Selections from George F. Nelson’s Diary:
the looting of gaash (cape fox)
Content Warning
The following diary entries contain graphic descriptions and photographic evidence of violence enacted by the members of the Harriman Alaska Expedition towards Indigenous cultural items during a stop at Gaash, colonially known as Cape Fox, a village which had been temporarily deserted by the Saanya Kwaan Tlingit. Members of the expedition removed totems and other carvings, violating the central Tlingit principle of at.óow, which translates into English as “an owned thing,” and includes any ancestor whose spirit is housed in a sacred clan object.
In their attempt to inscribe the Alaskan lands with the narrative of white American expansion, nineteenth-century settlers engineered regimes of social and cultural dispossession that targeted the Indigenous nations who hold ancestral claims to the land. The missionary school system was one significant method of dispossession, but it was not the only mechanism. Another method involved the eradication or appropriation of Indigenous cultural traditions, which was forced in part through the boarding schools, but also through colonial policies, such as the banning of essential celebrations like the potlatch, and the co-optation of Indigenous ceremonial treasures for colonial memory institutions and scientific study. On the Harriman expedition, the latter method was deployed in the theft of sacred totem poles and other items from lands belonging to the Tlingit clan of the Saanya Kwaan. The raid, which has become well-known among the Tlingit and scholars of Alaskan history as the “Looting of Cape Fox,” took place on July 26.
Harriman decided to visit the settlement, known as Gaash to the Saanya Kwaan, after running into a gold prospector along the expedition path who spoke of a nearby abandoned Indigenous village. The gold miner sketched a map that led Harriman to the site. The village was previously occupied by the Saanya Kwaan, who had temporarily relocated north of the site in 1894 after a smallpox epidemic led the community to believe that they had been cursed. Though the Saanya Kwaan were not physically present at the time of the Elder’s arrival in 1899, Rosita Worl explains in her essay for The Harriman Alaska Expedition Retraced (2005) that the Saanya Kwaan “never doubted that they retained ownership of the property when they left,” for “under traditional Tlingit law the ownership of clan property remains with the clan, absent or not.”
Worl describes the severity of the violence enacted by putting a saw to a totem. Contrary to the settler assumption that totems are “merely inanimate objects,” the Tlingit understand these clan objects as “sacred and tangible links to their ancestors and clan histories.” For the Tlingit, Worl explains, sacred clan objects “mark their path into the future.” To steal these treasures from their original homes, then, is a serious method of dispossessing Indigenous life, by compromising the sense of futurity among the Tlingit and other Indigenous peoples with similar concepts to at.óow on the Pacific Northwest coast.
July 26
Saanya Kwaan Tlingit territory
At 2 P.M. after gliding for a time through the broad and beautiful Revillagigedo Channel, we came to anchor and nearly everybody went ashore in launches to visit for nearly 4 hours a deserted Indian (“Cape Fox”) village, situated on the eastern shore, and abounding in interest to the tourist.
There are 14 framed houses of good size, in a row though not touching each other. Some are falling to decay; others look substantial; all have evidently been well-built. We saw many curious things inside of them; strong, hard wood chests; sets of shelves on walls; a few very decent-looking wooden bedsteads; a few small iron stoves; painted images; masks, &c. Not a few whiskey bottles were lying here and there amid the rubbish. Some 24 curios that could make a very respectable assortment for an Indian Curiosity shop were collected and brought away to the ship for Museums.
But the most interesting features of this weed-overgrown place are the totem poles and the carved, wooden images on some of the neighboring graves. There were at least 14 tall totem poles—from 10 to 30 feet high, with eagles or beasts on top and in some instances, with bears or other animals represented in colored carvings in front.
A page from Nelson’s entry for July 26 including an illustration of Jake White’s grave at Gaash (Cape Fox).
The stolen Tlingit property, lined up on the beach to be loaded aboard the George Elder, taken on July 26, 1899. From the Harriman Expedition souvenir album, Eberly Family Special Collections Library, Penn State.
At one of the graves, covered with a square, pointed roof are two large wooden bears standing on their hind legs; over an adjoining grave is a big, wooden raven. At the base of a pole some 30 ft high, surmounted by an eagle, I found a marble slab, rounded at the top, about 4 ft. high and 2 ft. wide, and 1 ½ inches thick with the following inscription:
Sacred to the memory of Jake White
Died Dec. 12, 1892.
Who was the deceased? an Indian who had taken the above name or more likely some gold prospector who, with others, had camped here after the Indians had abandoned the village; or some friend of the Indians who at the time of his death was living among them? As an eagle is cut on the stone just above the inscription, and as the slab is just in front of the totem pole surmounted by an eagle, it seems somewhat probable that Jake White was a friend of a family in the village who could boast the eagle as their clan emblem and the spirit of the eagle as their clan guardian, even if he was not an Indian himself.
I say there were at least 14 totem poles; but the number has been reduced, as it has been thought advisable to pull down five of them and bring them away together with 4 smaller totems from the interior of houses; and also the wooden bears and some other curious images from graves, in the interest of science.
… At 9 o’clock while I was walking on the hurricane deck, enjoying the freshness of the evening air, a small steamer came southward to the middle of the channel nearly opposite to us, and then turned round and went back toward the north. At the same time I noticed one of our launches approaching the ship slowly from the Deserted Village, having in tow a big, red, wooden bear, who looked quite uncanny floating there in the water on his back.
What an irony of fate! We can imagine the pious zeal with which the Indians carved that imposing image, and their confidence that it would stand for ages where they put it; and here it is on its way to some scientific society to be labeled and put among the curiosities three or four thousand miles away!
Dr. Dall thinks the Indians who formerly lived in the Deserted Village belonged to the same tribe as the MetaKahtlans.
July 27
Saanya Kwaan Tlingit territory
Men busy this morning with axe strokes cutting off the base of an immense cedar totem pole in order to get the pole down into the hold.
In the evening entertainment in honor of Mr Harriman; Addresses by Prof. Brewer, Dr. Elliott, Dr. Trelease, Prof. Ritter, etc; a verse by Mr. Keeler; a song, in which all joined, written by Mr. Stanley-Brown; poems by Capt. Doran and Dr. Fernow, violin piece by Mr. Gifford with piano accompaniment by Dr. Fernow; after remarks by Mr. Harriman, expressing his acknowledgements, and his gratification in view of the success of the Expedition.
July 30
Duwamish Territory (Seattle)
From the Harriman Expedition souvenir album, Eberly Family Special Collections Library, Penn State.
A loose page at the back of Nelson’s diary, showing the distribution of items from Gaash to different colonial institutions across the northeast.
A century later: The ancestors return
After the establishment of the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act in 1990, the Saanya Kwaan Tlingit who descended from the inhabitants of Gaash (Cape Fox) submitted a claim to repatriate the sacred totems and other items stolen by the Harriman Alaska Expedition in 1899. Nelson notes that five large totem poles were violently removed from the site, along with four smaller totems pillaged from the insides of the Saanya Kwaan homes, and two carved bears taken from a gravesite. As Nelson’s list provided above indicates, these sacred carvings were distributed without Tlingit consent among colonial institutions in the northeast region of the so-called United States, including Harvard, Cornell, the Chicago Field Museum, the New York Zoological Society, and the Academy of Sciences in California.
A century after the original expedition, in 2000, a group of Tlingit visited New York City as part of a commemorative project known as the “Harriman Expedition Retraced” to be reunited with some of the sacred items connected to their ancestors. One year later, in July of 2001, a ship chartered by the Harriman Expedition Retraced arrived at the old Gaash site with the permission of the Saanya Kwaan Tlingit, carrying the totem poles and other carvings stolen 100 years prior.
The Saanya Kwaan Tlingit welcomed home the items with a ceremony, which is featured in the documentary The Harriman Alaska Expedition Retraced (2002). In an interview on the beach of the old Gaash site, Rosita Worl, a member of the Chilkat Tlingit, explains that “these are not just objects that were returning, but ancestors coming back home.”