Harriman Recollected
New Views of an 1899 Expedition to Alaska
In 1989, the Eberly Family Special Collections Library at Penn State received a donation from an alum:
A diary kept by their great-uncle, George Francis Nelson, on the Harriman Alaska Expedition of 1899, a scientific and recreational journey that traveled over the lands and waters of the Tsimshian, Tlingit, dAXunhyuu, Sugpiaq, Unangax̂, Inupiaq, and Siberian Yupik peoples.
Nelson’s diary was donated with two albums of expedition photographs and seven Indigenous artworks that had returned home with Nelson.
This digital project tells the stories of these materials and their makers—their beginnings, their travels, and their archival afterlives.
To recollect, in the conventional use of the verb, means to remember. We have compiled selections from Nelson’s diary that remember the Harriman Alaska Expedition from a new perspective, that of the expedition chaplain.
Where previous histories of the HAE have construed it as a relatively benevolent expedition for scientific and recreational motives, Nelson’s diary is a counter-artifact that recalls the expedition’s implication in an assimilationist missionary school regime in Alaska.
This project is also an experiment in the work of re-collection: thinking about what it means to work with and share materials from colonial pasts at the same time as we steadfastly affirm anti-colonial futures. In conversation with emerging protocols for anti-colonial archival, editorial, and curatorial practices, we share our process of reckoning with the challenging and sometimes opaque provenance of the Harriman Alaska Expedition Collection at Penn State.
Provenance, as defined in the Dictionary of Archives Terminology, is “a fundamental principle of archives, referring to the individual, family, or organization that created or received the items in a collection.” In archival practice, the principle of provenance suggests that archival objects should be organized according to their custodial origins, such as their collector or donor.
But as the Métis scholar Jessie Loyer notes, this conceptualization of provenance leads to an organizational system centered around “the colonial impulse” of “a singular, white man’s joy.” When working with collections that include Indigenous creations and belongings, the conventional definition of provenance can obscure the often-fraught ethical dimensions of the collection, as well as the Indigenous ontological and cosmological teachings reflected in the collection items.
In the context of this project, provenance is not simply the institutional custodial record of the object’s transfer from collector to archive, but the more complex story—sometimes a partially speculative story, in the absence of formal records—of the ethical and socio-cultural circumstances under which each object was purchased, bartered, or stolen from, or gifted by, its maker.
To explore further readings about the concept of provenance that have shaped our approach to the Harriman Alaska Expedition Collection, visit our project bibliography.
We think about the idea of provenance in this project while acknowledging that it has been subject to worthy critique as an insufficient framework for narrating Indigenous object histories. We encourage further interrogation of the challenges and possibilities of provenance in archival work in a workshop exercise designed for archivists, found on our Teaching page.
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