Sitka tribe repatriates historic clan items
- Daily Sitka Sentinel
- 3 days ago
- 6 min read
By Anna Laffrey
Daily Sitka Sentinel
About a hundred people crowded into the cramped Arrivals area of the Sitka airport terminal Saturday evening to welcome home three Kaagwaantaan clan hats held for more than 100 years in a Pennsylvania museum.
Repatriation of the Kaagwaantaan Wolf Helmet, Ganook Hat and Noble Killer Hat from the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology follows years of work by clan leaders and elders, and Sitka Tribe of Alaska staff and museum professionals.
Return of the sacred objects was made possible by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act passed by Congress in 1990.
Kaagwaantaan clan members, friends and relatives at the airport Saturday welcomed the Kaagwaantaan hats, thought to be more than 250 years old, with Tlingit songs and speeches.
Yaandu.ein Paul Marks Jr., who had just carried one of the hats home from Pennsylvania, told the crowd that he felt as though he was being welcomed to sit on a relative’s lap.
“Our aunties and our uncles when we go visit them, they often tell us ‘come sit on our lap,’” Marks said. “That’s how I’m feeling tonight, all of you who are here tonight, our grandparents, our in-laws, the way we are feeling for our grandparents’ things.”
L’uknax.adi (coho clan) elder Gukhl’ Herman Davis Sr. spoke and performed a song and dance, and Kaagwaantaan elder Yanshkawoo Harvey Kitka spoke in gratitude for those who showed up to welcome the artifacts. Kitka thanked Marks, along with Nels Lawson II and Ixt’Ik’Eesh Steve Johnson of the Kiks.ádi clan, who all traveled to Pennsylvania to retrieve the hats.
Kitka said the hats “have been gone a long time – so long that some of us didn’t really know that they existed any more, they’ve been gone that long.
“It’s good to see them come back,” he said.
STA, a federally recognized tribal government with more than 4,800 citizens of tribal heritage, has been working with clan members to successfully repatriate these and other sacred objects, or at.óow, to Sitka clans.
At the end of January, the Sculpin Hat and Shakee.át (headdress) were returned to the Kiks.ádi clan from the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.
Last March the Kaagwaantaan Eagle Hat and Shark Helmet came home from the Alaska State Museum in Juneau, where they had been on loan from the University of Pennsylvania.
On Tuesday, the Sheldon Jackson Museum officially relinquished the K’alyáan Helmet, returning control to STA, and ownership to the Kiks.ádi clan.
“Chief K’alyáan (Katlian) wore the helmet in the battle of 1804 against the Russians. (It) is considered one of the most important pieces of at.óow for the Kiks.ádi clan,” STA said in a press release this week.
“At.óow are sacred objects in Tlingit culture, which are imbued with the spirit of our ancestors,” the press release stated.
Harvey Kitka, who belongs to the Multiplying Wolf House of the Kaagwaantaan clan, and is a spokesperson the clan, shared with the Sentinel on Thursday some of the significance and history of the Kaagwaantaan objects that returned home in the past year.
Kitka said that the hats date back to the time before the Little Ice Age, when Tlingit people lived in the area known today as Glacier Bay.
“These hats all came from a very long time ago,” Kitka said, noting that some information about the history of the hats is incomplete.
“The Little Ice Age pushed the last of our people out of Glacier Bay,” Kitka said of the regional climate change that occurred in the early 1700s. “Everybody moved to different places. Some went to Hoonah, some went to other places like Angoon. Our Kaagwaantaan moved to Klukwan which became the headquarters for the Kaagwaantaan.
“Then, there were complications with the Russians when they came down to trade in Sitka,” Kitka said. “The Russians fired on the Kaagwaantaan trading people that were coming down to Sitka,” He said that confrontation occurred in Salisbury Sound.
A Russian leader later offered land in Sitka to the Kaagwaantaan as payment for the people killed in the canoe, Kitka said.
“From the Russian fort site (at the present-day Sheet’ka Kwaan Naa Kahidi) to where the Ace Hardware store is now, at the little stream called Keet Gooshi Heen, was all given to the Kaagwaantaan as part of the payment for the people that got killed in the canoe,” Kitka said.
“The Russian at the time thought he owned more than he owned … All of this was Kiks.ádi land. So the Kaagwaantaan went and asked the Kiks.ádi if they used that portion of their property. And they said ‘no, only ferns grow there.’ So they didn’t use it, and so it was OK for us to take it,” Kitka said. “So the headquarters of the Kaagwaantaan moved from Klukwan to Sitka.”
“Then time went by, and in 1904, they had a potlatch here in Sitka,” Kitka said. “And at that potlatch these hats were worn by different leaders in our community.
“After that, one of the caretakers by the name of Augustus Bean, who was a (Kaagwaantaan) Multiplying Wolf House leader, and also one of the major leaders of the 1904 potlatch, he sold these hats to Louis Shotridge,” a Kaagwaantaan man who was purchasing objects for museums in the eastern U.S. That was about 1925.
“There was really a lot of questions about how this was possible that (Shotridge) would work for those people down there, we frowned on him for a long time,” Kitka said. “But we’re glad that he wrote down where he got the hats from, and basically which clans they belong to.
“So we were able to go down and identify these ones,” Kitka said.
About 20 years ago Kitka’s father Herman Kitka, Nels Lawson Sr., William Kanosh and his son David went to Pennsylvania to identify the hats, Kitka said.
“We started our repatriation, but it got blocked by another organization that really had no business blocking it,” Kitka said.
A competing claim to the objects by the Central Council of Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska held up the repatriation for almost 20 years, Kitka said.
“T&H, their constitution is set up to assist the clans, not to fight them, not to try to stop them from doing what they’re doing,” Kitka said. “They’re there to help us do what we need to do.”
“It took them a long time to finally agree that it was wrong what they were doing,” Kitka said. “Everything takes time.”
“So these have been gone from our possession for over 100 years,” Kitka said. “We are happy they’re back.”
Jeff Feldpausch, director of STA’s cultural resources department, said STA’s claim to the Kaagwaantaan items began in about 2011, when Nels Lawson Sr. was clan leader for the Sitka Kaagwaantaan.
“Our argument we put forward in the competing claims to these items is that all parties involved agreed these were Kaagwaantaan items from Sitka,” Feldpausch said. “They needed to come back to Sitka. So we held our ground, and it’s been 15 years of kind of back-and-forth” ahead of the successful repatriations of objects this past year, Feldpausch said.
He said that an STA task force is working on NAGPRA claims to local clan property that’s been taken and is owned by entities such as museums.
He said that some repatriated items now “are in a secured room within STA’s main building.
“We are trying to set up a repository, a small one, to house those items if the clans wish to have them housed with the tribe,” Feldpausch said.
“With clans, it’s an item of cultural patrimony, it’s a group item, it’s a clan item,” Feldpausch said.
He said that STA is looking at developing a space with climate control and a fire suppression system that would provide a place for clans to store these items, if they choose.
Clan members will follow traditional protocol to bring out some of the recently repatriated objects in ceremonies next weekend.
• This article originally appeared in the Daily Sitka Sentinel.
