An Alaska Museum Spotlights the State's Indigenous and Filipino Heritage
Chilkat weaving is among the world’s most complex and admired textile arts techniques, entailing years of study and practice. Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, and other Native peoples of the Northwest Coast of Alaska and British Columbia have traditionally employed it to create ceremonial robes. Historically, they used fibers made of mountain-goat hair and yellow-cedar bark, often in a color scheme of black, yellow, blue-green, and white. Over the summer of 2023, the Juneau-Douglas City Museum in Juneau, Alaska, displayed 18 children’s robes made by expert Chilkat weavers, introducing this Indigenous art form to thousands of visitors during the high tourist season.
photo by: Juneau-Douglas City Museum
Child-sized Chilkat robes woven using a complex finger-twining process were on display at the Juneau-Douglas City Museum’s 2023 exhibition "For Our Children."
The exhibit, For Our Children: Chilkat Regalia Woven in the Lineage of Jennie Thlunaut & Clarissa Rizal, initially ran at the museum in February 2023. But a grant from the National Trust’s Telling the Full History Preservation Fund (created with the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities) enabled a re-mounting of the exhibit from May through September 2023. Curated by internationally known Chilkat weaver Lily Hope, For Our Children highlighted work by master weavers Jennie Thlunaut and Clarissa Rizal (Hope’s mother); several acclaimed, currently practicing weavers; and students in a mentorship program run by Hope. Juneau-Douglas City Museum Director Beth Weigel says the high points for her and her team were “learning more about Indigenous arts as well as watching Lily Hope in particular grow this cohort of weavers.” This summer and fall, the museum is collaborating with Hope again on an exhibition of works made using the Ravenstail technique, another art form historically practiced by Indigenous weavers in the region.
In addition to supporting For Our Children, the Telling the Full History grant funded work to update the signage for three historic totem poles in the Juneau-Douglas City Museum collection. One, formerly known as “Four-Story” Totem Pole, got a completely new interpretation after the museum learned of recent findings that revealed previous assumptions about the 35-foot-tall pole’s meaning were incorrect. Through archival research, art historian Emily Moore had found evidence that the totem pole’s creator, master carver John Wallace of the Haida people, intended it to tell a story about Sa'wan, a Tlingit shaman. Anthropologist Daniel Monteith interviewed Wallace’s grandson Lee Guugwaangs Wallace, also a Haida carver, who suggested the pole’s new name: Sa'wan and the Halibut Hook.
Its new sign, along with those of the other poles, is expected to be installed sometime this summer—and, like the weaving exhibits, will help draw attention to the work Indigenous artists in Alaska have done to pass along their deep stores of cultural and technical knowledge. “John was part of a generation that taught a new generation of carvers and helped revitalize the history of an art form,” Monteith says. “That generation [are] real heroes—artistic geniuses that helped keep things going during times when [their art] wasn’t always seen by non-Native audiences as anything but a stereotype, or exotic.”
An emphasis on often overlooked cultural heritage also applies to a third project partly funded by the Telling the Full History grant. Mga Kuwento, which means “the stories” in the Tagalog language, was a podcast series, exhibit, and community celebration that began October 6, 2023, and was produced by KTOO Public Media, the Juneau-Douglas City Museum, and Filipino Community Inc. It ran throughout the month, which the Alaska state legislature had recently voted to establish as the state’s annual Filipino American History Month.
More than 30,000 Filipino Americans live in Alaska, some of them descended from immigrants who arrived in the early 1900s to work in salmon canning and other industries. The Mga Kuwento exhibit at the museum focused on those living in the Juneau area, using photos, dance costumes, and other artifacts to convey their experiences.
As for the Mga Kuwento podcast series, it won the Alaska Press Club’s award for best series in all media this past spring. “Sixteen thousand people saved it in the first month or so,” says Tasha Elizarde, the series’ executive producer and the exhibit’s curator. “That might not seem like a lot, but in perspective, that’s like half of Juneau.”
photo by: Juneau-Douglas City Museum
As part of "Mga Kuwento," the museum displayed dance clothing based on traditional Filipino costumes.
All three of these projects have helped the city museum—which was founded in 1976 to share the area’s mining history—to better connect with the community around it. “We want to show the diversity of our community and [make sure] people are represented,” says Weigel. Its current building, constructed in 1951 as the city’s first public library, doesn’t have much storage space left, she adds. “It’s hard to continue to collect.”
She hopes the museum might someday be able to move into a larger, purpose-built space. “These exhibitions and this work we’ve been doing to reach out to our communities allow us to talk about that future goal and how we can do much better in a new space that’s meant to be a museum; has the space to tell all these stories more appropriately; and has a different, welcoming vibe to it. Lots of people, particularly Indigenous people, didn’t come to this museum for a long time because it was really just the colonial museum. This [work] helps with building trust in our community.”
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