maker once known

Possibly tlingit

ca. 1870-1890

During a short stop at Juneau on the return trip to Seattle, Nelson went ashore to seek a repair for his eyeglasses. “While a jeweller was repairing the broken rim of my spectacles,” he wrote later in his diary, “I visited a few shops and bought a carved spoon and fork (wooden); pair of small colored oars (imitation); a few photographs, and a carved, wooden piece representing eagle subduing bear.” Two of these items—one of the oars and the totem—were included in the donation to Penn State from Nelson’s descendants.  

While Nelson may have been informed by a settler shopkeeper that the carving depicted here was an eagle and a bear, or while he may have inferred this himself, it is also possible that the bird is a raven. Both birds hold great significance for Tlingit peoples, and can be represented in arrangements with bears and other animals to represent moiety and clan systems. In their description of a model totem sculpture by a Huna Tlingit (T’akdeintaan clan) maker, the Huna Heritage Foundation explains that “Raven is one of two moieties of the Tlingit nation and is the transformer of the physical world for the Tlingit,” while “the Brown Bear is a crest of the Eagle moiety and has a close relationship with humans.” 

With the arrival of tourist cruise ships in the late nineteenth century, many Indigenous groups of the Alaskan coast began to apply their ancestral artistry to miniature or model pieces that could be sold to settler upper-class visitors. 

“Model totem poles,” writes the Sheldon Jackson Museum in a 2014 article,

“have suffered from the pejorative label, ‘tourist art,’ and been written off as culturally vacuous and ethnographically irrelevant, but contextualized, model totem poles are compelling, aesthetic testimonials of Native identity and cultural endurance and reveal much about the intercultural encounter between Natives, settler societies, and non- Natives. … The models were sold directly to tourists by Natives at wharves and were later sold to curios stores at ports of call including in Juneau, Wrangell, Seattle, and Vancouver. Mail order catalogues were developed by retailers to sell model poles to people who could not make the trip to the Pacific Northwest. By the early twentieth century, model poles became the most popular souvenir bought by Northwest Coast tourists.”

At the turn of the twentieth century, Juneau had developed a main street lined with several general stores where Nelson might have purchased this wooden carving.

The image below from the Alaska-based photography studio, Winter & Pond, shows downtown Juneau in 1909, ten years after Nelson’s visit (original source: Library of Congress). 

References

Hall, Michael and Pat Glascock. Carvings and Commerce: Model Totem Poles 1880-2010. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011.

“January Artifacts of the Month: Three Painted Tlingit Model Totem Poles.” State of Alaska Department of Education and Early Development, press release, https://museums.alaska.gov/documents/sjm/artifacts/2014/jan_2014.pdf.

“Raven Totem Structure.” Huna Heritage Foundation, https://archives.hunaheritage.org/digital-heritage/raven-totem-sculpture.