Archaeology course.
“During the course we've been meeting with guest speakers who are Tlingit artists and professors like Professor (Judith) Ramos, who talked to us last week about essentially the history of how these belongings traveled from their land into institutions that held them captive, like the museums like the Princeton University Museum and the Sheldon Jackson Museum,” Habib said.
“We’re hearing people telling their story rather than reading about it in museum records,” Habib said.
“So essentially, we've been shedding light on the history of how the objects traveled, but also talking about what to do now,” Habib said. “We have plenty of these objects in the Princeton collections. I think there's a few discussions about the repatriation, NAGPRA claims, but we need more.”
• This article originally appeared in the Daily Sitka Sentinel.
